Ruffly Speaking

grazed my cheekbone, pain radiated to my ear and across my scalp and down my neck. Human fingers wrapped themselves around my ankles. I saw nothing and heard nothing, but I know Steve’s touch. I knew his hands as surely as I knew Rowdy’s big-dog nails and that massive, malamute-perfect heavy-boned chest.
    “Move, for Christ’s sake! Holly, move! Open your damn eyes!”
    And then, miraculously, I was on the grass. Thick smoke swirled around me. “Rowdy! Steve... Oh my God, where is he?”
    A flashlight played on the open door to a hell now backlit by luminous flames. From its mouth emerged the cutout silhouette of an Alaskan malamute, a huge black dog, black face, black paws, black tail, pulling and struggling, head down and awkwardly twisted, taking impossibly slow, labored steps, jaws locked on the burden it dragged, the body of a boy too small for his nine years, light in life, heavy now.
    Dead weight. Ivan.
     

33
     
     In the year of our Lord 1636, two events no-table in the history of Cambridge occurred almost simultaneously. The first has never re-curred. Once founded, Harvard College was what it was and has stayed that way ever since. The sec-ond event took place immediately after the first. As you’ll remember, God let a whole week slip by between Fiat lux and a well-earned rest, but the word Veritas had no sooner passed the lips of the founders of Harvard than they began to congratulate themselves. (Had to be done! Knew it all along! I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I?), and before long, when they’d reached a jolly state of puritanical merri' ment in which no one would listen to a single word that anyone else had to say, an unusually modest and witty founder became responsible for the second notable event, the one that’s been endlessly repeated ever after, the cracking of the old Cambridge joke (A.D. 1636), “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
    When I listen to Leah, I sometimes reflect that, in this regard, Harvard women have finally achieved a status equal to that of Harvard men. “I’m supposed to be the novice,” Leah announced, “and you people are supposed to be the experts. So how come not one of you remembered the first thing, the first thing, about hearing dogs? Watch your dog! Trust your dog!” She caught her breath. “Remember? Trust your dog.”
    We were sitting outside Morris’s house. Matthew had located a couple of garden hoses and two faucets on the foundation of Alice Savery’s house, and he and Doug were making what I suspected were futile efforts to contain the carriage house blaze. Stephanie and Steve had taken Ruffly indoors; Steve needed the bright kitchen light to examine and treat the burns on the dog’s feet. Rita was using Stephanie’s phone to place another 911 call and to call Ivan’s mother, Bernadette. It had been minutes, not the hours it seemed, since Doug had originally called, but as it turned out, he’d innocently given Alice Savery’s name and address. Thus he might as well have told 911 that he wanted to report a false alarm. I’d left Rita with the receiver of the big white phone clamped to her left ear. The hearing aid she’d removed before making the calls was resting on the counter. Or that’s where it was until I palmed it,
    “Trust your dog!” Leah repeated.
    “Leah, that will do,” I said. “You are being—”
    “Leah?” a small voice echoed.
    “Ivan, the fire trucks are coming,” she told him. Ivan Was determined not to miss their arrival. That’s what we were doing outside. “They’ll be here any minute.”
    “Leah, God is everywhere, right?”
    “Ivan!”
    “This is important, Leah.” Scraped and black-smudged, Ivan’s face had lost none of its intense curiosity. Those round violet eyes commanded attention. “Leah, I Was thinking: God is everywhere, is everywhere to start with. But if I go into a room, and the windows are closed and the doors are all locked, and it’s a, uh, confined space... Does that mean that now there’s less of Him? Or does He just get squished up?”
    “Ivan,” Leah said gently, “you don’t need to worry about locked doors anymore. Just, from now on, stay out of people’s yards.”
    “Raccoons don’t,” he countered. “Matthew told us—”
    I stopped listening. Except for the weak, scratchy voice, Ivan sounded like himself. He remembered screaming for help. He also remembered resting his head on the floor by the side door of the carriage house,