Yet In My Flesh

Children discovered the bones of Agnes Day strewn across the twenty acres of land she kept but never tended. She preferred things wild and not “confined by the foibles and follies of man.” When the Sheriff arrived on the scene where Walt Tracey’s boy was frantically waving a human clavicle in front of his eager boy-scout face, he knew it had to have had something to do with those damn dogs.

The cedars yawned up into the winter sunlight in gestures of praise and adoration, their branches swinging mercilessly down to the needle-strewn forest floor where the Sheriff and Coroner’s men unearthed shallow burials of shins, phalanges, half a jaw with a gold tooth still set in it. Bob Henricks, a temporary deputy who got these jobs occasionally because he was the only man in town who owned a metal detector, found the jaw and pried the gold piece loose before announcing his discovery to the rest of the party, sans one tooth now safely resting in his breast pocket behind two Bic pens and a pack of chew.

The boys who tagged along for the thrill of the hunt were the first to stumble across one of the mad dogs. Hiding in a thicket, wiry grey and brown fur bristling along the length of its rabid back, the wild thing let its voice rumble like a broken tractor motor through bared yellow teeth. The boys turned tail and ran, sliding back to the home’s driveway with sneakers or hiking books and wide, white eyes. They kicked up sweet, musty tufts of dry land behind them as they insisted a man with a gun come to see the dog.

Eventually, the Sheriff called the city pound—not his jurisdiction, not this time—which sent an officer who came and collected no fewer than forty-seven dogs, all foaming at the mouth and bloody of tooth and eye. “How the hell’d she get so many damn dogs?” the pound official wondered as volunteers hauled one dog after another out the back door to the yard where a single crack! announced another mutt’s demise.

The pastor at the Baptist church offered his services for funeral arrangements, though Agnes never attended a church service one at his fellowship or any of the other two dozen or so protestant establishments in town. (Agnes never attended much of anything except soup sales at the local Safeway after her retirement from the town hospital. She walked the four miles in to town once a week to stock up on groceries; she caught a ride back from a park ranger who headed out her stretch of highway to check on a flock of sand hill cranes and the habitat they only visited for about three days per year. The park ranger delivered Agnes, her soup, and a monstrous bag of dry dog food—store brand—to the bottom of her gravel driveway every Thursday or Wednesday. She never asked for help, and he sometimes watched her struggle the forty pounds of dry dog food over a shoulder up the long, curving drive.) The funeral was a lonely and sparse one, attended mostly by local law enforcement and a couple of old hospital secretaries who didn’t know Agnes well but didn’t feel right not having folks at her wake.

“You know it started when she retired,” Cecilia Maddox, an old LPN, remarked to Loretta McClung, a retired hospital administrator, at the service. She spoke out of the corner of her lined, lipstuck lips to the woman perched in her black suit and veiled hat on the rickety wooden chair beside her. “She got lonely, with no patients left to care for, and went and got herself some mutts to keep her company.”

“What’s wrong with that? I got myself a little Pomeranian when I retired, named him Ralph and feed him twice a day.” Loretta stretched herself up to her fullest height, which still did not break five feet, and swung her ancient legs off the front of the chair.

“But Agnes never did keep those dogs civilized,” Cecilia preached. “And she didn’t have them neutered, either. They bred.”

The two dogs, both mutts, Agnes Day had adopted some fifteen years back, and were indeed the progenitors of the innumerable wild creatures the Sheriff and his deputies hauled into the pound the day they unearthed Agnes’ bones. Sheriff wrote as much in his report, which he filed late one evening about a week after the funeral. It was rare he had paperwork of this magnitude to file; the usual petty misdemeanors, public drunkenness, teenagers shoplifting condoms and the like, required little to no reporting at all. A woman’s bones picked clean and found scattered all over her property was something else.

Sheriff sat at his desk in the large HQ office, the ceiling fan on low, the desk lamp shining a murky pool of marigold light on the dingy stack of typewritten pages. They described finger joints, eye sockets, femurs. He kneaded his temples with his knuckles and peered down at the paper that recorded his discussion with the park ranger.

“I told her one day when I dropped her off that I noticed she bought an awful lot of dog food for just two dogs, and asked if they weren’t getting a little old,” the Ranger told him. “She told me they’d had puppies and she wasn’t even sure if the original two were around anymore. Sounds like they done and gone wild out that stretch of land.”

Sheriff rubbed his night-dry eyes with the meat of his thumb and stared out the crooked blinds to the gravel parking lot, lit by a single flickering street lamp. In his mind’s eye, he saw the foaming muzzle of one of the dogs he’d helped to drag into the back of the dogcatcher’s truck. He saw the crazed, rolling eye of the hound, the fur matted and bedraggled. He saw a chunk of ear missing. He saw the dog lunge for the cage bars; he saw the dog turn on another dog. He heard the snarling and the whining and the madness in guttural warnings and the choke of the truck engine.

He saw Agnes Day in his mind’s eye, opening p the light-swinging screen door that faced her driveway. He saw her rip open the bag of dog food, saw her put her cupped hand to her mouth and call for the dogs, saw the affection in her eye as they approached the clearing around her house. He saw the sparse mourners at the funeral, heard the minister’s words: This is my body, broken for you. He saw Agnes’ affection change to terror as the pack thrust their ribbed and suffering bodies at her, dozens of them, ripping at flesh, at sweatshirt, at bone. He heard the minister: Taste and see that the Lord is good. He saw her hands in the midst of them, her children, he saw her blood, he saw her. He heard the minister’s word, saw the flash of canine teeth, heard the minister’s tenor: See—He saw the claws and the strings of flesh, he saw the rickety wooden chairs in the church, he saw the gravel and the dog food and the half-buried shards of bone, he saw the minister adjust his collar—See—he saw—I make all things new.