Chapter Five #3
Scout stood in the kitchen entryway, impossibly inside the house. The shaft of light from Aunt Ruby’s room shone across half of Scout’s face, enough to glisten his bared teeth.
“Scout—help!” Mazelle said, but Scout didn’t need her to call him. Scout was lunging.
“I’ll knock you out!” Aunt Ruby said. She flung Mazelle away to swing her angry blows at Scout instead. Mazelle screamed, worried she might kill him.
But Scout was quick, dodging his head away from her swinging spoon. He lunged again, this time snapping his teeth into the back of Aunt Ruby’s thin housedress, yanking her the way she had yanked Mazelle, wrenching her off balance with his deceptive strength.
“Damn dirty dog—!” Aunt Ruby said right before she fell. The next sound was the thunk of her head across the sharp edge of the kitchen counter.
From the loud sound of her skull on the countertop, Mazelle feared (hoped?) that Aunt Ruby might be knocked out, or even dead—but an enraged, guttural shriek told her otherwise.
Aunt Ruby pulled herself up from the floor, her hand pressed to her forehead.
Blood seeped from between her fingertips above her wild eyes.
“Are you all right?” Mazelle whispered.
With another shriek, Aunt Ruby picked up the large cast-iron skillet from the dish rack, wielding the thick handle with both hands. She swayed as if she were dizzy, but she held on. Her eyes glared from the thin streak of blood across the top half of her face, a macabre party mask.
Aunt Ruby had murder in her eyes. Mazelle backed against the kitchen table, frozen in shock. All she could do was raise her hands to protect her head. “Please don’t hurt me—”
But Aunt Ruby whirled instead toward Scout, who was barking with such fervor that spittle and foam flew from his mouth. Scout lunged again, but Aunt Ruby swung the heavy skillet at him with such surprising precision that Scout backed away.
“Come on!” Aunt Ruby challenged Scout. “Wish I had my shotgun! But I don’t need no gun to brain you, you filthy stinking dog!”
Had Mazelle dreamed this moment? As if Scout understood her—and of course he did!—Scout turned to scamper away the instant before Mazelle said, “Run, Scout!”
Aunt Ruby chased Scout, and Mazelle chased Aunt Ruby, sobbing hard enough to cramp her stomach.
Scout’s nails scrabbled across the wood as he ran through the dining room, nearly losing his footing.
Why couldn’t Daddy and her sisters appear to save Scout and calm Aunt Ruby down?
Why did she have to be alone on this terrible night?
Mazelle prayed that the living room door would be wide-open and the sunporch door miraculously open beyond it for Scout’s easy escape, but the oak door in the living room was firmly shut as Aunt Ruby closed in on Scout. How could the door be closed?
“Where you goin’ now, huh?” Aunt Ruby taunted him. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
“Aunt Ruby, please don’t hurt him!” Mazelle wailed. “Please!”
Mazelle loved Scout, to be sure, but she remembered her daily morning dread that Scout would not be waiting on the porch, or the time her family thought he would vanish back into the woods after her first screen test, just when her future in pictures seemed set.
No matter what Charlie Chaplin said, she knew Aunt Ruby was right—without Scout, she wouldn’t be a star.
Mazelle was glancing around the living room to find something she might hit Aunt Ruby with to protect her dog, her life. But before she could think of anything from the blur of pillows and small figurines, Scout surprised Aunt Ruby by dashing between her legs to run behind her.
Toward the stairs.
The stairway in Mazelle’s house lay just beyond Mazelle’s bedroom, a dozen steep steps leading to the upstairs hall.
Scout ran up the stairs like a racehorse, and Aunt Ruby ran right after him, although she lagged because of her rage and heaving breaths.
This terrible episode wouldn’t end no matter how much Mazelle wished for it; it just kept turning new corners.
Mazelle was sobbing too hard to beg. But even if she could find her voice, she knew Aunt Ruby would not listen. After hitting her head so hard, wearing a bloody mask, she might not be in her right mind. As awful as Aunt Ruby was, she had become someone worse.
Mazelle had just reached the foot of the stairs when she saw that Scout had stopped running. Instead, he sat posed calmly at the top of the stairs while Aunt Ruby lumbered toward him with the skillet she planned to kill him with. Scout wasn’t panting the way Aunt Ruby was.
The truth behind Scout’s calm rocked Mazelle: This is a trap. Scout intentionally had lured Aunt Ruby to the stairs, and now he was only waiting for…
Scout looked directly down at Mazelle, and she saw the question in his eyes. She and Scout had never needed language, so Mazelle didn’t have to say the word he craved.
Yes.
As Aunt Ruby huffed toward the top landing, Scout raised himself high on two legs with unnatural balance, his spine uncurling with none of his usual doggy wavering to stand straight.
He stood as if dogs had been created to walk on two legs, his front paws raised high like a person’s outstretched arms—like Mazelle’s arms. Standing, he looked nothing like a dog. (Was he a dog at all?)
Aunt Ruby was so startled that she stopped a foot below Scout, the skillet raised. She gawked—not more than a second, maybe a second and a half—but long enough for Scout to lunge forward and plant his front paws against her breastbone.
“You goddamn devil—” Aunt Ruby said.
Scout pushed. Hard. When he did, Mazelle felt the muscles in her own arms tighten, as if she were watching herself at the top of the stairs.
Instinct made Mazelle cover her eyes, but she heard every thump and crack and felt every tremor as Aunt Ruby tumbled down the stairs.
Aunt Ruby’s heavy weight shook the floor not far from Mazelle’s feet when she landed, and Mazelle kept her eyes covered while she waited to hear Aunt Ruby scream or moan.
The only sound was Scout’s nails clicking down the wooden steps. She felt Scout lick her legs where Aunt Ruby had raised welts Mazelle had forgotten. The kitchen was long ago.
Her breath still hitching with sobs, Mazelle peeked from behind her fingers to the spot where she knew Aunt Ruby lay. For the rest of her life, she would wish she had not looked.
Her first sight was Aunt Ruby’s wide-open dead eyes.
Now her face was a proper mask, not just where her eyes were encased in smudged blood, but every inch slack and empty.
Lifeless. Her head had been wrested horrifically askew, her chin resting so far against her shoulder blade on her broken neck that she would have been able to see behind her.
Aunt Ruby was not merely dead—she was broken. Every limb was awry, jutting in ways they should not, her elbow here, her foot there. She looked like she had fallen down the stairs two or three times, not only once.
If Mazelle could have caught her breath, she would have screamed.
She sank to her knees, all strength sapped from her legs.
She wrapped her arms around Scout’s neck and sobbed.
This day could not be real. Charlie Chaplin had never praised her.
Millie Sharpe had never sounded like a minstrel.
Scout could not have killed Aunt Ruby because she had told him to.
But yet, all of it was as real as the body in a heap on the floor two feet from her.
Aunt Ruby had said the law would shoot Scout if he ever hurt anyone.
Mother and Daddy would insist that they get rid of Scout once they knew.
And the headlines about Scout would be in all the papers, not just the colored ones.
Each new thought was more horrible than the last, and Mazelle’s heaving sobs made it hard to catch her breath. Bile choked her throat.
Scout gently took Mazelle’s hand into his mouth and pulled, just like he had saved her and the other kids in the cast from the smoky set. Still sobbing, Mazelle brought herself to her feet and allowed Scout to lead her away from Aunt Ruby, toward the front door.
The door was still closed. As Mazelle’s drumbeat of panicked thoughts slowed, she paused enough to wonder: How did Scout get into the house? The two main living room windows were open halfway, but they had screens to keep out the bugs, all intact.
YOU brought him into the house, she reminded herself. You must have wished for him.
Scout, after all, was made of wishes.
The silence in the house felt obscene. Mazelle was practicing how she would explain to Daddy that Scout was only trying to protect her when Scout barked to go out to his sunporch.
Mazelle let him out, hardly thinking, careful to close both the screen door and wooden door behind him, making sure both were firmly shut, clicking the deadbolt lock into place.
The answer came to Mazelle with icy clarity: No one had to know that Scout had made Aunt Ruby fall.
Old people fell by themselves all the time, and no one knew that Scout had been in the house except her—and Aunt Ruby.
She could feel several welts across her skin from her beating, but they were hidden under her nightshirt because Aunt Ruby liked to hurt her where no one could see.
The answer seemed too simple to be real. Mazelle turned over the events in her memory: Scout had never bitten Aunt Ruby. He had never walked close enough to her blood to leave paw prints. No one could prove he had been there.
“She went upstairs to look for something and she fell,” Mazelle rehearsed to herself. “I heard her scream. That’s how I found her.”
She said it once. Twice. Three times. And again, this time with new tears.
She was still repeating the lie to herself fifteen minutes later when she heard voices outside and Daddy turned his key in the door.