A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford Page A

as though it might’ve had pointer blood back in its past. For no particular reason, I gauged it to be three months old, though its legs were long and its white feet larger than you would expect. “It’s those ones in the neighborhood wearing all the black,” Sallie said. “Whatever you call them. All penetrated everywhere and ridiculous, living in doorways. They always have a dog on a rope.” She tapped one of the square panes with her fingernail to attract the puppy’s attention. It had begun diligently scratching its ear, but stopped and fixed its dark little eyes on the door. It had dragged a red plastic dust broom from under the outside back stairs, and this was lying in the middle of the garden. “We have to get rid of it,” Sallie said. “The poor thing. Those shitty kids just got tired of it. So they abandon it with us.”
    “I’ll try to place it,” I said. I had been home from St. Louis all of five minutes and had barely set my suitcase inside the front hall.
    “Place it?” Sallie’s arms were folded. “Place it where? How?”
    “I’ll put up some signs around,” I said, and touched her shoulder. “Somebody in the neighborhood might’ve lost it. Or else someone found it and left it here so it wouldn’t get run over. Somebody’ll come looking.”
    The puppy barked then. Something (who knows what) had frightened it. Suddenly it was on its feet barking loudly and menacingly at the door we were standing behind, as though it had sensed we were intending something and resented that. Then just as abruptly it stopped, and without taking its dark little eyes off of us, squatted puppy-style and pissed on the bricks.
    “That’s its other trick,” Sallie said. The puppy finished and delicately sniffed at its urine, then gave it a sampling lick. “What it doesn’t pee on it jumps on and scratches and barks at. When I found it this morning, it barked at me, then it jumped on me and peed on my ankle and scratchedmy leg. I was only trying to pet it and be nice.” She shook her head.
    “It was probably afraid,” I said, admiring the puppy’s staunch little bearing, its sharply pointed ears and simple, uncomplicated pointer’s coloration. Solid white, solid black. It was a boy dog.
    “Don’t get attached to it, Bobby,” Sallie said. “We have to take it to the pound.”
    My wife is from Wetumpka, Alabama. Her family were ambitious, melancholy Lutheran Swedes who somehow made it to the South because her great-grandfather had accidentally invented a lint shield for the ginning process which ended up saving people millions. In one generation the Holmbergs from Lund went from being dejected, stigmatized immigrants to being moneyed gentry with snooty Republican attitudes and a strong sense of entitlement. In Wetumpka there was a dog pound, and stray dogs were always feared for carrying mange and exotic fevers. I’ve been there; I know this. A dogcatcher prowled around with a ventilated, louver-sided truck and big catch-net. When an unaffiliated dog came sniffing around anybody’s hydrangeas, a call was made and off it went forever.
    “There aren’t dog pounds anymore,” I said.
    “I meant the shelter,” Sallie said privately. “The SPCA— where they’re nice to them.”
    “I’d like to try the other way first. I’ll make a sign.”
    “But aren’t you leaving again tomorrow?”
    “Just for two days,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
    Sallie tapped her toe, a sign that something had made her unsettled. “Let’s not let this drag out.” The puppy began trotting off toward the back of the garden and disappeared behind one of the big brick planters of pittosporums. “The longer we keep it, the harder it’ll be to give it up. And that is what’ll happen. We’ll have to get rid of it eventually.”
    “We’ll see.”
    “When the time comes, I’ll let you take it to the pound,” she said.
    I smiled apologetically. “That’s fine. If the time comes, then I will.”
    We ended it