wanted it. He glowered at me, remarked upon the vaulted sky with
razor-thin cries, shuddered uncontrollably, circled the yard, circled
and circled until near dawn, when at last he came to me, exhausted, and
put his head in my lap and did not hate me anymore.
Just before sunrise, I went upstairs to my room, ready for bed hours
earlier than usual, and Orson came with me. Most of the time, when he
chooses to sleep to my schedule, he curls near my feet, but on this
occasion he lay on his side with his back to me, and until he slept, I
stroked his burly head and smoothed his fine black coat.
I myself slept not at all that day. I lay thinking about the hot
summer morning beyond the blinded windows. The sky like an inverted
blue porcelain bowl with birds in flight around its rim.
Birds of the day, which I had seen only in pictures. And bees and
butterflies. And shadows ink-pure and knife-sharp at the edges as they
never can be in the night. Sweet sleep couldn’t pour into me because I
was filled to the brim with bitter yearning.
Now, nearly three years later, as I opened the kitchen door and stepped
onto the back porch, I hoped that Orson wasn’t in a despondent mood.
This night, we had no time for therapy either for him or for me.
My bicycle was on the porch. I walked it down the steps and rolled it
toward the busy dog.
In the southwest corner of the yard, he had dug half a dozen holes of
various diameters and depths, and I had to be careful not to twist an
ankle in one of them. Across that quadrant of the lawn were scattered
ragged clumps of uprooted grass and clods of earth torn loose by his
claws.
“Orson?”
He did not respond. He didn’t even pause in his frenzied digging.
Giving him a wide berth to avoid the spray of dirt that fanned out
behind his excavating forepaws, I went around the current hole to face
him.
“Hey, pal,” I said.
The dog kept his head down, his snout in the ground, sniffing
inquisitively as he dug.
The breeze had died, and the full moon hung like a child’s lost balloon
in the highest branches of the melaleucas.
Overhead, nighthawks dived and soared and barrel-looped, crying
peent-peent-peent as they harvested flying ants and earlyspring moths
from the air.
Watching Orson at work, I said, “Found any good bones lately? ” He
stopped digging but still didn’t acknowledge me. Urgently he sniffed
the raw earth, the scent of which rose even to me.
“Who let You out here?”
Sasha might have brought him outside to toilet, but I was sure that she
would have returned him to the house afterward.
“Sasha?” I asked nevertheless.
If Sasha were the one who had left him loose to wreak havoc on the
landscaping, Orson was not going to rat on her. He wouldn’t meet my
eyes lest I read the truth in them.
Abandoning the hole he had just dug, he returned to a previous one.
I wanted to talk to Angela Ferryman, because her message on my
answering machine had seemed to promise revelations. I was in the mood
for revelations.
First, however, I had to call Sasha, who was waiting to hear about my
father.
I stopped in St. Bernadette’s cemetery, one of my favorite places, a
harbor of darkness in one of the more brightly lighted precincts of
town. The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns, supporting a
ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns, and the quiet space below
is laid out in aisles similar to those in any library; the gravestones
are like rows of books bearing the names of those who have been blotted
from the pages of life, who may be forgotten elsewhere but are
remembered here.
Orson wandered, though not far from me, sniffing the spoor of the
squirrels that, by day, gathered acorns off the graves. He was not a
hunter tracking prey but a scholar satisfying his curiosity.
From my belt, I unclipped my cellular phone, switched it on, and keyed