Shiloh

  Shiloh (Shiloh Trilogy, Book 1)

  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  To Frank and Trudy Madden and a dog named Clover

  CHAPTER 1

  The day Shiloh come, we're having us a big Sunday dinner. Dara Lynn's dipping bread in her glass of cold tea, the way she likes, and Becky pushes her beans up over the edge of her plate in her rush to get 'em down.

  Ma gives us her scolding look. "Just once in my life," she says, "I'd like to see a bite of food go direct from the dish into somebody's mouth without a detour of any kind."

  She's looking at me when she says it, though. It isn't that I don't like fried rabbit. Like it fine. I just don't want to bite down on buckshot, is all, and I'm checking each piece.

  "I looked that rabbit over good, Marty, and you won't find any buckshot in that thigh," Dad says, buttering his bread. "I shot him in the neck."

  Somehow I wish he hadn't said that. I push the meat from one side of my plate to the other, through the sweet potatoes and back again.

  "Did it die right off?" I ask, knowing I can't eat at all unless it had.

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  "Soon enough."

  "You shoot its head clean off?" Dara Lynn asks. She's like that.

  Dad chews real slow before he answers. "Not quite," he says, and goes on eating.

  Which is when I leave the table.

  The best thing about Sundays is we eat our big meal at noon. Once you get your belly full, you can walk all over West Virginia before you're hungry again. Any other day, you start out after dinner, you've got to come back when it's dark.

  I take the .22 rifle Dad had given me in March on my eleventh birthday and set out up the road to see what I can shoot. Like to find me an apple hanging way out on a branch, see if I can bring it down. Line up a few cans on a rail fence and shoot 'em off. Never shoot at anything moving, though. Never had the slightest wish.

  We live high up in the hills above Friendly, but hardly anybody knows where that is. Friendly's near Sistersville, which is halfway between Wheeling and Parkersburg. Used to be, my daddy told me, Sistersville was one of the best places you could live in the whole state. You ask me the best place to live, I'd say right where we are, a little four-room house with hills on three sides.

  Afternoon is my second-best time to go up in

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  the hills, though; morning's the best, especially in summer. Early, early morning. On one morning I saw three kinds of animals, not counting cats, dogs, frogs, cows, and horses. Saw a groundhog, saw a doe with two fawns, and-saw a gray fox with a reddish head. Bet his daddy was a gray fox and his ma was a red one.

  My favorite place to walk is just across this rattly bridge where the road curves by the old Shiloh schoolhouse and follows the river. River to one side, trees the other--sometimes a house or two.

  And this particular afternoon, I'm about halfway up the road along the river when I see something out of the corner of my eye. Something moves. I look, and about fifteen yards off, there's this shorthaired dog--white with brown and black spots--not making any kind of noise, just slinking along with his head down, watching me, tail between his legs like he's hardly got the right to breathe. A beagle, maybe a year or two old.

  I stop and the dog stops. Looks like he's been caught doing something awful, when I can tell all he really wants is to follow along beside me.

  "Here, boy," I say, slapping my thigh.

  Dog goes down on his stomach, groveling about in the grass. I laugh and start over toward him. He's got an old worn-out collar on, probably older than he

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  is. Bet it belonged to another dog before him. "C'mon, boy," I say, putting out my hand.

  The dog gets up and backs off. He don't even whimper, like he's lost his bark.

  Something really hurts inside you when you see a dog cringe like that. You know somebody's been kicking at him. Beating on him, maybe.

  "It's okay, boy," I say, coming a little closer, but still he backs off.

  So I just take my gun and follow the river. Every so often I look over my shoulder and there he is, the beagle. I stop; he stops. I can see his ribs--not real bad--but he isn't plumped out or anything.

  There's a broken branch hanging from a limb out over the water, and I'm wondering if I can bring it down with one shot. I raise my gun, and then think how the sound might scare the dog off. I decide I don't want to shoot my gun much that day. j

  It's a slow river. You walk beside it, you figure it's not even moving. If you stop, though, you can see leaves and things going along. Now and then a fish jumps--big fish. Bass, I think. Dog's still trailing me, tail tucked in. Funny how he don't make a sound.

  Finally I sit on a log, put my gun at my feet, and wait. Back down the road, the dog sits, too. Sits right in the middle of it, head on his paws.

  "Here, boy!" I say again, and pat my knee.

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  He wiggles just a little, but he don't come.

  Maybe it's a she-dog.

  "Here, girl!" I say. Dog still don't come.

  I decide to wait the dog out, but after three or four minutes on the log, it gets boring and I start off again. So does the beagle.

  Don't know where you'd end up if you followed the river all the way. Heard somebody say it curves about, comes back on itself, but if it didn't and I got home after dark, I'd get a good whopping. So I always go as far as the ford, where the river spills across the path, and then I head back.

  When I turn around and the dog sees me coming, he goes off into the woods. L figure that's the last I'll see of the beagle, and I get halfway down the road again before I look back. There he is. I stop. He stops. I go. He goes.

  And then, hardly thinking on it, I whistle.

  It's like pressing a magic button. The beagle comes barreling toward me, legs going lickety-split, long ears flopping, tail sticking up like a flagpole. This time, when I put out my hand, he licks all my fingers and jumps up against my leg, making little yelps in his throat. He can't get enough of me, like I'd been saying no all along and now I'd said yes, he could come. It's a he-dog, like I'd thought.

  "Hey, boy! You're really somethin' now, ain't

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  you?" I'm laughing as the beagle makes circles around me. I squat down and the dog licks my face, my neck. Where'd he learn to come if. you whistled, to hang hack if you didn't?

  I'm so busy watching the dog I don't even notice it's started to rain. Don't bother me. Don't bother the dog, neither. I'm looking for the place I first saw him. Does he live here? I wonder. Or the house on up the road? Each place we pass I figure he'll stop--somebody come out and whistle, maybe. But nobody comes out and the dog don't stop. Keeps coming even after we get to the old Shiloh schoolhouse. Even starts across the bridge, tail going like a propeller. He licks my hand every so often to make sure I'm still there--mouth open like he's smiling. He is smiling.

  Once he follows me across the bridge, though, and on past the gristmill, I start to worry. Looks like he's fixing to follow me all the way to our house. I'm in trouble enough coming home with my clothes wet. My ma's mama died of pneumonia, and we don't ever get the chance to forget it. And now I got a dog with me, and we were never allowed to have pets.

  If you can't afford to feed 'em and take 'em to the vet when they're sick, you've no right taking 'em in, Ma says, which is true enough.

  I don't say a word to the beagle the rest of the way home, hoping he'll turn at some point and go back. The dog keeps coming.

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  I get to the front stoop and say, "Go home, boy." And then I feel my heart squeeze up the way he stops smiling, sticks his tail between his legs again, and slinks off. He goes as far as the sycamore tree, lies down in the wet grass, head on his paws.

  "Whose dog is
that?" Ma asks when I come in.

  I shrug. "Just followed me, is all."

  "Where'd it pick up with you?" Dad asks.

  "Up in Shiloh, across the bridge," I say.

  "On the road by the river? Bet that's Judd Travers's beagle," says Dad. "He got himself another hunting dog a few weeks back."

  "Judd got him a hunting dog, how come he don't treat him right?" I ask.

  "How you know he don't?"

  "Way the dog acts. Scared to pee, almost," I say. . Ma gives me a look.

  "Don't seem to me he's got any marks on him," Dad says, studying him from our window.

  Don't have to mark a dog to hurt him, I'm thinking.

  "Just don't pay him any attention and he'll go away," Dad says.

  "And get out of those wet clothes," Ma tells me. "You want to follow your grandma Slater to the. grave?"

  I change clothes, then sit down and turn on the TV, which only has two channels. On Sunday afternoons,

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  it's preaching and baseball. I watch baseball for an hour. Then I get up and sneak to the window. Ma knows what I'm about.

  "That Shiloh dog still out there?" she asks.

  I nod. He's looking at me. He sees me there at the window and his tail starts to thump. I name him Shiloh.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sunday-night supper is whatever's left from noon. If nothing's left over, Ma takes cold cornmeal mush, fries up big slabs, and we eat it with Karo syrup. But this night there's still rabbit. I don't want any, but I know Shiloh does.

  I wonder how long I can keep pushing that piece of rabbit around my plate. Not very long, I discover.

  "You going to eat that meat, or you just playing with it?" Dad asks. "If you don't want it, I'll take it for lunch tomorrow."

  "I'll eat it," I say.

  "Don't you be giving it to that dog," says Ma.

  I take a tiny bite.

  "What's the doggy going to eat, then?" asks Becky. She's three, which is four years younger than Dara Lynn.

  "Nothing here, that's what," says Ma.

  Becky and Dara Lynn look at Dad. Now I had them feeling sorry for the beagle, too. Sometimes girl-children get what they want easier than I do. But not this time.

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  "Dog's going right back across the river when we get through eating," says Dad. "If that's Judd's new dog, he probably don't have sense enough yet to find his way home again. We'll put him in the Jeep and drive him over."

  Don't know what else I figured Dad to say. Do I really think he's going to tell me to wait till morning, and if the beagle's still here, we can keep him? I try all kinds of ways to figure how I could get that rabbit meat off my plate and into my pocket, but Ma's watching every move I make.

  So I excuse myself and go outside and over to the chicken coop. It's off toward the back where Ma can't see. We keep three hens, and I take one of the two eggs that was in a nest and carry it out behind the bushes.

  I whistle softly. Shiloh comes loping toward me. I crack the egg and empty it out in my hands. Hold my hands down low and Shiloh eats the egg, licking my hands clean afterward, then curling his tongue down between my fingers to get every little bit.

  "Good boy, Shiloh," I whisper, and stroke him all over.

  I hear the back screen slam, and Dad comes out on the stoop. "Marty"

  "Yeah?" I go around, Shiloh at my heels.

  "Let's take that dog home now." Dad goes over

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  and opens the door of the Jeep. Shiloh puts his tail between his legs and just stands there, so I go around to the other side, get in, and whistle. Shiloh leaps up onto my lap, but he don't look too happy about it.

  For the first time I have my arms around him. He feels warm, and when I stroke him, I can feel places on his body where he has ticks.

  "Dog has ticks," I tell my dad.

  "Judd'll take 'em off," Dad says.

  "What if he don't?"

  "It's his concern, Marty, not yours. It's not your dog. You keep to your own business."

  I press myself against the back of the seat as we start down our bumpy dirt driveway toward the road. "I want to be a vet someday," I tell my dad.

  "Hmm," he says.

  "I want to be a traveling vet. The kind that has his office in a van and goes around to people's homes, don't make folks come to him. Read about it in a magazine at school."

  "You know what you have to do to be a vet?" Dad asks.

  "Got to go to school, I know that."

  "You've got to have college training. Like a doctor, almost. Takes a lot of money to go to veterinary school."

  My dream sort of leaks out like water in a paper

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  bag. "I could be a veterinarian's helper," I suggest, my second choice.

  "You maybe could," says Dad, and points the Jeep up the road into the hills.

  Dusk is settling in now. Still warm, though. A warm July night. Trees look dark against the red sky; lights coming on in a house here, another one there. I'm thinking how in any one of these houses there's probably somebody who would take better care of Shiloh than Judd Travers would. How come this dog had to be his?

  The reason I don't like Judd Travers is a whole lot of reasons, not the least is that I was in the corner store once down in Friendly and saw Judd cheat Mr. Wallace at the cash register. Judd gives the man a ten and gets him to talking, then--when Mr. Wallace gives him change--says he give him a twenty.

  I blink, like I can't believe Judd done that, and old Mr. Wallace is all confused. So I say, "No, I think he give you a ten."

  Judd glares at me, whips out his wallet, and waves a twenty-dollar bill in front of my eye. "Whose picture's on this bill, boy?" he says.

  "I don't know."

  He gives me a look says, I thought so. "That's Andrew Jackson," he says. "I had two of 'em in my wallet when I walked in here, and now I only got one.

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  This here man's got the other, and I want my change."

  Mr. Wallace, he's so flustered he just digs in his money drawer and gives Judd change for a twenty, and afterward I thought what did Andrew Jackson have to do with it? Judd's so fast-talking he can get. away with anything. Don't know anybody who likes him much, but around here folks keep to their own business, like Dad says. In Tyler County that's important. Way it's always been, anyhow.

  Another reason I don't like Judd Travers is he spits tobacco out the corner of his mouth, and if he don't like you--and he sure don't like me--he sees just how close he can spit to where you're standing. Third reason I don't like him is because he was at the fairgrounds last year same day we were, and seemed like everyplace I was, he was in front of me, blocking my view. Standin' in front of me at the mud bog, sittin' in front of me at the tractor pull, and risin' right up out of his seat at the Jorden Globe of Death Motorcycle Act so's I missed the best part.

  Fourth reason I don't like him is because he kills deer out of season. He says he don't, but I seen him once just about dusk with a young buck strapped over the hood of his truck. He tells me the buck run in front of him on the road and he accidentally run over it, but I saw the bullet hole myself. If he got

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  caught, he'd have to pay two hundred dollars, more than he's got in the bank, I'll bet.

  We're in Shiloh now. Dad's crossing the bridge by the old abandoned gristmill, turning at the boarded-up school, and for the first time I can feel Shiloh's body begin to shake. He's trembling all over. I swallow. Try to say something to my dad and have to swallow again.

  "How do you go about reporting someone who don't take care of his dog right?" I ask finally.

  "Who you fixing to report, Marty?"

  "Judd."

  "If this dog's mistreated, he's only about one out of fifty thousand animals that is," Dad says. "Folks even bring 'em up here in the hills and let 'em out, figure they can live on rats and rabbits. Wouldn't be the first dog that wasn't treated right."

  "But this one come to me to help hi
m I insist. "Knew that's why he was following me. I got hooked on him, Dad, and I want to know he's treated right."

  For the first time I can tell Dad's getting impatient with me. "Now you get that out of your head right now. If it's Travers's dog, it's no mind of ours how he treats it."

  "What if it was a child?" I ask him, getting too smart for my own good. "If some kid was shaking like this dog is shaking, you wouldn't feel no pull for keeping an eye on him?"

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  "Marty," Dad says, and now his voice is just plumb tired. "This here's a dog, not a child, and it's not our dog. I want you to quit going on about it. Hear?"

  I shut up then. Let my hands run over Shiloh's body like maybe everywhere I touch I can protect him somehow. We're getting closer to the trailer where Judd lives with his other dogs, and already they're barking up a storm, hearing Dad's Jeep come up the road.

  Dad pulls over. "You want to let him out?" he says.

  I shake my head hard. "I'm not lettin' him out here till I know for sure he belongs to Judd." I'm asking for a slap in the face, but Dad don't say anything, just gets out and goes up the boards Judd has laid out in place of a sidewalk.

  Judd's at the door of his trailer already, in his undershirt, peering out.

  "Looks like Ray Preston," he says, through the screen.

  "How you doin', Judd?"

  Judd comes out on the little porch he's built at the side of his trailer, and they stand there and talk awhile. Up here in the hills you hardly ever get down to business right off. First you say your howdys and then you talk about anything else but what you come for, and finally, when the mosquitoes start to bite,

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  you say what's on your mind. But you always edge into it, not to offend.

  I can hear little bits and pieces floating out over the yard. The rain . . . the truck ... the tomatoes ... the price of gasoline... and all the while Shiloh lays low in my lap, tail between his legs, shaking like a window blind in a breeze.