A Shiloh Christmas

To the memory of Clover, the little dog who inspired the Shiloh series

Y
OU KNOW HOW SOMETIMES YOU
look back on a simple, ordinary day, and you wonder why things couldn't be like that forever? Why just loving your own dog wasn't enough?

My dog's simple, all right, and next to getting his belly scratched, Shiloh's favorite thing in the whole world is rolling around in deer poop. Guess who has to give him a bath. The girls have their bathing suits on already. Once a wet dog goes to shaking himself, anyone within ten feet ought to have an umbrella.

I put a big plastic laundry basket under the pump in our side yard and start working the handle up and down. The very second that water splashes out, I see Shiloh's tail disappear around the corner of the house.

“Here, Shiloh!” Becky calls. Only turned four last
week, and her voice don't carry even as far as the back porch.

So Dara Lynn gives it a shot. Got her head and arms through the tire swing hanging from our box elder tree. “Here, Shiloh, Shiloh, Shiloh!” she yells, as the tire turns her round and round.

But we could call that dog till the moon comes up, and he'd still make like he didn't hear. Shiloh's learned by now that the worse he stinks, the sooner he gets a bath. Ma comes out with the teakettle and pours it all into the basket to bring up the temperature of the well water.

“Pull it out there in the sun, Marty, so he won't get so cold,” she says before she goes back in.

Hard to see how anyone can get cold on a hot July day like this, the dry grass crunching every step I take. But I pull the basket out farther into the yard. Now comes the hard part, and Becky knows it'll be a while, 'cause she's got a little matchbox with a paper sail, and she comes over to float it in the laundry basket while she waits.

I walk around the house to where Shiloh's hiding under the front porch steps. Have to go through this every time Shiloh gets a b-a-t-h.

“Come on, Dara Lynn, and help,” I yell.

Dara Lynn works herself out of the swing and walks
around front. She's already outgrowed the bathing suit she had last summer, and it's stretched tight across her stomach.

We both know what to do. I make like I'm going to crawl under from one side of the steps, and Dara Lynn pretends she's coming in from the other. Sure enough, my beagle scampers out from between the steps and in two seconds flat, he's up on the porch looking down on us, like it's only a game.

We both lunge at him, but Shiloh's too quick. Goes racing around the front yard in his “crazy dog” act, and the minute we give chase, he's under the steps again.

Ever since I read about the brown recluse spider and told it to Dara Lynn, we neither one of us will go crawling under the porch or anywhere else like that. It's been ten minutes now of trying to get my smelly dog in that bathwater, and Ma won't let him back in the house until we do. He'll give in finally, like he always does, but Dara Lynn and me are both hot and tired of this nonsense.

“You know what this means,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, sitting back on her heels. “Let's do it.”

So I go in the house and come out with the vacuum sweeper, the only noise Shiloh hates worse'n motorcycles.

Don't even have to turn it on. Shiloh sees the nozzle coming toward him, and he is out between the steps, running around the house, Dara Lynn and me after him, leaving the vacuum on the grass, and the next thing happens so fast I almost miss it:

Becky's decided to cool herself off and is sitting there in the laundry basket, chubby little arms and legs hanging over the sides, and Shiloh jumps right in on top of her. Figures he might as well get it over with.

Water everywhere, and for a couple seconds Becky just blinks and wipes her eyes. Then she sees poop on her arm.

You never heard such screeching, not even if you closed the refrigerator door on your cat.

Becky's trying to get out of the laundry basket, Shiloh keeps turning around and around on top of her, and Dara Lynn is bent over double, laughing herself silly.

“I'm
poopy
!” Becky screams as Ma comes out the back door. “Get it
off
me!” And now it's on her bathing suit and in her hair.

“Marty, what in the world . . . ?” says Ma, like it's
my
fault.

But right then the laundry basket tips over and the dirty water splashes all over Dara Lynn.

“Yaaagh!” she bellows, pulling her bathing suit out
away from her body to make the poop fall off, and she's dancing up and down, hopping on one foot, then the other.

Ma sighs. “Get the hose, Marty,” she says. “This is sure a waste of good water.”

Ma washes Becky's hair, I wash me and the dog, and Dara Lynn scrubs herself twice just to make sure.

I hold Shiloh's muzzle with one hand as I dry him off and look into his big brown eyes. “You are a barrel of trouble, you know it?” I whisper. And when I'm sure Ma and the girls can't hear, I tell him, “Most fun I've had since school let out.”

Wish now I could have held on to that fun a little longer—made it last all summer. But there's not a single person ever knows for sure what's coming next. And whenever I get to worrying about it, the “it” is usually J. T.—Judd Travers. And I'm thinkin' now that the only other time I seen Shiloh hide under the front steps was when Judd Travers tried to take him back.

One difference between a dog and a boy is, a dog never asks
why
. I got a hundred
why
s in my head. You think a dog wonders why he was born or why he's got a tail?

But if Shiloh ever did think
why
about anything,
he must have wondered why Judd treated his dogs so poorly. Why, if they meant so little to him, wouldn't he just let 'em go?

But now that I've earned Shiloh fair and square from Judd, Shiloh knows he's part of our family. Ma forgave me for hiding Shiloh up in the woods, Dad forgave Ma for not telling him about it, and I figure the whole community has
almost
forgiven Judd for the miserable man he used to be, before he rescued Shiloh in the creek and showed he had some heart. I can't never thank him enough for that. But I can't ever seem to quit worrying about how long the peace will last.

We sprawl our scrubbed bodies around the living room, playing with Tangerine, the cat I gave Dara Lynn for Christmas last year. Got a couple feathers tied to the end of a string, and you just wiggle that along the rug and this cat does a twelve-inch leap off the floor, then pounces to the left; leaps again and pounces right. . . .

Dad comes home, drops his mailbag on a chair.

“You kids makin' that cat crazy again?” he says.

“Had one crazy animal around here today, and that was enough,” says Ma, nodding toward Shiloh, who's on his belly now, lazily watching the cat.

“And he got us all poopy!” says Becky.

“Well, can't have that, can we?” says Dad. Goes out
in the kitchen and draws him a big cold drink of water from the faucet. If my dad was a dog, I think he'd be either a boxer or a mastiff. Got a square face and a nose just shy of calling big.

“Saw Judd when I made a delivery at the hardware store,” Dad tells Ma. “He was buyin' a metal awning to go on his trailer. Wants a place he and his dogs can sit out in the shade.”

“That's a nice idea,” says Ma, her knife going
chop, chop, chop
as she dices some celery there at the counter. “Maybe he can invite a few neighbors over once in a while—show a little friendliness. He's not the only one out there on Old Creek Road.”

“I don't know,” says Dad. “He was having an argument with the clerk. Asked if he could bring the awning back if it didn't fit, and Mr. Bowers, he tells him not if it's dented. Judd wants to take it out of the box and make sure it's not already got a dent in it.”

Dad sets his glass on the table and grins. “They were still goin' at it when I left, but no shots fired,” he jokes.

Problem, I guess, is that Judd's not changed enough to suit some people. Not fast enough to suit anybody, that's for sure. He don't keep his dogs chained and hungry, the way they used to be, and they like romping around that fenced-in backyard. I haven't heard any
more complaints about him trying to cheat Mr. Wallace, either, and he don't swear around Ma, leastwise where she can hear it.

But he still spits on the sidewalk no matter who might step in it. Still honks the minute the light turns green if the car in front don't take off that split second. He'll sometimes walk right by a person down in Friendly or Sistersville and never say “good morning” even when they say it first. With people wanting so hard to like him once he'd saved Shiloh, wouldn't you think he'd
try
to make it easy for 'em?

“He'll never make friends if he's always looking for an argument,” I say.

“Marty, people don't change all at once,” Dad tells me. “You need to have a little patience with Judd. Old habits are hard to break.”

“Just think on how you still forget and leave your shoes where people can trip over them,” says Ma.

“And you go right on using my pencils instead of sharpening your own,” pipes up Dara Lynn, all eight years of her sassiness making themselves heard.

But Becky walks over and hands me one of her animal crackers to show that somebody in the family is on my side, and I feed it to Shiloh just to pass the favor along.

It's the driest summer West Virginia's had in sixteen years, the
Tyler Star-News
says. Last spring, Middle Island Creek was so high Dara Lynn almost drowned in it. Now each day, it seems, the water level drops some more, and things get uncovered that never should have been there in the first place—a baby carriage, for one. A stove top, another.