The Power of the Dog Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Thomas Savage

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Afterword

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley.

  Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.

  Phil is a vicious sadist, with a seething contempt for weakness to match his thirst for dominance; George has a gentle, loving soul. They sleep in the room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years.

  When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins an relentless campaign to destroy his brother’s new wife. But he reckons without an unlikely protector.

  From its visceral first paragraph to its devastating twist of an ending, The Power of the Dog will hold you in its grip.

  WITH AN AFTERWORD BY ANNIE PROULX

  About the Author

  Thomas Savage was born on 25 April 1915 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a large sheep-ranching family. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and on his mother’s remarriage Savage moved with her to Montana. He studied at the University of Montana and worked as a ranch hand for several years, but when an article he wrote on horse-breaking was published in Coronet magazine in 1937, Savage enrolled at Colby College in Maine to study English. He went on to have a variety of jobs, including welder, insurance man and plumber as well as teaching English at Brandeis and Vassar. His first novel, The Pass, was published in 1944 and he went on to write twelve more, including The Power of the Dog. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980. Thomas Savage died in Virginia on 25 July 2003, aged eighty-eight.

  OTHER WORKS BY THOMAS SAVAGE

  The Pass

  Lona Hanson

  A Bargain with God

  Trust in Chariots

  The Liar

  Daddy’s Girl

  A Strange God

  Midnight Line

  The Sheep Queen

  Her Side of It

  For Mary, with Love

  The Corner of Rife and Pacific

  For my wife

  Deliver my soul from the sword

  My darling from the power of the dog.

  – Psalms

  1

  Phil always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down first one and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out, and tossed it into the fire where the branding irons glowed. There was surprisingly little blood. In a few moments the testicles exploded like huge popcorn. Some men, it was said, ate them with a little salt and pepper. ‘Mountain oysters,’ Phil called them with that sly grin of his, and suggested to young ranch hands that if they were fooling around with the girls they’d do well to eat them, themselves.

  Phil’s brother George, who did the roping, blushed at the suggestion, especially since it was made before the hired men. George was a stocky, humorless, decent man, and Phil liked to get his goat. Lord, how Phil did like to get people’s goats!

  No one wore gloves for such delicate jobs as castrating, but they wore gloves for almost all other jobs to protect their hands against rope burns, splinters, cuts, blisters. They wore gloves roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay out to cattle, even simply riding, running horses or trailing cattle. All of them, that is, except Phil. He ignored blisters, cuts and splinters and scorned those who wore gloves to protect themselves. His hands were dry, powerful, lean.

  The ranch hands and cowboys wore horsehide gloves ordered out of the catalogues of Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward — Sears and Sawbuck and Monkey Ward, as Phil named those houses. After work or on Sundays when the bunkhouse was steamy with the water for washing clothes or shaving, fragrant with the odor of bay rum on those about to go into town, they would struggle with their order blanks, hunched over like huge children, biting the end of the pencil, frowning at their crabbed handwriting, puzzling over the shipping weight and the location of their postal zone. Often they gave up the struggle, sighed and turned the job over to one more familiar with writing and numbers, some one among them who had got as far as high school, one who sometimes wrote letters for them to fathers and mothers and remembered sisters.

  But how marvelous to get the order into the mails, how delicious and terrible to wait for the parcel from Seattle or Portland that might include with the new gloves, new shoes for town, phonograph records, a musical instrument to charm away the loneliness of winter evenings when the winds howled like wolves down from the mountain peaks.

  Our very best guitar. Play Spanish-style music and chords. Wide ebony fingerboard, fine resonant fan-ribbed natural spruce top, rosewood sides and back, genuine horn bindings. This is a real Beauty.

  Waiting for their order to get to the post office fifteen miles down the road, they read again and again such descriptions, reliving the filling out of the order blank, honing their anticipation. Genuine horn bindings!

  ‘Well, you fellows looking over the old Wish Book?’ Phil would ask, standing by the stove and stamping the snow off his feet. He would look out into the room, spraddle-legged, his bare hands clasped behind him. Over the years a few of the young men tried to imitate his habit of going barehanded, maybe seeking his approving smile or nod, but their imitations went unnoticed and at last they took up their gloves again. ‘Looking over the old Wish Book?’

  ‘Sure thing, Phil,’ they’d say, proud to call him by his first name, but closing the catalogue under cover of conversation that he might not see them lusting after the pert women who modeled corsets and underwear. How they admired his detachment! Half-owner of the biggest ranch in the valley, he could afford any damned thing he wanted, any automobile, Lozier or Pierce-Arrow, say, but he desired no car. His brother George had once expressed a wish to buy a Pierce, and Phil had said, ‘Want to look like some Jew?’ And that was the end of it. No, Phil didn’t drive. His saddle, hanging by a stirrup from a peg in the big long log barn, was a good twenty years old; his spurs were of good plain steel — no fancy silver inlays, not such spurs as crowded the dreams of others; he wore plain shoes instead of boots, scorned the trimmings and trappings of the cowboy, although in his younger days he was as good a rider as any of them, a better roper than George. With all his money and family, he was just folks, dressed like any hired hand in overalls and blue chambray shirt; three times a year George drove him into Herndon for a haircut; he sat in the front seat of the old Reo stiff as an Indian in his stiff town suit, his imperious nose hawklike under the slate-gray fedora, his jaw jutting. So he sat in Whitey Judd’s barber chair, his long, thin, weathered hands motionless on the cool arms of the chair while his accumulated hair fell in piles to the white-tiled floor around him.

  A drummer, a natty dresser with a flashing stickpin, had once chuckled and questioned Whitey.

  ‘Wouldn’t laugh, if I was you, mister,’ Whitey remarked. ‘He could buy and sell you fifty times over, or anybody else in the valley except his brother. I�
�m proud to have him sit in my chair, mighty proud.’ Snip, snip, snip. ‘Him and his brother are partners.’

  Just so they were, and more than partners, more than brothers. They rode together at roundup time, talked together as if they’d met for the first time, talked of the old days in high school and at a California university where George, as a matter of fact, had flunked out the same year that Phil was graduated. Phil recalled tricks he’d played on other students, friends they’d had — high jinks. Phil had been the bright one, George the plodder.

  It was something of a joint decision when they sold their steers each fall or bought a Morgan stud to improve the saddle stock. Each year Phil looked forward to hunting in October when the willows along the creeks had turned a rusty red and the haze from distant forest fires hung like veils over the mountain peaks. You saw the two of them with their packhorses riding across the flats toward the mountains, Phil with his stubby carbine, or with his thirty-caliber. It was not unusual to see such a relationship between brothers, Phil tall and angular, staring with his day-blue eyes into the distance, then at the ground close by; George stocky and imperturbable, jogging along on a stocky and imperturbable bay horse. They made wagers — who would sight and shoot the first elk? How Phil did relish a meal of elk liver! At night they made camp below timberline and sat cross-legged before the fire talking of the old days and of plans for a new barn that never materialized because that would mean tearing down the old one; they unrolled their beds side by side and together listened in the dark to the song of a tiny stream, no wider than a man’s stride, the very source of the Missouri River. They slept, and woke to find hoarfrost.

  So it had been for years, Phil now just forty. So too they slept in the room they had as boys, in the very brass beds, rattling around now in the big log house since those Phil referred to as the Old Folks had taken off to spend their autumn years in a suite of rooms in the best hotel in Salt Lake City. There the Old Gent dabbled in the stock market and the Old Lady played mah-jongg and dressed for dinner as she always had. Closed off, the Old Folks’ bedroom gathered dust kicked up by the automobiles — more and more of them every day — that putt-putted up the road out front. In that room the air grew stale, the Old Lady’s geraniums died, the black marble clock stopped.

  The brothers kept Mrs Lewis, the cook, who lived in a cabin out back, and she found time to clean the house after a fashion, complaining at every movement of the broom. Gone now was the girl, last of a series, who had waited table and slept upstairs in a tiny room. Her presence might have looked strange in a bachelor establishment, but still the brothers comported themselves with almost shocking modesty as if women still stalked the house. George bathed once a week, entering the bathroom fully clothed, locking the door behind him; silently he bathed, with small splashing and no song; fully clothed he emerged, but followed by the telltale steam. Phil never used the tub, for he did not like it known he bathed. Instead, he bathed once a month in a deep hole in the creek known only to George and to him and, once, one other. He looked around before he went there, should there be prying eyes, and he dried himself in the sun, for carrying a towel would have cried out his purpose. In the fall and spring he had sometimes to break a crust of ice. In the winter months he didn’t bathe. Never had the brothers appeared naked before each other; before they undressed at night they snapped off the electric lights — the first in the valley.

  Nowadays they ate their breakfast with the hired men in the back dining room, but took their dinner and supper as before in the front dining room off white linen, and the tools they used were sterling. It is not easy or desirable to slough off old habits, or to forget who you are, a Burbank with the best connections in Boston, back East in Massachusetts.

  It sometimes worried Phil that George got a far-off look, rocking in his chair, for George’s eyes would suddenly stare out across to the mountain called Old Tom thirty miles away and twelve thousand feet, a beloved mountain, and George would rock and rock and rock, looking across the flat.

  ‘What’s the matter, old-timer?’ Phil would ask. ‘Old mind wandering again?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I say, your mind wandering again?’

  ‘No, no.’ George would slowly cross his heavy legs.

  ‘How about a little cribbage?’ They had kept careful score over the years.

  To Phil, George’s trouble was that he didn’t engage his mind. George was no great reader, like Phil. To George, the Saturday Evening Post was the limit; like a child, George was moved by stories of animals and nature. Phil read Asia, Mentor, Scientific American and books of travel and philosophy the fancy relatives back East sent by the dozen at Christmastime. His was a keen, sharp, inquiring mind — an engaged mind — that confounded cattle-buyers and salesmen who supposed that one who dressed as Phil dressed, who talked as Phil talked, must be simple and illiterate, one with such hair and such hands. But his habits and appearance required strangers to alter their conception of an aristocrat to one who can afford to be himself.

  George had no hobbies, no lively interests. Phil worked in wood. He constructed the derricks that stacked the wild hay — timothy, redtop and clover — hewing out the huge beams with adze and plane. With those clever naked hands he carved those tiny chairs no higher than an inch in Sheraton or the style of Adam; his fingers moved like spiders’ legs, paused briefly sometimes as if to think, for Phil’s fingers had a private intelligence lodged, perhaps, in their padded tips. Seldom did his knife slip, and if it did, he scorned the iodine or Phenol-Sodique, two of the few medicines in the house, for as a family the Burbanks did not believe in medicine. His little wounds healed rapidly once he had wiped them with the blue bandanna he stuffed in a rear pocket.

  Some who knew Phil said, ‘What a waste!’ For ranching was no demanding or challenging occupation, once you had the ranch, and required brawn but little brain. Phil, people marveled, might have been anything — doctor, teacher, artisan, artist. He had shot, skinned and stuffed a lynx with skill that would have abashed a taxidermist. Easily he solved the mathematical puzzles in the Scientific American; his pencil flew. From the pages of the encyclopedia he taught himself chess, and often passed an hour solving the problems in the Boston Evening Transcript that arrived two weeks late. At the forge in the blacksmith shop he designed and hammered out intricate pieces of ornamental iron, firedogs, pokers shaped like swords and tridents; he wished he could have shared his gifts with George, who never caught fire, seldom even smoked, so to speak, who looked forward no longer even to the trips he made to Herndon in the Reo for the bank directors’ meetings and lunch later at the Sugar Bowl Cafe.

  ‘How about teaching you chess, Fatso?’ Phil once asked, looking ahead to evenings before the fireplace. The name Fatso got George’s goat.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Phil.’

  ‘Why not, Fatso? Think it’d be a little tough for you?’

  ‘I never was much of a one for games.’

  ‘You used to play cribbage. Pinochle, sometimes?’

  ‘That’s right, I did, didn’t I?’ And George would pick up the Saturday Evening Post and lose himself in some cheap fantasy.

  Phil was a whistler, and a good one, his tone accurate as a flute’s; he would whistle a merry tune and go into the bedroom and get out his banjo and pick away at ‘Red Wing’ or ‘Hot Time in the Old Town.’ He had taught himself to play and it was fine to see those fingers leaping on the strings. Once it was not unusual, when he played, for George to pad quietly into the room and lie on the other brass bed and listen. But not lately.

  Lately after a tune or two, Phil would get up from the edge of the bed where he sat playing, stand straight, put away the banjo and walk the path through the rustling ryegrass to the bunkhouse.

  ‘Well, fellows,’ he would say, blinking his eyes against the white glare of the gas lamp.

  Once one of the hired hands always rose to give him a chair, some cast-off chair from the Big House.

  ‘Hey — don’t bot
her,’ Phil always said, but someone always did bother — and fruitlessly, for Phil would accept neither chair nor gift from anybody. His visitations interrupted some discussion of whores, politics, horses or love and caused a silence that lasted until the clunk! of a length of firewood shifting in the stove emphasized that silence, and some man, terrified of silence, felt bound to speak.

  ‘What you think of this Coolidge?’ a man might ask, for eventually the Transcript found its way to the bunkhouse where it was used as waste and tinder, but only incidentally to read.

  Then Phil would frown and roll a perfect cigarette with one hand. He knew the value of the pointed silence. ‘Well, I’ll say one thing for him.’ Lighting the cigarette. ‘He’s got the gumption to keep his trap shut.’ And Phil would laugh, and there would be a halting conversation, perhaps of Coolidge. Then maybe one of the younger fellows, hoping to flatter, would ask advice about ordering a saddle. Did Phil think a center-fire or a three-quarter rig the better? Was the Visalia saddle all it was cracked up to be?

  At last Phil would look a little wistful. ‘Well, I guess you fellows must want to roll in.’

  ‘Oh, hell no, Phil.’ And there would follow more talk, perhaps of the work the next day, the overhauling of the mowing machines if the time was spring, the whereabouts of a bunch of wild horses, or Phil might tell an anecdote of Bronco Henry, that best of riders, that best of cowboys, who had taught Phil the art of braiding rawhide. Recently, having finished telling the fellows a story, Phil looked suddenly out the window over the top of the whispering ryegrass to the lighted bedroom window of the Big House. As he watched, the window went suddenly dark. George had not waited up!

  ‘Well, fellows,’ he said with a sad grin, ‘got to hit the hay.’

  When he had gone, one of the new loudmouthed young cowhands spoke right up. ‘Hey — he’s sort of a lonely cuss, ain’t he? Like about what we was saying before he come in, do you guess anybody ever loved him? Or maybe he ever loved anybody?’ The oldest man in the bunkhouse stared at the young fellow. What the young fellow had said was unsuitable, even ugly. What had love to do with Phil? The oldest man in the bunkhouse reached down and patted the head of a little brown bitch that slept close. ‘I wouldn’t want to be saying nothing about him and love. And if I was you, I wouldn’t call him a cuss. It don’t show respect.’

 
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