Savage December

Photo by Fleur Treurniet

The first time Lafferty saw her she was standing by the side of the road in Kilduff, a dead dog on the end of her leash. Molly Scanlon was her name. The dog was brown and furry and twisted and dead (Lafferty couldn't name the breed, being neither a dog man nor a cat man, nor even a guppy man), and Molly's mouth had fallen open at the sight of the van speeding away, the van that had just destroyed her dog. A dastardly hit-and-run. Duffy, he learned later, was its name. When the van had vanished round the bend by Connor's News Agent and was gone from sight, her head turned back toward him, a face so homely it was pretty, buck teeth, pointy chin, and eyes like saucers, especially now, so wide in shock and beginning to tear, and the next place they fell was on your man. Nothing was said, and she was in his arms, an embrace transcending the want of words. She needed comfort. He gave it. And himself needing it as well, it seemed, for whatever reason God only knew, but it felt like a comfort he both needed and deserved. They stood hugging, swaying, for some time, dead Duffy on a leash in the gutter at their feet.

The comforting continued in her wee room above the Pig and Whistle, the box of milk he'd been sent to fetch for his wife, Peggy, growing ever more tardy and forgotten into that long, long evening.

At the time, his son, Harry, was five. Since the day he'd learned of his impending paternity, around the time he'd turned the corner at forty years of age, your man had tried to kick the habit of being, as Peggy and her lot would have it, a habitual womanizer, a faithless bastard. A lover of life and women and all mankind was the phraseology he much preferred. He'd not always been successful, but he was getting better; he'd not been able to quit cold turkey, but he was cutting down. Molly was the first time he'd fallen off the wagon in a while.

In her bed, the light failing through the plain yellow curtains, the noise from the Pig and Whistle filling up the gloaming, she asked him hadn't he better be on his way, wouldn't his wife be looking for him? He said she would.

He said, "What about Duffy? Should we not bury him, then?"

"I suppose," said she. "We can't leave the poor thing to rot."

"Should we mark his grave somehow?"

"Sure, he's only a fecking dog, Terrance."

Lafferty considered the wisdom in her words. In the dim light she drew close to him under the covers. In the dimness she was no longer so wretched, no longer a cleaning woman in their nibs's estates, she was not living in this hovel of a room—she was a proud and lovely woman, the scent of talcum on her skin, a scent that made him long for something from a time before he could remember. She'd told him early on that she was pregnant, and after they'd decided where to bury the dog—too soon after, he realized in hindsight—he asked what were her plans for the future. Had she a friend, a family, was there anyone there to help out? There was no one, she said, not really. She sat up in the failing light—a squawk from the bed—and her untamed hair trying to flee her head resembled a halo from the glow through the window beyond. She intended to do the best she could, she told him, and Lafferty, realizing the best she could was scarcely a pot to piss in, imagined her standing bewildered, her baby dead in the gutter at the end of the leash.

How could he not comfort her? She was thirty and homely and brave and no prospects and up the pole...