Then the dog turns away from them, takes a few steps and looks back. He puts the ham carefully down in the middle of the road and says, Come along now. Hurry. Then he grabs onto the ham again, lifts it and starts trotting quickly up the road in the direction he came from. Vanise and Claude reach for their baskets, hoist them to their heads and follow along behind.
The dog moves swiftly, and they can barely keep up. At the top of the hill, he stops a second, looks back at them and steps into the bush. Then it’s down into a tangle of liana vines and low, dense mahoe trees and macca, with the yellow dog darting up and down and over limestone outcroppings and underbrush, the woman, baby and boy with their heavy baskets scrambling along behind, panting in the heat, lashed in the face and on the arms by vines and low branches, losing sight of the dog for an instant, then spotting him again and clambering over stones and fallen trees after him. The baby is awake now and crying, frightened. Vanise ignores the child and scolds Claude, telling him to hurry, run on ahead, don’t lose sight of him!
Soon they find themselves running along a sandy pathway that winds down a narrow defile between two limestone ridges. The dog stops ahead of them a ways and watches them stumble along behind. He drops the ham again, as if to rest a moment, and says loudly, with tricky laughter in his low, smooth voice, Come on, now, Vanise! Don’t tell me you can’t keep up with an old, three-legged dog! He laughs and grabs up the ham and races on, suddenly leaving the path and scrambling up the steep side of the defile to the top of the ridge and over. They follow, out of breath and wet with sweat, Vanise pushing the boy from behind, urging him on. Hurry, Claude, don’t lose sight of him! Get to the top and find him.
At the top, they stop for a second and search the underbrush beyond, low palmettos all the way to a turquoise streak of sea in the distance. They see the tin roofs of scattered cabins and small, cleared patches of ground here and there. He’s gone! the boy wails. I can’t see him. Then, a second later, No, there he is! and he points ahead at a yellow flash of fur on the ridge fifty yards beyond.
When the dog at last picks his way down the rocky side and enters the palmettos, they leave the ridge and in the palmettos come upon a mud flat, circle it halfway, following the dog’s three-legged tracks in the gray mud when they cannot see the dog itself. Then, beyond the mud flat, the ground rises slightly and opens to a grassy field, and they see at the far end of the field a small, unpainted cinder-block house. The dog heads straight for the house, through a corn field, old, dry corn stalks clattering in the afternoon breeze, across a packed-dirt front yard and around the side of the house to the back.
Vanise and Claude run along the windowless side of the house, their breath rough, their clothing wet and stuck with burrs and leaves, and they suddenly come upon the dog lying in the center of the backyard, gnawing at the ham with deep concentration, as if he has been there all afternoon.
There is a door and stoop on the back side of the house, closed, curtainless windows on either side of it. Beyond the dog there is a shed or henhouse made of old doors and roofed over with green corrugated plastic, and beyond the shed, a garden plot with yam poles stuck in the ground and tiny, bright green corn shoots peeping through the dirt. In the distance is a field, then woods, then sea.
Vanise sits heavily down on the stoop, and the boy sits next to her. Before long, their breathing slows, their hearts stop pounding, and their clothes, in the cooling breeze off the sea, loosen and dry. The yellow dog goes on chewing at the ham quite as if they were not present. Beside them squats a large metal drum, a rain barrel with a spout leading to it from the low roof. Lying on the ground next to the barrel is a white enameled cup, and the boy grabs it up, fills it with water and hands it to his aunt, who drinks and hands the cup back in silence. The boy drinks, then sits down again next to Vanise, and they resume waiting.
Will Papa Legba speak to us again? Claude asks.
Just be silent, she whispers. See, even the baby knows how to behave, she adds, looking down at the infant asleep in her lap. Give him water, she commands, pointing toward the dog with her chin, and Claude quickly obeys, filling the cup and placing it with great tenderness a few feet in front of the animal.
The dog studies him, and when the boy has returned to the stoop, lets go of the ham, steps warily toward the cup and slurps at the water. Returning to the ham, the dog curls around it, and holding the meat with his front paws, tears at it with renewed concentration, getting down to the white bone now, licking and chewing, gnawing against it and poking his long pink tongue after the marrow.
