Lazarus

My mother stuffed her round belly and swollen breasts into a low-cut, red sequined dress when she dragged us to church on Sundays. I wore the navy polyester and cotton suit she’d ordered from the Sears catalogue. I had black socks so people wouldn’t notice my pants reached just above my ankles. She slicked back my hair with Suave gel and made me button the top of my shirt before she poked, prodded and jabbed me half to death with the silver clip of my striped clip-on tie. Then she forced Leigh into a baby dress a size too small, given to us by a woman at the church whose own child outgrew it weeks ago, even though her baby was two months younger than Leigh.

“They don’t want a tramp like you at church,” George snarled at us from his bed on the couch.

“Of course, they do,” my mother told him. “Jesus said, ‘suffer the little children.’”

“That’s what the little children are doing,” George drawled. “Suffering.”

We slipped into the “crying room” in the back, a soundproof glass enclosure like a big fishbowl, where Leah threw tantrums while all the Baptist men gawked at my mother through the glass until their wives elbowed them and made them watch the front.

The preacher talked about Lazarus, this guy Jesus resurrected from the dead because He was all-powerful and cool and He could do stuff like that.

I liked the name so much I made up a baseball player right there—Lazarus Jones—and went outside to act out the games while George tried to ignore me.

“How come you never play baseball with Davy?” my mother asked George as he stomped through the dead leaves.

“How come I got to?” he replied. “He ain’t my kid.”

I stood across the yard from George, as he raked the shit around the doghouse. I could still make out the “Rex” painted green above its door, even though our dogs’ names were Hosea, Obadiah, Esther, Ruth, and Mary Magdalene. All little wiener dogs that yipped and dug out all the time.

“Help George,” she told me as she went inside.

“Get to work, you little jackass,” George said as he slapped the rake into my hand and pointed to the pair of leafless mulberries whose yellow brown leaves covered dead grass and dog crap left rotting on the ground. It had hardened on the outside but still made a mess if you stepped in it, like Leah did every time she came out, barefoot. And like George had then, since he wiped the side of his snakeskin boot against the base of the tree. It was then that I noticed Mary Magdalene, deep in a hole beneath the doghouse, hidden so far inside that all I could see was her long, brown snout. “George,” I said, “How come she’s under there?”

“Damn,” said George. “Looks like she’s gonna pop any day now.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“It means she don’t know nothing about birth control,” he grumbled. “Like your mother.” He knelt next to the hole and examined her. “Tell your ma she better find a home for them puppies soon as they come out,” he said.

“I want a puppy!” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “What are you? Stupid? We don’t got money for no more dogs. She’s gotta get rid of them.”

George didn’t stay around that night. Him and my mom got in a fight and he left about five that afternoon in the Malibu he always worked on in the front yard, even though he never had the energy after loading boxes all day at work to fix the alternator on my Mom’s Impala.

I stood on the pitcher’s mound next to the mulberry tree and pictured his face in the catcher’s mitt as I hurled the tennis ball off the side of the house. It caromed back at me and off the side of my glove before bouncing away and rolling right into Mary Magdalene’s hole. And that’s when I saw them.

She’d dropped her puppies—all slimy and long, like little rats, their eyes locked shut. One tore at her nipples, and another whined and gasped as it crawled toward its mother. She pushed it away with her nose. Three others were balled up in the corner. One of those was still covered in blood.

Mother stuck her hand inside and retrieved it. She stuffed it into a plastic garbage bag. “We gotta take the dead one out,” she said, “or Mary Magdalene will eat it.”

I held my breath and tried not to picture Mom hovering over my own, body and gulping me down.

“Mary Magdalene,” she said. “You gonna let me get a look at them babies?”

The dog turned its attention to the tiny rat-like puppy still feeding on her tit. She licked it with strong, vigorous strokes, like we weren’t even there.

“How come she don’t pay attention to the other ones?” I asked.

My mother reached down and gave one of them a little push. It did not move. “Sweet heaven,” mother whispered. “I think them two pups are dead, too.”

“She’s sitting on one,” I said, pointing.

Mother pushed Mary Magdalene to the side to reveal a tiny brown puppy, half the size of the others, as it squirmed to escape from underneath her.

“Lord,” my mother whispered. “The runt lived.”

“What’s a runt?”

“The smallest,” she said.

“Why ain’t she feeding it?”

“Because it’s a runt.”

“Would you stop feeding me if I was a runt?”

She tried to explain—the words George had spoken to her the last time Mary Magdalene had pups. Runts don’t live. There’s always one, maybe two. They’re not healthy. They hurt the chances for the others. But this runt didn’t take away from anything. There was just one puppy left and then this runt, squealing and begging for attention, and his mother turned her back and sat on him and took him away from her tits, an entire bunch of them, all so full of milk they drug the ground.

“She don’t love her own baby?” I sobbed.

We found an old cardboard box and loaded the dogs into it, my mother tenderly lifting first the runt and then the healthy pup from the hole to carry them into the house, where Mary Magdalene was never allowed. She followed us, determined, and the three of us walked to the car—my mother holding the box with the pups, me with the keys in one hand and Leigh’s hand in the other, and Mary Magdalene, whining, jumping at our calves. I held the box on my lap in the car as Mary Magdalene crawled in and stuffed the runt behind her. Leigh screamed from her car seat as we drove, and the dog covered her pups and trembled at the sound of Leigh’s wails.

“You’re certainly a big boy to help with this,” the vet said to me. We’d never been to a vet before. George said it cost too much. He’d be mad now.

The doctor reached into the box and pulled the healthy pup from its mother. Mary Magdalene abandoned the runt and snapped at the doctor’s hand. She stood on her hind legs and whined as he lifted the pup to his face.

“The mother’s a lively little thing,” he snickered, stroking the pup’s still-wet fur. “Hmm. Looks fairly healthy, this one. You say there were three that didn’t make it?” He turned the puppy over on its back and rubbed its belly. “A little girl,” he said.

He put the puppy back and Mary Magdalene immediately balled herself around it and licked away the doctor’s scent. He stuck his hand into the box and felt the old dog’s nipples. She growled.

“Yes,” he said, unphased. “There’s at least some milk there.”

Next he pulled out the runt and held it in front of me. It looked like a tiny rat, only half the size of its sister. The doctor did not speak. He held it to his eyes as Mary Magdalene shifted to turn her back to him and ignored the puppy in his hand.

“Naw,” he said, just above a whisper. “This one doesn’t look so good,” he said. “Little boy. Definitely malnourished. The mother isn’t feeding it. And it may not be capable of eating on its own anyway.”

“Is it going to die?” I asked him.

He lowered his voice and tried to sound grandfatherly. “Listen, son. There’s a reason Mother Nature lets dogs have a litter of puppies instead of one at a time.”

“I’m not freaking Opie Taylor,” I said. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a baby.”

They made me sit outside, where an woman held a Fox Terrier. “Don’t worry, little boy,” she told me. “The doctor will take care of your dog.”

“I’m not a little boy. Old lady!”

She frowned and did not speak again.

The doctor sold us boxes of milk substitute and an eyedropper with measurements across the sides. “Keep it refrigerated,” he said, bending down to face me. I tried to move, but he took my chin in his hands and forced me to look him in the eyes. “And when feeding time comes, put it in a cup of hot water until the liquid warms to room temperature. Then you give it three to four droppers full. Like this,” he said, taking the runt from the box to demonstrate. He put the dropper in the puppy’s mouth and squeezed. It quit crying and licked the milk from the dropper, its pink tongue cleaning whatever touched its tiny snout.

“There now,” the doctor smiled. “There is a little life in it after all.”

When Mother tried to pay by check the receptionist demanded cash—twenty-five dollars with tax.

“I don’t have it,” my mother began. “Surely you can accept a check.”

“We don’t take checks,” she said.

Mother put Leigh on the ground and rifled through her purse. Leigh giggled and charged at the Terrier.

“Davy, hold your sister!” my mother told me.

I grabbed Leigh and swatted her on the rump. “Bad baby!” I said, trying to sound like an adult. The force of my mother’s hand landed on my own rump and she swooped Leigh back into her arms.

“Just stand in the corner for God’s sake!” she said. “Don’t move. Don’t do anything!”

“We don’t take checks,” the receptionist told my mother again.

“Well, you’re going to have to take a check,” she said.

The receptionist went to get the doctor, and the doctor said my mother could write a check, and he cut seven dollars off the bill, too. My mother smiled at the secretary as she signed her name.

Leigh wailed in the back seat of the Impala as we chugged off into the street. Mother whispered under her breath, “Please, baby. Be quiet.”

Leigh didn’t listen to her.

“Please, baby,” she said again. “Quiet, please, baby.”

Leigh screamed louder.

I whirled around. “Shut up, you stupid little baby!” I yelled. €Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

My Mother grabbed my leg and squeezed it so hard it went numb. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said.

“Do what?”

She did not reply.

George banged his head against the couch cushion in frustration when he saw the vet bill. “He charged you fifty freaking bucks for the visit!” he said. “And another twenty five for an eye dropper and milk. If you’re so worried about it, why don’t you just feed it some Borden’s from the fridge? Or better yet, why don’t you wait till you drop the new kid and then just take off your shirt and feed the pup, too?”

“Why didn’t you have the dog fixed, anyway?”

“Cuz I don’t got the money!” he howled. “You’re gonna need cash for diapers and Gerber’s and shit like that. I sure as hell don’t have the money to pay for freaking twenty-five dollar dog milk!”

I waited until George squealed his tires and found Mother in the kitchen, crying.

“I got pregnant for him,” my mother said to no one in particular. I pretended to listen. She warmed a can of milk in a teacup while I stroked the runt’s neck with my thumb. Its hair felt damp and coarse. It smelled like old cheese.

“Hold it on its back,” she said. Then she stuffed the eyedropper into its mouth and squeezed out milk; it ran down the sides and across its pink tongue, and, for the first time since it had been born, the runt stopped whimpering and sat silent.

“Like that,” she said. “Do you think you can do that?”

She gave me a dropper full of milk and I placed it into the puppy’s mouth. “It needs a name,” she told me.

“How about Lazarus?” I said.

“Yes,” she said softly. “We’re raising him from the dead, practically. We’ll save it together. You and me.”

That night I dreamed we were in the living room and my mother’s belly burst with the new baby and it dropped on the floor and cried. I heard George shouting from the bedroom. “Shut that thing up!” So my mother picked it up and ate it, stuffing it into her mouth with both hands, blood dripping from her chin as she crunched its tiny bones. I screamed.

George was at home three days later when Mother crumpled to the floor. He took her to the hospital and left me and Leigh alone. I spent most of the time in the kitchen watching Mary Magdalene and the puppies—the healthy one, who Mother named Bathsheba, and Lazarus, usually asleep, sometimes underneath Mary Magdalene, but never eating unless I fed him myself. I had to feed Leigh that day, too, and the two of us ate Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes and cheese slices and bologna and whipped cream, and crackers and potato chips and peanuts.

George and my mom burst through the front door about ten. She went straight to the bedroom. I held Lazarus in my hands and sang a song I learned in Sunday School:
“Oh, how I love Lazarus. Oh, how I love Lazarus. Oh, how I love Lazarus, because he first loved me.”

George slept somewhere else that night. I know this because I waited until I heard my mother snoring and then climbed in bed beside her. She put her arm around me before I fell asleep.

When she finally made it out of bed a few days later, she found me in the kitchen where I watched Lazarus sleep. I’d circled the birth date in red on the calendar—ten days ago. I also put a little star on the day George took mother to the doctor, but I didn’t show her I’d done it.

“How is the puppy?” she said, her voice hoarse and weak as she opened the refrigerator door and retrieved a pitcher of water.

“I dunno,” I said as I gave Lazarus’ back legs and aerobic workout. Back and forth. Up and down. Got to build those muscles. One, two, three, four.

She withdrew a glass from the cupboard and poured a drink. “You’ve done a good job with that pup,” she said. “You should be proud of yourself. But. Um. He might not make it much longer. You don’t want him to suffer, do you? If he would always be sick and never able to run and play the way a puppy should? You’ve got Bathsheba—and, um. Maybe we can keep her if you want to.”

“I want to keep Lazarus.”

“But you don’t want him to suffer. And maybe that’s nature’s way. To take him so he doesn’t suffer.”

I reached into the box and brushed my hand back and forth across Lazarus’ back. “Is that why your runt died?” I asked.

I did not watch her as she walked away.

She called me into the kitchen several days later from my spot in the living room, where I’d set up my plastic toy soldiers The American army wore Kelly green while the Germans modeled charcoal gray. I divided them into platoons and dispersed them across the living room for a gargantuan battle I’d started just after George left, abandoning the baseball game in the back yard because it reminded me of Lazarus. And I abandoned Lazarus, too, except for feeding time, a dreaded ritual, like church, that my mother forced me into.

“Davy,” she said.

I glanced at the clock and saw it was only 11:00. An hour early. I frowned.

“What?” I asked.

She pointed at the box. “You better come here.”

I noticed Bathsheba first. The gluttonous little monster had opened her eyes—bright blue, still glazed as they developed—and attacked Mary Magdalene’s teats with a ferocity I’d never seen before. On the other side of the cardboard box was Lazarus, his eyes ready to open but still somehow glued shut. His mouth gaped open as he crawled in search of food. His tiny legs collapsed beneath him.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

My mother knelt over the box and touched him, noting how his tongue protruded as he pushed his way about. “Do you think he’s hungry?” she asked. He’d never looked for food before—I had to force him each time, turning him on his back and rubbing his little stomach before he’d open his mouth just enough to fit the dropper in. But now he opened his mouth wide and moaned.

“I’ll get the milk,” I said.

We warmed it quickly, keeping an eye on Lazarus as he whined, eyes still closed. My mother filled the dropper with milk and then hesitated before giving it to me. “Do you want to feed him?” she asked.

I picked Lazarus up in my hands and turned him over on his back, noticing how he squealed and kicked his little legs. He stuck out his tongue, and craned his neck toward nothing. I dipped the eyedropper into the milk and squeezed—we were up to four eyedroppers full at a feeding. The first dropper went into his mouth and he whined. His tongue shot onto the dropper as I squeezed the sweet milk into his mouth. I watched him squirm.

“Is he eating?” my mother asked.

“I think so,” I said. I imagined his eyes opening as I held him—already the little slits were loose; I saw a bluish color inside them for the first time. “Come on, Lazarus,” I said aloud. “That’s a boy.”

I squirted more milk into his mouth, but he spat it out and shook his head, gasping. Then he opened his mouth wider and fought to draw in a breath.

He yanked his snout away as I tried to insert the dropper. He twisted his head and gasped. The milk ran down my hands and stained my shirt.