The blue pickup truck had a rusted fender and a faded bumper sticker I couldn’t quite read from the kitchen window, but I knew the sound of its transmission before it even cut through the gravel. It was a heavy, low clatter that didn’t belong to the mail carrier or the county grader, neither of which ever came down our lane on a Monday. My thumb stayed pressed against the wooden edge of the screen door, right where the old paint had flaked away down to the gray grain over seven summers of leaning.
I didn’t move. I just watched through the rusted wire mesh as the truck door creaked open and a man in a canvas coat stepped down onto the stones, holding his hat in one hand and something dark and heavy dangling in the other. He had the same stoop in his shoulders as my husband Arthur did toward the end, though this man couldn’t have been a day past fifty, with hair the color of wet straw and a face carved by weather. The silence out here on the ridge was always heavy on a Monday, but that afternoon it felt like it had dropped lead weights into my ears.
It had been fourteen days since Sunday failed to show up at two o’clock. Fourteen days of me standing right here at this very same screen door with a cold slice of bacon cooling on a saucer, watching the break in the cedar hedge where the yellow dog always parted the branches like he owned the place.
Big yellow dog, thick in the chest, with a gray muzzle that made him look like a wise old judge and no tag on his scarred leather collar to tell me who he belonged to down in the valley. He didn’t bark. He didn’t scratch at the screen or beg for scraps the way a stray would. He just trotted up the steps like he was punching a time clock, laid his heavy chin across the west rail where the sun hits warmest around three, and stayed until the shadows stretched all the way across the clover patch. Then he’d turn around, head back through the gap in the hedge, and disappear until the next Sunday rolled around. The grandchildren named him Sunday the very first summer after my husband had his stroke, back when the house felt so quiet I thought the rafters might crack from the emptiness. It was the kind of name that sticks because it didn’t need any improving.
For seven years, maybe eight, that dog was the only clock in this house that still kept accurate time.
The man with the straw-colored hair walked up the porch steps slow, his boots making a dry, heavy scuff on the oak floorboards. He didn’t knock right away. He just stood there for a second with his hat clutched against his belt, looking past me into the dark of the hallway like he was checking to see if he had the right house. I let go of the screen and pushed it out an inch, not because I was brave, but because my knees were starting to ache from standing too long on the bare wood. “You missed the turn if you’re looking for the county road,” I said, and my voice sounded raspy to my own ears, like dry corn husks rubbing together. He looked down at the thing in his hand before he looked at me, and I saw then what he was carrying.
It was the scarred leather collar, dark with old oil and sweat, with the brass buckle that always caught the late sun when Sunday laid his head down on the rail. “I didn’t miss it, Mrs. Holloway,” the man said, and his voice had that gravelly low-country drawl that used to be common around here before the subdivision people moved in down by the creek. “I’m Arthur. Sam’s boy.”
The name didn’t ring a bell right off, but the shape of his jaw did. Sam lived three miles down the valley on the old Miller place before his hip gave out and his daughter moved him up to Knoxville to live in one of those brick places with the automatic doors. Sam had kept hounds back when my Arthur was still farming tobacco, big loud things that kept us awake when the wind came out of the east. “Sam’s boy,” I repeated, and I felt the cold air from the screen draft against my ankles. “I didn’t know Sam still had dogs. I thought he gave all that up when he went north.” Arthur shook his head, his eyes dropping to the floorboards between us where Sunday used to leave little circles of dust from his paws. “He didn’t have hounds anymore. Not after the stroke took the use of his left side. But he had Sunday.” He lifted the collar just enough for the brass buckle to clink against a button on his coat. “Or I guess I should say Sunday had him. And I guess, come to find out, Sunday had you too.”
That was when the kitchen clock behind me started its heavy chime, four slow strokes that sounded like stones dropping into an empty well. I didn’t turn around to look at it. I just looked at the man named Arthur and thought about the plate of bacon I had thrown out to the crows on Tuesday morning after waiting twelve days. “He didn’t come two weeks ago,” I said, and I didn’t bother keeping the sharpness out of my tone because grief always makes you prickly before it makes you sad. “I stood right here until the light was gone. I figured maybe he got old or got turned around by the loggers up on the ridge.” Arthur let out a long breath that smelled of stale tobacco and black coffee. “He didn’t get turned around, Mrs. Holloway. Sunday knew these hills better than the men who paved ’em. He just ran out of miles.”
He told me right there on the porch, standing in the shade of the cedar beams, how it had happened. Sunday had lived with Sam down by the creek until Sam passed away back in the spring of the year before. After the funeral, Arthur had loaded the old dog into the back of that very same blue pickup to take him home to his place over near Madisonville, three counties away where the land flattens out into pasture. But Sunday wasn’t a dog for flat land or new porches. Arthur said he kept him locked in the pen for three days, and the old yellow dog just sat by the gate staring south toward the ridge without taking a bite of his feed. On the fourth morning, someone left the latch half-clicked while they were unloading feed sacks, and Sunday was gone before the dust settled in the drive. Arthur spent three days driving every gravel road between here and the river looking for him, thinking some farmer had shot him for chasing sheep or he’d been hit by a timber truck on Route 7. But Sunday hadn’t gone looking for trouble. He had just walked back to where he belonged.
“He showed up on my back step three days after he broke out,” Arthur said, and a little ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth, though his eyes stayed heavy and tired. “My wife opened the back door to throw out some peelings, and there he was, sitting on the mat like he’d just stepped out to check the mail. Pads worn clean down to the pink. He didn’t want my house, Mrs. Holloway. He wanted his route.” I reached out and touched the rough wood of the porch pillar where the paint was gone, feeling the little splinters catch against my thumb. “He came here every single Sunday at two o’clock,” I said softly, almost to myself. “My husband used to sit right there in that green rocker before he passed, and Sunday would lay his big chin right across his boot like he was keeping him anchored to the floor. When Arthur died, I thought the dog would stop coming. I figured he only came for the man. But he didn’t miss a week. Not a single Sunday, rain or snow, until two weeks ago.”
Arthur nodded like he already knew the story by heart, like his daddy had told him things on the porch down by the creek before the memory started leaking out of him. “Daddy used to talk about how Sunday would disappear every seventh day right around noon,” he said, shifting the collar from one hand to the other. “Daddy thought he was chasing deer up on the ridge. He didn’t know about you, and I didn’t know about you until I found an old notebook in Daddy’s desk after we cleaned the house out last week. There was a page with your name on it, and a note about a yellow dog that had more sense than both of us put together.” He held out the collar then, resting it on the flat of his palm like it was something fragile that might break if he squeezed too hard. The leather was dark and soft where it had rubbed against that thick yellow fur for ten years, shaped into a permanent curve that looked like it still held the weight of an old neck. “He went on a Sunday, too,” Arthur whispered. “Right around two in the afternoon.
He was lying on that old braided rug in the kitchen, right where the sun comes through the window. He just let out one long breath and didn’t take another.”
The silence came back down then, but it wasn’t the heavy, lonely kind of silence I’d been living with since the morning of the fourteenth. It felt more like the quiet you get right after a hard rain, when the leaves are still dripping and the air smells of wet dust and pine sap. I looked out past the truck toward the cedar hedge where the gap was still dark and empty, and for a second I thought I saw a flash of yellow coat moving through the shadows before I remembered that the dead don’t come back down the lane on a pickup truck. “He was a good dog,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake nearly as much as I thought it would. “He was better company than most of the people who come down this road.” Arthur let out a dry, short laugh that sounded like gravel shifting under a tire. “That’s the truth. Daddy always said a dog like that doesn’t belong to any one person. He just loans himself out until his time is up.”
We stood there for a minute longer while the shadows from the west rail stretched all the way across the porch floorboards to the front door. Arthur didn’t move to go back to his truck, and I didn’t ask him to leave. He just reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, folded square of heavy paper, a photograph taken with one of those old Polaroid cameras, the edges yellowed and curled from sitting in a drawer. He laid it down on the little wooden table beside the green rocker, right where my husband used to keep his pipe tobacco. I looked down at it. It showed Sunday sitting on the grass beside an old man with a plaid shirt and a walking stick, both of them squinting into a bright summer sun that looked like it had been shining forty years ago. “You keep that,” Arthur said, turning back toward the top of the steps with his hat back on his head. “He liked this porch better than he liked ours. I figured he’d want to leave his papers where he spent his Sundays.”
I watched him walk back down to the blue pickup, his boots crunching loud on the dry limestone. He didn’t look back as he climbed in and ground the starter twice before the old engine caught with a blue puff of smoke from the tailpipe. I stayed right where I was by the screen door, holding the heavy leather collar in both hands, feeling the cold brass of the buckle against my palm. The truck backed around in the wide part of the drive, the tires biting deep into the gravel before it straightened out and headed back down toward the creek road, leaving nothing behind but the smell of burned oil and the dust settling slow on the weeds. When the sound of the motor finally died away behind the ridge, the yard was so quiet I could hear the pump kicking on down in the cellar and the wind whispering through the high cedar tops.
I walked over to the west rail where the sun was just starting to dip below the ridge, leaving a long smear of orange light across the clover. The wood was warm where the sun had hit it all afternoon, smooth and gray from years of weather and big yellow paws. I laid the old leather collar down right there in the middle of the rail, curving it just the way he used to lay his head when he was tired of watching the road. Beside it, I set the small ceramic saucer I usually kept by the back door for the bacon scraps, though I didn’t put anything in it this time. A dog like that doesn’t need bacon to remember where his Sunday was. I sat down in the green rocker for the first time since the fourteenth, letting the creak of the old springs fill up the empty space between the walls, and waited for the clock in the hall to tell me it was time to go inside.
