Nop's Hope Read online

  On Saturday the Salvation Army came for Lisa’s and Mark’s things, a pair of elderly black men from Winchester who removed their caps each time they came into the trailer. “Yes, ma’am,” they said and “No, ma’am,” and “Are you sure you want all these things to go?” And one said, “I have a niece who’d like to have this,” holding up Lisa’s Sunday jumper.

  Beverly came to help but kept bursting into tears, so Penny asked her to stay in the kitchen, make some coffee or something.

  Sunday, Penny and the dog walked nearly twenty miles. Farms were side by side along the river bottom and Penny knew all the farmers, so she ignored the no trespassing, no hunting signs, and when one farmer came on his tractor to investigate, he gave her a wave.

  That night Penny was ravenous and ate two TV dinners. She showered so she wouldn’t need to in the morning. She sat on the edge of the bed she’d shared with her husband. “At least that junk is out of here,” she said.

  Hope lifted his head and sniffed. “I will guard thee against ghosts,” he said.

  She said, “Lie down and stop padding around.”

  Monday, Tuesday, at school; okay. By Wednesday, the novelty of a bereaved mother as teacher had worn off. The first sign of the return of the old order was when Ralph Lawson stole Margaret Baxter’s arithmetic book and passed the book around the class.

  Little Margaret was nonplussed. “Okay, you guys,” she said, “who’s got it? I want my book back right now.” Repeating a line she’d heard from her parents, she said, “Do you think I’m made of money?”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re made of,” Ralph whispered, and proceeded to do just that.

  Penny said, “Alright Ralph, that’s enough. That’ll do.”

  Saturday morning, Penny telephoned. “Come down, Daddy,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  Out in the training field, the young dog behaved impeccably, balancing his sheep as accurately as a plumb bob, keeping a distance, stopping on command, standing until Penny called him on.

  “Well?” Penny demanded.

  “He’s a real crackerjack,” her father said slowly. “Reminds me of the first time I ever ran his father at a trial …”

  “But?”

  Lewis stuck his hands deep in his pockets. “Might be you’re bringing him on too quick,” he said.

  Penny bristled. “Until he’s got flanks, he can’t start to drive.”

  “You’ve got plenty time for that,” Lewis said.

  “He’ll need to drive in the open.”

  “Honey, he’s just fourteen months. He’s too young for open trials.”

  “Eikamp’s Rex was two when he won the Nationals.”

  “That was Eikamp’s Rex.”

  Later, when Lewis looked out the window, Penny was down in the field, training.

  That’s what she did, mornings and evenings, train her dog. On weekends, after Hope’s morning bout she’d walk him twenty-five miles a day over snow, and with all his dashing around, Hope was doing four times that.

  Hope was happy. He’d found a world perfectly designed for him—as much work as he could do until his attention wavered, and then off for a run until he tired. Hope got hard, stretched muscles over his bones. Once, rushing to get through a farm gate before Penny closed it, Hope smacked into Penny’s legs and Penny fell, and when her senses returned, here was this dog circling her whining, worried to death. She limped into school Monday morning, and when Margaret Baxter asked what had happened she said she’d fallen on the ice. Each time Penny locked up Hope it was like she was leaving her life behind.

  While the kids read their lessons, Penny’s mind wandered. She wondered if she really was pushing Hope too hard. “Yes, Bobby. You can go to the boys’ room.” She didn’t notice the kids’ grins—she’d already let two other boys go. Mr. Bahnson, the shop teacher, brought the miscreants back. “You’ve got more faith in these kids than I do. Wait’ll the janitor sees what they did in there.” The three boys looked hangdog, and Penny thought that Hope never looked hangdog. When Hope did wrong and she corrected him, sometimes his eyes got hot and red and she thought he wasn’t going to defer to her. But, always, he did.

  ON FRIDAY, December twenty-second, three o’clock, Penny came home and disappeared into her trailer. Lewis Burkeholder let the kitchen curtains fall closed. “Penny’s home early.”

  Beverly looked up from her devotional. “Maybe because it’s Christmas?”

  Lewis yawned. Wood heat made man and dog sleepy, and Old Nop was behind the stove, snoozing. Lewis answered the phone.

  “Lewis, it’s me, Billy Hess. I don’t know how much Penny told you, but it was no big thing.”

  Through the gap in the curtains Lewis could see Penny and Hope in the training field.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow, Billy.”

  “We all lose our tempers sometime. Penny isn’t the first teacher to … lose it. She scared him more than hurt him. The Lawson boy was hurting the Baxter girl and Penny stopped it. The Lawson boy’s a real terror …”

  “Listen Billy, I haven’t talked to Penny. I’ll call you back.”

  “Just tell her nobody wants her to quit. After Christmas, her job’ll be waiting for her.”

  PENNY WAS OUT in the big field, fifty acres tucked up against the flank of the mountain. A small flock of sheep had gathered on a knoll, perhaps a half mile down the field, and Lewis wouldn’t have seen them, except for the orange sun glinting off their wool.

  The dog was a dark dot against the snow way out there. The wind kicked up ice flakes from the surface of the snow and whisked them against Lewis’s boots, and he wrapped his woolen scarf over his face. Penny stood hipshot, giving no command, showing no impatience.

  When the sheep turned to face Hope, Penny put her fingers to her mouth and whistled a single, long blast. Two count, three. Hope was on his feet, marching toward the sheep, implacable.

  The sheep angled quietly across the field to Penny’s feet and she called Hope, “That’ll do, Hope,” and Hope came to her, knowing how fine he’d been, delight vibrating off him, and he jumped up then, his snout higher than Penny’s head, once, twice, three times.

  Lewis stepped into the circle of the woman and her dog. “Cold out here,” Lewis noted.

  “Oh yeah, I suppose it is.” Hope espied an inviting clump of dead broomsedge and snuffled under the golden straw, just like there was something hiding there.

  “I got a call from Billy Hess, at the school,” Lewis said.

  Penny stuck her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were her mother’s eyes. For a moment, in the fading winter light, Lewis saw the young woman he’d married forty years ago.

  Penny said, “I’m not fit to be around little kids.”

  Lewis raised his eyebrows and said, “If we don’t get into some shelter I’m going to freeze to death.”

  Hope bounced along, snuffling, thinking that maybe his foolishness could lighten things up a little.

  “Hess said it was no big thing, said he wanted you to stay on.”

  “So I can smack another kid?”

  Two Burkeholders, heads bowed, hands in pockets, silhouetted by the dying sun crunched back across the snowy field.

  Christmas morning, Lewis gave Beverly some handspun wool he’d picked up in Winchester, and Beverly gave him a sweater. At noon, they went out for the Christmas Buffet at Shoney’s. Just the two of them.

  Beverly was chipper and burbled like a bobolink and said how nice this was and how nice that was and, Lewis, won’t you take a look at this salad bar, but Beverly only took a few things for her plate and didn’t eat most of those.

  That evening Lewis went out early for the chores and finished well before dark. Although he saw Penny walking with Hope he and Nop walked the other way.

  Nop never strayed far from Lewis’s side. Nop felt sad, but that might have been the sad light of that time of year. He raised his head to sniff the air: the frozen earth under the snow, the sheep who’d passed this way this morn
ing.

  Just yesterday, Nop was sailing over every fence on the place, and now he waited, politely, for Lewis to open the gates. Just yesterday they’d been inseparable on America’s trial fields, ranging up and down the country, and victory had become habitual with them. The two old animals trudged back through the winter night to their warm, cheerless home.

  LEWIS AND BEVERLY didn’t see much of their daughter in the next few weeks. Neighbors, running into Lewis at the feed store or the tractor dealership would say how they’d seen Penny and that young dog “down at the Miller Place” or “halfway to Braxton’s Mill.”

  A little after dinner, on January 12th, which was a Wednesday, Penny knocked and asked if she could come in for a minute, just a minute, I know you’re busy, and Beverly put down her knitting and said, “Oh no, dear, we were just going to watch television,” and Penny said how she wouldn’t want to interrupt their program, and Beverly said it was just MacNeil/ Lehrer and they could watch them any night.

  “I’m leaving,” Penny said. After a moment she added, “There’s nothing here for me anymore.”

  “I’m just making up some herb tea,” Beverly said. “Lewis doesn’t care for it but I think it’s very refreshing. Where are you going, honey?”

  “Ma, please don’t cry.”

  Beverly blew her nose into a paper towel, stepped to the counter and scooped three spoonfuls of raspberry tea into her teapot. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be so silly.”

  “Me and Hope are going on the sheepdog trial circuit. There’s a trial at the Fort Worth Stock Show and I called ’em up and they’ll let us run.”

  “Open?” Lewis asked.

  “That’s where the prize money is.”

  Sweat dropped off Lewis’s forehead. Beverly always did like the living room too warm. “If you need us,” he said, “just call. Anytime, honey. Anywhere.” Lewis felt weak in the knees, but he didn’t want Penny to think he was too feeble to help her if she needed it. “That truck runnin’ okay?”

  She said that it was running just fine. She told her mother if she started to cry again she’d leave right now, and when Beverly did, Penny did.

  SOUTHERN ARIZONA INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK ASSOCIATION (SAILA) SHEEPDOG TRIAL

  March 4, 2nd go-round, Tuscon, Arizona

  Judge: Bill Berhow, Lavina, Montana

  63 open dogs went to the post

  1. Ransome Barlow

  Bute

  95

  2. Roger Schroeder

  Don

  92

  3. Roger Culbreath

  Trim

  91

  4. Bruce Fogt

  Molly

  90

  5. Ted Johnson

  Craig

  89

  MEN TRIAL SHEEPDOGS for the usual metaphysical reasons. Some men seek justice in their own lifetime. Others, a type of immortality. Bill Crowe of Virginia once explained that he trialed, “For the pure intellectual achievement of it.” Some men hope that love is proof against adversity. Some trial sheepdogs to forget—bad marriages can make good sheepdog handlers—and others trial to remember: that single moment, the flash of light on a dog’s coat, the dog dead now twenty years. A few men trial because that’s the only way they can reduce the world to their size; others trial for the raw information trialing provides, a flux they can puzzle over for a lifetime.

  When Ransome Barlow’s father walked out, Ransome was eleven. His parents never argued, never fought, never threw things at one another, never complained, but one day Ransome’s father went off to work and never came home and never sent a note or a postcard. Ransome’s mother acted like husbands vanish every day of the week. Ransome’s father left a new eighteen-foot skiff with twin Evinrudes, a Yamasaki ATV, a Bultaco dirt bike, a Nikon F-3 camera, and one by one in the months after he left, they were repossessed. Though Ransome’s mother was working, she didn’t make a single payment on any of them, not one. She didn’t make the payments on the Ford Mustang her husband drove away in, either, but never learned if the car was repossessed or not. She worked as the manager of a frozen food wholesaler, she did buy food, did pay the rent, preferred the “Andy Griffith Show” to “Jeopardy,” and by the time they found her cancer it had metastasized. She had kept up the payments on her insurance, which was adequate to bury her. Though Ransome was just seventeen, he joined the Marine Corps, and by the time the corps learned he’d lied about his age, he was old enough to stay.

  After four years they invited him to reup, promised him a bonus and corporal’s stripes, but Ransome said no thanks, he had other plans. Back in Johnson City, he went to the bank for a mortgage on a convenience store on the outskirts of town and worked seven days a week, 7 A.M. to midnight, open Thanksgiving and Christmas, until he owned it outright. Then he hired an elderly couple to take over while he went around the countryside dirt bike racing. He found the dirt bikes simple. Around you went. You ate dust. You got sore. You got deaf. Around you went.

  Pure accident brought Ransome to sheepdog trials at the Illinois State Fair. His bike had snapped a camshaft and he went out to the back lot to cool out, and that’s where he met his future. His ears were still ringing as the dogs slipped and dodged, he knew they were taking commands but couldn’t hear them.

  He bought a dog and five sheep and three weeks later, he stepped onto the trial field. He learned:

  Control is a gift.

  The finest control is a delicate grip on chaos.

  Control must be prepared for, trained, invoked.

  Control is self-referential.

  Perfect control retreats before the seeker.

  Ransome went through eight dogs, bought one week and resold three weeks later, before he found Bute, who’d been imported from Wales as a two-year-old, badly beaten by Jack Crowley in Arizona, and given up on by Jill Kerold in Michigan. Bute was hard and physically powerful, a medium-size dog with deep chest and thick hind legs.

  Though Bute came into this country for three thousand, Ransome bought him for five hundred dollars.

  Ransome put five ewes in a fifty-foot ring and walked in with Bute, and Bute promptly attacked a ewe, slashing her ham so badly it took twelve stitches.

  Next day, another ewe: eight stitches.

  Next day, Ransome Barlow got his corrections in just ahead of Bute’s teeth and needle and thread stayed in the medicine cabinet.

  Fourth day, Bute ignored Ransome’s command, dove for a sheep, and before the dog’s jaws could close, Ransome had tackled him and rolled him over in the dirt. Bute’s eyes flashed rage and the panicked ewes hurled themselves at the boundary fence and Bute would have savaged Ransome then and there had he not squeezed that black beast’s throat until Bute passed out. He knelt there in the dirt beside the dog, wheezing, until Bute opened his eyes.

  Bute never again tried to bite a sheep, and Ransome never again laid a hand on him. It wasn’t pain or fear of death that bound Bute to Ransome Barlow. Bute had finally found a man as serious as he was.

  THE BURKEHOLDERS’ PHONE was an old-fashioned wall phone, and since Lewis liked to pace when he talked, its long cord tangled like black spaghetti. It was Ethel Harwood, and country courteous, Lewis discussed the weather: terrible mud in Virginia, impossible to get into the fields. Ethel said it was wet in Texas too. After the weather they talked about dogs. No Lewis didn’t have any young dogs. He wasn’t trialing much anymore.

  Finally Ethel said, “That Hope dog of Penny’s is coming on well.”

  Beverly was in the rocker reading Lenten meditations. “Ethel’s seen Penny,” Lewis hissed. To Ethel he said, “He’s out of Nop, the dam is Florence Wilson’s Kate. Penny handling him alright?”

  Ethel didn’t know why Lewis’s daughter had left home and didn’t want to make things worse. “Penny’s healthy, Lewis. I’d say she’s lost too much weight. Her and that dog … well, Lewis, you remember how Lewis Pence was with that Star dog, the one he started working before he died. You remember how connected they seemed? That
’s how it is with Hope and Penny. That dog seems to be reading her mind half the time. She came third. Ransome Barlow and Orin Barnes beat her. Penny’s running in Arizona next week. The Saila trial.”

  Beverly plucked at Lewis’s sleeve. “Ask how Penny was dressed. Did she have warm clothes?”

  Lewis covered the phone. “Beverly, she’s in Texas. You don’t need warm clothes in Texas.”

  “Lewis, please?”

  Lewis Burkeholder came from a tradition of keeping family problems inside the family, that’s how his parents did, and what he remembered of his grandparents that’s how they’d done too. The phone was saying, “Lewis? Lewis, you still there?”

  “Yeah. Ethel, look, you’re an old friend and well, Beverly is kind of worried, and she wants to know if Penny is dressed warm.”

  “Lewis Burkeholder, you are an old fool. Put Beverly on the phone.”

  The women talked for thirty minutes, time for Lewis to look through a country living article in Farm Journal. “Oh yes,” the farm wife had written. “Farm life can be demanding, but every sunrise is a brand-new day.” Usually Lewis would have snorted, but today he examined the picture of the silly woman and her tidy farmhouse and thought that what she’d said was probably true. Lewis closed his eyes and prayed his daughter might be alright.

  After Beverly hung up she went into the bathroom and ran water for her face. Penny used to refresh herself in just the same way.

  “Oh, Lewis,” Beverly said. “I do wish Penny’d come home.”

  “I think I’ll call the insurance company, see if they’re making any progress with that trucking outfit. I don’t suppose a few dollars would hurt her.”

  Beverly’s face was bright and expectant as a girl’s. “Lewis, let’s go to Arizona. That Saila trial. You always wanted to go to that trial.”

  Lewis gaped. “Beverly, I haven’t got a dog.”

  “You can run Nop.”

  And Nop, hearing his name and knowing something depended on him stretched and yawned and wagged his tail. “I am thy dog and I am willing,” he said.