The camera is going. Dad shoots me and Caleb feeding her and Sherree making a garland and putting it around her neck: Princess Fe-line. Then Dobbs shows up in the dumptruck full of his kids and the mint compost mix that Mom ordered.
We all ride out to Mom's garden smelling like a million old Life Savers, and Dad shoots us shoveling and sweeping it out. Then us standing with our shovels and brooms on our shoulders. He shoots the chickens all already lined up at the fence like for class pictures, and Stewart making a big show out of beating up on Frank Dobbs's dog, Kilroy. Then he wants to finish the roll shooting the horses out in the far field.
Quiston, he says, you lock all these damn dogs in the paintroom. So they won't go bothering the fawn.
When the dogs are all shut in the paintroom we climb in the back of the dumptruck that's never dumped since Dobbs fixed it, and ride out to the pasture. Me and Caleb and all the Dobbs kids, and Sherree with her nose wrinkled at the smell. When we go by the orchard she's still nested right where we left her, in the tall mustard behind the flat-tired tractor. Her head is up like a princess all right, showing off her necklace of daisies and bachelor buttons.
The horses are excited to have all these people come visit. Dad shoots them prancing around on their green carpet, fat and feisty. He shoots until he finishes the roll and puts the camera in its suitcase, then gets out the grain bucket. He shakes it so they can hear there's something in it and then heads for the side gate. He wants to get them off the main pasture so it will make hay. They don't want to go. The colt Wild Snort and Johnny bump and nip at each other. Horsing around like kids in the locker room Dad says. Wild Snort's a young Appaloosa stud dropped off by Deadheads passing through last fall, and he's mine if I demonstrate I can take proper care of him.
His mother the white-eyed mare hangs back, watching. She's watching her kid sow his wild oats Dobbs says. Then she goes through the gate where Dad is shaking the bucket. Wild Snort follows in after, then Jenny the Donkey. Johnny the Gelding is last, being ornery and nearsighted. We have to chase him and chase him until we finally drive him close enough he sees the other horses getting the grain poured out of the bucket; then he goes through in a gallop.
Dad says Johnny is like a proud old silver-haired Texas Ranger, always got his man never took a bribe, but he's older now… has to finally go for the bucket.
Jenny the Donkey goes sidling up to the poured-out grain, rump first. And Jenny's like a Juàrez hooker Dobbs says… she has to do what she has to do, too.
Sherree walks back to the house. Caleb and Dobbs's kids are all off in the clover, chasing gardener snakes. I ride back in the cab between Dad and Dobbs. At the corral fence there's Joon the Goon in her nightgown, standing right alongside Abdul the Bull. Both of them are frowning out across the pasture, to make sure nothing's being mistreated. Such barbarism, Hubert, Dad says, like he's being Joon talking to her boyfriend Hub standing alongside, not the bull. Cruel, carnivorous barbarism! Makes me shudder.
Dobbs answers, I know what you mean, Joonbug – being the bull being Hub – but it's the only free accommodations available, here in carnivore country.
Dad laughs. People on food trips are funny to him. We drive through and I get out and shut the gate behind us. Joon is stepped up on the bottom rail so she can frown at Johnny prancing around where Wild Snort is jumped up on Jenny the Donkey from behind. Jenny's huffing and twisting this way and that. You guys, Dad says. I don't know who he's being.
We fix the pipe and turn on the pump and drive back in through the orchard past the beehives. Yesterday's new swarm is still there in the blossoms, drooping from a branch, like a big cluster of peach grapes, buzzing and working in the low light. The sun is slid nearly down the naked chin of old Nebo. Dad stands out on the runner board of the dumptruck and hollers for everybody to come in from the field: Star Trek in town at Uncle Buddy's in less than an hour!
From the garden where she's been raking, Mom hollers, An hour? More like less than half an hour!
Dobbs goes to put some bales in the back to sit on and roust up Mickey. Sherree goes to get tomorrow's homework to take to Grandma and Grandpa's. Caleb and Louise and May go to let out the dogs. I run on ahead of Dad back out to the orchard, to bring her in for the night.
Something is wrong. She is just where we left her, but her head is tilted wrong. Her garland has fallen off and there's a look in her tilted face. It isn't drowsiness and neither is it loss of moisture like from her diarrhea two days ago. I run to lift her and the head flops: Dad! He comes running.
Shit! The goddamn dogs got her.
I locked the dogs in the paintroom.
Maybe it was the neighbor's dog. Shit!
She feels – ah Dad, her back feels broke! Do you think she got run over when we came in from the pasture?
I don't think so, Dad says. I saw her when we drove through the orchard. She was fine then.
It was the sun! Mom warned us. It was too much sun!
Naw… you think? She wasn't out in the sun that long, it didn't seem… really.
It really didn't. Dad took her and carried her out of the orchard around the barn to the concrete grain storage, not because it was where Hub was living with Joon but because it was the coolest room on the place. The room looked cramped and little, with ten times the clutter that all of us used to make when we lived in it and we were six! Dad cleared a spot and found a half-blowed-up air mattress and laid her on it. I saw everybody coming so I climbed up on the cement shelf that used to be my bed. Everybody crowded in and fussed over her. Her breath was getting raspy and she was starting to twitch. I saw twitches begin, first at her spotted tail, then pretty soon they were running up her spine, then over her shoulders and around to her chest. Mom came and gave her some more of the clorzum milk she'd froze from when Floozie's calf died, and I tried to pray. But all the time I could see the life twitching against the little ribcage like it wanted out.
Hub came in from work and yelled a cussword. She was really his. He found her up where they were logging, no mother in sight. Orphaned by a sonofabitch poacher, was what he figured, poor thing. When he saw her in a wad on the rubber mattress, he yelled and threw his plaid lunchbox against the concrete wall and dropped to his knees. He started rubbing his huge rough hands up and down his pantlegs and cussing in a whisper. It was all raspy. He reached out to touch her. She arched backward into his hand when he stroked her neck, then flopped limp. He cussed and cussed and cussed.
She got worse. Her breaths came harder. Even up on my old shelf I could hear the stuff gurgling in her. Mom said she was afraid that she was drowning. Fluid in her lungs. Pneumonia.
Dad and Hub took turns holding her up with her head down, so they could get on their knees to try and suck that stuff out. Jelly stuff, silver gray, out of her nostrils. The blackbright shine was going away in her eyes, and the twitch against her ribs was getting calmer. Once, bowing backwards, she gave out a call, thin and high. It reminded me of the sound of Grandpa's little wooden varmint caller that he blows in the dark when he wants to lure in a fox or a cougar or a bobcat. Or says he does.
Hub kept sucking and puffing. She was getting bloated. Dad let him do it for a long time before he said, Give it in, Hub. She's dead. When Hub stopped and Dad put her down, the air coming out made a sound, but not an animal sound. It was a kind of silly honk, like Caleb's Harpo horn he got a long time later.
Sherree and Joon filled an apple box with rose petals and clover blossoms. Mom found a piece of silk from China. Out at the pump the cows and horses all stood around and watched. We put a round stone on top, a fine big stone Mom found on a river called Row. Before we were born, she said. Dad played his flute and Dobbs blowed his mouthharp and Joon tinkled on that old Fisher-Price xylophone Great-grandma Whittier gave me that still works. Hub blew once on a blade of grass – it made that same thin sound – and the funeral was over.