The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (33 page)

One of the behaviors that stamp our species apart—that make us human—is the telling of tales, such as the one I have just told you and the one I will tell you now. A few nights ago I told this same story to my children right before they went to sleep. I love this time of the day. I lie on Clara’s bed with her, Lucas in his crib right next to us. Clara presses against my back and Lucas, every night, ceremoniously lays his hand over mine in a gesture too elegant and determined for the toddler that he is. The lights are always off, and the door is always open in a burst of yellow from the hallway. And I was telling my children a true story, as I often do, about a discovery made by an archeologist just a few years ago. He had been digging in Israel, in the dry land out beyond the dome and the Via Dolorosa, looking for pottery chips. And this archeologist came across a grave, a surprise grave he had not expected to find. The grave was deep in the dry land, in a time before coffins. The archeologist knelt. He unwrapped the dusty, buried shroud and inside it, remarkably intact, he found the skeleton of a person—man or woman it was impossible to tell. The person, from some point in our Paleolithic past, was curled in a fetal position, and lying next to him was the skeleton of a puppy, the two buried together, lying in the ground this way for all this span of time. Most remarkable, though, was the skeleton’s hand. It rested upon the shoulder of the puppy as Lucas’s hand right then rested on mine, lightly, the tenderness obvious even in the hardness of bone. Human and canine, living together, buried together, clasped; it has been this way for a long, long while, and so it will go into the future.

And by the time I had finished the story my children were asleep, sweating in their sleep as they often do, and I had forgotten they were there, so immersed was I in the image, in the fact: the fact of skin and fur and how long and short we have been here. So I was surprised to look up and see in the burst of hallway light the man I married there, in the doorframe, listening—since when I do not know. Had he heard it all? Had he heard it at all? Benjamin has copper-colored hair, just like the pups, and he now has old-man whiskers, just like the pups. He sat there on the floor cross-legged, a dog sitting on either side of him, my children long gone, daylight saving time coming soon, this year our forty-seventh circle around the sun, he was bracketed by our animals, in contrast and contact, blurred but distinct, he Indian style, they on folded haunches, all eyes open, each dog alert, their ears pricked forward, his hands hovering over their beautiful heads.

Our new home has ceilings so low the summers are stifling inside, the ample mountain breezes barely able to squeeze themselves through the meager windows of this faux farmhouse. Unlike a real antique, our saltbox was built in the 1970s, which makes its smallness all the more an absurdity. In the olden days, people made their quarters cramped for warmth, but the prior owner built his house tiny in accordance with his wife’s penchant for the pretty. Because we haven’t yet moved in full time (we’re here for whole summers and then for weekends over the rest of the year) we haven’t yet had time to steam off heart-patterned wallpaper but knowing we can makes it easier to bear. The ceilings are another story. What can we do about those? At five foot one inch, I can stand up straight and nearly fan them with my fingers, the thick plaster swirled just barely above our heads, its peaked texture like egg whites stiffened with sugar.

The thirty-two acres of land we bought—rolling hills, unprimed woods opening up into grasslands and reservoirs—make the tiny house perched on it paradoxically both harder and easier to handle. Outside stretched fields clotted with black-eyed Susans, and then woods where towering trees, ripped up at the roots from a severe ice storm last year, lie felled like gentle giants on their sides, their canopies crushed under the mammoth weight of the now soft and rotting trunks. Standing in those woods, you look up and see the distant sky crosshatched by what seem like billions of branches: ash, oak, maple, cherry. And then you look down and see the ground gone emerald with moss, creeping up the flanks of the fallen trees; the moss wraps the rot in royal rugs across which dark beetles dart and upon which placid toads squat, staring out at the world with yellow eyes.

Beyond the trees there’s more moss, and streams running every which way, and loam which is, says our neighbor, Al, as old as the Pleistocene ice age. “This dirt’s been here millions of years,” Al told me one day not long ago, cupping a handful of the black fudge that oozed up between the tendons of the trees. I’d never considered the idea of prehistoric dirt before, but why not. “Why not?” Al said to me. “The stones here are glacial and so’s the till,” and I suppose he’s right. Now I hold the till and imagine it teeming with tiny prehistoric creatures, creatures unchanged since dinosaurs roamed and ruled, and as I stare the dirt turns transparent, so I can see in my palm a mini kingdom presided over by microbes and populated with citizens of cells.

Large and small; big and tall; we dwell, it seems, in a land of polar opposites. Winters here are marked by the snow’s first descent, the thermometer free falling past zero, the sky breaking up into billions of tiny tatters that, once fallen, revert to a one, a singular white too huge for words. Spring comes as the cracking of ice and by mid-July we’ve reached some metaphorical boiling point, the fields withered and parched, the pond’s crazed cracks on the ground, insects everywhere. We resent the smallest of the predators: mayfly, mosquito; while we fear the largest: the black bear, the coyote, some unseen ones that as of yet have no name. The other night, just into July, we heard an ungodly sound while we slept. It was the sound of murder, or terror, of a beast giving birth. Ben shot straight up in bed. “What is that?” I asked as the kids raced into our room and jumped under the sheets. We four stayed silent, waiting to hear the howl again, I thinking of lions on the loose, knowing it was impossible, but, bears, that could be. “Did you lock the door?” I whispered to Ben. Then the yowl again, this time the sound as if torn from the slaughtered throat of something at once intimate and alien, a beast I could not picture but whose pungent nature I could smell, seeping under our sills. Down stairs, our old dog began to bark, his barks, each one, falling uselessly onto the floor like blunt blades that could never protect us here. Then, a third time, and I could hear, I swear, the sound was slightly simian, and closer; Ben threw the sheets off, moonlight bright on one white leg, that leg, this house, so small, too small, the leg made of god knows what, the house made of cheap wood and single-paned glass; next to me, Clara was crying; Lucas had his eyes squeezed shut. “Don’t go,” I whispered to Ben, and he didn’t, and that disappointed me, even as I hugged him hard, aware of my cold, greasy clutch. We waited and waited. The sound didn’t come again. Minutes, maybe even an hour passed. Our bones would not bend. Sleep was a continent away. We stayed up the whole night, and it wasn’t until the hills got golden that any of us felt safe enough to rest in our ramshackle country house, while outside, on our thirty-two acres and far beyond that too, beasts roamed, rageful, and rightfully so.

After that, I decided to enlarge the house. Had I been using my common sense I would have thought about fortifying the house, but I wasn’t using my common sense. Somehow it seemed to me that if the house were larger we would be safer; we would be making a clear statement; lions tigers and bears OUT THERE; Slater/Alexander clan IN HERE. Our
in here
needed an exclamation point. Thus, like any good yuppie trying to countrify herself, instead of getting a gun or building a barrack, I called a contractor.

“Cathedral it,” the contractor said within moments, it seemed, of walking in our door. On the second floor, he bent his head back to scan our low ceilings, the dangle-down fixtures with their prisms in your hair and, with a sweep of his hand, half dramatic, half dismissive he said, “Cathedral the whole damn second story,” and that was that. It seemed easy enough to do. Knock out those poorly plastered ceilings and create a higher heaven. Cheap. Quick. Creative. What could be better?

And in fact it was easy to do. We went at it with hammers, axes, pry bars. A universe opened above us. Tearing down the ceilings was a lot of fun. It was like playing a piñata game over and over again. Wack wack wack with a huge hammer. All of us took turns. We wacked until our cramped ceilings sighed and snowed, until their smashed sternums gave way in heaps of fluff and insulation; we wacked until we were knee deep in the debris of insufficiency, and then we swept it all up and poured our tiny smashed sky in the dumpster we’d rented for just this purpose.

It seems amazing that you can do one thing to a structure and the one thing you do can have so many reverberations. Within a day our pathetic little 1970s saltbox went from kitsch- country to serious, stern, a building with many meaty attic rafters and significant trusses of chestnut and ash, all of it exposed in the soaring shape of an A-frame interior. Now when we looked up, we could see the muscle that had been hidden in our home all this time, and beyond the muscle we could see chinks of sky and patches of white cloud where the roof needed repair. The rain came in on us, but we felt our fortress was stronger, and we slept the damp restful sleep of the seemingly safe.

We loved our cathedral over the summer. The contractor put up planks made of maple, antique maple with a honey hue. We loved that hue, and the steep slope of the ceiling he’d built. We loved that the planks were irregular, not cut to uniform sizes but staggered in width, like an old country floor angling up, over your head. We fixed the roof, put in some skylights, and watched the season pass. We watched storms roll in over Wachusett Mountain, the sky going dark, the rain coming hard, later the stars all sequins. A blistering August brought with it shrill cicadas, hysterical from the heat, and the gardens went limp, the flowers fainting where they stood. At night we could see the massive roof ties of our home at once supporting us in here and sheltering us from what was out there, and we were almost sorry the simian sound of that gigantic wild creature never came again.

Other things came in its stead. The neighbor’s cat was killed by a coyote, her mauled body found beneath a tree. End of summer, black bears were sighted in the roads, or crossing people’s properties, coming so close to the houses that their dexterous mitted paws were clearly visible, as were the two dark dots of the sow’s nostrils. Driving back to Boston, we saw a crumpled car and not far from it a smashed deer, his antlers spearing the air, his head hanging sideways as the blood ran out. “Even the deer are huge here,” I remember my husband saying as we sped by, passing the ambulance coming from the other direction.

Indeed it seemed to us that the very idea of the bucolic, at least as it pertained to New England, was a giant misnomer. True, the several states that make up this region are known for their low stone walls and the beauty of the snow settling upon them; for the swards of green where sheep and goat graze side by side; for the genteel farmhouses with their still more genteel porches that shelter folks while they sit in the fading day, dragonflies darting in and out of mud as rich as chocolate. Cows give milk and horses whinny as though straight out of a storybook. That’s New England for you, at least from a pamphlet’s perspective. But having spent now several summers in Massachusetts’s north-central region, in the shadow of a midsized mountain and on fields that sport stone walls older than a century, the bucolic has given way to something rougher, more frightening, something simmering just beneath the skin of our lovely summer days. That simian scream. The fear of going out of doors after dark, because the bears are there, and hungry. Snakes longer than your leg coil beneath boulders, their teeth curved like a canine’s, the poison in their split viper’s tongue.

Summer ended and we left our country house, otherwise known as our “second home,” to come back only on the weekends now. We locked the doors, drove back to the city, dropped our kids off for their first day of school, their second day of school, the city smelling of city, the library’s lawn posted with signs:
Danger: Insecticide
. I thought I’d feel safer in the city, but in fact I felt oddly exposed, cramped, everywhere I went lawns being poisoned in preparation for fall.

On Friday, as soon as the kids were out of school, we drove back to the saltbox. Ben, working late, would be meeting us there in an hour or two. The ride was uneventful—the highway, the bathroom breaks, Burger King meals, the car filled with crumpled cups and boxes, the sheen of grease on the steering wheel.

And now—the house. We pulled into the saltbox’s driveway. On the outside everything looked just as we had left it. My son’s bike was leaning against the chestnut tree, his blue ball precisely where he’d last let it fall. In the darkening day I could see the little light we had kept on in the hallway, giving a glow to one window. We got out of the car. Above us clouds were streaming, surrounded by a cold cobalt blue. I stepped towards the house and, just as I did so, its one light went out, leaving the house sunk in shadows.

“Shhh,” I said to the kids, racing around the driveway now. Something in my tone made them stop, abruptly.

“What’s wrong? Clara asked.

“The light in the house,” I said. “It just went out.”

“Well you left it on all week,” Clara said.”

“I know,” I said.

But what I didn’t know, what I couldn’t put my finger on, was why our house seemed so strange, even as it looked completely the same. It seemed hunched, this house, and when I opened the front door the darkness was deeper than what it was outside; it was bat-black and tangible. And then I heard it, at first barely and then crescendoing to clearly … a hiss coming from some inside space. The hallway? The second-story bathroom? I cocked my head. Hisssssss. The sound seemed to be nowhere and everywhere at once. Hisssssss. It was low, this sound, both soft and sharp, like the rustling of skirts or flames.

I held the kids back with one arm and snaked my other arm along the wall until I hit a light switch, flicked it on, and in a nanosecond the hall and its adjacent rooms were flooded with yellow, warmly glowing, illuminating familiar objects on the one hand, strange vacancies on the other. The shadow space under the desk leapt into life. The wastebaskets were dank and dark inside. I could see the cupboards but the light could not reach that space beneath them, where crumbs and cockroaches go. Hisss-ssss. Now I knew: the sound was coming from upstairs.