GROUND DOG DAY
by Larry Eugene Meredith
Written in 1967
Nellie died before the New Year. Using a carton left from Christmas for a coffin, Everett buried her beyond the garden where the backyard turns to tall grass. Helen cried and couldn’t watch the interment. She had grown up with the dog, but it was her daughter who grieved too deep and long.
Standing at the sink Helen stole glances toward the kitchen table where the girl sat listlessly poking a fork into chocolate cake. She wished to lift Jenny’s spirit, but knew not how. Asking for help with the dishes was hardly a cure for melancholy. She scrubbed them alone at a loss.
Setting plates in a sopping stack upon the side counter, she stared out a kitchen window. She could see across the backyard to the field beyond. The hilltop and the trees along the fencerow were black against a light sky; slim proof winter days were indeed getting longer. The window was steamed up, caught between warm water in the sink and cold evening air. Yesterday’s snow left a bar of soft white upon the outer sill. The storm hit the upper states solid and Everett had called before dinner to say he was stuck up north.
“When you think you’ll git home?”
“Don’t know. Not this weekend. I’ll be a headin’ right back out to make up schedule.
Maybe mid-week.”
She was silent. He hadn’t been a trucker when they’d married. He’d been a stoker at a steel mill over in Coldsdale. One day he come bounding home bubbling about a new job.
“Why?”
“Why? Fer one it’s more money. And it comes with a house. And I’ll be out of that heat pit…”
“House?”
“There’s a house down a lick from the terminal they’ll rent me for a song. We’ll have a place of our own, Helly.”
But the runs took him out of the house and up north, long trips keeping him on the road except weekends. He loved it.
It was lonely weeks for her and Jenny.
His long distance, “I love you,” softly intruded on her thoughts.
“I know. I love you too.”
There was a pause.
“Little Petey’s dead.”
“Pete Lentz? How?”
“Didn’t want to hole up. Thought he could beat the storm down, but he skidded off the road somewhere in mid-state. Heard he froze t’death.”
A longer pause.
“Look, I really hafta go. Kiss Jen fer me.”
“Okay.”
She stood a moment, her hand still on the receiver. There was a clink of fork against plate. Her eyes drifted to a calendar hanging between window and door.
“Ya know what?”
Jenny looked over.
Helen pointed at the calendar. “Next week’s Ground Hog Day.”
“What’s that?”
“On Feb’uary second, if’n the ground hog don’t see his shadow, it means an early spring. If’n he sees his shadow, he’ll get a scared an’ jump back into his burrow an’ we’ll git six more weeks of winter.”
“Really?”
“That’s what folk say. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you oughta look fer a ground hog to see what he does.”
“There ground dogs ‘round here?”
“It’s hog, honey, ground hog. Sure, they’re around here. I’ve seen ‘em up the hill sittin’ back on their hunches. They like to make homes in fencerows.”
Jenny dropped her fork and trotted to the kitchen door, pressing her nose against the glass panel to stare at the hill.
Helen put her hand against her mouth and said nothing of what popped into her brain too late. There were ground hogs, but they would be hibernating deep in their lairs this time of year.
At cockcrow Jenny bundled and went out. She circled the yard, head down searching for ground hog tracks. She traipsed about for a half hour, until the snow was a hodgepodge of boot prints and then shrugging, retrieved her sled from beneath the back porch. She trudged up the knoll, tugging the sled behind by a piece of old clothesline. She walked up the field edge, knowing she’d have to stay on the wagon trail to sled. The wide patch of open ground covering the hill was a cornfield in the summer and the soil beneath the snow was choppy and thick with crushed corn stalks from the final harvest. If she tried coming down there her sled would snag in some broken shoot and throw her.
From the top of the prominence her home seemed a discarded dollhouse, desolate and forlorn. The back porch lacking fresh paint had become gray and water stained. The sides of the house proper did not match, to her right dingy red brick in need of pointing; to the left was stucco. Someone, before Jenny lived here, started to stucco over the brick, but stopped half done. The scaffolding had never been taken down. It clung there, a cage of intertwined rusting bars and rotting wooden planks. Surrounding her house to the front and stucco side was swamp. This marsh ran all the way from the highway a quarter mile distant from the house back to the edge of the woods bordering the cornfield’s far side. To the brick side a large pasture, where she watched cows grazing during the spring, was now a blank canvas of smooth snow broken by a narrow stream cutting a deep crevice across it like a black scar.
Living in a bog held her interests with its denizens of snakes, frogs and red-winged blackbirds. Last summer she had captured a pod of tadpoles in a mason jar and placed it on her dresser wanting to watch the transformation to frogs, but her mother called it cruel and dumped the tads back in the mire. She made a bouquet of cat’o’nine tails once, caught some crayfish in the pasture stream once and plucked watercress from the same stream and ate a fresh watercress sandwich - once. She had explored the woods beyond with Nellie at her side, both crinkling noses at the profusion of skunk cabbage; both returning covered in cockleburs.
On the other hand living in a fenland was a friendless life. Once they’d lived in town with her grandparents, right across from her grade school on a street full of kids her age. Then one day her father moved them here. Now she rode a bus to school, walking down their long lane to the highway to be picked up. She had had friends in town, but the kids at this school called her “Swamp Rat”, a natural enough nickname considering where she lived, but one she took personally, convinced her thin face and long nose gave an appearance of a big rodent. She tried to ignore the taunts, but sometimes at night she buried her face in the pillow so her mother wouldn’t hear and cried. Nellie use to hop on the bed and nuzzle her arm with a cold nose, licking the tears from her cheek. Dogs liked salt.
There were some people living along the highway and from on top the hill she could see the distant clump of houses. There were no kids her age, but there was an older boy named Thomas who befriended her. He played a trumpet and let her blow it, laughing when her cheeks puffed to bursting and her face reddened and the horn made funny sounds like loud farts.
A shift of breeze slapped her face and she recalled her purpose. Jenny sat on her sled and using her hands, pushed until gravity took her down the crisp surface of the wagon trail along the fencerow. She steered with her feet. The soaped runners picked up speed, building a wind that stung, making her eyes water and her cheeks burn. At the bottom she slipped sideways and tumbled over, the only way she knew to stop.
She lay half buried, a cold powder slipping beneath her collar to chill the nape of her neck. Giggling at the thrill, she got up brushing away snow and trekked back up the hill for another run.
During this slide something dark skittered through the brush. She cut the steering bar hard with her foot and rolled off to stop. She lay on her belly and stared into the fencerow and saw the shade run and disappear.
Dragging her sled, which bounced over rougher ground into her ankles with a sting, she entered the narrow line of trees. There was no sign of the thing, but she saw where it had gone. In the brush was a fallen tree and at the near end a hole. She walked to it. The hole was about ten inches in diameter. She peeked in, but couldn’t see far.
She walked around the log, discovering another cavity behind it. Half hopping, half dancing, she dragged her sled out of the trees, sat upon it and slid back to her yard.
“Mommy, mommy,” she yelled across the lawn, “mommy, mommy” up the porch steps, “mommy, mommy” into the house, “mommy, mommy” through the kitchen.
Helen rushed from the upper floor. “Are ya hurt, Jenny, didja git hurt?” How would she take her to a doctor? Everett took the car and left it at the truck terminal. Not that it would matter; Helen had never learned to drive.
“I saw a ground dog. I saw a ground dog.”
Helen’s eyebrows shot up and then narrowed causing a furrow to crease her forehead. “Where?”
“Up the hill in the trees. It must a got scared. It run into a hole in the ground. Does that mean we git six more weeks of winter?”
“I…Well…No. No. It ain’t Ground Hog Day yet. Not ‘til Tuesday. It don’t a count ‘less it sees its shadow on Ground Hog Day.”
Helen walked to the back door and peered at the fencerow. She saw nothing along the trees, but she noted the sky growing gray. When would it snow again?
Jenny traipsed up and down the hill all day Sunday. She didn’t take her sled. She would walk to the log and sing down the hole, “ground dog, ground dog”. She found a long stick poking through the snow and used this to prod the tunnel. The stick went in to her hand without bumping anything.
The day was calm. It was silent in the trees. Occasionally she would hear the sweep of a semi on the highway; sometimes the driver would blow the air horn and she would snap her head around, but the truck would whoosh away, just someone who knew her father from the road. In the quiet she heard a whimpering deep under the ground and she tossed the stick aside, afraid of scaring the ground hog so it would never come out.
On Monday she went to school, drifting through the morning classes. At lunch she bought milk and despite the chill went outside to a deserted spot behind an elm to eat the sandwich her mother had packed. The school band practiced in a room to that side and as she ate, wondering how to lure out the ground hog on Ground Hog Day, she heard the brass blaring and drums pounding. She looked toward the sound and smiled.
When the closing bell rang, she hurried to the bus stand and paced back and forth waiting for Thomas to come. He was three grades ahead of her and the older kids often dawdled by the flagpole after school, stalling to the last moment before running for their buses, often making the drivers stomp over to the green and hustle them along.
There was the danger that Thomas wasn’t at school.
He could be sick.
She wouldn’t know, their classrooms were on opposite sides of the building and they had different lunch periods and was he on the bus that morning? Was he? Was he? She couldn’t remember seeing him on the bus.
Then she saw him break from a group of boys and come her way. He didn’t hurry. In his hand was a brown trumpet case, swinging casually back and forth against his leg. She smiled and clapped her hands. She ran to him and offered to carry his trumpet.
“What’s up, kiddo?” he asked as she tried to tug the case from him.
“I wanna borrow your horn. I’ll give it back to ya Wednesday I promise, I promise. I won’t hurt it or nothin’.”
He cocked his head and looked down his nose at her. “Takin’ up music, squirt?”
“Yeah, kinda. Can I? Can I, please?” She tugged at the handle.
Thomas released his grip. She stumbled backward. “Yeah, you just be careful ‘cause if you break anything my old man’ll break my behind.”
“Oh, I won’t, Tommy, I won’t. I’ll be really, really, really careful.”
He laughed, raising one eyebrow.
Her face grew tight, her young brow even wrinkled. “Will your parents notice you didn’t bring it home?”
He waved a dismissing hand. “If’n they ask I’ll jest say I forgot it. It happened before. They know it’ll be safe locked in the band room.”
The new snow came Monday night. The wind roared around the eves of the house rattling the bars holding the scaffolding, threatening to rip the structure down. Drafts, like frosty ghosts, slipped in from every window frame and beneath the outer doors. Helen couldn’t stop shivering. She draped a blanket about her shoulders and listened to the constant weather reports.
A blizzard had crossed from Canada, growing worse across the upper states. The swirling winds were circling an outcrop of storm down from the Great Lakes to as far as Delaware. The biggest concern was high winds, but all was expected to move away from the area by Tuesday morning.
Helen was glad for that, but everything north was in the path of severity and she didn’t know which direction Everett was hauling now he was off schedule. He hadn’t called and that could mean he was on the road. She hoped he wouldn’t be caught along the highways unsheltered. She wanted to believe he was safely ensconced in a large truck stop, with a bed in the bunkhouse and food at hand.
She thought of Pete Lentz. It was he got Everett into trucking. Petey had a wife, two twin boys little older than Jenny.
Ground Hog Day was midday sunny, with fresh snow covering the footprints in the yard and up the hill along the fencerow. It laid a thick enough carpet across the highways to cancel school for the day. Jenny stood on the back porch blinded by the dazzle of white. Her eyelids fluttered against the shimmer. She pulled the hood of her snowsuit down low on her brow to shade her eyes. Hanging from her right hand was Thomas’s trumpet, glowing golden in the noon sun.
When her eyes adjusted, she saw a dark spot scoot across the field into the trees. Perhaps it was just a purple dot from glare. She held the banister going down the half dozen porch steps, aware of her promise to Thomas. The banister wobbled in her grip, its supports loose, the one partially split. She pulled the trumpet tight against her chest.
She reached beneath the steps and pulled the sled out by its rope. She crossed the yard and went up the wagon trail, which was so buried by fresh snow it felt as choppy as the cornfield. Half way to the fallen log, she saw the spot move again, and another and another. There were three ground hogs and they were romping in the snow. She probably wouldn’t need the trumpet.
A dark disk followed at her feet, a pooling of her shadow. It reminded her of the legend. If the ground hog saw his shadow he would be scared back into his burrow and there would be six more weeks of bitter weather. She saw the three dark spots scamper into the trees. They must have seen their shadows and were going to hide away until sometime in March. She dropped the sled rope and ran as best she could through the deep snow.
Into the trees she ran. The log, protected by the clump of branches above it, was only lightly dusted with new white. All about were tiny tracks. There were many and they went in circles and looping trails of confusion. They were thickest near the hole.
She knelt, putting her face against the snow to peer into the dark. There was nothing to see. She sat back on her heels and brought the trumpet to her lips, pressing the bell to the opening in the ground. She puffed up her cheeks and blew.
F-a-a-ph!
She lowered the mouthpiece and sighed. What made her think she could get noise out of the thing? That wheeze wouldn’t startle the ground hogs. She wanted a blast that would waken deep nesting slugs and frighten the ground hogs out their back door. She sighed again and in her head pictured Thomas playing his horn. Thomas never puffed his cheeks out like some croaking frog. His cheeks collapsed against his teeth when he played. They vibrated on some notes.
She pressed her lips to the mouthpiece and aimed the bell of the horn down the hole. She kept her cheeks flat and blew with her lips.
It was sour and it wobbled and whooped and died into a hiss at the end, but it was a definite blare.
Jenny looked around the log. No change. She took a deep breath and blasted the burrow again; her note more sustained this time. She blew until her chest was caving in atop her stomach and the inside of her skull hurt to bursting. When she stopped she fell backward to the ground, little flecks like a swarm of midget flies flitting around in her eyes.
And beyond the flies was motion. Jenny lay still. Something crawled onto her feet. Something else made a sound, a kind of squeak, toward the back of the log. She rose up on an elbow and saw a little black ball nested between her feet and two puppies scurrying about in the brush. They were puffy, their fur frizzed about them as if charged by electricity, all brown highlighted with white bellies. Their tails were furry worms held proudly up from their behinds like skinny banners.
The black ball uncurled and jumped off her. Jenny got to her feet and two pups scuttled down the hole, but the black one stood its ground staring up with eyes like ebony pearls. Her mouth dropped open and she took a step toward it.
“Ahh,” she whispered.
A growl answered from behind.
Jenny spun on her heels; the trumpet dropping into a clump of old leaves and twigs with a clunk against a rock beneath.
The dog was enormous. It had a square snout and squinting eyes. Its purple lips pulled back causing ripples along the jowls and displaying long teeth. Behind the ears, which were bent forward pointing the way to Jenny, was a ridge of stiff hair. The animal’s front legs were bent slightly at the knees and its shoulder blades pressed against the fur, jutting above its back.
Jenny ran. She burst straight through a bramble bush, scratching her face. She darted to her sled, threw it under her belly and sped downhill face first for the first time in her life.
Shaking after rolling off the sled, tears freezing beneath her lids, she waited on the ground for the attack. She flung her arms over her head to retain her face. After a few seconds of stillness, she lowered her arms and peeked back from where she’d come. There was no sign of the dog on the hill.
Helen called the shelter in the county seat. The men didn’t come to their place until the next day. They parked the pound truck at the edge of the wagon trail and walked up the hill carrying a net and a cage. They were up in the trees for an hour, but when they came down they had the mother dog in the cage. They didn’t stop at the house to say anything. They put the dog in the back of the truck, stowed their gear and drove off.
“What about the puppies?”
Helen patted Jenny’s head. “Oh, I’m sure they’ll be back to git the pups.”
But the men didn’t come back that day. When they didn’t come back the next, Helen called the pound.
They weren’t coming back. The only way to get the pups was to dig them out of the old ground hog burrow. Couldn’t they do that? No, they wouldn’t do that.
“But without the mother, the pups’ll starve,” Helen told them.
“We’re sorry,” they said.
There were some cans of dog food left in the cupboard after Nellie died. Helen planned to throw the cans away, but always forgot. She got them now. For the next few days, Jenny made the climb up the hill and spooned the food down the hole to the pups. Sometimes she saw them, but even when she did they quickly ran down the tunnel. She did rescue Thomas’s horn and returned it. He made no comment about the scratches or the small dent on the bottom just front of the valves. As long as his father never noticed, it would be their secret.
Everett got home Saturday. Jenny heard the old car clatter up the long drive and came running into her father’s arms as he stepped out. He carried her to the porch where Helen waited.
She looked down at him. “How ya feelin’.”
“Tired.”
“We got a problem.”
He turned his gaze up the hill as she explained. Jenny held him tightly and nodded to emphasize the facts her mother told.
He set his daughter down and rubbed fingers between his eyes. “You reckon I can get some sleep first?”
First thing Sunday morning Everett dug the three pups out of the burrow, handing each to Helen, who nestled each squirming body into a large picnic basket. Jenny leaned on the lid to keep them captured.
“What about their mommy and daddy?” Her words were barely heard over a hush of wind.
Helen glanced at her daughter.
Everett handed a yipping pup up from the hole. “Ya said they was eatin’ the canned food you put out. They don’t need the mother’s milk. And they prob’bly never seen the daddy dog.” He straightened up, stretched back. “Think that’s the last. You jest saw three?”
“Yeah,”
He handed the shovel to Helen and opened up the basket, lifting out the black pup. He held it toward Jenny. “Whatcha think of this feller?”
She looked into her dad’s eyes.
“Take it. It’s yours if’n ya want.”
They headed down the hill. Everett carried the load and Jenny walked alongside stroking the head of the puppy.
“But won’t they miss ‘em?”
“Miss who?” Everett shifted the basket to his other hand and drooped an arm around his daughter.
“Their mommy and daddy.”
Everett gave her a smile. “That’s jest nature’s way sometimes. They’ll get self-reliant real quick.”
Walking behind, Helen stared ahead at the solitary house and was quiet.
B&N Shorts
February 2003
Barnes & Noble
Wilmington, DE
Ann Murphy, Editor
Copyright 2003 by Larry E. Meredith
