Chapter 10 - The Grass That Doesn't End
The Sandhills don't look like the rest of the world.
They don't look like the city, where everything is straight lines and corners and glass that reflects somebody else’s life back into your face. They look like the bottom of an ocean that dried up ten million years ago—great, rolling swells of pale green sod that go on until the sky gets tired of holding them up and drops down to touch the dirt.
The house sat in a hollow between two hills, where the cottonwoods grew thick around the creek.
It was white—or it had been white when the aunt died ten years back—with a porch that ran around three sides and a tin roof that sang like a choir whenever the afternoon showers came off the hills.
By June, Bruno was gray.
Not just the scar above his eye—his whole muzzle had turned the color of river gravel. The stitches in his shoulder had healed into a hard, hairless knot that Sophia called his "medal," and he walked with a slow, heavy hitch in his right side that made him look like an old soldier on parade.
He didn't sleep in the house.
He had decided, with the stubborn, immovable logic of his breed, that the middle of the front porch was his post.
He lay there from seven in the morning until the sun went down behind the western ridge, his broad head resting on his paws, his amber eyes half-closed, watching the red-winged blackbirds bounce among the reed grass by the spring.
No one came up the road.
In three months, the only dust had been the mail carrier’s truck on Tuesdays and a neighbor named Hatcher who came by with a team of mules to help Damian pull the stumps out of the lower garden.
Hatcher hadn't liked Bruno at first.
"That's a lot of dog for a sheep country," the old man had said, spitting into the weeds. "Looks like something that ought to have a chain on it."
"He's not for sheep," Damian had said from the tongue of the wagon. He was wearing an old straw hat, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, his skin dark as a walnut from four months of mountain sun.
"What's he for, then?"
Damian had looked up at the porch, where Sophia was sitting on the top step, carefully peeling the paper off a red crayon while Bruno’s tail thudded against the cedar planks.
*Thump. Thump.*
"He's for her," Damian said.
That was all.
On an evening in late August, when the air was cool and smelled of wild mint and dry dirt, I came out onto the porch with a bowl of snap beans.
Damian was sitting on the bottom step. His boots were off, his wool socks had two holes in the heels that I had promised to darn three days ago, and his hands were black with grease from the tractor he had been trying to coax back into life behind the barn.
Sophia was asleep.
She had curled up directly across Bruno’s flank, her head tucked into the hollow behind his massive shoulder, one hand still gripping the stub of a purple marker that was now so small it barely showed between her fingers.
The dog didn't move. He didn't even shift his weight when a horsefly landed on his ear; he just flicked the skin until it flew away, careful not to disturb the small, brown face pressed into his fur.
I sat down on the step above Damian.
The sun was dropping behind the ridge, turning the grass into a lake of red gold that seemed to stretch all the way back to the Mississippi. The wind was coming down the creek, cool and clean, without a single smell of gasoline or iron or old paper in it.
"Miller sent a letter," Damian said softly.
He didn't take it out. He had probably burned it in the kitchen stove before he came out to wash his hands.
"What did he want?"
"He wanted to know if I was dead."
"What did you tell him?"
Damian reached out. His hand—the right one, the one that had held the SIG Sauer in the library while the glass fell like rain—found my ankle. His fingers were rough, calloused from the cedar posts he had been splitting all week, but they were warm.
They were so warm.
"I didn't answer," he said.
He leaned his head back against my knee.
I looked down at the gray at his temples, at the thin white line of the scar on his chin that didn't look dangerous anymore—just like an old mark left by a wire fence in a pasture where the cattle had long since gone to market.
Bruno let out a long, shuddering sigh.
His jaw settled three inches deeper into the dust of the porch floor. His eyes closed entirely.
Sophia mumbled something in her sleep—something about a purple dog that could fly over the barn—and her small hand uncurled, letting the little plastic marker roll down the step.
It clicked softly against the wood.
It hit Damian’s heel.
May you like
It stopped.
Nobody moved to pick it up. There was nowhere left for it to roll.
