• Home
  • Blog
  • Current
  • Archives
  • Shop
  • Donate
  • Subscribe
  • Contests
  • About
    • Contact
    • Submit
    • Media Kit
    • Resources
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Bev Trimpy’s Dog

Dappled Things

Honorable Mention, J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction
Ryan Rickrode

The house was ready for the wedding guests. She had cleaned it, literally, from top to bottom, starting with the cobwebs in the ceiling corners. She had put fresh sheets on all the beds, even her own, and the kitchen floor, freshly mopped, was so shiny it looked like a piece of polished jewelry. The bride was an intern at the church, her family among its longest and most upstanding members, and Bev had offered spare rooms to whichever out-of-town guests needed to be housed. She was doing this out of the goodness of her heart.

That night she walked from room to room imagining the groomsmen who would fill it and feeling satisfied with the preparations she’d made. It wasn’t often it felt good being in this big empty house. Long ago she’d painted the walls in the house bright colors—the living room lemonade yellow, the dining room red as grapes, the bedrooms green like the Atlantic Ocean—but she seldom noticed the colors anymore. The kitchen was sapphire. She walked into the kitchen and admired it. The chairs were spaced perfectly around the table in the breakfast nook. And then she stepped in it: a soft brown curlicue of dog shit on her clean kitchen floor.

She grabbed the dog by the collar and thrust him into the car. Enough was enough. She drove to the top of the hill, where the woods were alive with the electric hum of insects in the summertime. The air was warm. The moon was ominously and appropriately full. Without unclicking her seatbelt, Bev reached over and threw open the passenger side door. The dog hopped out. He was a small fox terrier, woolly haired and yappy as all get out, not much bigger than the microwave. He jaunted toward the woods, then paused to look over his shoulder at her. The dog smiled, wagged its tail. Bev shouted, “Go away! Go away, you godforsaken beast!” The dog gave a laughing bark and then tore off into the brush, and that was that. There were predators in those woods and the dog was not smart. He never came when Bev called his name. Most likely his fox terrier instincts would make him stick his snout into some snake’s hole and that would be the end of him. She felt a twinge of guilt, a half teaspoon’s worth and then no more.

She looked at the moon and then drove back down the hill. She told herself that she would now be able to enjoy a little peace and quiet, but she didn’t really believe that. Not-barking was one thing. Silence was a different thing. The emptiness of the house was one of the hardest things.

The phone was ringing in the kitchen when Bev unlocked the side door. It was Amelia Johnson from up the road. She said, “Bev, we found your dog! He hopped right up into the cab of Kurt’s truck when we called to him. We’re gonna drive him
on over.”

 

The groom arrived first, in gym shorts and a t-shirt, all smiles—the bride had dropped him off—and then the groomsmen trickled in that evening, in ones and twos, and by Friday morning the house was full of them. They were northern boys, tall and loud but, for the most part, very polite. They darted, shower-pinked and half-naked, between the bedrooms and the bathroom while Bev fixed them breakfast. It was the morning before the big day, and the boys were in high spirits, loud and full of jokes. She cooked two pounds of bacon, and they ate it all. It was good to have the smell of boy in the house again.

They were sipping at the last of their coffees when one of the groomsmen, the insurance salesman, asked, “What’s your
dog’s name?”

“I don’t call him anything,” Bev said without looking up from the suds in the sink. The dog, penned up all morning in the dining room, had been barking for so long she’d stopped hearing it. Now the barking came back into focus, shrill. “He’s my son’s dog. My son named him Bark Obama, but I just call him Git. Git!” she shouted, and the dog got quiet. “My son got a job in a recording studio down in Atlanta, moved into a no-pets apartment, so I got stuck with the dog. My children don’t come by much anymore—”

“Thank you for breakfast, Bev,” the groom said loudly as he stood. He stretched, scraping his knuckles on the ceiling, and then patted his stomach. The groomsmen echoed his thanks as they scooted from their chairs. They were heading to the church to set up tables for the reception, then it was off to laser tag and mini golf before the rehearsal dinner.

They were good boys. The weekend at her house was supposed to be a gift to them, not some desperate bid to staunch her own gaping loneliness. Not entirely. She shouldn’t have mentioned her family. She dipped their coffee cups into the dishwater, washed them out, and then sat down at the kitchen table. She opened her prayer book and began to pray from the Psalms as she did each morning, slowly, in a whisper: “Let us give thanks to the Lord, for his mercy and for the wonders he does for his children.”

 

For fifteen hours a week, Bev volunteered with an end-of-life care organization, reading to people who were dying. She read all sorts of things: newspaper articles, e-mails, mystery novels, inscriptions in old yearbooks, whatever the patient wanted. The organization didn’t tell her what each person was dying of, but often the patients would and sometimes she could guess. She had no idea what ailed Mr. Perkins, a small brittle man of almost ninety. He was a retired high school English teacher, and the only thing he wanted read was The Old Man and the Sea. They were on their fourth time through and would have been on their fifth or sixth except Mr. Perkins liked to interrupt with little lectures. He had spent his whole life going back and forth on the question of whether or not Santiago died at the end and wanted to reach a definitive conclusion before he reached the end of his own story. On her last visit, he had confided to Bev that he felt they were close to a breakthrough.

Bev picked up where they had left off last week: “‘Fish,’ he said, ‘I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.’”

Mr. Perkins interjected. “Santiago’s struggle with the fish is, of course, his struggle with himself.”

“Of course,” said Bev, and she read on.

Each time she read the book she liked it a little bit more than the time before. She was invested in Santiago. She wanted to believe that there was a certain sort of dignity, heroism even, that could emerge after you’ve fought and fought and lost. The sentences were becoming old and familiar like the Psalms in her prayer book, and it felt good to form them with her tongue. She knew how the story ended, but each time she read it aloud she found herself hoping Santiago would overcome. She flashed with anger every time she got to the part with the sharks.

 

When the groomsmen returned that evening, they bunched up around the kitchen island (where she had strategically set out a dish of candy) and gave her dramatic accounts of their laser tag battle. They spoke warmly of the food served at the rehearsal dinner, and the groom just smiled. Bev showed the boys pictures on her phone of a snake she’d found the week before, just outside the back door, a red snake draped across the back step with his head buried in the flowerbed. He was thick as Bev’s wrist and bloated in the middle with a lump of eaten animal, possibly a small cat. With a shovel she’d tried to pull him out of his hole, but the snake was like one long muscle. He held fast, so she let him live. She would have crushed his head, but she didn’t have the heart to cut him in half.

The insurance salesman shifted nervously. “He’s still
out there?”

“There’s a lot of snakes out there.”

After her snake story, none of the groomsmen wanted to go out and bring in their rented tuxes from the cars, but they did anyway. Bev sat down in bed with a book she’d borrowed from Mr. Perkins, another Hemingway one called The Nick Adams Stories, but she kept the book folded in her lap, her eyes closed, and enjoyed the sound of the screen door creaking open and banging shut as the boys went in and out. The mingle of their voices was pleasant until the jokes gave way to calls—“Here boy! Hey, come here! Here boy!”—and there was a knock at her bedroom door. “We accidentally let the dog out.”

She joined the boys on the back steps.

“He did a lap around the house, and we thought we could grab him, but then he shot into the woods,” the insurance salesman explained as the others walked around the yard, calling into the trees. The night air was warm and thick and humming with insects. It smothered their voices.

“It’s no use,” she said. “He doesn’t come when he’s called. He won’t come back.” The groomsmen looked guilty and distressed, ready to tramp through the brush to retrieve the sorry creature, snakes or no. Bev said, “It’s okay. I was tired of him anyway. Either he’ll be back in the morning or he won’t.” She was sounding passive aggressive again, she could hear it in her voice, but it was true, she didn’t care. The dog didn’t love her, and she didn’t love the dog. So why couldn’t she sound like she wasn’t upset? The groom hung his head. He looked like a
sad sunflower.

Bev sighed. “I suppose I could drive up the hill and see if he’s there.”

She got in her car and drove up the hill, and she shouted the dog’s stupid name: “Bark! Bark! Get your sorry hide up here in this car!” She shouted into the woods, and all she heard were the insects and beyond the insects the sound of the creek. She drew in a breath and raised her voice an octave. “Dog, I swear, I will kill you dead before this day ends!”

And the dog came crashing through the trees. He leapt onto the passenger seat, turned in a circle, and sat down. His tail beat happily against the seat back.

“You stupid creature,” Bev said as she shut his door and slid back into the driver’s seat. She started the engine, then reached over and scratched him behind his ear.

 

The wedding was a traditional affair, with organ music and the age-old vows, all of it beautiful because it was so rightly solemn. The only disappointing thing was that the mother of the groom had not introduced herself to Bev at the reception. Lord knew the woman had more pressing things than to meet the woman who had (lovingly) housed her son and his friends these past two days, but there was something about the way her fingers curled so delicately around her water glass that made Bev feel dismissed. She left the reception before the bride and groom made their big exit and snapped a picture of the groomsmen in the parking lot writing “Just Married” on the windows of the groom’s car.

At home she cleaned up a dog turd in the kitchen, gave the dog a dog treat, and then sealed herself in the master bathroom with a glass of red wine. She soaked in hot, bubbly water for an hour and tuned out the sharp shrieking barks of the dog. The scripture Pastor Folgers had preached from at the wedding had surprised her: the story of Jesus turning the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, the point being that with Jesus around things were better, especially in marriages. She took another sip of wine. There were mornings when she believed it, that with Jesus things were better, mornings when she could feel the Spirit coursing through her like blood. On the mornings she didn’t there were the Psalms, read slowly, a word at a time, rolled in the taste of coffee on her tongue. Lord, sometimes this life seems so long.

She had tried online dating, but she did not have the strength of Santiago, eighty-four days without a fish. No. She had received a few messages and sent none. The most promising prospects always turned out to be Baptists, and Bev had long ago had her fill of Baptist men. She was Presbyterian. And besides, she wasn’t even sure that she wanted a man. Maybe all she really wanted was a roommate. Her late husband (as she sometimes liked to think of him) had had much success in the realm of internet romance: He had reconnected with an old high school sweetheart through Facebook, and Bev had caught him. There were times when Bev felt that the internet had betrayed her. It wasn’t all eBay and cat pictures.

The groom was, by now, in the air, off with his bride on a flight to Cozumel, where his stepfather owned a condo, but the groomsmen were coming back, filing through the side door and into the kitchen. They were staying one more night and leaving early in the morning to catch flights or to make the long drive back north. She cinched her robe and went out to meet them.

 

In the morning, when she woke, the groomsmen were gone and the house was quiet (the dog being a late riser). But their smell lingered. She thought she could feel something of their energy still hanging in the dust in the air. One of them had left his tie hanging on the towel bar in the bathroom, and there was one slice of pizza left in the pizza box on the island. Mostly, though, they were gone. She stripped the sheets from the bed and put them in the washer before she stepped outside to go to church.

The snake—because surely it was the same fat red snake she’d seen in the flowerbed—was sunning itself on the gravel of the driveway. It didn’t even look at her when she came out the door. She crushed his skull with a shovel, killing him with one blow, and then scooped him up. The body hung limp and lifeless on the shovel as Bev carried it to the woods.

She arrived at church late, but in time for the message. Pastor Folgers continued his sermon series on the fruits of the Spirit by preaching about peace, peace being not the absence of conflict, but the presence of a steadfast inner tranquility. He preached about the difference between acceptance and resignation. He made Bev feel as though it was her own fault that she was unhappy. She wondered if Mr. Perkins was unhappy. Whenever she read to him he seemed too preoccupied to be happy or sad.

Bev almost always remained after church to talk with the others who remained after church to talk, but today she went straight home. She went straight home and transferred the bed sheets from the washer to the dryer and then walked through the rooms of the house feeling dissatisfied, looking for coasters to collect and tables that had shifted out of place. Several minutes went by before she realized the dog was gone.

How had she not noticed those tendrils of silence all through the house? How had the dog gotten out? He had snuck out, she was certain, with the groomsmen, when it was dark, and now he was gone. She went from room to room, checking behind sofas and the washing machine, calling out to him, and each empty room, each unanswered shout, made her feel a little more frantic, a little more alone in the house. She drove up to the top of the hill and cried out into the woods, “Dog! Dog, come back!” But the dog did not come back. It occurred to her that perhaps there was too much pleading in her voice, that the dog was remaining away to make her suffer. It occurred to her that she was attributing too much intelligence to the dog. The dog out there with all those snakes. It occurred to her that the dog could already be dead. The dog was not dead—in fact, the phone would be ringing when she walked back into the house. It would be Amelia Johnson with the dog in Kurt’s truck. Bev did and did not believe this.

The phone was not ringing when she returned to the house, so she removed the sheets from the dryer and folded them as neatly as she could. She stored them in the linen closet. There was no point in making the beds. She sat down at the kitchen table, opened her prayer book, and began to pray, slowly, a word at a time, while her ears strained for the sound of a dog barking in the distance.

 

Filed Under: Fiction, SS. Peter and Paul 2015

Instructions for Waking

Dappled Things

Jennifer Hartenburg

after reading Mary Oliver

You will not long remember
which part is dream and
which is waking parable.
Having filled your head 
with American poems—
virgilian guides—you’ve
waded into sleep’s black wood
a more primitive 
you crashing through

		the tangled 
ripe undergrowth. None
can say what thrushes wing there,
what honeyed berries 
swell wild in the bush, what
litanies, what rites.
As dawn returns, you 
return more nearly to your 
self, growing, perhaps,

more conscious of your children 
sleeping lightly now
nearby. Light laps like water 
along the shore where
you know what you must do, what
herculean feat.
Now at the frozen mountain
lake that is your life,
you take 

		a mammoth hammer
so large you cannot
wield it—and poise it even
so above your head.
Bearing down with force, you smash
the white glistening 
plane, opaque and lovely, but
not before the ice, 
hexagons expanding, cracks

the dam you did not 
know was there. The crystal slabs
of all that floating 
ice refracting light in each
direction will blind 
you. Dizzy you will fall down
and under water.
You may wonder then whether
and which way 

		to swim,
the press of searing 
water constricting you on
every side. Perhaps
you will fight the flow a while,
limbs frogging toward
the surface, a warmer more
familiar light, lungs
burning. It 

		doesn’t matter. 
You will not ever
breathe again—not like that. Pray
for gills. Fighting, or
no, you will come to the lip 
of the lake, crowning 
round out the breach in the dam.
You might slip-slide straight
through, or the water

		may squeeze 
for hours nudging 
inch by slow inch, but sooner
or later you will 
emerge from your tense matrix
to find yourself flung
wide and spilling down mountains 
in the roaring stream.
Bruised, you will come 

		to cliff fall
after cliff fall, swan 
diving ever down and down,
eternally drowned.
Looking about, you will see
gilled angels splitting
the water, leaping in spasms 
of wonder at 
		your side.

Filed Under: Poetry, SS. Peter and Paul 2015

SS. Peter and Paul 2015

Dappled Things

PP 2015 cover no bleed

Feature

On the Necessity of Hussar Armour Gabriel Olearnik
The Winged Horsemen Andrzej Wiktor

Fiction

Bev Trimpy’s Dog Ryan Rickrode
Honorable Mention, J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest

The Sister’s Inheritance Sean Madden

Essays

Taught to Love: Redemptive Questioning and Natural Theology in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
Stephen Mirarchi

The Largest Stone Silvia Foti

Poetry

Words for My Goddaughter on the One Year Anniversary of Her Baptism Dante Di Stefano
Day 49: Seen from the Moon, Your Lungs Are Water Laura Hanna
Primo Dolorem Rosalind Kaliden
The Road to Emmaus Geoffrey Smagacz
Brushy Creek Matthew Ulland
Instructions for Waking Jennifer Hartenburg
The Gardener Bree Devones Hsieh
The Road to Montserrat Karl O’Hanlon
Hymns to Our Lady of La Salette Karl O’Hanlon
Songs in Drought Sarah Winter
The Carpenter Sarah Winter
Three Hymns to Our Lady Sarah Winter
Resurrection (an Aubade) Cindy St. Onge
His Title His Glory Mike Aquilina
On the Shore Mark D. Bennion
Spring during a War Lenae Nofziger
Come Dew, Come Rust Peter Caccavari
Southern Louisiana, August 31, 2005 Gary Wilkens
A Jealous Lover on How to Examine the Conscience Michael Biehl
Pediatrics Michael Biehl

Visual Art

The Winged Horsemen Andrzej Wiktor

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

$13.00 – Purchase SS. Peter & Paul 2015 Issue Checkout Added to cart

Filed Under: SS. Peter and Paul 2015, Table of Contents

On the Necessity of Hussar Armor

Dappled Things

Gabriel Olearnik

horseman1

Duelist, Andrzej Wiktor Gabriel Olearnik is depicted wearing his hussar armour whilst drawing the sabre or szabla, the traditional side arm of Polish nobility.

“A chicken in every pot, and a battle-harness in every home.” Words to ponder, words to live by. So what do I mean? Well, no half measures, dilution or counterfeits. An articulated set of gleaming steel, with a breastplate, backplate, oriental style bracers, a lobster-tail helmet and a gorget to protect the neck. (The neck always needs protection, it’s one of those things you learn quickly when people are trying to kill you). You need one, I need one, we all need one and, should it assist, I can point you in the direction of some armourers who will furnish you with appropriate wares. You should anticipate a wait of about a year as the parts emerge rough from the forge and slowly take on a complete shape. And yes, it is advisable to have a spare set, to deal with those occasions when your best suit is out being polished and you have some guests to entertain or perhaps a would-be-burglar to terrify. I suspect that when someone goes out to burgle a house, they are really looking for light and marketable luxury goods to sell on or fence. They were probably not expecting you in six feet of burnished steel as part of the bargain. Well, surprise!

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Of course, in this world of frenetic intemperance, we will have the scoffers. This does not apply to you, of course, reader. I could detect your impeccable culture immediately. But they will say—pointless! Exorbitant! Childish! A fantasy! And—pointless! (This will not prevent them from asking for pictures, however, so that they can display them in whichever medium garners the most attention). Nevertheless, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires a justification for certain actions, and I can defend this one on the grounds of the beautiful, the good, and the true. Those are indeed worthy defences, which I intend to rely on, the basis of art and surest ground of an artist. But you want more, don’t you? So you’ll get more. The very nature of the thing, those three fundamentals working their way out in particular cuts and edges. So, in three words: arrest, invincibility, and hiddenness.

Beauty, especially extreme beauty, has on occasion elements of violence and paralysis. It strikes you as a blow, the shudder you have in a car as it stops suddenly, throwing you against the safety belt. And yes, the word stunning has been overused and it now appears as a description of everything from apartments to Tinder profiles. But this armour is stunning, is arresting, drawing in the light and your attention, demanding both. Which is what you would expect. When hussar knights appeared on the battlefield, this quality was supposed to intimidate—the usual stuff—riders, pale horses, and all Hell breaking loose.

Lancer - The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.

Lancer – The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.

There is also the distinct experience of wearing the armour. Normally, a strike to your chest would hurt. With a stick, you might take some bruises, perhaps crack a rib. With a sword or a hammer, it’s game over. In armour, though, you feel the impact but are utterly unharmed. The shape of the breastplate encourages blows to skitter off to the left or right. Perhaps you recall the old Norse myths about the god Balder, where everything in the universe apart from mistletoe swore not to harm him? Then the other gods played a game where they threw weapons and rocks and him—and found him invulnerable. This made them happy. It is one thing to read about it, another to feel confidence and euphoria, adult and child within you gloriously radiant. You are not just impassable. You have become impassibility, and nothing can hurt you.

And finally, hiddenness. In Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, the character of Death has a conversation with his granddaughter. (Don’t ask.) Here’s how it goes, with Death speaking first:

“Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.”

“They’re not the same at all!”

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor - The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor – The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.

“You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.”

“And yet”—Death waved a hand.

“And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some . . . some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.”

 

Death always gets the last word, and here he’s right again. There isn’t a single atom of courage in the universe, not an ounce of nobility. There isn’t any measure of bravery, and as for identity, you can’t, for instance, show yourself being Polish or American or French in any other way than making it physically manifest. Art is a type of sacramental. It is the means by which the conversation of the living and the dead is prolonged. It is a proof for who we are and what we value. We have to become the winged horsemen, the angel knights, to show the angels inside us.

And here, dearest reader, you should imagine me smiling, and it is a real smile, with humour, but also hard, a grin which shows the edge of teeth, and because certain things are both funny and true—there is something wild in my eyes, something untameable, which speaks of the pride of a tribe that was long ago and far away, of the very deepest woods and campfires in the Old Country, of dark forests and tangled, where, if you pause and listen, you can still hear the griffins calling to each other and, ever so faintly, the wings of eagles.

The Winged Horsemen

Andrzej Wiktor

Introduction

This series depicts a particular type of cavalry unit unique to Poland: the hussars. The hussars were active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were characterized by their singular appearance and fortitude. They were largely undefeated during their period of operation, often taking on opponents when outnumbered three to one or more. Their most famous engagement was the relief of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

The photographs depict contemporary Poles dressed in historical reproductions of hussar armor. The participants are associated with an re-enactment society based in the castle of Gniew (g-nyeah-fff) in North Poland.

Andrzej Wiktor and Gabriel Olearnik are personal friends. When Gabriel saw Andrzej’s series of “Knighthood” pictures a few years ago, he suggested that they work on something in the future. A few months ago, they met and agreed to produce a revised series of photographs to accompany Gabriel’s new essay.

Captain, Andrzej Wiktor – The characteristic half plate armour of the hussars is shown on a regimental officer here. He wears a delia coat and carries a horsemen’s hammer as a mark of office.
Sergeant, Andrzej Wiktor – Hussars carried firearms to defeat cavalry. Note the powder horn and cartridge box worn on the chest.
Man-at-arms, Andrzej Wiktor – The most essential armor component is always the protection for the head. Hussar helms were open fronted with a lobster tail construction shielding the neck. This offered a fine combination between defense, mobility and comfort.

Veteran, Andrzej Wiktor – A hussar’s defenses consisted of metal armor on front, with the back protection often being the pelt of an exotic animal. This veteran wears a leopard skin cloak.
Armorer, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Lancer, Andrzej Wiktor – The success of a hussar charge was based on their hollow lance, the kopia. Up to 20 feet long, it proved its worth in countless engagements.
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor

Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Hussar, Andrzej Wiktor
Duelist, Andrzej Wiktor – Gabriel Olearnik is depicted wearing his hussar armour whilst drawing the sabre or szabla, the traditional side arm of Polish nobility

Filed Under: Art and Photography, Essays, SS. Peter and Paul 2015

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

Newsletter

Sign up to receive the latest news from Dappled Things.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Have you enjoyed our content online or in print during the past year?

Dappled Things needs the support of its readers over and above the cost of subscriptions in order to continue its work.

Help us share the riches of Catholic art and literature with our impoverished culture by donating to Dappled Things.

Archives

Home
Blog
Current
Shop
Subscribe
About

Copyright © 2021 Dappled Things · Staff Forum · Log in

Graphics by Dominic Heisdorf · Website by Up to Speed