Last Days of the Dog-Men

BILL

WILHELMINA, EIGHTY-SEVEN, LIVED ALONE IN THE same town as her two children, but she rarely saw them. Her main companion was a trembling poodle she’d had for about fifteen years, named Bill. You never hear of dogs named Bill. Her husband in his decline had bought him, named him after a boy he’d known in the Great War, and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He’d always been Wilhelmina’s dog. She could talk to Bill in a way that she couldn’t talk to anyone else, not even her own children.

Not even her husband, now nearly a vegetable out at King’s Daughters’ Rest Home on the old highway.

She rose in the blue candlelight morning to go see him about the dog, who was doing poorly. She was afraid of being completely alone.

There were her children and their children, and even some great-grandchildren, but that was neither here nor there for Wilhelmina. They were all in different worlds.

She drove her immaculate ocean-blue Delta 88 out to the home and turned up the long, barren drive. The tall naked trunks of a few old pines lined the way, their sparse tops distant as clouds. Wilhelmina pulled into the parking lot and took two spaces so she’d have plenty of room to back out when she left. She paused for a moment to check herself in the rearview mirror, and adjusted the broad-brimmed hat she wore to hide the thinning spot on top of her head.

Her husband, Howard, lay propped up and twisted in his old velour robe, his mouth open, watching TV. His thick white hair stood in a matted knot on his head like a child’s.

“What?” he said when she walked in. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Hello!’ Wilhelmina replied, though she’d said nothing.

She sat down.

“I came to tell you about Bill, Howard. He’s almost completely blind now and he can’t go to the bathroom properly. The veterinarian says he’s in pain and he’s not going to get better and I should put him to sleep.”

Her husband had tears in his eyes.

“Poor old Bill,” he said.

“I know,” Wilhelmina said, welling up herself now. “I’ll miss him so.”

“I loved him at Belleau Wood! He was all bloody and walking around,” Howard said. “They shot off his nose in the Meuse-Argonne.” He picked up the remote box and held the button down, the channels thumping past like the muted thud of an ancient machine gun.

Wilhelmina dried her tears with a Kleenex from her handbag and looked up at him.

“Oh, fiddle,” she said.

“Breakfast time,” said an attendant, a slim copper-colored man whose blue smock was tailored at the waist and flared over his hips like a suit jacket. He set down the tray and held his long delicate hands before him as if for inspection.

He turned to Wilhelmina.

“Would you like to feed your husband, ma’am?”

“Heavens, no,” Wilhelmina said. She shrank back as if he intended to touch her with those hands.

When the attendant held a spoonful of oatmeal up to her husband’s mouth he lunged for it, his old gray tongue out, and slurped it down.

“Oh, he’s ravenous today,” said the attendant. Wilhelmina, horrified, felt for a moment as if she were losing her mind and had wandered into this stranger’s room by mistake. She clutched her purse and slipped out into the hall.

“I’m going,” she called faintly, and hurried out to her car, which sat on the cracked surface of the parking lot like an old beached yacht. The engine groaned, turned over, and she steered down the long drive and onto the highway without even a glance at the traffic. A car passed her on the right, up in the grass, horn blaring, and an enormous dump truck cleaved the air to her left like a thunderclap. She would pay them no mind.

When she got home the red light on her answering machine, a gift from her son, was blinking. It was him on the tape.

“I got your message about Bill, Mama. I’ll take him to the vet in the morning, if you want. Just give me a call. Bye-bye, now.”

“No, I can’t think about it,” Wilhelmina said.

Bill was on his cedar-filled pillow in the den. He looked around for her, his nose up in the air.

“Over here, Bill,” Wilhelmina said loudly for the dog’s deaf ears. She carried him a Milk-Bone biscuit, for his teeth were surprisingly good. He sniffed the biscuit, then took it carefully between his teeth, bit off a piece, and chewed.

“Good boy, good Bill.”

Bill didn’t finish the biscuit. He laid his head down on the cedar pillow and breathed heavily. In a minute he got up and made his halting, wobbling way toward his water bowl in the kitchen, but hit his head on the doorjamb and fell over.

“Oh, Bill, I can’t stand it,” Wilhelmina said, rushing to him. She stroked his head until he calmed down, and then she dragged him gently to his bowl, where he lapped and lapped until she had to refill it, he drank so much. He kept drinking.

“Kidneys,” Wilhelmina said, picking up the bowl. “That’s enough, boy.”

Bill nosed around for the water bowl, confused. He tried to squat, legs trembling, and began to whine. Wilhelmina carried him out to the backyard, set him down, and massaged his kidneys the way the vet had shown her, and finally a little trickle ran down Bill’s left hind leg. He tried to lift it.

“Good old Bill,” she said. “You try, don’t you?”

She carried him back in and dried his leg with some paper towels.

“I guess I’d do anything for you, Bill,” she said. But she had made up her mind. She picked up the phone and called her son. It rang four times and then his wife’s voice answered.

“You’ve reached two-eight-one,” she began.

“I know that,” Wilhelmina muttered.

“. We can’t come to the phone right now. ”

Wilhelmina thought that sort of message was rude. If they were there, they could come to the phone.

“. leave your message after the beep.”

“I guess you better come and get Bill in the morning,” Wilhelmina said, and hung up.

Wilhelmina’s husband had been a butcher, and Katrina, the young widow who’d succeeded him at the market, still brought meat by the house every Saturday afternoon steaks, roasts, young chickens, stew beef, soup bones, whole hams, bacon, pork chops, ground chuck. Once she even brought a leg of lamb. Wilhelmina couldn’t possibly eat it all, so she stored most of it in her deep freeze.

She went out to the porch and gathered as much from the deep freeze as she could carry, dumped it into the kitchen sink like a load of kindling, then pulled her cookbooks from the cupboard and sat down at the kitchen table. She began looking up recipes that had always seemed too complex for her, dishes that sounded vaguely exotic, chose six of the most interesting she could find, and copied them onto a legal pad. Then she made a quick trip to the grocery store to find the items she didn’t have on hand, buying odd spices like saffron and coriander, and not just produce but shallots and bright red bell peppers, and a bulb of garlic cloves as big as her fist. Bill had always liked garlic.

Back home, she spread all the meat out on the counter, the chops and steaks and ham, the roast and the bacon, some Italian sausage she’d found, some boudin that had been there for ages, and even a big piece of fish filet. She chopped the sweet peppers, the shallots, ground the spices. The more she worked, the less she thought of the recipes, until she’d become a marvel of culinary innovativeness, combining oils and spices and herbs and meats into the most savory dishes you could imagine: Master William’s Sirloin Surprise, Ham au Bill, Bill’s Leg of Lamb with Bacon Chestnuts, Bill’s Broiled Red Snapper with Butter and Crab, Bloody Boudin a la Bill, and one she decided to call simply Sausage Chops. She fired up her oven, lit every eye on her stove, and cooked it all just as if she were serving the king of France instead of her old French poodle. Then she arranged the dishes on her best china, cut the meat into bite-sized pieces, and served them to her closest friend, her dog.

She began serving early in the evening, letting Bill eat just as much or as little as he wanted from each dish. “This ought to wake up your senses, Bill.” Indeed, Bill’s interest was piqued. He ate, rested, ate a little more, of this dish and that. He went back to the leg of lamb, nibbling the bacon chestnuts off its sides. Wilhelmina kept gently urging him to eat. And as the evening wore on, Bill’s old cataracted eyes gradually seemed to reflect something, it seemed, like quiet suffering — not his usual burden, but the luxurious suffering of the glutton. He had found a strength beyond himself, and so he kept bravely on, forcing himself to eat, until he could not swallow another bite and lay carefully beside the remains of his feast, and slept.

Wilhelmina sat quietly in a kitchen chair and watched from her window as the sun edged up behind the trees, red and molten like the swollen, dying star of an ancient world. She was so tired that her body felt weightless, as if she’d already left it hollow of her spirit. It seemed that she had lived such a long time. Howard had courted her in a horse-drawn wagon. An entire world of souls had disappeared in their time, and other nameless souls had filled their spaces. Some one of them had taken Howard’s soul.

Bill had rolled onto his side in sleep, his tongue slack on the floor, his poor stomach as round and taut as a honeydew melon. After such a gorging, there normally would be hell to pay. But Wilhelmina would not allow that to happen.

“I’ll take you to the doctor myself, old Bill,” she said.

As if in response, a faint and easy dream-howl escaped Bill’s throat, someone calling another in the big woods, across empty fields and deep silent stands of trees. Oooooooo, it went, high and soft. Oooooooo.

Wilhelmina’s heart thickened with emotion. Her voice was deep and rich with it.

Hoooooo, she called softly to Bill’s sleeping ears.

Ooooooo, Bill called again, a little stronger, and she responded, Hoooooo, their pure wordless language like echoes in the morning air.