A Willing Heart

One July afternoon, when the bayou gators slithered to the shade of the swamp reeds and heat rose like a heavy curtain from the forest.floor and even the kudzu refused to crawl an inch, on such a sultry afternoon two-year-old Mary Esther Culpepper disappeared, and it was my fault. Pop was church pastor at the time, and he crusaded against sinners, the Culpepper bunch, in particular.

"Dirt farmers," he called them. "So lazy they barely eke out a living, and they let their kids run wild. Not our kind of folks at all."

He'd get riled up then and commence to write a good two hours' worth of preaching on the sins of drinking, fornicating, or sloth. I knew them as a sinful bunch, but I can't rightly say I saw any of this sinning for myself. Didn't seem to matter, though, to Pop.

"See that you stay clear of them and their nits, Jory," he said to me. He didn't need to add 'or else', but I heard it just the same, and I knew what it meant... or else I was going straight to hell.

Emily Culpepper was in my class at school, when she came to school, but I didn't pay much mind to her, except she wore frumpy hand-me-downs and kept to herself. She showed up one morning with Mary slung on her hip, a cute little kid with a mop of red curls, even if she was thin and hardly bigger than her name, and when the principal objected, Emily said she had to look after her little sister. They didn't let her stay.

That was the last I heard of Mary, until I watched the sheriff s car kiss Asa Culpepper's beat-up Chevy past the peanut field and the new cut hay, all the way up to the horse barn where me and Injun Joe was working. I'd given lnjun three afternoons a week after school and every Saturday for two summers in exchange for the filly we foaled that morning, and I never imagined anything else would mean as much to me.

Mr. Asa's face was ruddy, his veined cheeks shiny with more than sweat, and he had a wild look to his eyes, like Pop did the time a rattler sunk fangs into his best hound. I gazed at the man and shivered. Eleven rattles and a button, and that dog died before he knew he'd been bit. The bayou was full of them.

"You the preacher's boy, ain't you?" Mr. Asa said.

There was an undertone I didn't fully catch, as if he knew me already, but I couldn't figure how. I'd never laid eyes on him before.

"N-name's Jory Diamond," I said, nodding, then squared my shoulders and tried not to stare at my boot tops.

Mr. Asa grunted, then looked at me through eyes that were worn and world-weary. "Word is, your BoJack is the best trail dog in the county," he said. "We need him to find my baby."

I could picture Mary, big blue eyes, liked to suck her thumb, and was as quiet as his question that hung in the air. I felt more helpless than I'd ever felt in my life.

"Leave the boy be." Injun shoved his hands in his overall pockets then and shook his head. "His BoJack's never trailed a person, never even tried. I dunno if Brother Diamond......

Mr. Asa was a lean man with a hard face, not easy to like, and with ten younguns to feed I reckon he had call to be. His oldest girl was Mary's mama. She'd dumped Mary on her mama and daddy's doorstep and run off with a married man twice her age. I wasn't supposed to know that, but we got thin walls and screen doors and sometimes I can't help but hear Pop when he's out on the porch, whispering, I reckon with someone in his congregation. Nope, not our kind of folks at all.

As if Mr. Asa could read my thoughts, he bowed his head, then looked up at me with moist eyes, and I felt something shrivel inside.

Mary had been gone four hours, with the other Culpepper younguns and their kin searching for her. She was last seen toddling after a litter of puppies in the back yard. They hadn't found a trace of her along the red clay road, and the sheriff figured more than likely she wandered toward the creek, into the tangle of pines and underbrush that backed up to the three acres where the Culpepper trailer sat.

I poked the loose dirt with my boot tip. Going in those woods was iffy for a grown man with a good spotlight and a pair of snake chaps, but with dark coming on, I didn't see that a lost baby girl wearing nothing but a diaper and a smile stood much of a chance.

As daylight ticked by, I could feel Injun's disapproval at my silence, even though he stayed as stone-faced as his wooden carvings that gave him his nickname. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from blurting out that BoJack had seen his best seasons already, that he was so gray and bent with arthritis now the only thing he'd trailed in the last year was his supper dish.

Mr. Asa's eyes beseeched until it hurt me to look at him, and gauging by lnjun's piercing gaze, I reckon he felt the same heaviness in his chest.

"I ain't promising nothing," I heard myself say, "except we'll do our best."

"That's all I can ask." Mr. Asa loosened his shoulders and swiped his hand across his nose, then sniffed. "All a body can ask."

"It weren't an easy decision, son," Injun whispered to me. "But I'm mighty proud of you."

I watched Mr. Asa head back to his truck, and I took a shaky breath.

"Don't reckon there's anything else I can do," I said, then flinched when my voice did a singsong squeak, though Injun didn't seem to notice. "I done told him we'd come."

No point in lying and saying the thought of hellfire didn't cross my mind. It did. I wondered if Pop would ever understand.

BoJack was the spit of his daddy, who was a black and tan, and like his daddy, accepted the run of Injun's place as his due. Pop said dogs belonged locked in the dog pen, but Injun thought people could learn a lot from animals and never seemed to mind BoJack under foot. He couldn't jump into the box when I ordered, "C'mon, up!", though I know he wanted to. I could see the plea in his cloudy eyes for a boost, at least as far as the tailgate.

Injun threw some gear in his truck box and seemed distracted as we tore out after the sheriffs car. I wouldn't have heard him if he'd said anything anyway, what with my heart drumming in my ears. With luck, we'd find Mary in a half hour, and Pop wouldn't be the wiser until I could explain.

Heat devils danced in the road, and we spit red dust all the way to the Culpepper place. I wasn't much surprised to see there wasn't but three or four cars in the yard.

One was parked on Mrs. Culpepper's daylily bed. She didn't notice though. I could see that by the way she stood staring out at the bayou, clutching her faded apron to her face, as if nothing else existed except for them trees. Emily was on the back porch, staying out of the way like she does in school, and riding herd on two of her littlest brothers who were wrestling on the ground.

I felt her blue eyes bore into me as I got out of the truck, and when she called my name, the soft sound held me prisoner. My head swirled with the sweet scent of honeysuckle that travelled across the yard.

BoJack smelled something different in the air, too. When I opened the dog box, he took two steps forward and raised his nose, winding. I untied the red bandana from his neck and replaced it with the worn leather collar that had Injun's name engraved in a brass plate should the hound ever get lost. Then I clipped on the thin leather lead.

He stood still, real solemn, and let me dress him for the business at hand. If clothes make the man, I figured the collar makes the dog. I'd watched the same change come over Pop when he put on his Sunday clothes to step into the high pulpit. With his starched collar rising just above his black robe, Pop would stare out on the congregation as if he knew he could ferret out every sin and crawl into every dark place. There were no secrets that could hide from his penetrating eyes.

BoJack wore that same determined set, except his pulpit was a tailgate and his congregation was the bayou.

"Can her grandma hand me something the baby's worn?" lnjun said to the sheriff. "A lot of scents would confuse the dog. A shirt... no, something she's peed on would be best." Even the bees seemed to quiet as Mrs. Culpepper brought out a tiny white nightgown, obviously seconds from the local Carter's mill. I knew because me and every other kid on the bayou wore Carter clothes, and the strawberries on this one were blue, instead of red. My throat was dry and I swallowed.

Injun took the nightgown in his hand, squatted down, and called BoJack's name. The dog buried his nose up to his ears in the cotton fabric, huffing and snuffling as he drank in the scent. Then Injun hollered, "Hunt'em up!"

BoJack planted his nose to the dirt, and it was all I could do to keep up with him as he twisted and turned this way and that, with me hanging onto the end of the lead. He picked up a trail a moment later, opened, and took off like a shot. Five minutes out, he jumped a downed poplar and headed straight into the swamp.

"Hold up!" Injun shouted, and I dug my heels in the mud, pulling on the lead for all I was worth until BoJack and I were both straining for breath.

Steam rose from my shirt and baked my face when I glanced back across my shoulder. Injun was keeled over, blowing hard, his hands braced on his knees, sweat dripping off his nose. A cloud of noseeums swarmed around his head.

"He's trailing a deer," Injun said. "She didn't come this way."

"How can you tell?"

He made a sweep with his arm. "The line he's following. She's not big enough to climb over that tree and make straight for cover." Injun jerked off his hat, swiped his shirtsleeve across his sweaty forehead, and shook his head. "I was afraid of this. Let's start again."

By the time we'd trudged back toward the Culpepper yard, the sun was slipping down behind the trees, which didn't so much ease up the heat as it set the night bugs to gnawing early. Pop would be wondering where I'd got to.

Emily met us coming out of the trees and handed me a tumbler of well water. The glass was cold and sweating. I wiped my stinging face with my sleeve and smelled my own stink, and it occurred to me I ought to move downwind of her. When I did, though, she touched my arm and held on. Somewhere a quail called bobwhite, bobwhite. Emily had freckles on her nose I hadn't ever noticed before.

"You're giving up, ain't you?" she said.

Yes, I was considering it before she spoke. Her voice, though, burned into my heart with a strange emotion. It was tired and soft and hinted at the sadness that comes from not having much and expecting even less.

"I don't hold it against you, Jory. We're obliged you and your dog come and done what you could."

"It's getting late," I said. "Pop doesn't know I'm here, and he won't like it if he has to hold supper for me."

She offered to call him, using Mrs. Parker's phone down the road, then hoofed it up to the house, while I could've bitten my tongue off. I didn't want to stay and I didn't want to go home, so instead, I let BoJack slurp the rest of the water.

Mud and green slime caked his legs and under belly, and sandspurs clung to his coat. His tongue lolled to the side as he drooled ropes of slobber, and he was panting double time. lnjun wasn't looking much better.

"BoJack's give out in this heat," I said. "Maybe we ought to stop?"

Injun hesitated, then said, "it's your call, son. You've got his lead."

I hated him then. Nothing sounded better than to quit, drink a gallon of lemonade, and eat my weight in egg salad, but when I ruffled BoJack's head, his eyes sparkled. He knew something, something I hadn't yet figured out.

"He'll stiffened up if we stop now, won't he?" I said.

"He ain't a puppy no more, but that dog's got a willing heart," Injun said.

"Think BoJack understands what we're doing and why?" Injun squatted beside the panting dog, cupped both hands on his dirty muzzle, and stroked from wet nose to shoulder.

"It wouldn't surprise me one bit," he said. "Dogs have more sense than people do. It's up to you, Jory, do we quit or keep looking?"

BoJack stared at me then, talking to me with his soft eyes, and I got the nagging feeling I'd know what he was saying, if only I listened better. I considered the oak tree's cool shade, then thought of Mary Esther Culpepper, hot and tired and wanting her grandma.

"We've still got light left," I said. "Maybe we can do something with it."

At the perimeter of the yard, I noticed we had company. I can't say where the folks come from or when, I'd been too busy hoofing it through the woods to pay much attention to anything else, but when I looked toward the trailer, there were cars and trucks everywhere, with more pulling up.

The sheriff was busy organizing men to comb different sections of the woods, while some of the neighbor women had set up torches in the yard and set tables with sandwiches under the sprawling oak trees. Even Pop was toting water jugs.

He caught me staring at him, and it was hard to figure out what he was thinking. Then he nodded. Whatever indecision held him, he'd come to terms with it, and we'd talk later about what I'd done.

It was twilight, that time of day when you can almost see the air.

We followed a path cut by nightly trips to water, through sparse pines and toward the sandy creek bank. The cloying smell hit me when we entered the thick brush, canopied by towering pines. I checked up, BoJack jerking on the other end of the lead, and glanced over at Injun. He seemed to have aged, his shoulders slumping, his face haggard.

Without a word, he moved forward, until the bank came into view and we could see gator tracks, a big gator, and what caused the awful stink, or what little was left of it anyway.

The sight of a toddling baby girl in a nightgown with blue strawberries rushed into my mind, and my horror must've shown on my face because lnjun shook his head and said, "it's not her. That's too ripe to be today."

He shoved the nightgown into the dog's nose again. BoJack snuffled the ground, retraced his steps a yard or two, then took off toward the oak bottom opposite the creek. I couldn't see the other men, but I could hear them shouting Mary's name through the trees. BoJack had stopped drooling and was panting as loud as he was baying. He must've stepped wrong in a hole because he was favoring his right foreleg as he ran down the incline.

My steps against the pine needles and dried leaves sounded like cannon fire. Maybe that's why I didn't notice the gun blast behind me and didn't turn around until I heard Injun scream my name. He was crumpled on the ground, waving me on with the smoking gun. "Rattler!" he said. "Watch your step!"

"I'll get help," I shouted back.

"They heard me. They'll come. Keep going!"

BoJack dug in his paws, his veins bulging, muscles straining, and dragged me down to the oak bottom, sucking and huffing dirt and gasping for breath against the tightening collar. I slipped and slid through dead leaves and vines, the air so close and thick, I could barely grab a breath. The sound of crickets and tree frogs thundered in my ears. Sweat stung my eyes and my hands were so wet my fingers lost their grip on the lead. BoJack felt the slack and tore off down the bottom without me.

I don't know how long after that I noticed the silence, maybe a few seconds, maybe a couple of minutes. Dusk was failing, night was closing in, and BoJack had quit baying. I kept following where I thought he'd gone, hearing nothing except my own wheezing and my own pounding heart.

I found him laying just around an overgrown clump of dogwoods--his side heaving, his mouth foamy red, eyes glassy, and his nose pointed ahead. One look and I knew BoJack had gone as far as he was ever going.

The fear and the pain rushed up at me then, and I dropped to my knees beside him. If I had tried harder... hadn't wasted time... hadn't doubted. Mary was gone forever--it was an instinctive knowledge that came to me as sure as the smell of death and pine resin.

"Good boy," I said, stroking BoJack's mottled head. "You done your best."

Once the sheriff got Injun to the hospital and saw he was doing okay, he radioed for the county search team. Pop had taken up a collection among his congregation to help the Culpeppers put up a fence.

Someone had draped an old plaid blanket smelling sweet of honeysuckle over BoJack, so I buried him in that blanket, in the woods that he loved, and it wasn't too many yards from him that, in winter, two years later, hunters came across the abandoned well.

For a long time I couldn't understand why BoJack would run himself to death for a little girl he never knew. Then I remembered what Injun had said that day. BoJack had known Mary all along; his nose had told him she was little and helpless and lost, and for him, that's all that ever mattered.

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