Demon Box

Dobbs goes to put some bales in the back to sit on and roust up Mickey. Sherree goes to get tomorrow’s homework to take to Grandma and Grandpa’s. Caleb and Louise and May go to let out the dogs. I run on ahead of Dad back out to the orchard, to bring her in for the night.

Something is wrong. She is just where we left her, but her head is tilted wrong. Her garland has fallen off and there’s a look in her tilted face. It isn’t drowsiness and neither is it loss of moisture like from her diarrhea two days ago. I run to lift her and the head flops: Dad! He comes running.

Shit! The goddamn dogs got her.

I locked the dogs in the paintroom.

Maybe it was the neighbor’s dog. Shit!

She feels—ah Dad, her back feels broke! Do you think she got run over when we came in from the pasture?

I don’t think so, Dad says. I saw her when we drove through the orchard. She was fine then.

It was the sun! Mom warned us. It was too much sun!

Naw… you think? She wasn’t out in the sun that long, it didn’t seem… really.

It really didn’t. Dad took her and carried her out of the orchard around the barn to the concrete grain storage, not because it was where Hub was living with Joon but because it was the coolest room on the place. The room looked cramped and little, with ten times the clutter that all of us used to make when we lived in it and we were six! Dad cleared a spot and found a half-blowed-up air mattress and laid her on it. I saw everybody coming so I climbed up on the cement shelf that used to be my bed. Everybody crowded in and fussed over her. Her breath was getting raspy and she was starting to twitch. I saw twitches begin, first at her spotted tail, then pretty soon they were running up her spine, then over her shoulders and around to her chest. Mom came and gave her some more of the clorzum milk she’d froze from when Floozie’s calf died, and I tried to pray. But all the time I could see the life twitching against the little ribcage like it wanted out.

Hub came in from work and yelled a cussword. She was really his. He found her up where they were logging, no mother in sight. Orphaned by a sonofabitch poacher, was what he figured, poor thing. When he saw her in a wad on the rubber mattress, he yelled and threw his plaid lunchbox against the concrete wall and dropped to his knees. He started rubbing his huge rough hands up and down his pantlegs and cussing in a whisper. It was all raspy. He reached out to touch her. She arched backward into his hand when he stroked her neck, then flopped limp. He cussed and cussed and cussed.

She got worse. Her breaths came harder. Even up on my old shelf I could hear the stuff gurgling in her. Mom said she was afraid that she was drowning. Fluid in her lungs. Pneumonia.

Dad and Hub took turns holding her up with her head down, so they could get on their knees to try and suck that stuff out. Jelly stuff, silver gray, out of her nostrils. The blackbright shine was going away in her eyes, and the twitch against her ribs was getting calmer. Once, bowing backwards, she gave out a call, thin and high. It reminded me of the sound of Grandpa’s little wooden varmint caller that he blows in the dark when he wants to lure in a fox or a cougar or a bobcat. Or says he does.

Hub kept sucking and puffing. She was getting bloated. Dad let him do it for a long time before he said, Give it in, Hub. She’s dead. When Hub stopped and Dad put her down, the air coming out made a sound, but not an animal sound. It was a kind of silly honk, like Caleb’s Harpo horn he got a long time later.

Sherree and Joon filled an apple box with rose petals and clover blossoms. Mom found a piece of silk from China. Out at the pump the cows and horses all stood around and watched. We put a round stone on top, a fine big stone Mom found on a river called Row. Before we were born, she said. Dad played his flute and Dobbs blowed his mouthharp and Joon tinkled on that old Fisher-Price xylophone Great-grandma Whittier gave me that still works. Hub blew once on a blade of grass—it made that same thin sound—and the funeral was over.

So we missed Star Trek at Buddy’s and Sunday supper and Grandma and Grandpa’s and everything. Dad cut our hair instead. Everybody went to bed early. Then, this morning, still foggy before the schoolbus comes, there’s a loud bunch of barking from the pond. Mom says, Never you kids mind finish your breakfast and get things ready. She’ll go see what it’s all about. She goes out the sliding kitchen window and heads down through the mist. Hub gets up and watches, sipping his coffee, then the barking stops and he comes back to the table. Joon puts his lunchbucket on the table next to his plate and Hub grunts. I think for a minute he’s going to go to cussing again. But then here comes Mom back, Stewart and Lance jumping all over her! She’s carrying our five-gallon minnow-catching bucket held high from the dogs, and she’s red with excitement.