The sixth and smallest pup was brindled, black on gray, didn’t even look like he belonged in the litter. But a litter could have two different sires, Kenan knew. That old gray mongrel down the street must have jumped the fence one day when nobody was watching. “You going to be a jumper, too, boy?” he whispered. It was comical and sad, the way the runt mewled like a cat. Kenan slipped his hand under him gently and scooped him out of the nest. “What’s the matter, little barky?”

He sighed. Maybe this one wasn’t going to make it. Dandy was an old girl to be having pups, and not all of her teats were giving milk. “Got a cold belly, do you?” Kenan carried the runt into the kitchen in the crook of his arm and fed it from a baby bottle he had borrowed from Hattie, the cook, figuring he might need it. He’d been around dogs all his life, and not every pup had what it took to make it in this world. In his younger days, when he’d run a dozen field dogs, he might have let the runt die. But he didn’t keep sporting dogs anymore—Dandy was just the family pet. And the years had mellowed him. He shook his head—if the boys at the Light Infantry could see him now, perched on a kitchen stool in his athletic clothes, nipple-feeding a mongrel runt pup.

The hell with it, he figured, and laughed out loud. His voice filled the kitchen, and he laughed again just to hear it. What was the joy of being a strong man, if not reaching a hand out to the helpless?

He was an elder in the Presbyterian church now. He had learned such things. His life was settling into a deep goodness. He could see it in Mary’s smile as she played the piano in the evenings when it was just the two of them, home alone. Feel it in the shy way she touched his cheek, and the way she went breathless, after all these years, when he suddenly hooked her around the waist and drew her into his big embrace.

The puppy fell asleep feeding. He put it back with the litter, tucked into Dandy’s belly, and went into the house to change clothes.

The frame house—he’d built it almost thirty years ago—was bigger now, with the children grown. Time was, he’d felt crowded in that house, with Mary and the children—Mary Lily, Jessie, Sarah, and Bill Junior—and all their friends jostling and talking and playing underfoot. He used to retreat to the woods and fields, stay out for days, sometimes just watching, listening, walking, not shooting anything, until he was ready to come back into the city.