The road leading home is a dusty, gravel one; it climbs steeply, gradually leveling out. A two-inch snow makes the road impassable in the winter from either side of the mountain. Mama's parents are buried on one side of the mountain and Daddy's on the other. Home sits in the middle. Adjacent to it rises the highest knoll, a crumble of house-size boulders at the top, shelter of wild cats and other life. The mountain, and particularly home, over the years sheltered many animals, the identities of some of these, though obscured by time and fogs, coming back to me strongly after her Mama's death, their names making them characters in the long drama that began in the hills and continues to play itself out in my mind and heart.
The road home is more traveled than it was when I was a child there. Mama and Daddy had built before a road had even been blasted through the rocky hills. At one time, we knew all the people and cars that passed. A neighbor would always wave or toot unless, as on a time or two, somebody was on a non-speaking streak. Nowadays, cars pass more often and contain, likely as not, strangers. Lovers sometimes use the road for parking, ignoring the disturbed dogs, which fill the nights with barks, alerting Daddy of intruders. On Sundays, people out driving happen by chance upon the steep, winding road, and turn up it in explorers' fever. The remaining flea-eaten dogs chase the cars half-heartedly.
We'd had other dogs of a different sort-Ol' Tex, Ranger, and Skip. Skip got too close to their Uncle Quint's car; we cried when Daddy scooped him up from the road, still yelping with his broken back, carried him down by the barn, and shot him in the head. Daddy figured a bullet in the head was preferable to a slow and painful death. I lay awake that night thinking about Skip's body out in the sinkhole where Daddy had dumped him. During the next week, I watched buzzards circling Skip's now bloated body; by the time the week was over, I knew only Skip's skeleton would remain in that hole. Tex had to be shot, too. He got the mange so badly his hair came out in clumps, and then one day his joints quit working. Tex had been my brother Chester's dog. Chester died a year before I was born. He'd taken a short cut across the roof of an old house, caught his pants legs, and fallen head-long onto a corn stalk. He died of an infection in his stomach from the wound. Tex's being shot revived in Mama all her memories of the pain of Chester's death. Ranger was bitten by one too many rattle snakes, this last bite near his right eye; it swelled up in a knot almost bigger than the head itself from which a green pus oozed, then dried and crusted. He finally just didn't get up out of his sleep; Daddy carried him away to the sinkhole, too.
Many dogs came to our house by circumstance. When Grampa and Gramma came to live with us, Ol' Drum had followed. After Gramps died, Mama wouldn't let anyone shoot Drum, even though he had a bad eye and was cantankerous; Mama allowed that any being that old had earned a right to a place of respect. Mama was the only one sad when Drum wandered off into the hills to die.
Daddy's heart was less tender than Mama's; his years of living hardened him to the life cycle. As a child, I thought of him as cruel. He was not tolerant of dogs that had no use-he even shot one when its bark scared away a squirrel that he had in his gun sights. Still, dogs of one kind or another always hung around the house. As the roads became more traveled, the starved, ragged old mongrels would drift in at feeding time. Since Mama couldn't stand to let anything go hungry, she would feed them, and they'd stay.
My cavorting with Fred one summer got Whitey, a half-grown pup, into the act. He chased, growled, and nipped at our heals. A dog had bitten Fred in the past, so reacting instinctively, he kicked out his foot, and it collided soundly with the dog's head. Whitey dropped down as if dead, his eyes rolled back in his head, showing only white. Knowing Mama favored the dog, I rushed over and cradled his unconscious head, convinced of the worst. Little by little, life returned into his limbs. After that, Whitey would sulk away sullenly whenever Fred came near. When he was no longer a pup, he would stand his ground, fangs bared, when Fred passed. Whitey was shot in old age when he snapped at a toddling niece. Mama told me about it over the phone, her voice trembling; I knew she was fighting back tears even as she talked.
Uncle Quint on Mama's side lived a few hundred yards in the woods below our house; he must have been cursed by some of Mama's tender-heartedness when it came to dogs. By the time he was murdered, he had collected fifteen or twenty dogs. Quint was Mama's younger brother; she had two brothers and five sisters. Rumor had it that Quint got hardened arteries. Whatever caused it, he was kinder to dogs than he was to neighbors and kin; he'd gotten into spats with everyone on the mountain and most of the valley. Just days before he was shot with a high powered rifle while working in his garden, Quint had gotten into a tussle with some cousins of mine and broken an arm of the younger. Many thought maybe Quint's death was the result of their seeking revenge. The truth of the matter never did come out, the truth being that sheriffs in the county didn't do much investigating. The dogs after his death were left to scatter around the mountain, getting by as best they could. By that time Mama had suffered one of the many strokes that debilitated her in her last years. Uncle Quint's dogs killed a few of the ones hanging around our house, and apparently a few of his died, too. One or two wild dogs ranging through the woods was all that was left of the pack by the time Mama died.
Although animals showed up and were fed, survival of the fittest prevailed, and dogs fared better than cats. Mama preferred cats, particularly Ol' Butter, a honey-blond tom cat. Ol' Butter purred around Mama's feet all day, and when she dropped tiredly into an overstuffed chair, he would curl up in her lap and sleep. Mama would sometimes sit several minutes just letting him sleep; we kids would catch her gently stroking his back. When Daddy kicked him out from under foot, Mama scolded, "Leave that cat alone; he ain't hurtin' y' none." She told us kids, "Someday, God's gonna punish them that mistreat dumb animals."
One night, Ol' Butter didn't return from his evening trip out into the yard to do his thing. Mama told me she'd heard what sounded like cat squalls in the nights; she didn't think too much about it though since there were other less favored cats prowling around in the woods. When she found Ol' Butter's body, dew-wet and chewed-up by dogs, her eyes welled over, her cheeks trembling against the effort of control. "I regret so bad," she told me, "not goin' t' check, and him dying, too." And in later weeks, she'd say, "I miss him so bad sometimes I can't hardly see."
Other animals came and went, too. One pet duck, waddling and quacking amiably, had his head almost severed beneath the rubber-less wheels of an old wagon a cousin Anna Mae and we girls had been pulling around the yard. Anna Mae, holding the duck, shuddered as Mama pulled the torn skin back together, raw edges oozing blood, and sewed it up. That needle, Anna Mae told me, "haunted me for years. I could hear and feel your mama pushing it through th' skin, her hand steady and firm." That surgery and salves kept Oscar waddling on into old age. As a child, I experienced many times the gentle yet sure touch of Mama's restorative hands. Mama always touched the severest hurt in me and, if not stopping the pain, at least redirected its throbbing to a deeper mystery of the heart burning in my chest. I remembered Ol' Brindle's heaving in heavy labor, heard her soft lowing again, and thought of birth as a first mutilation into life where other mutilations had to occur. I carried my own mutilations of body and soul, holding them tightly within, a self-containment of sheer will. Mama's death broke through my fortress, tearing through soft flesh and penetrating into the soul itself, filling me with the terror for my own brute existence.
Frisky, an un-weaned baby squirrel, arrived in our house in brother Bill's shirt pocket. He had killed the mother whose shrill chattering had warned him away from the nest. Mama fed Frisky warm milk from one of our dolls' bottles. He grew into a real pesky pet, making his nest behind the couch, this agreeable for a while; we just respected his territorial rights and watched out for foraging teeth. Since didn't often get off the mountain to church, an occasional, well-intentioned preacher would sometimes seek us out. Brother Bob didn't know about Frisky, and being preacher-polite, we kids forgot to warn him. He left shortly after an angry Frisky pinched his hand, not drawing blood but leaving an indention. We giggled about that for awhile, but Mama decided, when Frisky started tearing the lining out of the couch and making a bed of the stuffing, that enough was enough, that Frisky was old enough to learn about living in the woods. I went with Mama when she took Frisky a mile or so from the house and turned him loose; her eyes following him as he jumped from limb to limb, leaves shaking, until he was out of sight. That night it rained. Sitting in the living room, we heard a thump and scratching claws at a window screen. Sure enough, a wet and indignant Frisky had returned. He stayed that night but was firmly taken out to the woods again the next day. This time he never returned or at least not recognizably; he could have been any one of a number of squirrels that eventually made their way into the stew pot. Mama thought that a family of squirrels nesting in the woods just outside the house belonged to Frisky, and she warned Daddy to "leave 'em alone." He would slip out anyway and put an end to some of the unfortunate barking. Squirrel hunting was in his blood-and its call was louder than Mama's scolding.
One pet of Mama's, I never did learn to like. Blacky was a crow, ebony, raven-like. He, too, had come to the house straight out of a nest after his mother had been shot. While still in a shoebox, droppings confined, he could be tolerated. Once he got out of the box, he became mischievous and downright annoying. Daddy clipped his wings to keep him from flying, after he had started making off with the apples Mama had drying on some tin out in the sun. Mama said, "I jest don't aim t' work my fingers t' th' bone f'r some dumb, black crow; it takes t' long t' peel and dry a gallon o' apples t' have 'em stuffed in some holler tree." Blacky strutted around the porch indignant after the clipping.
Daddy grew a patch of cotton that year, and Blacky would walk along in the fields with us kids, pulling out cotton and dropping it into a bag. Congenial as he seemed, though, he liked everybody in the family but me. In the evenings when I would sit down on the front porch with a pan of water to wash my feet, Blacky would jump into the pan or dart up, peck my feet, then flutter away. I was afraid of him, and sensing that, he made it his business to torment me. When his wings grew enough for him to fly, he would sometimes chase me around the yard. After Mama spanked me one day, Blacky, attracted by my crying, chased me, me flailing him, into a fence. Another time, to the delight of everyone on the school bus, he practiced beak-diving into my hair; I escaped, hair tousled, into the closing bus doors. Blacky eventually flew away-everybody but me lamenting him. For a while he lingered around the hills, announcing his presence by following someone through the woods. Mama swore a cousin eventually shot him.
The week I went home to visit Daddy after Mama died, a new version of dogs lay around the porch. An old pallet of quilts were there because Mama had insisted, Daddy said. I decided to grit my teeth and tolerate, if I could, the dogs, as long as they stayed away from the eager hands of my two infant daughters. I knew Daddy found them company; their barking at night his trained ears could sort out as communication with the far-off yelping of other dogs, an instinctive filling of the darkness with sound, or the approach of danger. He was comforted by their presence. Still, I found it a little much when my sister's horse-like hound made off with ham I had planned to use in sandwiches for traveling home the next day. Arms filled with kids and bags, I'd left the car doors open, returning moments later-but too late to save a loaf of bread and the ham the dog swallowed package and all. That night, thinking about it, I realized Mama would have chuckled about it, seeing she couldn't do anything about it anyway. Rocking quietly and listening to a whippoorwill crying in the distance, I broke out laughing, and when Daddy inquired, I told him, "Oh, I was just wondering whether Reba's hound had digested that cellophane." Daddy's laughter pushed back the darkness, rivaling the distant barking of dogs and the nearer sounds of small animals scurrying around for food and shelter. After our laughter subsided, we sat quietly, feeling ourselves merging and mingling with the night, knowing it as part of an illimitable and ultimate darkness which had already claimed an intimate part of ourselves; each of us was moved in a different way to a great and conclusive knowledge of the destiny that moved in us, through us, and out again into the greater beyond.