Ours is an old dark house. It has been 14 months since bread was baked in the kitchen; tonight it feels like a meat locker and so I go upstairs for a sweater. Down the hall is my daughter’s room, with the pale pink carpet and candy-striped paper, the one bedroom I keep open, for I have closed off the others to keep in the cold. I can see my breath in the master bedroom. The white sheets over the Victorian dresser, over the wing chair, over the marble-topped night stands give the room the feeling it is being preserved in snow and ice, like the bodies of Arctic sailors kept intact for 90 years, coats, stockings and all. So the days proceed: like snow coming down to form a glacier, layer upon layer entombed in an inexorable mass moving away grindingly slowly.
“Woof,” I hear; there’s some disagreement downstairs. I am called back to the present, to the battle over three or four pieces of kibble and the memory of battles over who gets to keep the silverware, the electric bread maker, or, most sadly, our daughter.
The dogs and I now live downstairs in the parlor with the fireplace. It contains one couch and one table facing a window. I watch for the snow from here. Having completed their dinners and lapped their water, Rufus, Argus and Marcus file into the room, their claws click-clicking on the wood floor. They lie down on the one fat rug by the hearth, exhale and look at me. Where the hell are the cigars? it seems they’re saying. And, I must say, I wish we could share a brandy and a five-dollar smoke, the four of us opening up old photo albums that chronicle our time together: head dog Rufus as a puppy 13 years ago bounding across a mountain stream; piano-legged Argus, a stick in his mouth, standing in the snow (“Christmas, 1980” it says), and Marcus, born in a woodpile, collector of rocks, excavator of craters on the shore of the lake, being hugged by my daughter, his tongue sticking out like a pink spoon.
Toward the end of the marriage I think he was my daughter’s only confidant. She hid with him in her room and cried on him as though he were a 93-pound pillow. That he regularly broke her porcelain ballerinas with a sweep of his tail was forgiven. She wanted him when she and her mother moved out. I watched them drive away. There is that blankly innocent expression dogs have when traveling in a car, their mouths open and their eyes wide; you could be taking them to the pound, but they trust. And so it is with kids. But when Marcus broke out of his new house, ripping at the doors with his paws, they had to bring him back here: his canine need to be with his pack was too strong. I hoped my daughter would laugh at the ceremony among the dogs when she returned Marcus home: nose touching, circle turning and the peculiar pose where a dog drops down to his forelegs with his hindquarters in the air.
He’s happy to be back, I said. That’s good for him, isn’t it? Sure, she said. Dogs stick together, but people don’t.
The east wind comes sailing up against the Rockies, rises suddenly into the vortex of clouds, then falls back ghostly to earth as snow. I can no more resist a night walk in a snowstorm than a dipsomaniac can resist wine. I trundle along with no destination, turning east at the weeds where the rabbits live. The cottonwood here is the pillar for the sky. I can go far if I want. I know the horse meadow to my right. The snow sifts down onto my neck. I rewrap my coat. Up comes the parka’s hood. This is the part I like best, this move deeper inside my coat inside the turning white with everything else. Now I hear the geese plainly: ya-honk, ya-honk, as if they are asking one another, Are you there? As children ask, Are you there, Daddy?
When she was very small, I read her Mother Goose in bed. There is something about a little girl’s room at night, a softness of light and a radiant face, bunnies, hens and frayed lace, with secret things collected, and surrounding that little body beneath those blankets are bears, many bears, on whose watch she drifts through her dreams, on her own for the first time. Sometimes you may hear her exclaim in fear, “Daddy!” at 2 a.m., and you must rush to tell her, “Yes, we’re here, we love you, dear.” That is what you must do … Ya-honk, they say as they flock together, ya-honk.
I’m cold. It occurs to me that I might simply lie down to sleep in the heaven of geese, beneath the layering snow, preserved and carried through the ages in the belly of this frigid night-when suddenly the dogs come dashing.
Something is unloosed in them, some wolfish urge, and they bound past me as if on to fresh blood. I am up after them. Rufus and Argus are old; they should not be out in deep snow too long. It takes me 20 minutes to find them in the rabbit weeds. We welcome each other, I on my knees. I’m thankful it wasn’t a skunk they were after. All three have that prideful look of dogs that have done good work. To get back home we cut across the lake on the ice. The geese are oblivious to the dogs and the two older dogs are oblivious to the geese, but Marcus barks a couple times.
There is still more work to do when we arrive at our house. I must dry them each with a towel. I must fetch more wood and rekindle the fire. I must mop the water off the kitchen floor. I must change their drinking water. I must work for them late into the night.
