Shiloh Read online

  "Take those gunnysacks to the Jeep like I said," Dad tells me, and I follow behind as we go down the hill. I keep my mouth open to let the breath escape, crying without making a sound. Just like Shiloh.

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  Ma's watching from inside, the screen all covered with June bugs where they been buzzing about the light. Dara Lynn's up, standing there in her nightshirt, watching.

  "What is it? What's he got?" Dara Lynn says, pestering Ma's arm.

  "A dog," says Ma. And then she calls out, "Ray, is it alive?"

  "Just barely," says Dad.

  I put the gunnysacks in the Jeep, and Dad carefully lays Shiloh down. Without waiting to ask, I crawl in the Jeep beside Shiloh, and Dad don't say no. He goes in the house for his trousers and his keys, and then we're off.

  "I'm sorry, Shiloh," I whisper, over and over, both hands on him so's he won't try to get up. The blood's just pouring from a rip in his ear. "I'm so sorry! Jesus help me, I didn't know Bakers' dog could leap that fence."

  When we get to the bottom of the lane, instead of going up the road toward Judd's place, Dad turns left toward Friendly, and halfway around the first curve, he pulls in Doc Murphy's driveway. Light's still on in a window, but I think old doc was in bed, 'cause he come to the door in his pajamas.

  "Ray Preston?" he says when he sees Dad.

  "I sure am sorry to bother you this hour of the

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  night," Dad says, "but I got a dog here hurt bad, and if you could take a look at him, see if he can be saved, I'd be much obliged. We'll pay. . . ."

  "I'm no vet," says Doc Murphy, but he's already standing aside, holding the screen open with one hand so we can carry Shiloh in.

  The doc's a short man, round belly, don't seem to practice what he preaches about eating right, but he's got a kind heart, and he lays out some newspapers on his kitchen table.

  I'm shaking so hard I can see my own hands tremble as I keep one on Shiloh's head, the other on a front paw.

  "He's sure bleeding good, I can tell you that," Doc Murphy says. He puts on his stethoscope and listens to Shiloh's heart. Then he takes his flashlight and shines it in the dog's eyes, holding each eye open with his finger and thumb. Finally he looks at the big, ugly wound on Shiloh's hurt leg, torn open right to the bone, the bites around Shiloh's neck, and the ripped ear. I turn my head away and sniffle some more.

  "I'll do what I can," Doc says. "The thing we got to worry about now is infection. That leg wound is going to take twenty . . . thirty stitches. What happened?"

  I figure Dad will answer for me, but he don't-- just turns to me. "Marty?"

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  I swallow. "Big old German shepherd chewed him up."

  Doc Murphy goes over to the sink and washes his hands. "Baker's dog? Every time that shepherd gets loose, there's trouble." He comes back to the table and takes a big needle out of his bag, fills it full of something. Something to make Shiloh numb, maybe. "This your dog, son?"

  I shake my head.

  "No?" He looks at me, then at Dad. Dad still won't say nothing, makes me do the talking. While the doc leans over Shiloh and slowly inserts the needle in his side, I get up my nerve.

  "It's Judd Travers's," I tell him. I got to start practicing the truth sometime.

  "Judd Traversal This the dog he's missing? How come you brought it in?"

  "I had him," I say,

  Doc Murphy sucks in his breath, then lets it out a little at a time-- huh, huh, huh. "Whew!" he says, and goes on about his work.

  Don't know how long we're there in Doc's kitchen, Dad standing over against the wall, arms folded, me with my hands cupped over Shiloh's head while Doc Murphy washes the wounds, dresses them, and starts stitching the skin back up. Once or twice I feel Shiloh jerk, like it hurts him, but when he lays

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  too still, I don't know if it's because he's numb or if he's dying.

  "The next twenty-four hours, we'll know if this dog's going to live," the doc says. "You check with me tomorrow evening; we'll have some idea then. I can keep him here for a day or two, Ray. Then, if he makes it, you can take him on home."

  I put my face down near Shiloh's again, my mouth next to his ear. "Live, Shiloh, live!" I whisper.

  Hardest thing in the world is to leave Shiloh there at Doc Murphy's, the way his eyes follow me over.to the doorway, the way his muscles move, like he's trying to get up when he sees me leaving. Second hardest thing is to crawl in the Jeep with Dad afterward.

  There isn't a word passed between us till we get home. Once Dad turns the motor off, though, and I'm all set to get out, he says, "Marty, what else don't I know?"

  "What?" I ask.

  "You keeping Judd's dog up there on our hill-- got a place for him all built, never letting on. What else you keeping from me?"

  "Nothing, Dad!"

  "How do I know that's not another lie?"

  " 'Cause it's not."

  "You saying so don't make it true."

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  I know then what Ma meant. But it's not all so black and white as Dad makes it out to be, neither. And sometimes, when I get mad, it clears my head.

  "You would have thought more of me if I'd let that dog wander around till Judd found it again, kick the daylights out of 'im?" I ask. "That what you want me to do, Dad?"

  "I want you to do what's right."

  "What's right?"

  For once in my eleven years, I think I have my dad stumped. Leastways, it seems to be thirty . . . forty seconds before he answers:

  "You've got to go by the law. The law says a man that pays money for a dog owns that dog. You don't agree with the law, then you work to change it."

  "What if there isn't time, Dad? Shiloh could be dead by the time somebody looked into the way Judd treats his dogs."

  Dad's voice is sharp: "You think Judd Travers is the only one around here hard-hearted toward his animals? You think he's the only one who starves 'em or kicks 'em or worse? Open up your eyes, Marty. Open your eyes!" Now Dad half turns in his seat, back resting against the door, facing me: "How many times have you walked to the school bus and seen a chained-up dog in somebody's yard? How many times you ever put your mind to whether or not it's happy, its ribs sticking out like handles on the sides?

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  Suddenly you're face-to-face with a dog that pulls at your heart, and you all at once want to change things."

  I swallow. "There's got to be a first time," I answer.

  Dad sighs. "You're right about that," he says.

  I'm pushing my luck, I know. "If Doc Murphy don't tell Judd about Shiloh, can we bring him back here and keep him? I could build him a better pen. Make the fence high enough so the shepherd can't get in."

  Dad opens the Jeep door on his side. "No," he says, and gets out.

  I get out, too. "Just till Shiloh's better, then? You know how Judd treats anything that don't work right. He'll shoot Shiloh, Dad! I found a dog once before over near Judd's place with a bullet hole in his head. We could at least get Shiloh well. I'm going to pay Doc Murphy's bill. I promise you that. You get all my can money for the next three years, and I'll deliver the county paper, too, if I get the chance. Honest! I promise!"

  Dad studies me. "You can keep him here till he's well, that's all. Then we'rej;akmg him back to Judd." And he goes in the house.

  My heart starts pounding again. Thumpity, thump. Thumpity thump. There's still time, I'm thinking. Shiloh's still alive, and I ain't licked yet.

  CHAPTER 11

  It's only after I lie back down on the couch that night that I realize what all I've done. To Ma and Dad, for one thing. Ma's still awake. I can see the light in the bedroom as Dad goes on down the hall. And then I hear their voices. Not all of what they say, but enough:

  "Ray... told you I just found out about that dog myself. . . ."

  ". . . secrets from me, you and Marty." "... till tomorrow. I would have told you then...." ". . . every day . . . the mail to Judd's place ... mentions that dog to me, and all the t
ime ... up on my own property, me not even knowing. . . ."

  I bring my arms up against my ears and hold, 'em there. So many things going wrong, it's hard to remember anything going right. Doc Murphy knows I've got Judd's dog now, Dad's mad at Ma, and we won't know till tomorrow if Shiloh's even going to make it. Worst of all, I'd brought Shiloh here to keep him from being hurt, and what that German shep-

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  herd done to him was probably worse than anything Judd Travers would have brought himself to do, short of shootin' him, anyways. This time, when the tears come again, I don't even fight. Don't even try holding back.

  I must have slept through Dad's going off to work the next morning, 'cause when I wake, Becky's standing beside the couch eating a piece of honey toast and breathing on my face. Dara Lynn's already told her about the dog, because she asks right off, "Where's it at, the doggy?"

  I sit up and tell her the dog's at Doc Murphy's and we'll find out how he is that afternoon. Then I look in the kitchen at Ma. There's the set look about the lips that means trouble--that means don't mess with her, 'cause she's already in trouble with Dad.

  I go outside, pick me a couple wormy peaches, and sit on the stoop, eating at them, spitting out the wormy places.

  Dara Lynn comes out and sits beside me. Today she's all kindness.

  "Judd Travers don't take care of his dog, Marty, no wonder it come up here," she says, trying to say the right thing. I can tell she's been figuring it all out, from what she could overhear between Ma and Dad and anything else Ma told her.

  I take another bite of peach.

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  "It wasn't like you stole him," she says. "That dog come up here on its own."

  "Just hush up, Dara Lynn," I say, which I had no business saying. I didn't want to talk to anyone, that's all.

  "Well, you could have told me and I wouldn't have told anyone."

  "Thanks."

  "Ma says we've got to give him back to Judd Travers when he's better."

  I get up and start toward the hill to clean up the ground where Shiloh was attacked. See if there's any way I can put some fence wire over the top of the pen to keep out the shepherd.

  "What's his name, Marty?" Dara Lynn calls after me.

  "Shiloh,:' I tell her.

  I'm only halfway up the hill when I hear a car and turn around. It's Mrs. Howard's car, and David's in it. Soon as he sees me he jumps out--it still moving a little--and comes running toward me.

  "I get to stay here today!" he yells., waving a kite he,'s brought with him. "Everyone else is going to Parkersburg and I didn't want to go."

  I look over to where Ma and Mrs. Howard are talking, see Ma nodding her head. I get lonely sometimes up at our house, but today I want to be with

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  that loneliness. Don't want to talk to Dara Lynn, to Becky, to Dad, or even to Ma. If we had a telephone, I'd be calling Doc Murphy every hour. As it is, I have to wait till Dad comes home from work before I can find out about Shiloh. Can't go down there pesterin' Doc, him with patients to see.

  "What do you want to do?" I ask David, trying to dig up the least little bit of enthusiasm. David and I are in the same grade, even though he's taller and heavier and looks like junior high already.

  "Try out this kite over in your meadow," he says.

  I lead him around the long way, away from Shiloh's pen, and he doesn't even notice because he's unwrapping his kite, made of silk or something, which one of his relatives brought him.

  We stand out in the meadow flying the kite, and I watch the blue-and-yellow-and-green tail whipping around in the breeze, and I'm thinking about Shiloh's tail, the way it wags. You get a dog on your mind, it seems to fill up the whole space. Everything you do reminds you of that dog.

  When we bring the kite down later, though, David sees a groundhog, and next thing you know he's after it--the groundhog zigzagging this way and that, David yelling like crazy.

  "I'm taking your kite back down to the house, David," I yell when I see him getting near Shiloh's pen.

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  He goes on running and yelling.

  "I'm going to get me a handful of soda crackers. You want to make some peanut-butter-cracker sandwiches?" I call out, trying to get him to follow.

  And then his yelling stops. "Hey!" he says.

  I know he's found the pen, and I walk over.

  "What's this?" David asks. He looks at the blood on the ground. "Hey! What happened here?"

  I go over and yank his arm and make him sit down. He's looking at me bug-eyed.

  "You listen to me, David Howard," I say. Whenever I say "David Howard," he knows it's serious. Only did it twice in my life--once when he sat on the paper flowerpot I'd made for Ma at school, and once when he saw me with my pants down in the bathroom. That really made me mad.

  But today I'm not mad, I'm serious: "Something awful and terrible happened in there, David, and if you ever tell anyone, even your ma and dad, may Jesus make you blind."

  That's the kind of talk my folks can't stand, but I got it from Grandma Preston herself. Ma says Jesus don't go around making anyone blind, but Grandma Preston always used it as a warning and she went to church Sunday morning and evening both.

  David's eyes about to pop out of his head. "What? 1 ' he asks again.

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  "You know Judd Travers?"

  "He was murdered^"

  "No. But you know the way he's mean to his dogs?"

  "He killed one of his dogs in there?"

  "No. Let me tell it, David. You know how he's missing a dog?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, it come up here on its own and I let him stay. I built him a pen and kept him secret and named him Shiloh."

  David stares at me, then at the blood in the pen, then back at me again.

  "Last night," I. tell him, "Bakers' German shepherd jumped the fence and tore him up. We took Shiloh to Doc Murphy, and Judd don't know."

  David's mouth falls open and hangs there. "Wow!" he says, then says it again.

  I tell David how hurt Shiloh was and how we've got to wait till tonight to see how he is, and then we go in his-pen together, and David helps me clean up the blood--pull up all the grass with blood stains on it and throw it over the fence into the woods.

  It's easier somehow with David helping. With David knowing, even. If it was me by myself, I'd be thinking again and again how this never would have happened if Shiloh could have got away from the

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  shepherd. I look at David and think we're friends for life. Then I think of how there are exactly seven people now who know I have Judd Travers's dog, and it's only a matter of time before somebody lets it out. Probably Becky. She'll warble it to the first person coming up the lane. Did you ever notice how the more a little kid tries not to tell a secret, the sooner it gets out? Nothing that child can do about it. A secret is just too big for a little kid.

  What I didn't expect was that at three-thirty, before Dad come home, here's Doc Murphy's car chugging up the lane, and he's got Shiloh in the backseat. I'm standing out by the oak tree with David, taking turns on the bag swing, when I see the car and Shiloh's head raised up in the backseat. I'm over to that car in three seconds flat.

  "Shiloh!"

  No cry ever sounded so happy as the one that come up out of my throat.

  All of us, we're crowding around the car--Ma and Dara Lynn and Becky and David Howard, and all of us are saying, "Shiloh! Here, boy!" and holding out our hands; and Shiloh's trying to lick everything in sight.

  "Patient recovered faster than I thought he would," Doc says, getting his big belly out from behind the steering wheel and standing up. "So I

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  figured I'd bring him on over myself." And then, to Mother, "Had patients coming in and out today, and don't know that I wanted them to see the dog."

  She nodded.

  "I'm going to pay for this, Doc Murphy," I tell him. "You send the bill to Dad and he'll pay it, but then I'm payin' him."


  "Well, son, that's a generous thing to do, with a dog not even yours," he says.

  "Is he all well now?"

  "No. Not by a long shot. Think it's going to take a couple weeks to heal, and I can't promise you he'll walk without a limp. But I got him sewn back up and full of antibiotics. If you can keep him quiet for a few days and off that leg, I think he'll pull through just fine."

  If Ma was mad at me before, she's not now, not the way S.hiloh's licking her all over both arms, getting a quick lick in at her face every time she bends close. Becky's sticking her hand out for Shiloh to lick, and when he does, she squeals and pulls back. Shiloh's tail going like crazy.

  It's like a welcome-home party. Ma has me bring in this cardboard box from the shed and we put an old pillow in the bottom of it and cover it with a clean sheet, and Doc Murphy lays Shiloh down inside it.

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  Shiloh seems to know he can't walk too good, because as soon as he tries to stand up, he sits back down again and licks at his leg.

  I'm glad Shiloh's back, I'm glad he's going to get better, and that we can keep him till he's well. But the more I sit there petting his head, feeling his happiness, the more I know I can't give him up. I won't.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sure seems strange having Shiloh in the house that night, after trying so hard to keep him secret. Strange, too, the way Ma takes to him. Seems like she can't hardly pass his box next to the stove without reaching down to pet him, making low sympathy noises in her throat, way she does when Dara Lynn or Becky or me gets sick.

  Dad don't say much. He come home to find Shiloh there, he just stands off to one side, listening to what Doc Murphy said about him; he don't get close enough for Shiloh to take a lick.