Thaw

When the first truck hit Nevin’s dog, the howls echoed off the brick walls of First United Methodist Church.

 It was in March in the East End where snow piled on the corners higher than the first story of our house. The depth of ice on the lake measured in feet. Coal soot sat on the snow and in the evening, when I washed my face the washcloth ran from gray to black. The whole neighborhood had dirty little houses.

 My family was moving south the next day, from a city grid to the open fields of a small farming town. Two men had parked a moving van on our street. The driver said he’d sleep in the back of the cab. The other, younger man said he’d sit on the seat and probably never sleep. My father invited them in to sleep on our sofa sitting up.

 Nevin was my friend from third grade. We ran when we heard the howl, but Nevin ran winding his leg in semicircles, a half-block back. Nevin had a stiff leg set in the years before surgeons had learned how to reconstruct a knee that had turned a one-eighty when Nevin was spun by the fist of his father. A depressed coal-hopper feeder, Nevin’s father would scream so loud after dinner that families two blocks in all directions cringed, muscles remained tense for an hour. Conversation shrank until he drank himself to sleep. After that, Nevin’s mother would start her litany of bedtime threats.

 Tall and bony, Nevin, already one grade behind in school, took the beatings from his father intended for his brother and sister and mom, and beatings from his mom intended for his brother and sister.

 Nevin swung the leg around like a stick and let smaller kids ride on his boot never understanding how watchers-on debased him through laughter and derisive cheering. I did, too, when he wasn’t around.

 He loved his dog, a golden he called it, but red in color, as if Nevin’s blood had overflowed from his heart through constant petting and dyed her fur. She was more than consolation and companion—she was a kindness he never knew from others.

 Gavan, his younger brother, beat him to the block, to the blood, to the dog. He wooed, and the dog softened, licked Gavan’s hand, so Gavan lay down by it.

 The second truck hit Gavan as if the driver had not seen him, and kept going as if the driver had not felt the bump his chassis and shocks must have.

 Nevin hobbled to his brother and his dog and a loud piercing sobbing cry came over the same four-block diameter of his father’s anger, as if a shawl of God’s displeasure had covered our neighborhood. Two mothers checked on Gavan, unconscious, legs contorted as if lacking bones. One tried to take Gavan, but Nevin thrust her away with a flurry of his hands. One tried to pull Nevin back, but he stayed.

 My mother came and took me by the shirt-collar home. I heard an ambulance depart. My father told me later it took three men to pry Gavan’s body from Nevin. Gavan survived, a ruptured spleen, a broken pelvis.

 No one could pry away the dog.

 I remember them bound, as if one, the raw bones of Nevin gathering them all, the dark poverty of our houses, the twilight, the silence of that night.

 We moved the next day to the farmlands.

 My father told me the thaw up north came in late April. The ice on the lake did not fully break until May.

 To this day I still see Nevin leg out and stiffened, dog seized in the rigor of pain, Gavan clutched, limp, frozen.

 For me, the thaw has never come.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California. He has a digital chapbook available, Little Popple River , from Red Wolf Editions, and print chapbook from A Filament Drawn so Thin from Red Bird Chapbooks.