Russell Banks: A Permanent Member of the Family

No one blamed Sarge, of course, for rejecting joint custody and thereby breaking up our family. Not consciously, anyhow. In fact, back then, at the beginning of the breakup of the family, none of us knew how much we depended on Sarge to preserve our ignorance of the fragility, the very impermanence, of the family. None of us knew that she was helping us postpone our anger and need for blame — blame for the separation and divorce, for the destruction of the family unit, for our lost innocence.

Whenever the girls stepped down from the school bus for their three or four nights’ stay at my house, they were clearly, profoundly comforted to see Sarge, her wide grin, her wet black eyes glazed by cataracts, her floppy tail and slipshod, slanted, arthritic gait as she trailed them from the bus stop to the house. Wherever the girls settled in the yard or the house, as long as she didn’t have to climb the narrow attic stairs to be with them, Sarge lay watchfully beside them, as if guarding them from a danger whose existence Louise and I had not yet acknowledged.

Vickie wasn’t around all that much, but Sarge was not attached to her in the same intense way as to the three younger girls. Sarge pretty much ignored Vickie. From the dog’s perspective, I think Vickie was a late-arriving, auxiliary member of the pack, which I hate to admit is how the three younger girls saw her, too, despite my best efforts to integrate all four daughters into a single family unit. No one admitted this, of course, but even then, that early in the game, I saw that I was failing to build a recombinant nuclear family. Vickie was a free radical and, sadly, would remain one.

Mostly, when the children were at school or up at their mother’s, Sarge slept through her days. Her only waking diversion, in the absence of the girls, was going for rides in my car, and I took her everywhere I went, even to my office at the college, where she slept under my desk while I met my classes. From dawn to dusk, when the weather turned wintry and snow was falling, if I was at home and my car parked in the driveway, Sarge’s habit, so as not to miss an opportunity for a ride, was to crawl under the vehicle and sleep there between the rear wheels until I came out. When I got into the car I’d start the engine and, if the girls were with me, count off the seconds aloud until, fifteen or twenty seconds into my count, Sarge appeared at the driver’s-side window. Then I’d step out, flip open the tailgate and lift her into the back. If the girls weren’t there I still counted, but silently. I never got as high as thirty before Sarge was waiting by the car door.

I don’t remember now where we were headed, but this time all four daughters were in the car together, Vickie in the front passenger’s seat, Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha in back. I remember it as a daytime drive, even though, because of Vickie’s classes and the younger girls’ school hours, it was unusual for all four to be in the car at the same time during the day. Maybe it was a Saturday or Sunday; maybe we were going ice-skating at one of the local ponds. It was a bright, cloudless, cold afternoon, I remember that, and there was no snow on the ground just then, which suggests a deep freeze following the usual January thaw. We must have been five or six months into the separation and divorce, which would not be final until the following August.

Piling into the car, all four of the girls were in a silly mood, singing along to a popular Bee Gees disco song, “More Than a Woman,” singing in perfect mocking harmony and substituting lines like “bald-headed woman” for “more than a woman,” and breaking each other up, even the youngest, Andrea, who would have just turned seven then. I can’t say I was distracted. I was simply happy, happy to see my daughters goofing off together, and was grinning at the four of them as they sang, my gaze turning from one bright face to another, when I realized that I had counted all the way to sixty and was still counting. That far into it, I didn’t make the connection between the count and lifting Sarge into the back of the station wagon. I simply stopped counting, put the car in reverse and started to back out of the driveway.

There was a thump and a bump. The girls stopped singing. No one said a word. I hit the brake, put the car in park and shut off the motor. I lay my forehead against the steering wheel rim.

All four daughters began to wail. It was a primeval, keening, utterly female wail. Their voices rose in pitch and volume and became almost operatic, as if for years they had been waiting for this moment to arrive, when they could at last give voice together to a lifetime’s accumulated pain and suffering. A terrible, almost unthinkable thing had happened. Their father had slain a permanent member of the family. We all knew it the second we heard the thump and felt the bump. But the girls knew something more. Instinctively, they understood the linkage between this moment, with Sarge dead beneath the wheels of my car, and my decision the previous summer to leave my wife. My reasons for that decision, my particular forms of pain and suffering, my years of humiliation and sense of having been too compromised in too many ways ever to respect myself again unless I left my wife, none of that mattered to my daughters, even to Vickie, who, as much as the other three, needed the primal family unit with two loving parents in residence together, needed it to remain intact and to continue into her adult life, holding and sustaining her and her sisters, nurturing them, and more than anything else, protecting them from bad things.

When the wailing finally subsided and came to a gradual end, and I had apologized so sincerely and repeatedly that the girls had begun to comfort me instead of letting me comfort them, telling me that Sarge must have died before I hit her with the car or she would have come out from under it in plenty of time, we left the car and wrapped Sarge’s body in an old blanket. I carried her body and the girls carried several of her favorite toys and her food dish to the far corner of the backyard and laid her and her favorite things down beneath a leafless old maple tree. I told the girls that they could always come to this tree and stand over Sarge’s grave and remember her love for them and their love for her.

While I went to the garage for a shovel and pick, the girls stood over Sarge’s body as if to protect it from desecration. When I returned, Vickie said, “The ground’s frozen, you know, Dad.”

“That’s why I brought the pick,” I said, but the truth is I had forgotten that the ground was as hard as pavement, and she knew it. They all knew it. I was practically weeping by now, confused and frightened by the tidal welter of emotions rising in my chest and taking me completely over. As the girls calmed and seemed to grow increasingly focused on the task at hand, I spun out of control. I threw the shovel down beneath the maple tree and started slamming the pick against the ground, whacking the sere, rock-hard sod with fury. The blade clanged in the cold morning air and bounced off the ground, and the girls, frightened by my wild, gasping swings, backed away from me, as if watching their father avenge a crime they had not witnessed, delivering a punishment that exceeded the crime to a terrible degree.

I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn’t see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls, and I slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn’t know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.