Seven years is two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days of keeping time by a dog’s paws on gravel, which is longer than most marriages last these days and certainly longer than any milkman or paper boy ever bothered to check if I was still breathing over here behind the west hedge. My husband Walter had been gone three months into the ground when Sunday first trotted up the steps of this old farmhouse, right at two o’clock on a July afternoon when the cicadas were screaming so loud you could hardly hear your own thoughts.
Walter had always said that numbers had elbows because they jabbed you when you least expected it, and he was right about that, just like he was right about the way the cedar shingles on the north side would curl up if you didn’t brush the needles off every autumn. I had been sitting in the straight-backed wicker chair with my hands folded in my lap, feeling the kind of hollow loneliness that makes the walls of a big house feel like they are slowly pressing inward to measure your coffin, when I heard the dry scrape of claws on the bottom step and looked down to see a big yellow dog with a face dusted in gray standing there like he had an appointment. He didn’t bark, and he didn’t whine, and he didn’t look at me with that desperate neediness you see in strays that have been kicked around by teenagers down at the county road; he just walked straight to the west rail, lowered his heavy hindquarters with an audible grunt, and laid his chin right across his front paws to stare out at the pasture as if he owned the mortgage.
He wore a heavy leather collar that had a brass ring all worn down to a thin silver crescent, but there was no metal tag dangling from it to tell me his name or who owned him, though my grandchildren took one look at him the following Sunday when they came out for pot roast and decided he looked like a Sunday kind of dog, and the name stuck because grandchildren have a way of cementing things into the earth whether you want them there or not.
Walter had always kept a tin of bacon grease by the stove, and after that first afternoon, I started setting aside two strips from my Sunday morning skillet, letting them cool on a brown paper towel while I cleared the breakfast dishes, waiting for the two o’clock shadow to fall across the bottom board of the screen door. The routine became as fixed as the tides or the rotation of the overhead fan in the kitchen, because every seventh day, regardless of whether it poured rain or baked forty degrees above normal, that dog would materialize out of the gap in the wild plum hedge where the fence wire had rusted through back in the seventies, trot up the steps, and take his post by the west rail for exactly sixty minutes.
He would eat his bacon out of a blue-glazed saucer I kept on the porch floor, lick the glaze until it squeaked, and then tuck his nose under his tail for a brief nap while I sat rocking and reading my paperback westerns or sewing buttons back onto shirts that hadn’t seen a wearer in years. We never made a fuss over each other, because there are times in life when people and animals get old enough that they don’t need a lot of noise to prove they are keeping each other company, and I reckon Sunday understood that I didn’t want to talk to the empty air anymore than he wanted to be chased off with a broom. My son Daniel used to tell me I was spoiling a vagrant animal that probably belonged to some hunters over near the creek bottom, and maybe I was, but Daniel lived two hours away in the suburbs of Amarillo with a wife who kept white carpets and three children who looked at my old linoleum like it was a museum exhibit of the Pleistocene, so his opinions on my porch guests didn’t carry much weight when the sun started sliding down behind the cottonwoods.
The trouble started on a Tuesday, which was wrong right from the start because Sunday was strictly a Sabbath visitor, a creature of high noon and afternoon shadows who never had any business showing up on a weekday unless the world had tilted off its axis. I was standing at the kitchen counter slicing radishes for a chicken salad sandwich when I thought I heard the familiar scritch of nails on the bottom step, and my hand jerked so hard the paring knife nearly took the tip of my thumb off, but when I dropped the towel and hurried to the screen door, there was nothing out there except a stray brown thrasher pecking at a fallen mulberry in the dust. That was two weeks ago, and every day since then I had caught myself looking out toward the west hedge every time the wind shifted or a car downshifted on the highway half a mile away, waiting for that heavy yellow head to push through the briars, but the grass stayed flat and undisturbed, and the saucer by the west rail sat dry and empty collecting dead gnats and cottonwood fluff.
I told myself he was old, that even a dog with a constitution like a blacksmith’s anvil has to fold his hand eventually when the arithmetic catches up with him, but telling yourself a sensible thing doesn’t stop your stomach from feeling like it swallowed a lead sinker every time two o’clock rolled around and the porch stayed dead quiet. By yesterday afternoon, the silence had gotten so thick in the house that I had turned the radio up to listen to farm market reports I didn’t care about just to drown out the sound of the grandfather clock ticking off the seconds in the hallway.
When the blue Ford pickup truck with the dented tailgate and the county-seat bumper sticker rattled down the gravel drive, it kicked up a yellow cloud that hung in the still air like a curtain, and I didn’t even bother to take my apron off before I walked to the front door because you don’t get many visitors out here on the ridge unless someone is lost or looking to buy the old tractor chassis sitting behind the barn. The man who climbed out of the driver’s side was somewhere around fifty years old, wearing a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show forearms tanned the color of walnut hulls, and he had a gray work cap pinched between his thumb and forefinger like he was standing outside a church waiting for a funeral procession to clear the gate. He didn’t walk with the bounce of a salesman or the hurried slouch of a utility man, but rather with the heavy, deliberate tread of someone who has spent his entire life carrying things that were slightly too heavy for his shoulders, and when he stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, he looked up at me with eyes that were the exact shade of weathered oak bark.
He didn’t smile, and I didn’t either, because we both had that rural habit of sizing up a stranger before wasting breath on pleasantries, and for a long moment the only sound between us was the ticking of his truck engine cooling down in the heat and the dry rattle of the corn stalks out in the bottomland. He had a strong jawline and a thin white scar running from the corner of his left eyebrow up into his hairline, and even though I had never laid eyes on him before in my life, there was something familiar about the set of his mouth when he finally cleared his throat and tried to figure out how to start a sentence that didn’t have an easy ending.
He held his hat against his belt buckle and looked past my shoulder toward the empty wicker chair by the west rail before he finally spoke, his voice coming out lower and rougher than I expected from a man of his build. He told me his name was Arthur Miller, though not the writer one, and that he had spent the last three weeks going through his late father’s house down in the timber past the creek where the old Miller place used to have those three big silos that everyone could see from the ridge road back when farming was still something a man could make a living at without a government subsidy. He said it slow, pausing to wipe his forehead with the heel of his palm, as if he were reciting an inventory he had written out on a yellow legal pad the night before by the light of a single kerosene lamp.
I just stood there with my hand on the screen door handle, feeling the wire mesh bite into my palm, and didn’t offer to let him up because people don’t usually drive an hour out of their way just to give a widow a real estate update about a rotting farm three miles through the brush. He told me his father had passed away in his sleep the week before Thanksgiving, quiet-like, with the television still murmuring about the grain futures and a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal on the bedside table, which was the kind of departure old men who live alone usually manage when they finally decide to put down their tools. Arthur said they hadn’t spoken much in the last ten years, mostly because his father was a stubborn old mule who wouldn’t leave that damp river bottom for a modern place in town, and when Arthur finally got around to clearing out the roll-top desk in the parlor, he found a stack of composition notebooks filled with the old man’s shaky handwriting recording every time his big yellow dog wandered off for the weekend.
That was when the air on the porch seemed to shift, turning thin and cold despite the July heat baking the cedar siding, and I felt the small hairs on my arms stand up as Arthur reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of lined paper that looked like it had been torn out of a school notebook and carried around in a billfold until the creases were nearly worn through to nothing. He didn’t hand it to me right away, but instead smoothed it against his thigh with a calloused thumb, looking down at the gravel between his work boots as if he were embarrassed to be reading poetry to a stranger on her own front step. He told me his father had a bad stroke about eight years back that left him half-paralyzed on his left side, and after that, the dog had taken it upon himself to make that long trek across the creek bottom and up through the timber every single Sunday afternoon, slipping through the wire just as the church bells down in town were finishing their second round.
The old man hadn’t been able to walk the property lines anymore, but he used to sit by the back window with a pair of binoculars watching the ridge, and he kept a log of every visit in those notebooks, noting whether the dog came back with burrs in his tail or smelling of bacon grease from some kitchen up on the hill. Arthur looked up then, his eyes a little wet around the edges, and told me his father had written down my name in the margin of the last page three years ago after following us with the glasses one afternoon when I came out to shake a rug over the rail. He didn’t sound mad, and he didn’t sound like he was trespassing on my privacy, but rather like a man who had stumbled onto a secret religion he didn’t quite understand and wanted someone to explain the liturgy before he locked the church doors for good.
He told me Sunday wasn’t coming back up the hill anymore, not because he didn’t want to, but because his back legs had finally given out completely the Tuesday before last, right around two o’clock in the afternoon, just as the sun was hitting the porch floorboards down at the old homestead. Arthur said they had tried to get him to the vet in town, but the old dog was heavy and stubborn to the last, and by the time they got the tailgate down, Sunday had already laid his head down on the cool concrete of the machine shed floor and refused to let anyone move him another inch. He told me the dog had worn out a path through the ferns down by the creek where he crossed every week, a little gray ghost of a trail that nobody else would have ever noticed if they weren’t looking for it, and that when he cleaned out his father’s desk, he found a small, rusted tin can sitting behind the inkwell with three strips of dried bacon wrapped in wax paper inside it.
Arthur looked right at me then, his face working hard to keep from breaking down in front of a woman he had met five minutes ago, and said he drove all the way out here because his father had left a note scribbled on a calendar page telling him that if anything ever happened to the dog, he was supposed to go find the woman on the ridge with the white porch rail and tell her that Sunday made it every time. I didn’t say anything for a long minute because my throat had tightened up into a hard, dry knot that wouldn’t let a single word past my teeth, and I just stood there holding the screen door while the cicadas started up again in the cedar trees down by the garden.
Arthur didn’t wait for me to invite him up, but he took two slow steps toward the stairs, stopped with his boot on the bottom riser, and asked if I wanted to come down to the old place and see him before they buried him under the big oak tree by the springhouse where Walter used to fish for perch when we were first married and the world still made some kind of sense. I looked at the empty blue saucer sitting by the west rail, catching the hot afternoon glare, and then down at Arthur’s dusty boots and the way his hands were still trembling just a little bit as he held his hat against his leg. I told him I couldn’t walk that far anymore, my knees being what they were since the damp weather set in last November, but I told him to wait right there on the gravel while I went into the kitchen to fetch the parcel I had wrapped up in brown butcher paper just in case Sunday decided to show up late like he sometimes did when the weather was heavy.
I didn’t cry when I handed it to him, because at my age you learn that tears are like well water, you only pull them up when the bucket is heavy enough to break the rope, and I wasn’t quite ready to let go of the handle yet. Arthur took the paper package with both hands like it was something fragile, nodded once without saying thank you, and walked back to his truck without looking over his shoulder once as he backed out of the drive and headed back down toward the timber where the old man and the dog were waiting for the shadows to stretch out across the grass.
