Under the Dog Star: A Novel

By Joseph Caldwell

After her husband’s death, a mother moves her family onto a farm and hatches a scheme to win back the land she used to own
An unlikely criminal, Andy Durant is robbing gas stations to buy back land once connected to his wife’s farm in upstate New York. But when he’s shot and killed during a robbery, he leaves his wife, Grady, and their three children to fend for themselves. Moving back to the debt-laden farm, Grady ignites a plan that involves getting in the middle of an adjoining neighbor’s marriage. Meanwhile, one by one the whole family is charmed by Royal Provo, a young and charismatic orphan working on the property. When the money Andy Durant stole resurfaces, all find themselves in escalating danger. Under the Dog Star is chillingly good storytelling. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480444126

Joseph Caldwell

Joseph Caldwell is an acclaimed playwright and novelist who has been awarded the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of five novels in addition to the Pig Trilogy, a humorous mystery series featuring a crime-solving pig. Caldwell lives in New York City and is currently working on various writing projects.

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Under the Dog Star

A Novel

Joseph Caldwell

To Don Ettlinger

Contents

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About the Author

Acknowledgments

1

WHEN GRADY DURANT’S HUSBAND, Andy, was killed holding up a gas station, he was wearing a mask made from the stockings Grady bought to go with the black dress she wore when she sang in the Christmas Cantata at Holy Apostles Church. The stockings, too, were black, but because it was Christmas and because Grady herself did not tend toward the severe, she’d added a random pattern of tiny red stars cross-stitched into the nylon. They would show only to the knee, but she worked the pattern all the way up because anything less would have been a half measure and she didn’t like half measures.

When one of the stockings was made into the mask, it must have seemed that the wearer had taken on, along with his anonymity, a bad case of the chicken pox. The red stitchings were, in a way, prophetic, since they marked on Andy Durant’s cheeks and forehead and chin with almost complete accuracy the places where the exploded glass would strike his face.

Andy Durant was not killed by a bullet. The way it was reported to Grady—and to the police—he’d already completed the hold-up and was on his way out to the car. The gas-station attendant, a kid really, who’d been on the job less than a week, called out to him, Wait! There’s more! Andy had turned around just as the young man fired his hunting rifle through the station’s window. The bullet missed, but one shard of the thrown glass hit Andy in the neck, effectively slitting his throat. Other pieces of the shattered window struck at various parts of his body, wounding him all over, especially in the face, chest, and arms, with one piece even nicking his left ear.

It hadn’t been necessary for Grady herself to identify the body. Once the stocking mask was removed, both the police and the doctor at the hospital recognized him. He was Andrew Durant, associate editor of the local newspaper, the Coble Tribune. He’d come several times before to the police station in Schuylerville, where his final robbery occurred, but those other times it had been to cover a story. (It was of some interest later to realize that Andy himself had dutifully covered several of the hold-ups in the surrounding counties committed by the Chicken-pox Bandit.)

By the time Grady saw him he’d been washed and it did seem indeed that he’d died of some peculiar disease or that the red stitchings of her black stocking had run their colors and left this imprint on his handsome face. He’d been stripped of the bloody clothes, and Grady could see that the body wounds were larger, as if he’d been shot, like Saint Sebastian, with arrows and had died a martyr’s death.

Five robberies were attributed to Andy, all of them at filling stations within a fifty-mile radius of Coble. The total take was said to be $7,342, but none of the money was recovered. Grady accounted for every penny that had passed into and out of the family economy, discovering in the process that she’d paid twice for her son Peter’s skis. A search of the house and Andy’s desk at the paper turned up no money at all. There was talk of gambling and another woman, market speculations and blackmail. But there were no answers.

As for Grady herself, it was as if the gunshot had been a starting pistol, sending her off at an accelerated pace that left her little or no time for reflection. She shed tears induced more by shock and perplexity than anguish and grief; buried her husband; and consoled, to the degree that she was able, her three children. She accepted sympathies and ignored stares, telling herself that all she had to do for the moment was go through the motions; she could add the emotional content when there would be more time. She felt, in a way, as though she were handing out promissory notes that would be called in sooner or later, but she never doubted that the funds could be found if and when they were needed. She knew she was a resourceful and intelligent woman, and her adequacy was never in question, especially to herself. The only noticeable effect of this response was that she felt pursued; she had the impression that she was in constant danger of being gained on, overtaken. Whether these were her emotional creditors who would eventually demand full or possibly usurious payment, she had no way of knowing. It could even be a rescue party or Andy himself, masked, trying to catch up with her, eager to explain everything. But Grady didn’t care. She wouldn’t look back. She merely set herself a goodly gallop and moved ahead.

Her major decision was to return to the farm that had come to her through her grandparents, her mother’s parents who’d raised her since the age of three, after the car crash that had killed her mother and father. The move back, her friends told her, was absurd, even insane. Farm foreclosures were epidemic in the territory and even if she started out free of debt the banks were there, waiting. She should go back, she was told, to being a singing teacher. But Grady didn’t want to go back to being a singing teacher; she wanted to go back to the farm. For her, the extravagance of Andy’s death seemed to require an extravagant response. If he’d died in his sleep, she would have gone back to teaching; if he’d died of a stroke or a heart attack, she would have considered the farm but then gone back to her teaching. Andy killed, masked, in a hold-up, required nothing less than a return to the farm. She could be as stupid and as daring as he.

In the days and weeks that followed, she sold the house in Coble, paid off the mortgage, secretly returned to each of the filling stations the amount stolen, reclaimed the leased acreage on the farm, took stock of her pastures and outbuildings and machinery, hired an extra hand, gathered her children, the six hens and one rooster she’d kept even as a town dweller, and took off.

But now the pickup truck she’d bought secondhand stalled at the foot of the hill leading up to the farmhouse and wouldn’t budge. Grady stared through the windshield at the tall grass, not even looking up. She would ignore the delay and, withered by her indifference, it would go quietly away.

Peter, Grady’s fifteen-year-old son, felt otherwise. He’d never driven a pickup before and he was worried that the truck’s refusal to move was a reflection on his inexperience. He pumped the clutch, shifted gears, turned the ignition off, then on, and kept trying to surprise the motor with sudden pedalings of the accelerator. He got nothing for his efforts but a low throaty growl, the truck’s warning that it intended to stay exactly where it was. Peter tried the left- and right-turn signals and even the windshield wipers, hoping that one functioning part might inspire the others into action through good example. It didn’t work.

Stay here. It’ll only take me a minute, he said. Then got out, raised the hood, and ducked his head inside like an innocent child curious about the tonsils of a crocodile.

It won’t go, said Martha, Grady’s five-year-old, certain that this was a needed summary of their situation. Martha sat next to her mother in the middle of the seat, clasping a heap of her brother’s clothes as if she’d been holding him in her arms but now he’d gone, leaving her nothing but this empty bunching of shirts and pants and jackets. She, too, stared ahead at the raised hood, quietly bewildered, wondering what had happened to the previous landscape.

Grady looked another moment at the unbending grass on the slope of the hill, then raised her feet from the cardboard carton jammed under the dashboard. She opened the door and shifted her legs sideways. The avocado plant lodged between a swollen suitcase and the sewing machine in the well behind the seat brushed her cheek. She looked at it, a warning to watch its step. All during the trip from town it had been nodding its floppy leaves right next to her head. Twice Grady had slapped her neck, thinking it was a bug. If the plant hadn’t been a survivor of Peter’s fourth-grade botany experiment, she would have chucked it out the window the minute they’d turned onto the country roads. Grady glared at it. Knowing what was good for it, it didn’t move.

She got out and slammed the door. A deadweight clunk came from inside the hollows of the door, the sound of something knocked unconscious. Easy on the truck, Mom, Peter said. He pulled his head out from under the hood and pressed his right ear as if it had just been punched.

Sorry, Grady said. She put a hand on the door, a touch of apology if not of healing. But when she stepped back and looked at the truck, she thought of flogging it. They should beat it until it moved. It had it coming. That it was stalled was the least of it. Why had it allowed itself to be so put upon to begin with? Anything that submissive deserved to be flogged. Piled in back were a chest of drawers complete with mirror, an overstuffed chair, a hallway coat tree, a hump-topped trunk that looked as if it dated back to pirate days, a rocker, boxes of food and stereo records, a brand new plastic garbage can packed with dishes and, tied to the very top, a kitchen table flat on its back, it four legs sticking straight up in the air like those of a dead deer.

On the roof of the cab, Anne, Grady’s seventeen-year-old daughter, sat backed by the crate of hens, presiding over the heap like a pageant queen enthroned on her float. The hens clucked away like maiden aunts giving conflicting solutions to the present difficulty. Oh, shut up, Grady said. Offended, they fell silent, but stretched their necks to the limit and, with quick jerks of the head, pretended to be evaluating the view. Anne looked at them over her shoulder, then faced front again, contemptuous that they’d been so easily subdued. One hen clucked a seeming complaint at such a harsh judgment.

Anne began picking a scab on her right elbow, quietly, purposefully. Grady wondered if she wasn’t ridding herself of this last vestige of childhood before completing her move to the farm. In the time since her father’s death, Anne had changed from a pudgy duckling into a swan. Grady thought at first that her daughter had merely done what she’d been told to do for the past five years: stand up straight and pull in her stomach. Then she thought the girl’s neck had lengthened, drawing the bulky body upward, shaping it to a perfect form with each proportion pleasantly related to the others. Grady finally decided she just hadn’t been watching closely enough, that it wasn’t until she’d seen her daughter mourning at the side of her father’s grave that she realized she’d become a woman, and a beautiful one at that.

So that she wouldn’t see again her daughter praying at her father’s grave, Grady looked over toward Peter, bent down under the hood. The motor was a greasy crawl of tubes and blocks and cylinders, a stomach blackened and bloated by the plague. She took a cigarette from the pack in her sweater pocket and lit it. She’d started smoking again three days after Andy’s death and had promised herself she’d quit once they’d arrived at the farm. The farm was at the top of the hill. She was at the bottom.

Grady drew in on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly, a curling cloud weaving upward in front of her. When it cleared, she raised her head, cocked it a little to the left and looked up at the house on top of the hill. Its paint weathered away, it was the color of ash, as if it had been burned and this was the moment just before it would fall into a light gray dust. There was, Grady conceded, a certain rightness to this. One suggestion she’d heard recently was to burn the empty house and the unused outbuildings, plow it all under, and lease the cleared acreage—some of the best on the whole farm—for additional income. Looking at the house now, Grady was relieved that she hadn’t listened.

Of course there was work to be done. The sag in the porch that ran the front length of the house had gotten worse, and Grady could see the black pockmarks on the green roofing left by the hail storm twelve years before, when her grandparents were still alive and working the farm. Under the dining-room bay at the side of the house spindly stalks of woundwort had replaced the irises; a few surviving hollyhocks at the far end of the porch struggled up out of a patch of horseweed. Grady was surprised to see horseweed growing so close to the house. It belonged near the pasture fence or even in the field itself. But then the house had been untenanted for seven years, since her grandfather’s death, so it was really no wonder that the horseweed had felt bold enough to advance almost to the front door.

Grady considered climbing the hill and letting the pickup either follow or stay where it was and rot—along with all the junk heaped onto its useless carcass. Then she felt, no, she’d rather make her formal return to the house of her childhood accompanied by the furniture she’d taken with her at her marriage and by her three children, and armored (somewhat) by the recalcitrant truck. Also she didn’t think she should go ahead without the hens. They were the descendants of the small brood she’d brought with her into town, a wedding present from her grandmother accompanied by the injunction that she not forget her proud origins as a farmer.

Grady took one last puff on her cigarette, dropped it onto the gravel and ground it with the sole of her shoe. Martha, she called, do you want to get out? Peter has to fix the truck. Wouldn’t you like to pick some flowers?

Martha reached over and opened the door on her mother’s side, then crawled out over the clothes, trailing Peter’s pants and jackets onto the driveway after her. She kicked a sweater away, sending it under the front wheel, then slammed the door, catching the sleeve of a shirt she’d been holding with such concern only a moment before.

Pick Mother a pretty bouquet, Grady said, leaning against the side of the truck and lighting another cigarette. Martha dutifully made for the dandelions, fleabane, and gentians that grew in the tall grass along the rutted road. What had been the front lawn had deteriorated into almost perfect hay. The hillside abounded in alfalfa, clover, and timothy, but it should be mowed before it topped off and before the next rain. Automatically, Grady checked the sky. A few cumulus high in the west, but no threat of rain that she could see. Peter was staring down at the motor, his fists clenched at his hips as if he were getting ready to challenge it to a fight. You’d better get Royal, she said.

Peter looked at his mother, then toward the top of the hill. He put his open hands to the sides of his mouth and yelled, Royal! There was no answer. Peter called again, and started up the slope, bending into the high grass.

Around the side of the house came a young man, a boy really, tall and skinny, an old stained gray fedora shading his pale face. His loose chinos were held up by brown suspenders and he was wearing an unironed white shirt with sleeves that came to about three inches above his wrist bones. It was Royal Provo, the extra help she’d taken on, but, with the hat, the suspenders, the shirt, and the pants, he could have been one of the hired hands Grady’d seen in photographs taken during threshing time, long before she had come to live on the farm, a photograph taken when oats were still grown, and wheat. The current teenage dress code required that everything look discarded, preferably by someone a different size, as if everyone between the ages of twelve and twenty wanted to disclaim vanity and assert independence from the tyrannies of exact measurement. Royal Provo, apparently, was no exception.

Royal was Peter’s friend. They’d met about two months ago, when Peter had worked after school at the checkout counter of the Dawson Mall Grand Union. Royal had been a full-time cashier and Peter had bagged groceries for him. When Grady announced the return to the farm, Peter proposed that Royal come along to live there, to help, since Anne would be away most of the summer working as a swimming instructor again at Camp Kennedy. Grady did not think so. There was no extra money to pay a hired hand and she didn’t want to take on the burden of another human being in her life.

But Royal was not really a cashier, Peter explained, he was a mechanic; he knew all about motors. Grady began to be interested. Her interest, however, faltered again when Peter, overplaying his hand, mentioned that his friend had recently been sent out into the world from what was locally called The Home, an industrial school for orphans; that he lived alone in a rooming house on Larkin Street; and that he was very quiet.

To Grady, Royal sounded far too frail, far too waiflike. But Peter had the good sense to repeat his praise for Royal’s genius as a mechanic. Grady knew that the first thing a farmer should be was his own mechanic. If he couldn’t take care of and repair his own machinery, he was at the mercy of charlatans and incompetents, to say nothing of delays. For want of a tightened bolt, a baler was lost, for want of a baler a day was lost, for want of a day—right on to a lost crop, a foreclosed farm, and a ruined life, probably unto the third generation.

She asked Royal the day she met him what he could do with a tractor that hadn’t been used for seven years. He said he could make it go. So Grady had brought him to the farm when she and Peter came to take the boards off the windows. He made the tractor go. He was taken on, and moved himself to the farm that night so he could begin work on the disker, the baler, and even an old wheelbarrow. His only request was that he be allowed to fix up what had been something of a bunkhouse in the old, old days of hired help and itinerant workers. Grady had said there was plenty of room in the house and that he would be more than welcome to be one of the family, but Peter had taken up the cause, including himself in the arrangement, citing it as an adventure, and Grady had consented.

She’d thought since that Royal might have wanted to be alone, especially after his years of enforced communality at The Home, that it was privacy he wanted, not adventure, and that Peter was an intrusion. But Royal had said nothing, nor had he even looked as if he might object—and besides, Peter deserved some reward for being uprooted, to say nothing of a recompense for the loss of his father—so Grady gave her permission to them both.

Looking at Royal’s clothes, it occurred to Grady that these might well be genuine hand-me-downs, that the boy had nothing of his own except what had been bequeathed by others, and she was somewhat ashamed for having judged him a conformist when he was probably the uncomplaining recipient of whatever came his way. Seeing him there at the top of the hill, in front of the old house, waiting, wearing the old gray fedora he’d found on a nail in the tractor shed, Grady couldn’t help feeling that she’d come on the wrong day, in the wrong time. The young man seemed puzzled by their arrival, bewildered that these strangers should have summoned him from his chores, interrupting the harnessing of a horse or the honing of a plow. Why was he being asked to welcome and accept them, especially when they had come to take his place, to usurp his stewardship, to make of him no more than a ghost, an unnamed youth caught in a fading photograph.

The boy took off his hat and ran his sleeve across his nose. Immediately the hired hand vanished not in a puff of smoke but in a burst of flame. A great shock of orange-red hair had been sucked up from the boy’s scalp by the hat’s removal, chunks and clumps tossed and leaning against each other, a conflagration the hat had only momentarily extinguished but that could now rage unchecked. This was not the first time she’d seen the hair, but she wished he wouldn’t surprise her