The Dog Who Guarded an Empty Yard

The pavement on Fifth had been open since the ninth of March, so Nell walked home down Larch Street instead, and on the fourth evening she stopped in the middle of it. A dog was barking behind a chain link fence, three barks and a pause and three more, and he was not barking at her, or at the car that went by.

Behind the fence stood a house with boarded windows, a porch sunk at the near end, a yard gone to weeds and rust, a swing set whose chains rattled and would not swing. The dog was grey to the eyes, and he faced the far corner where the concrete had washed pale, and he barked at it, and stopped, and barked at it again. Nothing was in the corner. "What is out there?" Nell asked him, and he did not turn.

Larch Street had learned to sleep through him. The children called him the barking dog and pedalled past without slowing, and somebody kind left kibble by the fence in a cracked bowl, never the same somebody twice. Animal control had come out in the first autumn and again the June after, and had twice filed the yard as empty, which was accurate and also wrong.

On the sixth evening Nell brought a folding chair, and on the ninth a notebook, because the barking kept an hour: ten past six, give or take a minute, in rain and out of it. On the tenth she knocked on a door.

"Fox," said Mrs. Boyd, two doors down, who had her answer ready before the question was finished. "There's a fox dens under that shed, always has been, and he's barked at it since the family went, and the whole street knows it."

"At ten past six, every evening?"

"Foxes keep hours, same as anybody."

"There isn't a shed in that yard," Nell said.

"Then he's barking at where it was." Mrs. Boyd put a hand on her door. "Dogs are simple, dear, and that one is half deaf on top of it."

"How long since anybody lived there?"

"Three years in October. Money trouble, and they went in the night near enough, and left him on the porch." The door shut on the last of it.

On the eleventh evening Nell opened the gate. The latch was rusted through and gave at a push, and the gate scraped an arc into the weeds. She knelt at the pale corner with the water bottle from her bag and poured it out over the concrete, and three winters of rain gave up a little of what lay under them, like a page held up to a lamp. A chalk square, then another beside it, then the ghost of a 4.

Eight squares and a number, drawn by somebody who had to kneel to draw them.

At ten past six the dog came off the porch, crossed the grass, and took his place at the edge of the chalk, facing the square a child would land on. He barked three times, stopped, and barked three times more. Nell sat down on the concrete beside him. "All right," she said. "I see it."

She took him home on the second of April, which Mrs. Boyd put down to the fox moving on. He kept the hour for a while: at ten past six he would go to the door of the flat and face east, toward Larch Street.

By June he slept through six o'clock on the rug by her chair, and by the following March, Nell had to look at a clock to tell when the hour had gone.

Loyalty needs someone to see it.