Always had.
Food. Animals. You lay in bed and thought. Now that it was summer, your bed was pushed up against the window, and your head was by the window, and the window was open and you could hear the bullfrogs at the west pond talking and the bullfrogs at the east pond talking and from everywhere else you heard crickets. You could hear a car on the gravel road a long way away, moving, making a whooshing noise on the gravel, growing louder, cresting a hill, then fading. Who was that, out driving in the night? Maybe it was Elizabeth, who was out with her boyfriend, Wayne Elwood. Maybe not. Light bloomed up through the open stairwell and shone against one wall of your room. Dad was still awake, but it was quiet down there, down in the living room. You listened and you waited and then you heard him turn a page.
You rolled over and you looked at the dark, open doorway to your sisters’ room. Then you heard something. A faint jingling. A rhythmic jingling. Outside. You rolled onto your stomach and looked out the window, but it was dark, very dark out there. But the noise, you knew what it was. It was the terrier, Teddy. His vaccination tag—the little aluminum vaccination tag—jingling against his collar as he trotted across the yard. Maybe he was about to bark at something. Maybe he sensed raccoons in the vicinity.
The jingling stopped.
“Teddy?” you called out the window.
No jingling. You knew he was standing motionless in the dark, his ears pricked up because he had heard you. He was listening.
“Teddy,” you said, “go to bed.”
In the other room, Susan laughed. You smiled because you had made her laugh. She was lying in her own bed, going to sleep, just like you.
You put your chin down onto the pillow, still looking out the window. You sank into the pillow up to your nose, and you could smell the pillow and the pillow blocked your nose and made breathing pleasantly difficult.
The terrier was on the move again and then the sound faded away.
From the other room, after awhile, Susan said, “Where’d he go?” She had heard him, too. She was lying by her window, too.
You said, “Around the house, I think.” You wondered. You said, “Maybe he’s thirsty.”
You thought about that, and about the pan of water behind the cellar house where he drank. The cats drank there, too. You thought about the doghouse on the front porch, which was painted the same color as the real house. Sometimes the terrier slept in there and sometimes he didn’t. It was anybody’s guess. Then you thought about how if you pointed to something extremely directly—in other words, touched it—and said the terrier’s name with a certain urgency, he would eat whatever you were pointing at. Or attempt to eat it. He was four years old and you’d owned him since your sixth birthday and he was a cairn terrier approximately the color of old straw. His eyes hid behind a veil of hair but he didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing and sometimes for fun you would pull back his bangs and reveal his eyes and they were black.
If you were working in the garden, the terrier would join you because any kind of garden work involved edible things for him. True, if you were there, it might mean you would trick him into trying to eat a piece of wood or a grasshopper. But your mother would never trick him and if she was doing any kind of digging or weeding it meant that in all likelihood the terrier’s favorite delicacy would be unearthed. Grubs. White grubs. Fat white grubs. Why did he like those so much? They were somewhat see-through.
He also liked peas. Last year when the peas were ripe you would sometimes wander into the rows of peas in the afternoon and pick a few and shell them and eat them right there and usually the terrier would be right at your heels and he would eat the hulls you dropped but also he was hoping you would give him a whole pod—peas and all—because he liked that even better than the hulls. And who wouldn’t? You and Susan would give him a few whole pods, but not many. He also ate some kinds of cattle feed and occasionally poop, but that was hard to understand. Also, when the farrier came to trim the horses’ hooves, he would leave the trimmed bits of hoof in the barnyard and the terrier found these to be extremely enjoyable to chew on, especially after they had dried for a few days. When they dried, they shrank and curled. He didn’t eat them, he just chewed on them, but if you came too close to him when he was chewing on a horse hoof he would growl. Stay back, bucko. This is my horse hoof. So no monkey business.
He meant it. And who cared? You didn’t want the horse hooves.
“Hey,” you said. You had rolled onto your back and your eyes were closed.
“What?” Susan said from her bed. You could tell from her voice that she was close to sleep. Downstairs, the lights in the living room were off, but you could hear Dad in the kitchen.
“Do you remember,” you said, “how Teddy ate peas last summer?”
You waited awhile. “Yeah,” she said.
The peas would be ready again soon. In the garden.
“Do you think he’ll eat them this year?” you asked.
“Yeah . . .”
“I bet so,” you said. You opened your eyes and then you closed them again and then you thought of something and you opened them.
“Hey,” you said, “do you remember when Teddy ate that balloon once?”
“Yeah . . .”
You thought about it. “Me too,” you said.
And it was the last thing you said, because you were falling asleep.
Mulberries were a June thing. They went from white to pink to red to black, and then they were ready. They weren’t that good to eat and if you had more than a few your stomach got quarrelsome. You had to spit out the stems because they were unchewable and tasted like clover leaves. There were little bugs on the mulberries anyway. Bugs about the size of dust, but you could see them moving if you looked close. Mainly you thought about mulberries at the end of the night when you washed your feet. You went barefoot all summer and when you were running around the yard barefoot in June sometimes you weren’t really thinking about what you were doing, because apparently you ran under the mulberry tree a few times and crushed a lot of fallen mulberries with your feet without even realizing it. You saw the blotches when you washed your feet at night. You didn’t mind the blotches. They were kind of like a suntan; it was just something that happened in the course of the summer. You could still see the stains the next day. They didn’t wash off. You’d see them at breakfast as you sat cross-legged. They were a reminder. A reminder of themselves. You’d look at your feet and think to yourself, oh, mulberries. They’re no good to eat. You never even realized you’d been running under the mulberry tree until later. Oh, you’d think, mulberries.
Summertime breakfast. Certain regions of your hair were sticking up.
The day after school ended in late May, your shoes and socks came off. But your feet were tender. Walking in the grass felt like being tickled. If you stepped on a june bug it would buzz and you would shriek because of how it felt. The sidewalk was rough. And you couldn’t walk on the gravel of the driveway at all because it was just too much to take. The situation of having tender feet had no immediate remedy, but you were reminded by Mom that it wouldn’t last; your feet would get tougher, and in a couple of weeks you’d be running in the driveway, riding bikes, walking on the prickly hay in the barn, and so forth, without even realizing you didn’t have shoes on. You would start to lose track of your shoes. Shoes? Where are my shoes? I haven’t seen my shoes
