Marcia Talley: Sing It to Her Bones

When we reached the pond, Colonel planted his front paws at the water’s edge, took a long drink, then chased a frog into the water. He sat alert, ears erect, studying with hopeful eyes the ripples where the frog had submerged. When he panted, his clean, pinkish purple tongue hung out, dripping saliva onto the ground.

He probably would have sat there forever, but I raised my arm to distract him and threw the stick as far as I could into the nearby woods, the scar on my chest stretching and stinging with the effort.

Colonel bolted off through the trees. He returned in triumph a few moments later, carrying the stick in his mouth. He trotted over and laid it at my muddy feet. I retrieved the stick and continued walking as Colonel danced and circled around me, urging me to toss the stick again, but I was already tired of the game.

Once the fence had been a continuous line of posts and barbed wire. Occasionally, to save posts, Paul’s father had nailed the wire to the trees that grew naturally along the property line. After many years the trees had grown around the wire, engulfing it. It now appeared as if some magician had pulled the wire right through the trees. In other places where it was not adequately supported, the wire had rusted through and separated, leaving gaps.

For some reason I was profoundly happy. I found myself singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” whacking the stick against my leg to the rhythm of the song as I walked. Colonel grew bored and ambled on ahead, sniffing at fence posts and tree roots, lifting a leg every so often to mark his territory.

Suddenly he began to root around, poking his nose into a pile of leaves that had blown up against the fence last fall. I heard a frantic rustling; then a rabbit bolted out of the leaves and dashed easily through the fence into our neighbor’s field. Colonel raced off in joyful pursuit.

“Colonel! Colonel! You get back here!” The beastly dog ignored me.

I wasted some time searching back along the way we had come for a break in the fence, then gave up. Risking a tear in my “Smith College-100 years of Women on Top” sweatshirt, I held down the lower strand of barbed wire with one hand and carefully squirmed through. I ran after the dog, yelling, “Colonel, come!” and waving my stick impotently.

Colonel had disappeared behind the house.

I had never seen the old Nichols place up close. The once-white siding on the ancient two-story dwelling was pitted and stained gray-green from the woodsmoke that used to pump out of the chimney night and day. Dark green shutters, missing most of their slats, hung crookedly from an insufficient number of nails. Nearly all the windows were broken-juvenile delinquents in training were responsible for that, I was sure-and most had been boarded up. Shingles torn from the roof by the wind littered the ground.

Colonel had apparently cornered his rabbit. As I rounded the side of the house, I saw him guarding an old cistern that had been used to collect rainwater back in the days when wells weren’t so easy to dig. The cistern was a concrete cylinder about five feet in diameter, set deeply into the ground and topped by a cover of wooden boards joined together with wide metal straps. Two large, flat stones rested on top.

Colonel continued to bark, but I couldn’t see the rabbit. Perhaps it was hiding in the bushes that had grown up, lush and green, around the foundation of the house back by the cistern where water was plentiful.

When I was still about twenty feet away, Colonel trotted over to me, circled twice, then returned to his duty station by the cistern. He barked, then looked at me expectantly. He barked again.

“Are you trying to tell me something, dog? Who do you think you are? Lassie?”

As I got closer, I could see that the cistern’s cover was cracked.

“Did your rabbit go down the well, Colonel?” I peered through a gap in the cover but could see only a sliver of light on the water below that reflected the blue sky above me and a dark shape that must have been the shadow of my head.

“Well, boy, if your rabbit’s down there, he better be a damn good swimmer.”

With both hands, I pushed one of the rocks to the ground, then the other. It took more effort to wrestle the cover itself aside. This done, Colonel, ever helpful, placed both paws on the lip of the cistern, hunched his shoulders, and peered in.

The cistern was fed from a pipe leading into it from the roof of the house. It was impossible to tell how deep it was because of all the water it contained. After the recent rain the water level was fairly high, only four or five feet from the place on the rim where my hand rested. A rusty automobile axle jutted out of the water at an angle, wrapped in a tangle of baling wire. Like the house, this cistern clearly hadn’t been used in years.

“No rabbit, Colonel, old boy. Just a lot of junk.” I grasped his collar and pulled until his front paws touched the ground. Before I could turn to push the wooden cover back into place, however, Colonel was leaning into the cistern again, howling pitifully. “For heaven’s sake, Colonel! I told you there’s nothing down there!” Using both hands, I tugged on his collar again, but Colonel refused to budge.

While my hands were occupied with the stubborn dog, a sudden gust of wind lifted my Orioles cap and snatched it from my head. I watched helplessly as it sailed into the cistern, revolving slowly like an autumn leaf. It floated on the surface for a few seconds, then began to sink beneath the stagnant water.

“Now look what you’ve done, you stupid dog!” I picked up my stick and used it to poke around in the floating debris, trying to fish up my precious cap before it sank and was lost forever. I had no intention of walking back to the house bald. I leaned into the cistern as far as I could with safety and used my stick to push aside some deteriorating blue fabric, an old milk carton, and what looked like a white plastic garbage bag.

But it wasn’t a bag. Something solid was floating there that responded to my gently prodding by turning over lazily. Not a plastic bag at all, but a pair of human buttocks, with what looked like part of a leg attached.

“Oh, God, Colonel! Let’s pray I’m seeing things. Let’s hope it’s a dead deer or a small calf down there.” I felt ill. But I couldn’t convince myself, let alone the dog, that I was seeing anything but the sad remains of a human being.

I ran the mile or so back to Connie’s at record speed, although everything conspired to delay me: the barbed wire fence plucking at my clothes, the muddy field sucking greedily at my shoes. After what seemed like hours, I burst into the studio, the screen door slapping shut behind me. I found Connie in the kitchen, slicing a grapefruit.

“What happened to your hat?” she asked.

“Connie, I think there’s a body in the cistern over at the old Nichols place!” I paused to catch my breath, bracing my arm on the kitchen counter. “Who do I call out here? You were married to a cop! Who would you call?”

Dear, unflappable Connie looked up at me, then laid the knife down with elaborate care on the cutting board. “Nine-one-one,” she said. “Just like everyone else.”

You’ve got to hand it to those folks at 911.While I stood at the kitchen counter panting, my heart pounding in my ears and feeling as if a live, leaping thing in my chest had swollen to twice normal size, crowding out my lungs, Connie made the call. Almost as soon as she hung up, we heard the firehouse sirens in town kick in, wailing long and loud, the old-fashioned way, to call in the volunteers.

Connie led me back to her studio. There the windows offered a panoramic view over the fields as far as the next ridge where the road into town and a scattering of houses lay.