This was, she said, a skip of time. She called it that, as if I would understand, which I did not. I was sixteen then and dumb as a knuckle. I had come in from the heat outside and found her in the shadows of the living room, staring oddly out the window.
“What are you thinking?”
“About a day like this.”
“What do you remember about that day?
Sitting in the rocker, her head tilted to the side, she combed a part of her hair into a single darkened flow of black and gray and silver, down below the seat of the rocker, all the way to the runners; and the comb was silver and caught at the light and looked as if it had left some of its color behind with each stroke.
“I walked up onto the mountain,” she said,” above the corn field, where the land turned up beneath the pine. It was a hot day then and the sweat tickled me and I wanted the shade.”
I knew that the hair had reached the floor when she stood, but she had finished with that, and already turned a part of it into a thick rope, and twisted that much behind her head with several pearl headed pins to hold it in place. Now she sat and braided what remained.
I asked her what it smelled like. This caught her attention, and she stopped the comb mid-way and looked at me with surprise. She was given to the importance of smells—cooked by smell and judged what the day would be by its smell, the first thing in the morning.
“There was okra in the field there beside,” she said, “and that was what I smelled all the way up to the pine. Sweet in the sun. I remember that pretty well too. And then I could smell that dog but I didn’t know it was him yet because I had never smelled him before. And that was when I heard the shot, and the echo off the mountain, and saw my Daddy striding for me from the house. He still had his white shirt on because he had been to the bank and I’d seen his truck come back but not him until then and that shirt was a terrible white in the sun and he was not wearing his Sunday pants so those were the dun brown ones and stained from field work. I smiled at him, mostly I think because he looked so serious. He reached where I stood and stopped to hold my shoulders but he had no words just yet. His eyes were black and serious. His hands were big and his fingers bent in around the bone. And he finally said, ‘Did he touch you?’ and I said, ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘That dog’ and pointed back into the pine and there the body of the dog lay with his eyes still open but he was dead. I could see the black of the blood on his shoulder and his head was to the side. Daddy had kilt him with the one shot which would have been a brass casing and cost ten cents so he wouldn’t want to waste another.”
She started combing again, and braiding parts of it divided by arthritic fingers, She hadn’t answered her father’s question yet so I asked it again.
“Had he touched you?”
“No. But I found out later that he did bite another dog at a house up the road, and that boy, his name was Struther, he cried like he had been belt-whipped when his daddy had to shoot that dog too. Never saw Struther again after that day. He was a good boy all in all. Cute as a button and I already had my eye on him, but Momma and Daddy put me on the train that very Monday to stay in Canton with my Aunt Jean…But then she never got the letter and she was already down to Gaffney to work at the mill there so I took a room with Mr. and Mrs. Burk and you know all of what happened then.”
“Did they send you away on the train because of the mad dog?”
“No. No. It was because they had to sell the property to the bank. They were going to move up to my uncle’s house in Chimney Rock, and those folks had the room for my sisters but not for me. Those girls was too young anyways. I was already fifteen and big for my age. I already knew everything I could about sewing by that time and I had even run my mother’s Singer machine for a while before she sold that and so they took me on down at the mill in Canton to sew the flour sacks and that was what I did until they needed someone to work on pants and shirts and by the time I was sixteen I was a full-on seamstress and getting a dollar and a half a week where my Aunt Jean had never earned more than a dollar.”
My mind was still on that dog.
“So that dog was rabid and coming down at you and you never heard him but you smelled him?”
“I smelt him like he was right next to me. I remember it. One minute it was the okra and then pine-shade like cool water in that heat and the next it was spoilt meat.”
“That is some memory.”
“Just a skip of time.”