order to it. The old one was obviously in charge: I could see well enough now to see how gray the dog’s muzzle was. And around his eyes, sort of like a raccoon. His front paws turned in slightly, the way they did on a bear, and he moved stiffly.
Around the entry hall there were gilt-framed paintings of racehorses, most, apparently, from the nineteenth century, when they were painted with long bodies and small heads. On the other hand, maybe in the nineteenth century they did have long bodies and small heads.
The dog nudged my knee with his head, and I reached down to pat him some more. The other dogs watched. Under the fresh booze smell was a more enduring smell of dog. I liked both smells, though there were people who liked neither.
There was no sound in the house, not even the sounds that houses make: air-conditioning, or furnace, or the stairwell creaking, or the refrigerator cycling on; nothing but a silence that seemed to have been thickening since Appomattox.
“You guys have much fun?” I said.
The dogs made no reply. One of them, I didn’t see which one, thumped his tail once when I spoke.
The black man scuffed quietly back into the huge entry.
“Mr. Nelson say to come this way, sir.”
We went to the end of the entry hall and under the stairs and through a door into a bright gallery along the back of the house that was full of sunlight through the long bank of French windows. At the end of the gallery we turned right into a huge octagonal conservatory with a glass roof shaped like a minaret. Sitting in a wicker chaise on a dark green rug in the middle of the bluestone floor, with the sun streaming in on him, was an old man in a white suit who looked like Mark Twain gone to hell. He had long white hair and a big white moustache. He probably weighed three hundred pounds, most of it in his belly. There was some in his jowls, and plenty in the folds of his neck that spilled out over his wilted collar. But there were hints, still, as he sat there, of strength that had once existed. And in the red sagging face, the vestiges of the same profile his daughter showed in her portrait.
On the wicker table beside him was a blue pattern china bowl of melting ice, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, partly gone, and a pitcher of water. He had a thick lowball glass in his hand. A blackthorn walking stick leaned on the arm of the chaise. Across the room was a wicker chair. Next to it a wicker side table held a big color television set. On the screen stock cars, gaudily painted, buzzed endlessly around a track. There was no other furniture. The room had the feel of an empty gym.
There were three or four more dogs in here, all hunters, long-eared, black-and-white, or blueticked, looking somewhat like Pearl the wonder dog. Except their tails were long. And the color. And they were bigger. And calmer. One of them thumped a tail on the floor when she saw me. The others watched me but did nothing. Sprawled on the floor, they moved only their eyes to look at me. Air-conditioning buzzed unseen somewhere above us. Despite the sunlight the room was cold.
The old black man gestured me to the other seat with one gnarled, still graceful hand. I sat. Jumper Jack stared at the car race. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
“Care for some whiskey and branch water, sir?” the black man said.
I thought about it. It might keep my teeth from chattering. On the other hand, it was ten-thirty in the morning. I shook my head.
The black man nodded and shuffled a little ways off, near the door, and stood. Nelson continued to gaze at the stock car race.
I waited.
Nobody did anything. It was as if immobility were the natural order of things here, and movement was aberrant.
Jumper Jack drank some more whiskey. The race announcer was frantic with excitement as the cars went round and round. The excitement seemed contrived in this room where time was suspended and movement was an oddity. The huge television set itself was inappropriate, a blatting, contemporary intrusion into this motionless antebellum room full of dogs, and old men, and me.
I sat. The black man stood. The dogs sprawled. And Jumper Jack stared at the race and drank whiskey. I waited. I had nowhere to go.
Finally someone won the car race. Jumper Jack picked up the remote from the table beside him and pressed the mute button. The television went silent. He turned and looked at me, and when he spoke his clotted voice rumbled up out of his belly like the effortful grumble of a whale.
“Got no daughter,” he said.
“None?”
“No daughter,” he said and finished his whiskey and fumbled at the fixings to make another one. The old black man was there. He made the drink with no wasted movement and handed it to Nelson and returned to his motionless post near the door.
“You know a woman named Olivia Nelson?”
He shook his head, heavily, as if there were hornets around it.
“No,” he said.
“Did you ever?” I said.
“No more.”
“But you did once.”
He looked at me for the first time, raising his head slowly from his chest and staring at me with his rheumy, unfocused gaze.
“Yes.”
I waited again. Nelson drank. One of the dogs got up suddenly and walked over and put his head on Nelson’s
