You need to pick up a few things, she told James.
I am too tired, he said. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?
No, she said. I need them now.
She handed him her list.
He got up and put on his coat and walked to the door.
It’s snowing, he said. The roads will be bad.
Not that bad, she said. Git.
#
In 1965 James’s father had been hired by a man named Hofer to help with the haying. Hofer put James’s father and the other hands up in the bunkhouse within walking distance of the river. It was high summer, and there was light enough at the end of the day to drink your beer and count your mosquito bites. Hofer gave them a .22-calibre varmint rifle, an old Cooey repeater ordered from a Sears catalogue during the depression, but no bullets.
What’s this for? James’s father asked.
When you come in for breakfast, he said, my dog will set himself on you unless you have the gun. You hold the gun up, wave it around, and he’ll let you alone.
What if we have to shoot him? the other hand asked. You’ve given us no ammunition.
There won’t be any shooting, Hofer said. The dog has already been shot once – shot by me. I shot him in the ass from not much farther away than you are from me now, so he knows what it is to be shot. If he sees the gun, he’ll leave you alone. He is not smart, but he is consistent in his interpretations.
The other hand shrugged.
At 6:30am in the morning they walked out of the bunkhouse to go down to the main house where they had been told breakfast would be waiting. Halfway there the dog tore after them, head lowered and fangs bare. The dog looked to be made of all dogs, piebald black and white, with red-rimmed eyes and the look of animal that knew loyalty but not love and had the posture born from the low cunning possessed by things that bite from below and behind. The other farmhand held up the old Cooey just like Hofer told them to and just like Hofer said the dog gave way and took itself back into the shadows in the line of caragana that acted as a fence against the west wind.
Any problem with dog? Hofer asked them when they got to the door.
They shook their heads.
They ate a big farmer’s breakfast of oatmeal, sausage, eggs and black coffee washed down with water from an artesian well exactly ten meters deep. Hofer told them that his father had drilled that well in 1930 and that it was exactly ten meters. My daddy was an exacting man, he said. The water comes out just a few degrees above freezing and you can’t hardly find water as pure and cold as that anymore, he said. He told them that in the winter he had to heat the pump house, but that was just to keep the pump from freezing up. The water was too deep in the ground to ever freeze, and it was just like it is now every day of the year, in all seasons. He had it tested once a year by the county. The county had never found anything wrong with it.
They hayed all morning and the work went fast. Hofer’s wife brought them a lunch of chicken, pudding, apples and unpasteurized whole milk in cold bottles where the condensation rolled down the sides and left clean lines in the dust on their hands and wrists. In the afternoon they baled what they had cut and put it on a flat deck trailer pulled behind an old Allis-Chalmers with a metal seat. Hofer drove the bale wagon back to the yard and they stacked the hay by hand until supper. They washed their hands, necks and faces in the well water and it felt a kind respite from the day’s heat and the chill made them laugh and whoop like children rolling down a hill. Hofer’s wife fed them a sunset supper of beef, beans and greens and two baked potatoes each and they walked back to the bunkhouse weary and sated and were asleep in ten minutes with no conversation between them when Hofer knocked and woke them up. They’d forgotten the .22 at the main house and he brought it over and warned them again about the dog.
I don’t know how you made it here, he said. He must be busy killing gophers or hares. If he don’t see the gun, he is going to bite you, and you won’t face him down with your boots just so. If he sees the gun, he’ll stay in line.
The next day they ate the same meals and drank the same cold well water and hayed from the same old tractor and stacked bales while the sun hung red in the west and the hay chaff filled the air above the ground, suspended in the heat that did not abate. Wearily they left Hofer’s table and walked back to the bunkhouse slow of foot like men walking uphill but they did not forget the gun and had no trouble with the dog. They sweated in their sleep like men at their labors of the day and the single blue-bottle fly trapped inside with them – it too, afraid of the dog – tormented them with the sound of its flight until they both dreamt of it in the same way and in their dreams it became an old man shouting at them for a ride.
After a few days the haying was done. Hofer paid them cash money, and then, when the other hand had gotten into his truck to leave Hofer took him aside and offered to make him permanent. Hofer told him that he had work enough for two, fencing for sure, cattle to feed, and winter wheat. He was going to buy forty bred sows and they’d need looking after. He said he’d pay all wages due in cash, it’s was up to him what he told the government he made, and reminded him of the water from the well, cool and pure, drawn from ten meters below the surface of the earth. There were none like it anywhere else and it was its own inducement.
#
She had brought home a dog. A rescue, she said. He needs a home.
How old? James asked.
Old enough, she said. The older ones don’t get adopted like the puppies do. They are not so cute and cuddly. This makes them harder to place. It’s a good thing we’re doing.
Take him back, he said. If they aren’t socialized right early, they’re a hazard later on. You don’t know what you are getting with an older dog.
You’re being an asshole, she said. A rescue dog is a good thing.
He shrugged.
Three months later she gave the dog up. The shelter tried to cajole her into keeping the dog at first, offering to refer her to an excellent trainer, but she brushed them off. They pled with her then, saying that the dog would be euthanized within a week of his return. Please keep him, they begged, please.
No one can handle that dog, she said. No one.
Where do dogs like that go after people are done with them? he asked her.
They go back to wherever they came from, she said, not taking the bait. Back as far as they can go. That’s where they’re trying to get to in the first place, dogs like that.
Ah, I see, he said.
#
In the winter, when the river froze over, Hofer asked James’s father if he wanted to play shinny on the river. He said sure, and on a Sunday afternoon in January he joined a half-dozen other farmers on the river ice along with Hofer. Hofer had taken the old Allis Chalmers out and bladed the snow off of the ice. Hofer had showed up in full gear while the rest of the farmers and the hands had skates, sticks, and gloves. Hofer was all elbows and knees, and knocked the rest of them ass-over-teakettle chasing the puck around. He enjoyed himself to the point of abusing others.
Hey Hofer, one of others said in jest, have you ever thought of turning pro?
Hofer laughed at that.
You never know what might have been, he said, if I’d ever had the chance.
Hofer skated back into the fray leading with both his right knee and elbow forward like a truck with a snowplow and the other men fell away from him at either side and cursed him for a son of a bitch before regrouping to trail him and the puck.
The man who had chided Hofer turned to James’s father. One of these days someone is going to spear him in the groin, he said, but for the most part Hofer is ok, a good enough guy really. You ever meet his old man?
No, he said.
There was a piece of work, the other man said. He beat those kids – Hofer and his sister – and their mother, pretty nearly every day of their lives. He beat them hard. The old lady’s been in the hospital near unto death more than once. There was no rest or respite from it. Sundays and Christmas too, all were just as likely to start that way or end that way. It’s a miracle any of them survived. Those kids were raised on head cheese sandwiches and being beaten with a leather belt. You ever see Hofer’s mother?
No, he said.
You can see it in her face, the other man said. You can see this kind of violence on a woman. It is on her face and in her gait.
The other men left singly or in twos until there were just James’s father and Hofer left. They took their skates off at the river’s edge and walked back to the main house in their boots. Hofer’s wife fed them then, beef and greens, potatoes baked until the white of them was as light as cotton candy, sour cream and fried onions and cheddar cheese to dress the potatoes with, and black coffee and water to wash it down.
They ate without talking. Hofer had a little wooden plaque on the kitchen wall. Caricatured in bright, block colors were a fat and happy couple, a man in overalls and a wife in a print dress and apron. Stenciled onto it was the phrase:
The Greatest Gift a Man Can Give his Children is to Love Their Mother
Hofer saw him looking at the little adage and said that his mother had given that to them to hang in their kitchen – she’d found it at a flea market or craft sale and the sentiment appealed to her.
He asked Hofer if he and his wife were ever going to start a family.
No, Hofer said. We won’t have that blessing.
They left it at that. James’s father did not press for an explanation, and Hofer offered none. Hofer’s wife betrayed no sign that she’d even heard the question. All in all, she was a quiet woman, efficient in her movements and her speech.
After the meal Hofer asked him to stay for a drink. After the hockey on the river, he said, we need get some color in our cheeks.
He produced a mason jar full of clear liquid. Dandelion Wine he said – moonshine from a Hutterite colony. You ever go to a colony? Look in their kitchens. They’ve got a copper pot on every stove, a pot full of mash. This is how they made vodka or whiskey in the old country back when they were objecting to conscription. They believed in prayer and toil, but not military service – but distilled spirits were not forbidden either before old Hutter or Mennon or after them, by any of their prophets or revelations.
In all his time he’d never seen Hofer take so much as a drop nor mention it. He had assumed Hofer didn’t drink. They had a drink then, just one, and talked of hogs and cattle and poultry and the relative cost of any number of things. Done their drink and with the promised color in their cheeks, Hofer put the jar away and he took that as a sign to excuse himself, putting on his boots and walking back to the bunkhouse in the clear cold of the early evening with the .22 in his hand. Hofer’s dog watched him intently, crouched on its belly with its head between his paws, but it did not move or make a sound.
#
Have I ever told you about Hofer’s dog? James said.
Who was Hofer?
A farmer my dad worked for a few months in 1965.
It does not sound familiar, she said.
Hofer’s dog was vicious. He gave my dad and the other hand a .22-calibre rifle to carry with them on the farm to avoid being attacked. You could not friend that dog. But it’d been shot before, and it feared Hofer’s rifle just by the sight of it. They never even loaded it.
And your point is what exactly? she said.
A few years after my dad worked for him, Hofer took sick. Like most farmers he put off going to the doctor until his wife practically had to carry him in. The doctors didn’t want to let him out. He was so full of cancer he was more tumor than man. They wouldn’t even number his remaining days. Not two years, not two months, not two weeks. They just told him to get his affairs in order and that they’d make him comfortable.
Cancer is horrible, she said.
Anyways, he went home, got a gun, and went to his parents’ place. I guess they were both still alive. There, in front of his mother and his wife, he shot his old man in the chest and killed him.
What happened to the rest of them? she asked.
No idea, he said. My dad only worked for him for that short time and –
No, she said. Not him. Just the wife, and the dog. Them. Didn’t they have names too?
I am not sure what they were, he said. My dad never told me. He just told me about what happened, and that Hofer died in hospital with his wife and mother at his side before he ever stood to plead against his charges.
They should have names, she said. Something for everyone to remember them, too.
#
James’s father said that before he left Hofer’s farm, on the first warming day in February, he’d gone back down to the frozen river with his skates, gloves, and a hockey stick and left the old Cooey repeater propped up on a log on the bank. He skated on the river in the pink light of dawn, up and down and around and back again over and over. It was, for a time, just him and the joy of his own motion and the sound of his own breath and the feel of his own blades cutting the ice crisp and sharp with each stride and holding the particular of its sound longer through every turn. Skates sound different on the deep ice of nature than they do on the painted ice made by man. A man strides and his blades cut the ice during the turns cracking until they echo like a rifle shot. Hofer’s dog came down to the river and lay in wait for him on the near side with his familiar head low between his paws, staring at him without blinking. James’s father skated to the far side of the river and pulled up handfuls of the tattered stalks of cattails from the brittle and yellow forests of them left dead and dry by the fall heat and he set himself to light them with a match and they came to fire easily in spite of the cold. He took a great sheaf of them up like a torch and skated over to the dog and drove the demon along the river’s edge with the fire in his hand. Fiery tatters dropped from the cattails and hissed where they fell on the ice to spit and curse at the evil spirit and he roared with laughter to see the violent creature run as fast as it could one way then another, back and forth on the river’s edge, red-eyed, inchoate, and furious to be harassed until finally it gave up and ran back up into the stubbled fields and quiet darkness up and away from the river’s edge and was gone away from him forever.
The End
Steve Passey’s book Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock is available here.
Learn more about Steve on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: David Goehring/flickr.com/ CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Annie by Steve Passey - June 29, 2023
- Back as Far as They Can Go By Steve Passey - December 16, 2021