Chapter One #2
And those eyes! Brown pools of love stared back at her.
She and the dog had just met, but those eyes said that this dog would give his life for her.
Devotion shone from beyond the mud rings, and his mouth was a wide grin, his bright pink tongue swinging as he panted with joy.
And even better, this dog could help her family raise money to fix the leaky roof and buy the automobile Daddy said he wished he could afford.
“First I’ve gotta get you cleaned up,” Mazelle said. “If I don’t wash off all this nasty mud, you won’t have a chance when I take you home. Then you better keep doing tricks when I tell you, or Daddy will chase you away with a broom. You hear me?”
The dog did hear her. She knew this not only because of the way his ears twitched, excited, but he also let out a polite, obedient bark. Still grinning.
From that moment on, Mazelle was convinced that the dog had not only heard her but that he understood every word she spoke—and maybe some of the words she didn’t speak.
None of this struck her as strange, since she knew other children in Gracetown with lizards who waited for them on the porch after school or wild hares who met them on the road and followed them wherever they went.
Or rougher creatures in the swamp you’d better hope would not follow you, or so her classmates said.
Such things were not unusual in Gracetown, so why shouldn’t this dog be able to follow her silent commands?
In that instant with her palms clasping the dog’s muddy paws, a strange thought tried to surface—Did this dog crawl out of the muddy ground?
—in the same moment she wondered if she had conjured this dog at the Wishing Pool.
She’d asked for a best friend, but she hadn’t specified a human being.
Was this the Wishing Pool’s answer to her loneliness?
Her sisters, who were twins (and being identical twins was the biggest part of their “talent,” even if they wouldn’t admit it), stayed in their room gossiping and looking at Harper’s and Collier’s and never invited her to join them.
Even Brother didn’t spend time with her anymore since he got a job driving the undertaker’s Model T, trying to save money for college.
Mazelle hated the ten-year gap between her and her sisters, which they said meant she was an “accident.” Although she didn’t like them much, she always craved to be near them, as if they held a secret to her future.
She felt like a ghost in her own house, with Daddy behind his newspaper pages, Mother at the stove, and her sisters hiding from chores in their room.
Her friend had arrived, muddy or not. Smelly or not. Ready to lead her to a new life.
Mazelle hugged the dog in the middle of McCormack Road.
“I think I’ll name you Scout.”
As soon as she named her dog, Mazelle was filled with feverish anxiety. Giving Scout a name made him hers, and she couldn’t stand the prospect of losing him. She would run away from home with Scout if she had to, she vowed.
But it might not come to that. Not if she was smart—and everyone said she was very smart.
Mazelle filled up a bathing tin with well water behind their wood-frame house and scrubbed Scout for an hour with a washrag to try to get him clean.
Every time she washed off one layer of mud, she unburied another.
At times, he seemed dirtier than before she started, the water growing into such a dark and murky sludge that it was like washing him in mud.
But under the direct pumps of well water, a miracle emerged: Scout was light-colored, nearly white, after he shook off the water and drenched her. While she toweled him off, his fur dried in delicate ringlets that made him not only clean—but handsome. Special.
“Supper!” Mother called through the kitchen window. “Come wash up, Mazelle!”
Scout had been so quiet that no one else knew he was there. Mazelle was eager to show him off, but she knew that if she tried to delay eating, no one would be in a good mood for his show. The smell of Mother’s cornbread made Mazelle’s mouth water too.
“You sit right here,” Mazelle told Scout, leaving him on the rear stoop. “Don’t move. And don’t you dirty yourself up. I’ll be right back after supper.”
Scout licked her cheek instead of barking. And sat to wait.
Through most of the meal, she was sure she’d dreamed the dancing dog.
She fidgeted in her hardback chair, trying to crane over far enough to see Scout through the kitchen window, but she wasn’t tall enough.
She was bouncing so much that Papa looked up from his Tallahassee Daily Democrat to tell her to be still.
Mazelle felt herself disappear at suppertime: Papa dreaming about faraway places he missed, her sisters chatting loudly with Mother to hear their own voices, and Brother silently scheming how he would sneak out later to see his girlfriend, who was such a secret to everyone but Mazelle that she wondered what was wrong with her.
In that moment, feeling insignificant, Mazelle doubted her plan.
Her heart raced as she imagined all of them laughing at her for believing a stray dog who’d crawled out of the mud would join their family and somehow help their fortunes.
It seemed so unlikely that Mazelle was on the verge of deciding that she should chase the dog away when—
Scout barked.
All eyes at the table came to Mazelle. “We have an act!”
Mazelle’s family gathered in a semicircle just beyond the back porch in the patch of yard worn to red soil from their feet.
All of them waited to see her promised act—once a show business family, always a show business family.
Even her sisters were grudgingly curious, and Brother seemed to have wrenched his mind away from thoughts of his secret lover.
“But we’re not keeping this dog,” Mother muttered as she waited. Ha. She would see.
For better theatrics, Mazelle stood behind the sheet hanging on the clothesline. Scout trotted up and sat beside her, as if he knew he was supposed to be behind the curtain too.