Barking Man Read Online Free Page B

living there once she was done, had herself a job at the Baptist Hospital. After she got that cancer she stayed on as a patient a while but there wasn’t anything they could do for her, and in the end she came home to Keyhole Lake to die. Peter Jackson nursed her right on through it, never had any other help at all. It wasn’t quick or anything like it; it kept on for five or six months and you didn’t have to hear a whole lot about it to know there must have been pain and to spare.
    It was mid-March or so when they buried her; there’d been a hard winter and there was still some thin snow on the ground. Peter Jackson stood alone this time, grim and silent for the most part. Nobody had a lot to say to him either. He had gone lean under his hardship, but he was still a fine-looking man, and people said he looked well in his funeral suit. Of course, he’d had his share of opportunity to get the hang of wearing it. As a young man he’d had deep red hair, and now it was rust-colored, patched with gray. His eyebrows were thick and bushy, turning out in devilish points at the sides, and underneath, his deep-set eyes surprised you with the brightness of their green. This time he wouldn’t turn back from the grave once they had filled it, and after a minute the priest walked over to stand with him. Shoulder to shoulder, they looked like a matched pair, Mr. Chalk in his black cassock and Jackson in the suit.
    Mr. Chalk was fairly new to the town; he’d done a lot of work in the prisons and he wasn’t known for wasting his words. A few people crept up near to listen for what he’d find to tell a man like Jackson, which was this:
    “Well, you’re still here,” Mr. Chalk was heard to say.
    Jackson spat on the snow and said, “What of it?”
    “You’re surviving,” Mr. Chalk said. “Today’s today and then there’ll be tomorrow.”
    “That’s right, and it’s a curse,” Peter Jackson said, and turned on the priest with the tunnels of his eyes. “I been cursed with survival,” he said then, speaking in a different tone than before, as if, after all, it were a new discovery.
    That spring he didn’t plant tobacco. Round about the time he should have been, he was driving all around the county looking at dogs, and going clear to Nashville too. He looked at all the good-sized breeds: collies, Great Danes, German shepherds. There was a story that went along with it, which got out and made the rounds. Funny how many people got to hear of it, because it was a personal kind of a thing for a man like Peter Jackson to go telling.
    It appeared that when Peter Jackson was born, his parents had a big old dog that they let live in the house and all. Jackson didn’t recall himself what breed of a dog it might have been and there wasn’t anybody for him to ask, because his parents were long dead and he never had any brothers or sisters. Anyway, they had worried the dog might eat the baby when they brought him home but it turned out the opposite: the dog loved the child. So much so that in the long run they trusted the dog to watch the baby. They might go out and work their land or even leave the place altogether for a short spell, knowing the dog would see everything was all right. This all happened at that same place at Keyhole Lake, and one time, so the story went, little Peter Jackson, only two or three years old, let himself out of the house somehow and went wandering all the way down to the shore. This old dog went right along with him, saw he didn’t drown himself or get hurt any other way, and in the end when the child was tired, the dog brought him on back home.
    So Peter Jackson spent that spring driving practically all over creation, looking at different kinds of dogs, and when people wondered how he could be so choosy when he didn’t even appear to know what it was he wanted, that was the tale he would tell them. Finally he ended up at the place of this woman way out the Lebanon Road who bred Dobermans. He went out