Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

Author:Sarah Bernstein [Bernstein, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

A PRIVATE RITUAL

When my brother returned a few weeks later, I would learn the outline of what happened to the dog. What elsewhere would have been merely ridiculous was treated in the town and surrounding areas as a tragic incident but primarily and clearly an occult one. What I mean by this is that the dog’s phantom pregnancy, alluded to in the opening lines of this account, was understood by the townspeople to have been brought to pass by means covert and malignant, the event and the form of the event a terrible calamity. They were an earthly people, not particularly given to affairs of the spirit, but something came over the townspeople that spring and summer, strange things had been happening, and they would not reach their pinnacle with the affair of the dog, no, and not for a while. I could well understand how the series of misfortunes with regard to the local animal life must have seemed connected, how, added together, they might appear to constitute a concerted, organised or even divine punishment. And yet I did not quite perceive that a cloud of discontent had begun to roil over the town. There were certain indications, signs I would have been able to read had I been paying attention. A sense of things fraying. Yes, strange things had been happening in the countryside, in the blue gloaming of the early hours, at one in the morning, at two or three, sometimes at four and a few times as late as five o’clock, I would hear intermittent blasts, like those caused, for instance – or so I supposed, having never heard the noise in real life, only in films and on television, and so could not be sure, exactly, given the added degree of depth, the specific topographical layout that might catch sound or cause it to reverberate, cause it to echo – by the discharge of a gun. On several occasions I found the skinned remains of eviscerated rabbits in the garden, by the woodpile, on the front step. I figured a polecat, or a mink, or a weasel, a particularly voracious one, or else a colony of several who had established themselves somewhere nearby and found a safe place in my brother’s garden to devour their really quite prolific spoils, and I dutifully cleared away the masses of these leavings, dutifully, yes. I have already mentioned the thrice-daily practice of the local dogs, in which even Bert, who normally was so docile, so (how else to explain it) undoglike, who I would have thought above such affairs, participated, rounding his little mouth and howling the most terrible, the most heart-wrenching lament three times each day. Each of these things I explained away with ease – it was hunting season, there were undoubtedly predators in the woods, the solstice had come and gone and the summer days were beginning to take on a different texture, things drying up and diminishing, and one felt it, one felt it

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