DOGS IN NIGHT TO BARN WHERE SHEEP by Robin McCarthy
The man and the woman first arrived in autumn. They met the farm with uncallused hands and walked eighty acres into the shallow valley together, smooth palms touching. The man showed the woman how deeply he could dig before spade struck rock and she agreed to stay. She learned to shake persimmon trees until ripe fruit fell to the ground, and she found she liked the too-sweet pulp best when cold, the shriveled flesh nearly frozen by morning frost.
The man worked and the woman worked and they weathered the first winter. Their earliest spring, the brink of lambing. The ewes swelled at their haunches and the woman became sad. Where once she had lit her mornings with steady humming, she had begun to break ice from the trough in silence, noiseless as she collected eggs and stacked logs of elm and osage beside the stove. Alone and mute, she struggled to replace what they had burned.
Her sorrow was deep. Indecipherable.
There was no other man, but she did not say so to her husband when she left. She let him imagine men from the church and men playing poker in the back room of the feed store and men from her work in town whom she knew her husband did not trust. He would not be able to imagine them tender with his wife. She did not want him to.
That year, there were lambs born in February and another handful in March. Fourteen new animals and the woman missed the births of them all. And also, she was not there when the meekest of them died, and she could not point to the place in the orchard for the man to dig a hole.
She stayed away for fifteen weeks. She called the man twice to ask after the farm and measure the depth of speaking his name into the phone. When she returned, she seemed cured of sadness. She hummed again with the morning chores and whispered sorry into damp pockets of her husband’s skin. She walked with him over the hill to the orchard, and he showed her the place he had buried the lamb and she could still see where the sod had been broken, where it had spent the summer trying to grow back together.
After her return, there was a week in October when the man was away. Four nights and five days she looked after the farm on her own. On the third night, dogs came barking from the darkness. The woman heard their calling over the land and she pulled on the man’s rubber boots with extra socks to make them fit. She took his rifle, a winter hat, and spent the night in the barn. She sat first on an overturned bucket, lay later in the hay opposite the sleeping ewes. The sheep slept tight against each other, new lambs wedged between mothers. The woman listened to the howl of the dogs, waited for them to draw near the barn.
She knew she would kill them if they came too near. She would struggle dead dogs into the man’s pick‑up. She would deliver their bodies in black trash bags to the addresses on their silver tags. She would imagine the man when she looked at the ground and said, We can’t have dogs stalking the sheep. She would shift her weight and scan the sloping hill and try to make her handshake a promise that said, This is an animal I have killed. I am not ashamed.
Years later, the dogs came a second time and the man and the woman did not hear the barking until the animals had arrived at the barn. The man stood on the front step in shearling slippers, watching with a rifle in his hands: the high arch of canine spines, bristled scruffs, and the backward glow of eyes. He heard the metallic clinking of collars as they ran off with a sheep in a wash of moonlight. He shot the gun in the direction of the dogs, but he could not hit them at such a distance.
When they had slept and it was growing light, the man and woman laced their boots around their ankles. The woman carried the man’s gun and the man carried nothing and they followed the trail of blood and paw prints across crusts of snow, through the far pasture. The man chided himself for the failure of his handmade fences and his wife said, They were fine for a very long time.
They found the clearing in the woods where the dogs had torn at flesh. The man surveyed the skin in the snow, too brown-blooded to be turned to something useful. He looked to his wife and shook his head. She could hear bowls of dog food being set on a back step for beasts who would not need a meal for days.
They left the butchered ends for the vultures and coyotes. They were angered by the slaughter, but also, this was the natural world. It was animals without human intercession. It was not their place to clean up after murdering dogs.
When they returned from the site of the slaughter, the man and woman stood in the barn facing the ram. The sheep watched them all. The animals said nothing of their disappointment. The man and woman blinked back at their animals as their animals blinked at them. All of them, animals blinking.
The next day the neighbors into telephones and visiting anxiously at the ends of driveways, speculated about coyotes and wolves – something wild – carrying the lamb away. But the man and woman had seen and heard the theft in the cold and they were certain when they said, No. No, it was dogs. It was your dogs, maybe, or someone else’s.
The woman and the man lived a long time on the farm, each generation of chickens and sheep measured against the last. They turned over sod to expand the garden. Each year, more fresh earth tilled. They built a greenhouse and ate lettuce in February and one year, men in orange vests paved the road at the bottom of the hill.
Indoors, the walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were piled with books stacked on their sides. Their neighbors installed satellite dishes on rooftops and in front yards, and the man and woman bought more paperbacks, more cast-away library seconds. They had a child that did not live. The man buried the ashes in the orchard, beneath an apple tree identical to all the other apple trees.
And then, late into the evening one June when the woman’s hair was turning gray at the temples and the man had stopped eating salt, a neighbor called to say he had heard dogs in the valley between their farms.
On the telephone, the neighbor spoke first of the weather and then of the threat. The man told the neighbor he was sure their farm would be safe. It had been decades since they had worried about dogs.
But already he was finding his boots. Already his wool coat was fastened when he saw his wife with the rifle, moving toward the door. They stood opposite each other in the hall. The man reached out his hand and the woman gave up the gun.
He leaned it against the doorway and led her to the kitchen, took a velvet pouch from the cedar cupboard that held the everyday plates. She pulled the cord to loosen the bag and dropped into her palm a wooden medallion on a gold chain. A persimmon, carved and sanded by her husband from an apple branch, oiled by his hand and marked by a dark stripe of heartwood. He watched for what she would say. She looked to him and ran the cracked skin of her fingers over the smooth surface he had made. She let the chain fall over the rough of her hand.
You remember the spring I went away? she asked. I came back, weeks before I came back for good. The house was empty but the car was in the corn crib and your boots were gone from the door. So I followed the path up to the orchard and found you gathering osage oranges along the ridge. I hung back and watched you drop the fruit into a plastic bag, watched you carry it down into the valley. You stood in the pasture with a baseball bat, lobbing the oranges into the sky and swinging as they fell back to earth. The fruit broke above you and its flesh rained onto the land where the animals fed. You seeded the far pasture with osage, you broke the knobby orbs over and over again, and I could see the sweat along your hairline and feel the sting in the muscles along your back. You tossed and swung as though you were a boy in Little League and I saw how alone you must have been as a child, how alone you were when I left.
That’s why you came back? the man asked.
No, said the woman. I came back because once, years ago, when you were visiting your sister, I heard the dogs on the ridge and I spent the night in the barn with the sheep and the dogs did not carry them away.
But that was later, you couldn’t have known, said the man. And the dogs came back.
Yes, said the woman. Yes, the dogs came back.
There’s not a lot of time, said the man, worried for the sheep.
He took his gun and the woman wore her boots and carried a heavy blanket, and together they walked to the barn where the sheep had been roused by the barking dogs. The ram stood between the man and woman and their flock and his stare demanded a promise. The woman reached forward to touch the ram’s cheek. The man righted an overturned bucket. It was winter and when the woman left, she closed the gate behind her, the gun over her shoulder and her husband seated in the hay, under the blanket.
The woman walked up into the orchard and over the ridge, into the far pasture in the valley below. She stopped to listen until she heard a light howl. The night was still and the sound echoed. She followed the sound beyond the pasture, past the old Buick long rusted into the crick bed. She crossed the fence marking an old property line, the shapes of their own farm buildings distant behind her. She traveled faster as the barking grew louder. The moon was absent behind the clouds, but her eyes trusted the darkness. Her feet knew where to step.
She gained on the dogs, and soon the woods were thick with hardwood trees. The call was no longer moving, stationary in the valley below.
In the valley she could hear that she was very close to the dogs. It sounded like many animals, but when she finally saw them through the trees, it was three. She heard the wild desire in the desperate din of the howling. She had once felt like that, stifled by the land and hungry for something new. She tilted her head and opened her mouth to release her own low and loaded warbling call. At first, her howl was quiet, but air rushed in and out of the woman and she grew in volume, in fever. The animals looked to her, their own howls silenced by surprise. She filled her lungs with winter air and began again, and soon the dogs joined her, their noise layered over hers.
She howled until she was hoarse and then she raised the gun to her shoulder while the dogs still yodeled into the night. She aimed at the largest of them and the sound of the shot silenced everything, everything. The dog collapsed into the crusted snow and the two others fled deeper into the woods, a wounded whimpering following. The woman tracked their prints a while, ignored the smell of the shot on the cuff of her sleeve.
She trailed for minutes, maybe hours. She passed the brambles that brought blackberries in summer and kicked at leaf litter with the toe of her boot. She remembered again her husband and the osage oranges, the way they had drawn up so much from this land.
She returned with the man’s gun to the barn many hours later. He stood to greet her and the sheep ferried themselves to a far corner.
I heard a shot, said the man. Only one.
I killed a dog, she told him. We’ll have to gather the body in the morning. There were tags, it had a home.
The man took the rifle and enveloped her ear with the flat warmth of his palm.
I’m glad it was you, he said. He handed her the blanket and they walked together to the house, where he leaned the gun against the door and took the handmade medallion from where the woman had left it on the table. She turned so he could clasp it at the base of her neck, and as he did, he recalled to her how deeply he had loved when he first watched her suck persimmon seeds clean, the astonishing way she spat them out into the earth. They spoke softly of the season they learned to scrape the pulp from the pit with their teeth, how for so many years they had worked buried things bare.
Robin McCarthy’s stories have appeared in WordRiot and on National Public Radio.