I Pray the Lord My Soul to Keep

The world was green about him in the time they called summer.

He could not understand why the sky was not part of the world. The woman told him the world was all about him. Wasn’t the sky about him? Why wasn’t it part of the world?

But the world was green about him in the time they called summer.  And it was pleasant to be outside in the summer warmth.  The world included the house where he and the woman lived, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins’ farm up the road, the farmhouse where the widow woman lived, and the church over by the Ohio River.  But he understood that the world was even bigger than that. Other people lived far away from the valley where they lived.  He had seen a lot more people at the church, people he had never seen before or anywhere else. So they lived somewhere else in the world.  The world around him seemed to be all the same place, but it must have stretched way far away.

He lived in the house with the woman and her dogs.  Hardly anyone visited him, the woman, and her dogs. People called her the dog-woman and “Crazy Annie” and said that she was weird.  He wasn’t certain what that word meant, except that it meant she did strange things.  She simply called him “Boy.” She said he didn’t have a name.

But the dogs had names, or most of them did. How many were there he didn’t know.  He could only count to twelve, and there were more dogs than that. There were tiny dogs and huge dogs and dogs of a size in-between. There were white dogs, brown dogs, gray dogs, dogs with colors mixed, and, of course, black dogs…. Some of the dogs lived in the yard; some dogs lived in the house. Most jumped in and out of the open windows, so that it was hard to tell where they lived. Sometimes they slept on the sofa, on the kitchen table, or with Annie in her bed.  Sometimes they pooped and peed on the floor, and Annie wouldn’t always clean the messes up, so the farm house sometimes smelled.  Often she would get her deer rifle, go out in the woods, and kill a buck.  She would cook part of it for him and her.  She would throw bloody gobs of the rest of the meat into the yard, and the dogs would snarl and fight over them.

The dogs could be mean.  Sometimes the smaller ones would yip at him and bite him on the finger or on the leg. And he would kick them.  But she told him never to do that to any of the real big dogs like Napoleon, Buster, and Black Devil.  Sometimes Black Devil especially would growl at him and reveal nasty yellow teeth.  She told him never to aggravate Black Devil or the other big ones. One time she had to lock him in a bedroom because Black Devil started running at him. After he was in the room, he would hear Black Devil growling outside and ripping his claws up and down on the door.  Thereafter, she locked him in the room whenever she was away or out working in the garden so that Black Devil and the other mean dogs could not get him.

Crazy Annie had a round face and wore a kerchief tied up over her dark hair. She wore long dresses that dragged through the dust out by the hitching post.  Sometimes she went bare-footed, even in the winter; sometimes she wore big old brogans. She called them men’s shoes.   Her face looked dusty-dusky as though the North wind had picked all the yellow-brown dirt off the road and had blown it into her skin.

Sometimes she would sit on a nail keg in the yard and tell him to gather up the rotting apples that were always falling from the tree and then ask him to throw them.  She would sit, pistol in hand, waiting for his arm to draw back as far as it could go. Then he would hurl the apples as high and as far away as he could.  Almost every time her pistol-crack would send an apple flying into pieces….. One time, as she sat cleaning the pistol after one of her shooting games, he squatted beside her in the tall grass by the keg she was using as a chair and asked, “Are you my mama?”

Her tobacco-yellowed teeth showed when she grinned. “Where did you ever hear about mamas?”

“The kids at church. They say every boy and girl has a mama and a papa.”

She pinched his far shoulder playfully, smiled, and said, “Naw, I ain’t yore mama. Land sakes, child, who knows who your mama is?”

Crestfallen, he dared not ask who his papa was.

“Then how did you get me?”

“Oh, I woke up one morning bright and early and went out and found you a-layin’ in the cabbage patch.”  With a low, pleasant laugh, she hugged him.

Somehow he suspected she was not telling the truth….

 “You just call me ‘Boy.’  Don’t I have a name?”