Anna watched him, stepping back in shock, calling out to Ralph to come and see; but Ralph was not in the house. Potluck’s body seemed to shrink, as if his bones were contracted by his efforts. And yet there was no effort, because a stinking liquid seemed to flow from him as if a tap had been turned on inside. Yellow-green, viscous, the fluid pooled about his feet, washed across the carpet, widened about the room. Its stench rose up; it hit Anna like a fist. She herself gagged; it was like nothing she had smelled before, a hellish compound of rotting plant life and burnt rubber, a smell of panic and morbidity and flesh revolted against itself. On and on it went, a ceaseless flow. She had heard of cancers, of malignities that are so foul that even the most Christian of nurses must enter the rooms with masks. Was that what she was inhaling now? She wanted to turn and run, skitter down the steps of the front stoep and out into the air. But pity for the creature gripped her; it held her to the spot. She saw the dog’s ribs heave, saw his eyes turn up into his skull; hand over her mouth, she saw his whipped crouch, his buckling joints. Potluck fell, lurching stiffly onto his side; but still that revolting fluid pumped on, and on. How could his body contain so much? She moaned his name; oh, Potluck, my little dog, what has happened to you? She crouched beside him and put her hands on him. His fur was wet, and a thousand pulses seemed to jump at her through his side.
But as she touched him, the flow stopped. The feculent pool ceased to grow. With a final expulsive effort the dog heaved his body clear of the floor, like an animal galvanized in an experiment. He dropped back, thudding against the floorboards. He drew a great breath, shuddering as a human being might. His whole body twitched, and his lips curled back from his teeth. He closed his eyes.
But Potluck was not dead. When she put her hand on his head, his tail moved, once. It beat the floor, spreading the hideous efflux to her skirt. She looked up, saw Ralph in the doorway, staring down at them. “Poisoned?” he whispered.
They said nothing further. They were afraid to speak. They picked up the dog and carried him to the veranda next to their bedroom; they sponged the filth from his coat, wrapped him in blankets, and dabbed water on to his dry muzzle, hoping he would lick. Anna sat by him while Ralph dragged the ruined carpet into the air, and threw buckets of water and disinfectant onto the floor, and swept out the froth and scum.
When he finished, and returned to Anna, Potluck was licking water from her fingers. His eyes were still closed, and the orbs danced and jerked under his lids. “I think he’s saved himself,” Ralph said. “God knows what it was, but no doubt if it had been in his system another hour it would have killed him.”
Potluck is a big dog, Anna thought. The poison for a dog would kill a child, kill two babies. A horrible rush of fear swept over her, left her nauseous, weak, clinging to the windowsill. “What can it have been?” Her voice shook. “What can he have eaten?”
“Something left for him,” Ralph said. “Bait.” He dropped his head. “I’m sorry, Anna. Enock’s final act of spite, I think. He never liked Potluck and he knew that we loved him, I have seen his lip curl when he has heard me talk to him. You were quite right about the man, I should have listened, you were completely right and I was completely wrong.” He held out his hand. She took it. “Anyway, he’s failed.” He stooped, patted the animal’s side. He looked vindicated, as if good had won out. As if it had prevailed. As if it always would.
For the rest of the day Anna checked Potluck at intervals, first every ten minutes, then every half hour, then on the hour; keeping a fearful vigil, as she had for the twins in their first months. She would have brought him to a more convenient place, but he was an outdoor dog, and did not understand carpets and furniture; to lie on the stoep was as much as he could tolerate. By dusk he had heaved himself from his side into a more alert position, and his strange swivel-mounted ears had begun to move in accordance with the sounds of the household and the compound. But he was halfhearted about his vigilance, and when he tried a bark he had to ponder it; the sound was muffled, and afterwards he looked bemused and exhausted. “Never mind, Potluck,” Anna said, rubbing his head. “You’re off duty tonight.”
“He’ll be all right now, won’t he?” Ralph said. “I would have cried, I think, if we’d lost Potluck. I love him for his simple and greedy character.”
“He’s like the twins,” Anna said. “That is their character, exactly.”
He took Anna in his arms, pressing her head against his shoulder, feeling her shiver from the stresses of the day. He stroked her back, murmuring meaningless, reassuring words, pet names; but he was shot through by self- doubt, shaken inside by it. This business with the gardener, it had bothered him, disturbed him a good deal. Anna would say, oh, of course there are injustices, there are miscalculations: they all even out. But he did not believe that. He did not say so to his wife, but he thought her attitude faintly repulsive; it is fatalistic, he thought, it releases us from the responsibility which we should properly take. We should do our best, he felt, always our best —consult our consciences, consult our capabilities, then, whenever we can, push out against unjust circumstance.
Enock was a crook, a petty criminal, perhaps accused of the one crime he didn’t commit; all acts of injustice are magnified in the victim’s eyes. The error may be irretrievable, Ralph thought; we have made a choice about him, perhaps the wrong one, but what can we do now? The situation could not stand still. We had to choose.
Lying awake sometimes, listening to the sounds of the bush, he brooded on the larger thoughts that routine keeps at bay. This I could do, or that … Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe. If in the course of his life he had done one thing differently, one tiny thing, perhaps he would not be where he is now; his frail wife in his arms, his twins on the knee of their dark nanny, his convalescent dog at his feet, ribs heaving with delight at mere survival. Everything in the universe declines to chaos and waste; he knows this, he is not so poor a scientist. But he believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be; believes it simply, as he believed in Bible stories when he was a child. If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternative universes, he will not inquire. And surely, in the end, he says, my will is free? The world is not as Anna says. There is no dispensation that guarantees or provides for an evening-up of the score. If we are not to be mere animals, or babies, we must always choose, and choose to do good.
In choosing evil we collude with the principle of decay, we become mere vehicles of chaos, we become subject to the laws of a universe which tends back toward dissolution, the universe the Devil owns. In choosing to do good we show we have free will, that we are God-designed creatures who stand against all such laws.
So I will be good, Ralph thought. That is all I have to do.
The storm broke that night, around nine o’clock. Ralph and Anna had lit a fire in the twins’ room, and left them, warm and drowsy, under Felicia’s eye. The twins did not wake much at night now, and Anna was happy to attend to them when they did; so usually the nanny would have been back in her own quarters. But the rain was heavy, unrelenting, cold like frozen metal and falling like metal rods. On her haunches before the fire, Felicia rubbed her shins and indicated that she would stay; and her own bedstead, with its two plump pillows and crocheted blanket, was more inviting than the battering wind outside.
The world was full of noise, you had to raise your voice against it; the metal rain drummed the roof, and the wind moaned. Anna stood at the window, watching sheet lightning illuminate the garden, the fig tree, the mutilated fig tree that was part of Enock’s legacy. It lit up the straggling boundary fence of the mission compound, the shacks of their visitors—lighting them as they had never been lit before, because there were people in those shacks who could not afford candles. The inhabitants would be awash in brown water and mud, their roofs carried off perhaps,
