Shiloh: Chapters 1-4

“Just once in my life,” she says, “I’d like to see a bite of food go direct from the dish into somebody’s mouth without a detour of any kind.”

Saw a groundhog, saw a doe with two fawns, and saw a gray fox with a reddish head.

I look, and about fifteen yards off, there’s this shorthaired dog—white with brown and black spots—not making any kind of noise, just slinking along with his head down, watching me, tail between his legs like he’s hardly got the right to breathe.

Dog goes down on his stomach, groveling about in the grass.

He don’t even whimper, like he’s lost his bark.

Something really hurts inside you when you see a dog cringe like that.

He wiggles just a little, but he don’t come.

So I always go as far as the ford, where the river spills across the path, and then I head back.

This time, when I put out my hand, he licks all my fingers and jumps up against my leg, making little yelps in his throat.

I’m laughing as the beagle makes circles around me. I squat down and the dog licks my face, my neck.

My ma’s mama died of pneumonia, and we don’t ever get the chance to forget it.

I get to the front stoop and say, “Go home, boy.”

He sees me there at the window and his tail starts to thump.

“I could be a veterinarian’s helper,” I suggest, my second choice.

Mr. Wallace, he’s so flustered he just digs in his money drawer and gives Judd change for a twenty, and afterward I thought what did Andrew Jackson have to do with it?

Standin’ in front of me at the mud bog, sittin’ in front of me at the tractor pull, and risin’ right up out of his seat at the Jorden Globe of Death Motorcycle Act so’s I missed the best part.

He says he don’t, but I seen him once just about dusk with a young buck strapped over the hood of his truck.

Dad’s crossing the bridge by the old abandoned gristmill, turning at the boarded-up school, and for the first time I can feel Shiloh’s body begin to shake.

For the first time I can tell Dad’s getting impatient with me.

“Marty,” Dad says, and now his voice is just plumb tired.

I shut up then. Let my hands run over Shiloh’s body like maybe everywhere I touch I can protect him somehow.

First you say your howdys and then you talk about anything else but what you come for, and finally, when the mosquitoes start to bite, you say what’s on your mind. But you always edge into it, not to offend.

First you say your howdys and then you talk about anything else but what you come for, and finally, when the mosquitoes start to bite, you say what’s on your mind. But you always edge into it, not to offend.

“Yep,” he says, thrusting his face in the open window.

“He runs all over creation,” Judd says.

Judd only growls.

“He could be a fine huntin’ dog, but he tries my patience. I’ll leave him be tonight, but he wanders off again, I’ll whup the daylights out of him. Guarantee you that.”

Thinking how I’d disappointed him, whistling like I meant something that first time, gettin’ him to come to me, then taking him on back to Judd Travers to be kicked all over again.

I don’t let my mind go any further; don’t dwell on what Judd would want for Shiloh, or even whether he’d sell. Especially don’t ask myself how I’m supposed to get the money.

“Collect some bottles, take ’em in for deposit. Pick up some aluminum cans, maybe, for the recycling place.”

“I’ll ask along my mail route, but don’t know many folks with money to spare,” he says. Which is what I thought.

“You got that dog on your mind,” she says, lifting the big iron skillet to the stove top and laying some bacon in it.

“You hear that?” I ask Dad.
“Just a hound complaining,” is all he says.

Next morning Dad gives me a nudge when he comes through to the kitchen, and I’m up like a shot.

“You hear that?” I ask Dad.
“Just a hound complaining,” is all he says.

He’s got a big old sickle; is cutting weeds along his side of the road.

His shirt’s all soaked with sweat, and he wears this brown handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the sweat from running in his eyes.

Judd just laughs, and his teeth’s dark where the tobacco juice oozes through.

It isn’t that we’re rock-poor; trouble is that Grandma Preston’s got real feeble, and she’s being cared for by Dad’s sister over in Clarksburg.

I’m tense as a cricket that night. Tense when Dad drives up in his Jeep, afraid the dog will bark.