Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Author:Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

CHAPTER 9

I can’t move. Seems as if the sky’s swirling around above me, tree branches going every which way. Ma’s face even looks different from down on the ground.

Shiloh, of course, goes right over, tail wagging, but all the steam’s gone out of me.

“How long have you had this dog up here?” she asks. Not one trace of a smile on her face.

I sit up real slow and swallow. “ ’Bout a week, I guess.”

“You’ve had Judd’s dog up here a week, and you told him you didn’t know where it was?”

“Didn’t say I didn’t know. He asked had I seen him, and I said I hadn’t seen him in our yard. That much was true.”

Ma comes around to the trunk of the pine tree, unfastens the wire that holds the fencing closed, and lets herself in. She crouches down in the soft pine needles and Shiloh starts leaping up on her with his front paws, licking at her face.

I can’t tell at first how she feels about him, the way she leans back, away from his dripping tongue. Then I see her hand reach out, with its short, smooth fingers, and stroke him.

“So we’ve got ourselves a secret,” she says at last, and when I hear her say “we,” I feel some better. Not a lot, but some.

“How come you to follow me up here tonight?” I want to know.

Now I can tell for sure her eyes are smiling, but her lips are still set. “Well, I had my suspicions before, but it was the squash that did it.”

“The squash?”

“Marty, I never knew you to eat more’n a couple bites of squash in your life, and when you put away a spoonful of that to eat later, I knew for sure it wasn’t you doing the eating. And then the way you’ve been sneaking off every night . . .” She stops stroking Shiloh and turns on me. “I wish you’d told me.”

“Figured you’d make me give him back.”

“This dog don’t belong to you.”

“Mine more than Judd’s!” I say hotly. “He only paid money for him. I’m the one who loves him.”

“That doesn’t make him yours. Not in the eyes of the law, it doesn’t.”

“Well, what kind of law is it, Ma, that lets a man mistreat his dog?”

Ma just sighs then and starts stroking Shiloh’s head. Shiloh wiggles a few inches closer to her on his belly, rests his nose against her thigh, tail going whick, whack, whick, whack. Finally Ma says, “Your dad don’t know about him?”

I shake my head. More silence. Then she says: “I never kept a secret from your dad in the fourteen years we’ve been married.”

“You ain’t going to tell him?”

“Marty, I’ve got to. He ever finds out about this dog and knows I knew but didn’t tell him, how could he trust me? If I keep this one secret from him, he’ll think maybe there are more.”

“He’ll make me give him back to Judd, Ma!” I could hear my voice shaking now.

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