The Trade

Afterwards, Marty and I erected two tiny crosses under the willow next to the remains of the barn, even though we hadn’t found them.

We’d screamed their names from the doorframe against a howling wind, a pea soup sky. The silo ripped free of its moorings, steel screeching like a murderous banshee. They cowered in the deepest corner of the barn, waiting for us to rescue them. We stumbled to the basement, Marty’s face a rubber mask of tragedy. He pulled a mattress over our heads as jam jars fell and exploded into a sweet strawberry-rhubarb fog. Stupid mutts, Marty said, crying, clutching my arm as we breathed into the dirt. Stupid mutts. There was a moment of eerie silence­–our lives suspended between having and not having–and I thought I heard Bartlett’s hoarse yelp rising away from us before the roar moved on.

When it was safe again, we’d walked the property, slowly. Our loss wasn’t anything insurance couldn’t handle. One wall of the house was peeled away like a layer of skin, scabby drywall curling at the edges, like looking into a tidy dollhouse. The bedside lamp still erect, my thin book still under the bed: Starting a Hobby Farm in Oklahoma.

The yard was in ruins, the laundry line wound tight around the VW bus tipped on its side like a trussed bull, the silo rolled into a giant metal joint. Our heirloom corn, kernels in burnished purple and gold, were piled in front of the door in a perfect pyramid, like an offering.

Here, I made this for you. A trade.

I’d stared at it for a while before ripping my hand free of Marty’s and attacking, kicking the mound loose with my muddy boot, screaming, falling into the drift, a few cold nubs like wooden teeth sliding down my shirt collar.

“It’s ok, Sarah. We’ll keep at it.” Marty laid down with me in the pile of corn as I sobbed. We’d kept at it, though, for years. It was my physiology, my withering insides. My idea the country life could summon miracles. My idea to get the dogs instead. I thought he’d grabbed them and put them in the cellar. He thought I had. What awful parents.

At night we heard the sad braying of beagles throwing their voices across the universe. Marty kicked in the sheets, dreaming in canine. We stapled flyers to telephone poles; in black and white they looked like anybody else’s dogs, eyes like polished marbles. You couldn’t tell anything from those pictures. You couldn’t hear Tip’s Baarow-roww-roww singing, head cocked to one side, couldn’t feel her nose nudging the inside of your hand, searching for strokes. You couldn’t see the pattern of spots against Bartlett’s stomach, like rusted barbeque grates, presented for scratching, or laugh at two tennis balls crammed in his mouth like some yellow buck-toothed hillbilly. You couldn’t see the infinite, stretching past their dark pupils.

We searched the fields and the fire lanes and found lots of other things we also didn’t want to talk about: the chicken with no eyes, the goat impaled in a tree, a random toilet in the deep woods, lid unhinged, hanging like a menacing jaw. Other people had pyramids, too, had things taken. Some had thought to take pictures of this phenomenon and briefly relished in small- town fame, in prairie newspaper headlines.

I took the clippers and sheared my long hair to nothing. I didn’t want to be in pictures. Marty understood and ran his hand along my head, scratching me behind the ears, not realizing he was doing it.

Two months later, Marty hollered for me from below the bedroom window.

“Sarah! Sarah come NOW…” I peered out to see Marty’s thick hands scooping up some small, wiggling animals from atop the broken slab of concrete in front of the old barn. He was running to the house, cradling the things in his arms: piglets, bunnies maybe.

I swung open the front door to see what had put the spark back in Marty’s voice. There they were, another miracle on my doorstep — shuddering in Marty’s arms were our dogs. Parts of them, anyway.

Bartlett’s floppy ear, torn off like a broken leaf; Tipple merely a front leg, paw-pad callused and raw. They shivered in Marty’s hands as he bawled, rubbing his face all over them.

“I knew they weren’t gone.”

Tip pulled herself along just fine, paw first. Bartlett inched along after like a caterpillar. If he was tired, he’d flop over Tip for a ride, like Dali’s melting clock. We heard their questions, or our own projections. Either way we made it work.

“How could you?” we felt them say first, quivering with anger.

Crying, we explained how sorry we were. They forgave us, slowly. We put their food bowl back. They rolled in it, remembering the stinky pong of kibble; afterwards we’d bathe them in the kitchen sink with Palmolive. We let them lounge on the couch which they obviously enjoyed, spreading themselves out so Marty and I only got one cushion to ourselves.

One night I lay with Bartlett’s ear pressed against my cheek, the warm fuzz undulating as if panting, and stared up at the ceiling.

“What was it like, in the storm? Could you see the farmhouse below? What were you thinking about?” I asked aloud. The ear folded in next to mine, rubbing, rubbing.

“We were thinking, Stupid Marty. Stupid Marty.”

I shook with laughter. Bartlett gave a shiver of happiness and fell off onto the wooden floor with a plop. It took me awhile to stop laughing; him too, his ear flip flopping. I think he was laughing, anyway.

Each day we get to know them a little bit better, get to know what they need. We don’t ask any of the other people who were gifted pyramids what they got back. We decide to leave the crosses where they are, though, for what we did lose.

* * *

Ⓒ Erin MacNair

Originally published in Orca, Winter 2022. Reprinted here by permission of the author.