This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [42]
Norm had been missing all morning. We looked out the front windows for him, the sky hanging low and gray over the dormant earth of the garden. There had been little snow that winter of 1972, and what had fallen so far had not stayed on the ground. Normie’s brown-black coat usually blended into the colors of the earth as he did his morning rounds of his territory, sniffing to find what animals had visited in the night and lifting his leg to pee and let them know whose farm this really was.
“I’ll go give a holler for him,” Mama said, putting on her wool coat and hat with earflaps.
“Hope he didn’t get into a porcupine,” Papa mumbled.
When he wasn’t guarding the compost heaps from squirrels and coons, Norman the Normal Dog, as he’d been dubbed by Papa’s college fraternity brothers, was often getting into some kind of trouble or other. Chasing Puss-o, Helen’s Maine coon cat, onto roofs and trees. Getting sprayed by a skunk and stinking up the whole house so Mama had to wash him in tomato juice. Worst of all for Normie was getting into a porcupine. He couldn’t resist the lumbering animals that poked about the woods and looked so much easier to catch than a raccoon. But when he pounced at them, the wiry gray-white hair stood up on end like armor and the quills seemed to shoot out, hooking barbs into the soft flesh of his mouth and tongue. He’d yelp and skitter away, tail between his legs, his head a pincushion of hurt. “Son of a gun, not again,” Papa would say. I cried, too, as Norm whined and squirmed while Papa pulled out the quills with a pair of pliers.
After the chickens left, Normie had taken their place as my best friend. I liked to nap with him on the padded benches, fitting my head in the soft hollow where his leg haunch and stomach met and waking from common dreams of chasing rabbits in summer, he whining and leg-twitching in his sleep.
“He fell in the dry well hole,” Mama said when she came back from looking for Norm.
She settled him on the couch, his back legs limp and dragging behind. He looked at me with his dark eyes and tried to lick my face.
“Poor old guy,” Mama said, hugging him to her chest. “Your legs are giving out on you.”
“Poor ole Norm,” I said, patting his fur.
“Time for an extra-special diet,” Mama said, heading for the kitchen. “Grated carrots and olive oil have resurrected him many times before. I’ll add some herbs and raw veggies mixed with cooked millet, cod liver oil, brewer’s yeast, and lots of garlic.”
From the couch, Normie-dog rolled over and groaned.
With Normie out of commission, I turned to books.
“Books,” Papa often said, “are the truest of friends.” Papa sat at a long table in the dusky great room of the local library. He had a stack in front of him and was writing into a notepad as columns of light from the windows cut tunnels through the dust and made the curved parts of his ears glow.
“Papa, read me books . . . ,” I said, but Mama gave me a look under heavy brows.
“Shush.” She pressed her finger to her lips. “Whisper.”
“Sss,” I repeated huskily, pressing my finger to my nose. “Whispure.”
Mama tried not to smile.
“Papa is doing research,” she told me softly. “He needs to con-cen-trate.”
Mama took my hand, and we walked down the rows of grown-up books to the children’s section. The books surrounded us like wrapped presents. It was only by opening them that you could find out if they held anything special. I picked out the ones I wanted and we sat at a table with the stack in front of us, just like Papa.
“This one,” I said, choosing one with a picture of a green island surrounded by blue sea on the cover.
When Mama opened the book and started to read, the story reached out and took my hand; it told me I was not alone in the world. In a good story, the characters were telling a secret that you knew was true because you remembered it from somewhere deep inside.
“The cat looked underwater and saw that the island was connected