The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 16

  It was too beautiful not to share. Theron went up to his Daddy’s rolltop desk one day and got a magazine and copied the address down, because he thought other people ought to be able to see Piggy’s poetry too. He got three cents from his mother, who loved Theron enough to let him go his own way, and he got out one of his favorite poems and mailed it to the Breeders’ Gazette. He went down to the mailbox every day for a couple of weeks, looking for a letter, and then he forgot about it.

  In November Theron’s Daddy came home. He dropped his canvas bag and his yachting cap on the floor in the front hall and peeled off the twins, who were climbing up his trousers, and asked Mrs. Pinckney where Theron was.

  She chased the twins into the kitchen and said, “Dow’t the field.”

  Theron’s Daddy gave her a close look. “He been any help to you since I left?”

  “Course he has,” she said, edging in front of the dining room door so he wouldn’t see the harness Theron was supposed to repair, still waiting on the dining room table.

  “He’s wasting his time with that—horse.” Mr. Pinckney pushed his sleeves up above his elbows and looked around for something to threaten Theron with.

  “Eldred Pinckney, you lay one hand on that boy …” Mrs. Pinckney stood toe to toe with him.

  He backed down a little. “It’s not Theron, it’s Piggy I’m after,” he growled. “Should’ve let the dog warden take him right off. I’ll drive him down to Beaufort tonight and see what I can get for him …” Theron’s Daddy was so mad he’d forgotten Piggy wouldn’t walk. He grabbed a cane from the elephant-foot umbrella stand and barged for the front door. The screen swung open and banged him in the face and he reared back to see a little man in a sack suit still reeling from his battle with the door.

  “It’s wonderful. Wonderful,” he said, sweeping past Theron’s Daddy and taking Mrs. Pinckney by both hands. “Where is he?” He readjusted a folder of papers under his arm and started sniffing around the house.

  “What’s wonderful,” Mr. Pinckney said, standing smack in the doorway so the little man couldn’t see into Theron’s room.

  “Why, this,” the man in the sack suit said. He closed his eyes as if he were in church and started reciting:

  Sky of Sky! With clouds all brindle

  With the birds that dart between them

  And thy sun which doth enkindle

  Nightingales before we’ve seen them

  In our nooks …

  Then his voice trailed off as he saw that Theron’s parents didn’t think it was wonderful at all, they were just staring, and he said, “Oh, you didn’t know about it,” his voice getting fainter and fainter, “ … perhaps-I’d-better-explain …”

  A little later, while Mr. Pinckney was sulking on the widow’s walk, Mrs. Pinckney took the man in the sack suit down to Theron’s field. Theron was just taking Piggy into the shed.

  “Theron, honey, this is Mister Brooks. He runs a poetry magazine …”

  Mr. Brooks flushed to his round collar and said, “That’s just in my spare time, I’m afraid. Actually I work for the Breeders’ Gazette. I was down this way doing a story on hogs …”

  “You got my poem?” Theron said and pulled him inside.

  He sat Mr. Brooks down on a marble-topped commode, far enough away from Piggy so that Mr. Brooks wouldn’t be frightened of him, and they talked for a long time. Mr. Brooks told Theron the Breeders’ Gazette didn’t exactly take to his kind of poetry, in fact it didn’t take to poetry at all, but he happened to be working there (“just to support my poetry magazine”) and he saw it and he wanted Theron to know he thought it was great. Then Mr. Brooks gave him a copy of Fragile, which was his magazine, and then he gave Theron five dollars, which was because his poem was in it. He got down off the commode and came over and took Theron’s hand.

  “If you could come back to Louaville with me, I bet I could get you a scholarship somewhere. You could write poetry for the reviews, you know, the Prairie Schooner, you could win the Bollingen prize …” Mr. Brooks’s eyes were hazed over with longing. “We’d both be famous, son. With your talent …”

  “———,” Theron said through his fingers, blushing red.

  “What did you say?”

  “It wasn’t me, it was Piggy.” He said it over and over, but Mr. Brooks didn’t want to understand. Theron did get it across to him that he couldn’t go to Louaville ever and thank you very much. Then he looked down at the five dollars and he promised to send Mr. Brooks all his poems because Mr. Brooks seemed to feel so bad.

  He patted Piggy on the nose and walked Mr. Brooks to the edge of the field. “I couldn’t leave Piggy, see,” he said, and then he handed Mr. Brooks a big sheaf of poems because he looked like he was about to cry.

  On his way back to the house Mr. Brooks must have said something to Theron’s Daddy, because he came down to the shack and took Theron’s five dollars. After that he never said anything more about getting rid of Piggy, and he stopped talking about sending Theron back to school.

  There were little bits of money after that—Theron’s Daddy took the checks to keep up the house—and copies of magazines, Challenge and Output at first, mimeographed just like Fragile, and then austere-looking reviews that bored Theron and Piggy because there were no pictures in, and in a few years there were copies of The Atlantic and The Saturday Review. One year Piggy was a Yale Younger Poet. Sometimes people came down to see Theron, all bright-eyed and loaded down with their own poetry but Theron’s Daddy sent them away. Every once in a while Mr. Brooks would send Theron a clipping about a speech he’d given on poetry—Theron’s poetry, because Mr. Brooks had appointed himself Theron’s literary Goddaddy and his agent (that was the way he explained it to Theron) and he was very famous now. He’d even quit the Breeders’ Gazette.

  In a few years the twins got married and moved away, and there began to be scruffy patches on Piggy’s shoulders, and transparent hairs in his mane. Theron only sat on his back two hours a day now, and the words that came to him were all detached and sharp and pure, wheeling like gulls over the river.

  His mother brought his food down to him every evening and took the poems to mail to Mr. Brooks. Piggy’s longest poem paid for the funeral when Theron’s Daddy died. After he was buried and put away, Theron’s mother began hanging around the shack door of an evening, too lonely to go back to the big old house. At first Theron was impatient with her for being there, because the words were singing in his brain and he wanted to be alone with them, but one night when she touched his hand as she gave him the bucket, he looked down to see soft, trembly lines around her mouth, and he was so sorry about that and the way her hand shook that he opened the door and sat her down in the Queen Anne chair. Piggy rocked a little until he was lying alongside her, and put his head in her lap. They both sat quiet as marsh-rabbits and listened to Theron make the words ripple in the air.

  Theron threw back his head in the glow of the lamp, thinking he’d be perfectly happy if he could die right then. As his mother got up to go something glittered on her cheek, and Theron saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “Son, that was beautiful.” She ducked her head and slipped out the door before Theron could say anything to her. Piggy nickered and looked almost as if he’d like to follow her up to the big house and put his head in her lap again. When she came the next night Theron opened the door and motioned toward the Queen Anne chair without a word. After that his mother spent all the long evenings with him and Piggy, listening to Theron in the closeness of the lowceilinged shack.

  One night after she’d left, Piggy nudged Theron, who watched amazed as Piggy struggled to his feet without urging and edged his hind quarters around so that his belly was resting on the rock. He took Theron’s sleeve gently in his teeth, tossing his head until Theron climbed up, slowly because Piggy tired easily these days. Then he gave Theron his most beautiful piece of poetry. When he got it in the mail Mr. Brooks was to say that it was the culmination—the pearl—of Theron’s late
period:

  The sun kept setting, setting still,

  Because I could not stop for Death.

  Great Streets of silence led away—

  I took my power in my hand,

  As far from pity as complaint.

  My life closed twice before its close

  I asked no other thing.

  Safe in these alabaster chambers

  A spider sewed at

  Night.

  When his mother heard it the next evening she wept.

  Days sang and days passed, one like the other, until Theron’s mother tapped at the door one night, bright-eyed and quivering. Theron sat quietly without beginning, because he knew she had something on her mind. She ducked her head, pretending to stroke Piggy’s sparse mane, and then she saw that Theron wasn’t going to begin; he was waiting for her to tell him what was bothering her.

  “Mister Gummery was asking after you, Theron,” she said.

  Theron scratched his head.

  “He was in fourth grade the year you quit school.” Her hands fluttered in Piggy’s mane.

  Theron rattled some papers, wondering what she was going to say.

  “Theron.” She got up abruptly, so that Piggy’s chin fell off her lap and bumped on the floor. “He says the church is going to have its hundred-twentieth birthday next month, and he wants you to write them a play.”

  Suddenly, Theron’s hands were still. “Mama, I don’t know if I can. Piggy’s getting tired.” His voice sounded old. “And so am I. Can’t he use some play out of a book?”

  Her eyes were hurt. “I never asked you anything before. Your great-great granddaddy went to that church.” She touched his arm gently. “Son?”

  Theron looked at Piggy, whose skin was almost transparent now under the light fall of his brindled mane. Piggy’s white-rimmed eyes were wide open and swimming with love. He began rocking and rocking back and forth gently, back to floor, then belly, until he got his spidery legs under him and began heaving himself to his feet. He almost made it and then he fell, catching splinters in his delicate knees. Theron rushed to him but he was already struggling again, heaving until he got his legs under him. He rose with a massive gesture and with a sigh put his nose on Mrs. Pinckney’s shoulder. Theron gave him one tragic look and then turned to his mother.

  “You better go now, Mama. Piggy and I have to get to work.”

  Piggy carried Theron on his back all that night and all the next day and they were still going the next evening, when Mrs. Pinckney scratched at the door of the shack. Theron’s eyes were bloodshot and his fingers cramped from scribbling, but Piggy snatched at him with his teeth every time Theron tried to get down. Finally Theron scribbled “The End,” so drunk with words that he didn’t realize what he was writing, and with a gallant toss of the head Piggy fell sideways away from the supporting rock and sank to the floor. He turned his head toward Theron, and his eyes glazed over with pride.

  “Mama,” Theron said simply. “The play.”

  She turned her eyes away because she couldn’t stand to see Piggy’s rigid fat body with the legs sticking out, or the pain in Piggy’s eyes. After the church show, when Mrs. Pinckney sent a copy of the play, A.B., to Mr. Brooks, he sent her a pile of money and told her it was going to Broadway and Theron would certainly win the Poets’ Prize. The money came too late. Piggy had already gone into a decline.

  Theron called a heart specialist down from Charleston (he’d have nothing to do with a vet, like he’d had nothing to do with the dog warden all those years before) but there was nothing anybody could do. He took to his shack, pining so that he wouldn’t even let his mother come in at night. She sat on a step outside, listening for Piggy’s breath.

  The prize came the day after Piggy was buried under a wooden marker, down in the soft grass at the end of the field.

  Five men in dark suits and black Homburgs and a woman in a lace-trimmed dress and a velvet tam pulled up outside the Pinckney house. Hushed by the brooding trees, they talked in whispers until Mrs. Pinckney opened the front door. She hardly recognized Mr. Brooks, he was so gray and distinguished-looking. She seemed not to understand until, wordlessly, the woman held out a small leather case with the medal, nested in satin, bearing Theron’s name.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Pinckney said. “You want my son.”

  They followed her around the house, past crumbled garden statues and a sundial that had sunk into itself a hundred years before, nudging each other and whispering as they caught glimpses of ruined chiffoniers and Federalist mirrors through the tall, low windows. Gently, they untangled vines and bushes from their ankles and, single file, looking reverent and austere in the bright daylight, they followed Theron’s mother across the hummocked field. They picked their way up the worn little path and stood uneasily at the door to Theron’s shack. His mama called to him. There was a rustling inside and Theron poked out his shock-white head.

  He stood in the doorway with the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up above his gaunt elbows, and looked at the men in the fine black suits. Then he smiled tentatively at Mr. Brooks, who nodded almost shyly, and the ceremony began.

  The leader of the delegation gave his speech. Theron heard him say something about “most coveted prize in poetry,” and he said, “Piggy’ll be glad,” but the man in the sack suit gave him a puzzled look and went on with the speech. Theron waited respectfully until he was finished, stepping aside because he could see that the lady in the velvet hat was trying to peek inside his door. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the Queen Anne chair was standing up, just where he’d propped it, and Piggy’s place was all swept clean. He whispered, “That’s where Piggy used to sleep,” but she pretended not to hear.

  “ … pleased to give you this award,” the speaker concluded, and he held out the medal so Theron could see where they had engraved his name.

  “It wasn’t me,” Theron mumbled, and they all nodded their heads and twittered to each other about his modesty. “It wasn’t me, it was Piggy,” Theron said again, as they pressed the leather case with the medal into his hands. “It was Piggy,” he said again as they bowed their heads in a moment’s respect and turned like nuns in a procession and started single file back across the field. “It was Piggy,” Theron said, looking down at the glint of the medal in his hands.

  He sat down on the front step of his shack, turning the case over and over, watching the sunlight catch the gold until tears shimmered in his eyes and he couldn’t see. Then he went inside and combed his hair and put on a clean shirt. Slowly, as the delegation had walked, he went to the end of the field and put the leather case on Piggy’s grave.

  —The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1962

  Song of the Black Dog

  “The black dog is not like any other,” the forensics officer says. It is a little incantation.

  In the journalists’ skybox high above the civic auditorium, Bill Siefert strains to see the distant stage, the speaker, and at her back, the beast he is here to deconstruct. That’s the way he thinks of it. Siefert hates anything he doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t make sense, disassemble it. He’s always been uncomfortable with the idea of supernatural powers, but this is not his stated reason for sneaking into the press box. He thinks he’s here to crack the black dog program and show the people its inner workings. If the wonder dog is just a dog, then the police department are money-grubbing charlatans and the exposé will move him from unemployed to famous.

  He’ll be all over CNN. Networks will come calling. Silence the black dog, he thinks, and wonders where that came from. Stop mizzling and get the story. He needs a job. He needs the attention. He needs the power. He needs to be more than who he is, and before any of this and all of this Bill Siefert needs to figure out why this morning, on a perfectly ordinary day, he woke up screaming.

  Get the story, he tells himself and does not know what about this makes him so uneasy. Cell phone for instant screen shots. Notebook, digicorder, nice smile. Seat in the booth. Fake pr
ess pass to get him backstage. Piece of cake.

  With the black dog, nothing spins out the way you expect.

  “The black dog can cut through the welter of visual and olfactory stimuli in a disaster situation and find those most in need of rescue,” the forensics officer says matter-of-factly, as though this is a given. She is sleek in the black uniform. Persuasive. It is disturbing. “He is only the first,” she says and then she says portentously, “His descendants will save thousands.”

  Cut to the chase. Startled, Bill shakes himself. Did I speak? Who?

  The speaker glitters in a cone of light but the wonder dog—if there is one—is nowhere present. Peering into the shadows behind her, Bill looks for the darker shadow signifying a living creature, reflected light pinpointed in the eyes. The darkness gives back only darkness. Nothing to see, he tells himself, and wonders why this comes as a relief. No dog. Another wasted day like so many days in what is shaping up to be a wasted life.

  With the black dog, the future is open to question.

  In the next second he shivers, transfixed. He can’t even guess what just happened, but all the furniture in his head has shifted.

  It sees me.

  Given that the stage is far, far below this is unlikely, but the sense that he is being watched is so acute that all of Bill Siefert’s bones begin to itch. No, he tells himself. No way. He swallows hard but his throat closes. It’s just a dog.