Scars

Abstract

Margaret Edwards Margaret Edwards was born and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her B.A. at Bryn Mawr, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford. She now teaches creative writing and American poetry at the University of Vermont, Burlington. Having studied poetry writing at Stanford under Donald Davie, she turned to fiction ten years ago and has stayed primarily with that form. Her stories have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Mississippi Review, Redbook, Gallimaufry, and Tri-Quarterly. She has recently completed a novella and has plans for a novel. Scars HIS DOG HAD bitten a child. It was very late in the afternoon when Ted Landy stepped into the kitchen, closed the back door, and took off his gloves. "I've seen the boy," he said. "It doesn't look good." His wife, Joann, was setting the kitchen table for a light supper. She was dressed in a long plaid skirt, a jersey turtleneck and a strand of pearls. "You're going with the girls?" He hadn't expected that. "I thought we said we'd let them go alone this year," he said. "I want to go. It will help me keep my mind off what happened. I should think you'd want some distraction too." She was setting the four places. Ted sat down in his usual chair and watched her align the knife, fork and spoon in front of him. "Well, what about the boy?" Joann did not stop moving, but her voice had the enforced quiet tone, the determined lilt, of anxiety. "It's bad. Very bad. He got bit all right. Lovejoy did a real job on him." "Oh, Ted!" Joann had pulled the paper napkins out of the dispenser. Now she stood holding them. "How bad? You actually saw him?" "Like this." With his finger on his own face Ted drew a line from the middle of his right eyebrow over the bridge of his nose, then another line from the right corner of his mouth into the center of his cheek. The red lines in the boy's face had been sewn with black thread, two angry centipedes. "Over fifty stitches." Joann shook her head. "And he's only eight - in the girls' grade at school. What possessed Lovejoy?" Lovejoy was their Doberman pinscher. He had been a gift to Ted from a friend who owed him money. "Champion stock. Doesn't look like five hundred dollars yet, but he will," said the friend, depositing the wriggling black puppy on the floor where he began to frolic, skidding on the linoleum. Joann had named him. Lovejoy outgrew his name as he began to fulfill the friend's prediction. He became a sleek five-hundreddollar 's worth and loped along the streets of the small Vermont town looking as aggressive, errant, prosperous and acquisitive as a ski tourist. He roamed. He snapped. They had to keep him penned. He loved the family exclusively and threw himself against the cyclone fence at strangers with a ferocity that had, at one time, pleased Ted. That something so elegant and dark and temperamental was protecting him made Ted feel secretly happy, though he protested to friends that he would "do something" about Lovejoy's bad manners. He hung a Beware Dog sign near the garage - "where no one could see it," Joann had pointed out - but he had hung it. It had really never occurred to him that Margaret Edwards The Missouri Review ¦ 207 Lovejoy's threats were real. He thought Lovejoy troublesome, annoying, loud, rude - yet never dangerous. "Damnedif I know what brought it on. But one thingis certain. . ."Ted lethis voice fall so thatJoann could complete the thought for herself. Then he asked, "Where's Lovejoy now?" "In the cellar." Joann placed a folded paper napkin by his fork. She turned to the stove and began to serve the plates. "The girls have been crying and sitting on the stairs hugging him ever since they got home. I think they know." Joanris eyes were red. "And you know too, don't you?" Ted drew her to him, taking the plate of chili from her hands. He...