During the weeks and days of my grandmother’s dying and death she was moved from her apartment in Stillwater, Minnesota, to the hospital in St. Paul and back to a care center in Stillwater, which is on the great St. Croix River. I do not know whether she was happy or not. The maternal side of my family gathered together.
My mother and her second husband came home to Minnesota and rented a cabin on the shores of the St. Croix, staying close and caring, too, and making arrangements.
That cabin was in Copas, as a matter of fact, down on County Road 95, where my father and I would work the shoreline like coons and cast from shore for walleye. I think he caught a catfish once. The mooneyes came out on the surface and I was trying to catch a mooneye, whatever that was, and always failed. We never caught a gamefish. That spot was just one of our ideas, my father’s and mine.
I would stay with them, my mother and her husband, on most nights. We would all be occupied during the day, first at the hospital in St. Paul, then at the hospice in Stillwater, then with packing up grandma’s apartment and getting through the funeral in Taylor’s Falls and brunch in St. Croix Falls after she died finally.
But in the mornings and evenings at the rented cabin down on the St. Croix, I showed off Peppy (the golden girl) and Lucy (the mother’s-milk-white girl) working at heel for my mother and her husband. Then off leash the pups were into woods with us. I taught my mother and her husband to use the cheap orange whistle when necessary and the girls would coming crashing down the hollows back to and right up to us both obediently and just wanting to please, and how we loved that. Sometimes they used the whistle just for kicks.
It was fall with the leaves dying like ducks in a retriever’s dream. There were green and fresh and tarry black walnuts everywhere, and this was a different ecosystem than ours now. It tasted different in the nose and smelled different on the tongue.
When I threw out a bald, lost tennis ball into the river and it started bobbing downstream at a rolling clip of ten miles an hour, and Peppy and Lucy dove in after it, my mother worried. I shrugged my shoulders, “Either they’ll come back with the ball, or they won’t.” No whistle could bring them back from a retrieve on the water.
In the cabin in the evenings my mother, growing older now, drank wine, and her husband drank whiskey, and I drank St. Pauli Girl. I sat on the hardwood floor and spread my legs and called Peppy to me. I laid her in between my legs and bent over and meticulously picked off and killed every wood tick I found. Then I pushed Peppy away, saying “Git!” and over came Lucy and she laid down submissively for some grooming.
I wish I could say something had come full circle. I wish I could conclude with an insightful sentence about my grandmother, and pups, and me and my pups, and my mother, but I can’t.
And unfortunately the only corroborative witness to Peppy’s finally fetching up that old tennis ball, a half-mile downstream later that one night and returning up the shoreline from Crabtree’s Kitchen to the landing at Copas, is dead. Lucy. In the sky. With diamonds.
I am not happy.
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