Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

He kept ranting. She was having a hard time following. Something about court-appointed attorneys and the invalidation of wills composed while incompetent. His words were running together, and he repeatedly wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. And then, he flung the piece of siding at her and retreated a few steps. He had one hand raised in the air, his index finger up and pointing at the sky.

“Get your house in order,” he screamed. “Or, so help me god, one more of those shitting animals steps on my property and I’ll shoot it dead and drag it to your doorstep.” He turned and stomped off the porch, the shepherd dog at his heels.

The livestock truck was scheduled to show up the next day, and right then she decided that she was going to call and cancel. Lauren put on her boots and set out across the pasture to retrieve her cattle. An hour later, she had them back in the enclosure and she mended the break in the fence. Splicing the wire together in the first of what would be many fixes. While she worked, she thought of each person she’d known in this world who had died or left and she tried to put them on a scale against the people she still knew who were still alive and in her life. Never had finding a balance seemed more desperate.

The Reds stood, flies blowing around their flanks, seemingly as happy to be fenced in as they were to be roaming free. “That’s enough of that,” she said to them. “I don’t expect anymore of that out of you lot.”

II 1.

Wind and loneliness, interminable fatigue, and broken trees. Also, animals that needed to be fed. The same world that wanted to steamroll you also contained goats bleating their hunger, eggs that would go to waste if they weren’t gathered, cattle that would run wild if they weren’t contained. Lauren watered. She milked. She grained. She gathered. She collected all the splintered pieces of her trees and doused them with kerosene in her burn barrel. She tossed in a match, and there was a concussive whump as the pines caught fire, and she didn’t even stand there for one second to watch them burn.

—

Winter came creeping down from the north, frosting the hill pines, taking up residence in her hands. She swallowed four ibuprofen every morning. In the long evenings, she sat at the kitchen table, soaking her stiff fingers in a bowl of hot water. Sometimes, before night fell, she could see Jason’s shepherd dog padding across the snow-blown field between their houses.

The wind picked pieces of her house and sent them spinning out into the drifts. A shingle here, a section of trim there, a blue sliver of siding, piercing a backdrop of pure white.

There was a storm that lasted for three days. Her road was drifted shut and all night she lay awake, listening to the house shift and creak under the weight of the snow.

When the storm broke she emerged, a brilliant sunny morning, the light frantic with nowhere to settle. The cattle sensed her coming. They shifted, sleep-eyed, red coats made piebald with matted ice and snow. The goats sprang from their shelter, kicking through the fluff — in disgust or delight, she couldn’t tell. A cat appeared from behind a hay bale. It slunk, weightless, toward her, and sat still, allowing her to rub its ears clumsily with her gloved hands. One of her roosters let loose, softly at first, as if clearing his throat, checking his tone, then louder, a raucous crowing that seemed as clear and timeless an affirmation as one might ever expect to hear. The storm was over, a clear dawn. Lauren had to laugh. Roosters, like males of other species, seemed to have a knack for stating the obvious.

—

Lauren quit her job at the school. She was sick of working nights. It had been fine when she’d needed to avoid Manny, but now it felt like she was starting to exist on some strange dark planet, conjoined maybe but ever separate from the rest of the daytime world. She wanted to sleep at night like a normal animal.

She got a job at the Frontier assisted-living facility and was somewhat surprised to find out that she loved it. The residents could be cranky, but most of the time they were happy and wanted to talk to whomever they could, even if it was just her, the janitor, emptying the trash cans in their rooms or shaking out their rugs. She had one old gentleman who liked her to sit for a few moments and listen to music with him. He had a record player and the scratchy songs were ones she vaguely remembered her mother listening to on the AM radio in the kitchen.

“If I was a little bit more spry, I’d ask you to dance, young lady,” he’d say. “You wouldn’t be able to chase me off with a stick.” He was in a wheelchair, his legs atrophied to pipe cleaners. “Well,” Lauren said. “Probably for the best. I’m not much of a dancer, anyway. I just like to listen.”

“We make quite a pair then,” he said giving a phlegmy laugh. “The last of the great listeners.”

Sometimes Lauren had to clean rooms whose former occupants would never be returning. Often no one would come to claim the resident’s belongings, and she would be charged with bagging up clothes for donation. She sometimes thought working at Frontier was the best thing she’d ever done, but this, the handling of remains, she didn’t like. She didn’t like the idea that someone would have to come along and sift through the pieces of her life and decide what could be donated and what was trash. Maybe this is part of why people had kids, so, in the end, at least it wouldn’t be strangers rifling through their belongings. She wanted everything she owned to precede her into death. She wanted to pass out of this world with nothing much more than a pair of comfortable wool socks, broken-in jeans, a thick flannel shirt. Maybe it was hard to arrange the particulars of your dying, but all things being equal, she’d like to go on to her eternal rest in her work clothes, all her faculties intact until the very end. She thought maybe she should start throwing things away.

2.

At some point Lauren decided that she wasn’t going to cut her hair ever again. It had been white for a long time now. Although occasionally she discovered a dark one in there, and it came as a surprise. She remembered finding her first white hair somewhere near her thirtieth birthday and it had sent her on a tailspin for half a day. It’s starting, she’d thought then. The follicle that produced that hair is dying. I’ve reached the tipping point and from now on it’s nothing but slow decline.

Now, she regarded the random brown strand as offensive. A vital hair on the head of a seventy-year-old woman was like the kind of optimist that no one can stand. The person who will sit there on parade day under torrential skies and say I think it’s going to clear any minute now . The kind of person who will cheerfully fight to the death for a crumbling government, lacking the good sense to surrender. Lauren supposed that, on a cellular level, we never surrender. That was part of the problem. These days, when she saw a brown hair, she pulled it out immediately.

It was hard to believe, but, somehow, in old age, she’d gotten vain. She loved her hair. It was long, pure white. She kept it in a thick braid, tucked into the back of her overalls when she was out doing her chores, so it didn’t get in her way. She brushed it out every night. She only washed it once a week because she’d read in her magazines that too much shampoo could destroy the natural oils that make hair healthy. A seventy-year-old woman reading Cosmopolitan . That was something that would probably give some folks pause.

As it was, people didn’t quite know how to take an old woman with long hair. In town, she got looks. She’d be pushing her cart through the County Market and kids, shopping with their mother, would stare. She wore her overalls and muck boots most days and her braid hung down near to her waist. She figured that some of these folks in town, newcomers most of them, thought she was some kind of crazy witch, living way out where she did with all the animals. Her old truck pieced together with baling wire, still running forty-some years after it rolled off an assembly line in Detroit.