2005-05-20 - 6:28 a.m.
I lie still, listening to peepers and another sound which is simultaneously half an octave higher and lower, and alternately diminishing and swelling, seeming as I near sleep to portend a vague menace, as if the heavenly hosts had somehow become displaced and unsettled.
Soon enough I am strangely aware of myself lying not in my own bed but on the curved bank between the shadows of the looming barn and the empty dark house. I discover where I am and the time of where I am only on waking, facing the stars, meeting the presence of a warm body I have missed next to me in the grass. I turn to see a small glowing light, like a lamp wick turned low, suspended over the pond. Rising, I walk the dark path towards and downwards.
Somehow fire, though extinguished on the ground, smolders high in a solitary treetop. A breeze blows embers to flame as I sit waiting, not realizing the time, nor needing to, content to be in this place with a dog watching fire on water, until a pickup truck turns off the road and crawls up the dirt drive to the empty, dark house.
Illumined by the white beam of the headlights on the downside curve of the drive, Sirius stands wagging his tail, blocking the truck’s passage. Two men sit waiting inside, their faces turned outward. But only the driver speaks.
“Just wanted to make sure everything is all right,” he says, reaching for, pulling the gearshift, and then the truck drifts and they are gone.
*********
I feel the cool air on my face, awakening to the otherworldly chorus still entering through the screened window. Overnight the voices have changed, becoming less dense, more singular and separate. I differentiate the solos of individuals now, allied but distinct, revealing themselves with an incomprehensible logic of time and order. Altogether they make an intricate composition, a mingling mass. Eventually the movement diminishes and slows. A solitary reverberation starts midrange and another joins in, a little lower pitched, and soon following a third adds a higher thin line at the end. All their voices together waver, peel away and reconnect in an aural interplay of wavy, buzzing modulation. But it doesn’t last and when the other two suddenly leave off, the sole remaining voice continues only briefly before thinning and quieting too.
On the floor beneath the bed, Chance stretches a leg, scratching the floor. He feels my movement through the bed frame and is up, whining, wanting to go out. As I descend the stairs he walks politely behind, but then eagerness gets the best of him as I lift my hat off the rocker and he turns himself sideways, dancing all the way to the back door.
Outside, after being gone half the night, Beau lies atop the bank by the circle of daffodils. He looks at me through the window, laconically, catching the morning sun. This one place, of all places, is lately his favorite, as it was for his daddy, and there is no way of knowing whether he likes it because he shares Teddy’s natural affinity for the spot or because of something else. Evidence of the former is contained in the fact that Sirius also used to lie nearby, positioned so he could look down the hill while keeping an eye on the yard and the field to his back. But Beau lies so tight against the daffodils it seems probable there is yet another reason he waits almost directly on the location of the hole my brother and I dug not a year ago. When it was done and still empty, before we could fill it, Beau had jumped in to retrieve the baseball Mom had brought. “That’s not for you,” Dad said, referring (I thought then) to the ball.
“He’ll remember,” Mom said, and now I wonder if she wasn’t right. Possibly he does remember: the falling ball, his jumping in and lying down with it. Or maybe he senses, as Teddy had an uncanny ability to do, the corporal realness of horsehide wrapped around a wound body of wool, no matter how well it was hidden. But it seems what he remembers or senses is too vague for direct action because so far he hasn’t tried to dig, and that is what we had feared.
I open the door and Chance dances out onto the gravel and grass drive as Beau rises, tongue lolling, and runs happily down the slope to join us. He clasps Chance at the back of the neck, biting down a little too hard until I say stop, and then together, with Beau still intermittently pestering, we start across the side field on our walk.
This is what we are made for: to pursue happiness, to find pleasure in what we should do nonetheless, and the dogs know it perhaps more intimately than I, though they are rightly hesitant to assume their ideas are always exactly mine. They stop and look back to make sure I have not turned to go the opposite way up the road, or up the right-of-way due south, but seeing that I am indeed continuing on the path they have started upon they turn away again going east toward the old fence line separating our property from the neighbors’ below.
The fence line is an ancient demarcation, evidence for which resides in broken, bent strands of rusted barbed wire embedded in split locust posts and wide-girthed dying, or already dead, trees. A surveyor’s rod planted next to a towering shagbark hickory at our back corner is the official last word, certifying the work of the old fencers. Before establishing the range of enclosed cattle, this line existed only on a map as the upper boundary of the Indian reservation that ran parallel to the river below, and so it remains described to this day in the property title abstract. The neighbors have put up Notice signs on trees guarding their side of the line, and new fencing a little farther up it whose fresh gleaming strands, tied with strips of torn sheeting, carry a mute warning not to touch. Yet if one listens, the faint thitt thitt of an electrical pulse can be heard beating in the morning quiet. Chance learns the hard way, sniffing the new wire too closely, and now keeps his distance. Meanwhile, Beau has discovered three heifers half-hidden behind some apple trees and barks, amazed and slightly indignant at the sudden fact of their presence. They seem not at all concerned by his attention, though, although they are shy and don’t move, and continue looking at us discretely from a safe vantage. Beau leaves off trying to rouse them when he realizes Chance and I have moved on and, galloping like a horse, catches up and races on by.
A week ago there were turkeys in the ravine to our left that Beau startled, one after the other, into flight. They beat against the underbrush, taking clawing swipes at the air lumbering towards a middling apogee that at last allowed them to coast, their bodies canting and stiff, towards the safety of some down-valley trees. Today there is no evidence they are anywhere near, not even a distant faint gobbling. Between the coyotes and the dogs it seems destined to be a quiet spring.
Not that there aren’t other sounds. A redwing blackbird perched atop a field rosebush makes a persistent liquid note while competing birds—robins and larks among others— contribute other own intonations, mostly musical. Some of the sound is nothing but a low-grade, agitated twittering and this noise (and where it is, it is just that) comes from a tangle of grapevines and briars rimming the ravine at field’s edge where innumerable sparrows flit about in a frenzy of truncated flight. As soon as we pass they quiet and disappear so completely it is as though we and they were never there.
We round the funneling, muddy mouth of the ravine and backtrack down the other side. Coming to a corner in this second field we turn and follow the continuation of the reservation line for a quarter mile more before reaching a farther corner and turning again. At the territory oak that holds a permanent stand we cross into a third field, but not before the dogs take a quick detour into the muddy wallow made by the spring runoff. After walking a short upslope on the way to the woods just shy of Gobbler’s Knob we take the old lumber trail to a place where, on a similar morning five years before, another pair of dogs and I met with and flushed a turkey coming up the ridge from the other side.
And then we are going down again, turning for home, crossing the upwelling spring pool where Beau plops down once more before rising, muddy and smelling like muck, to walk with us again at the back edge of a field along the last fence line, continuing past the point where the bordering woods stop and the field opens suddenly larger. We are seen in our passing--a man with two golden dogs in the greening grass--by Pastor Maclaughlin who leaves off momentarily tending his garden of tulips by the A-frame on top the hill, raising a hand as if wanting to call out in his clipped, bright voice: “Howdy neighbor.” But he only shoots his arm and waves, recognizing we are too far away for the strength of his voice. And yet because I have encountered it so many times before my mind supplies this spoken greeting for him, down to the Scotch accent. In turn I give him a long wave back and follow the dogs into a small hollow before ascending again to the road where we turn downwards to find the wide valley, still filled at the bottom with fog. There are times when we see the world and times we do not, times it takes the enthusiasm of a passing traveler to commend it. But when we come by ourselves to our senses the thought hits us full on that though some things are permanent, we certainly are not. And so I notice as I come upon our pond there is blue on the water where the now silent frogs swim, and the sky seems to part as the dogs wade in, up to their ribs, lapping at the surface.
