Small Beneath the Sky Read Free Page A

reader doesn’t skip over words,” she admonished. I felt ashamed for trying to fake it, but the older students clapped anyway when I was through.
    At the end of the year, Miss Bee awarded me the prize for having read the most books in first grade. It was a black plaster-of-Paris cocker spaniel leaning on its front elbows, bum in the air, as if it were about to pounce. When I brought the prize home, Mom put it on the china cabinet beside my brother’s first hockey trophy. Eventually, the spaniel ended up on my bedroom dresser. Its head tilted like the RCA Victor dog’s, but it wasn’t music from a phonograph its long, curly ears were waiting for. Alone in my room I read out loud, as I had once with my mother, passages from the old Book of Knowledge: entrancing descriptions and perfectly punctuated sentences that might have flowed from the pen of an English governess. Over and over I recited the verses I had to memorize for school, and, later, the mantra of a boy’s name married to every rhyme I knew. My plaster spaniel sat loyal, attentive, listening.

by and by
    O NE AFTERNOON when I was four, my father came into our kitchen with a toy Pomeranian tucked into his jacket pocket. Unbeknown to his boss, he had traded a half tank of oil from his delivery truck for one of Mrs. Rittinger’s purebred pups. Red and furry, the dog was smaller than my father’s hand. Lying on my belly on linoleum warmed by the fire in the wood stove, I watched her small pink tongue lapping milk. The thread of white stretching from the surface to her mouth didn’t break until she’d licked the bowl clean.
    My mother named her Tiny, and she became my brother’s dog. The seven years between us made me more of a nuisance than a playmate, but sometimes Barry would let me tag along when he and his friends played kick the can or built a soldiers’ fort out of the log ends waiting to be chopped for the stove. As soon as he grabbed his jacket from the hook, I was at his heels like a second dog, dumber in canine ways but just as loyal and underfoot. Some days he’d order me to stay in our yard. Other days, by the caragana hedge, he’d tell me to hide and he’d count to ten, and then he’d never find me. Tiny wasn’t sent away unless the games spread too far afield. “Go home, Tiny,” he’d say, and she’d wend slowly down the block, head and tail lowered. I knew exactly how she felt.
    On winter mornings from the picture window, I’d watch Tiny and my brother head off on his paper route, her trotting ahead, running up the steps to the houses that took the news and passing those that didn’t. Our neighbours thought this was the smartest, cutest thing and tipped my brother with change left over from the milkman. Once I went off with them because Mom was curling in a bonspiel out of town and had left the house early to make the first game. All down the block, every house or so, Tiny leaped straight up, as if springs had been buckled to the bottom of her paws, so that she could see above the snow piled on both sides of the shovelled walk. When my brother’s bag was almost empty, he lifted me and set me inside on top of the papers he had left, Tiny bounding ahead on her short legs and doubling back. I was so proud and happy. If he’d told Tiny any time, “Go home,” she’d have known exactly where to go, but she didn’t have to. The three of us had work to do, lights coming on one by one in the windows down the winter streets, the snow blue as flax just before the dawn.
    Because my brother tossed so much in bed, Tiny slept with me. A cranky little dog, she’d bite if I moved my feet. I learned to lie like a courtly lady on a tomb, dog on a carnelian cushion at my feet. No one would have guessed in the morning I’d lain all night in that neat bed.
    MOST SUNDAYS in the summer, we drove to Grandma and Grandpa Ford’s farm thirty miles from Swift