The Scent of an Angel
The Scent of an Angel
By Nancy Springer
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in GUARDIAN ANGELS, Martin H. Greenberg, Ed., Cumberland House, 2000.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
By Nancy Springer
I am a couple hundred years old now, but I was just a nameless he-puppy in my first fur when I chose for myself an oddling’s path. A long, weathersome road it’s been, and sore paw pads. It happened because—there is no telling why it happened, really. But on the surface of it, it happened because I bespoke the haughty, braggart cat from the neighboring cottage.
A fat black cat, larger than I was, with her tail in the air. “My mistress is a witch,” she told me with a glare of her copper eyes, “and I am her familiar. Why should I hold converse with you, dog?”
Having experienced little more than cuffs and harsh words in my young life, I was not offended. My mother was dead, her head crushed in the jagged jaws of a bear trap, so there was no one to teach me that cats were meant to be chased. In my puppy mind I accepted the tales the cat told me as simply as I had accepted my mother’s death. “Is the old woman truly a witch?” I asked humbly. I had heard the humans say that the bent old crone in the next cottage was a witch. They said they could tell because she lived all alone and talked to herself. They said her mumbling made hens lay bloody eggs and milk cows go dry, and she could do worse than that with her evil eye. They said that when the evil fit was upon her she could fly. No one spoke to her. She limped, she stared into air, she gave no one greeting, but she cosseted her cat like an infant. Folk said she suckled it at her sagging teat.
The proud cat did not answer my question, only repeated, “I am her familiar.” The cat declared, “She gives me milk and juicy bits of chicken to eat.” Hearing this, I drooled with envy, having known only crusts and hunger, myself. “She gives me a velvet cushion upon which to sleep.” Whereas I slept upon the hard clay floor of the cowshed. “She anoints me with fragrant oils and strokes me and calls me Precious.” I could believe it, for the cat smelled like bacon fat and her fur shone glossier than a crow’s wing. Around her smug, fluffy neck she wore a silver bell on a striped ribbon of silk.
“I want to be a witch’s familiar,” I said.
The cat sat on her fat haunches and purred in merriment. “You can’t,” she said with utmost scorn. “You’re
white.”
So I was, although the dirt on which I lay had yellowed my fur. White, a color easily made foul. Not like the cat’s rich, shining black. Now that she had made me yearn for some softness in my life, something more than a kick from the farmer’s booted foot, she would deny me because my fur was white? She angered me. Witch’s familiar, indeed. If a witch’s familiar had to be black, then—
“Then I’ll be an angel’s familiar,” I said, and I turned tail and trotted away. The black cat’s purring laughter followed me.
I kept trotting, for there was nothing to hold me to that place. Still with my milk teeth in my mouth, I trotted off, any way the wind blew, to find an angel.
* * *
I knew of angels only that an angel was the opposite of a witch. Where witches flew foul, angels flew fair. Where witches smoldered, angels blazed. Where witches cursed, angels blessed. Where witches glared the evil eye, angels—I was not sure how an angel looked. I had never seen one.
This did not matter greatly, because seeing is for humans. For a dog, the way of knowing is through the nose. I would not just search; I would track. Surely I could do this. I knew how to track a rabbit or a deer or even an old leather shoe once I found the right scent—
But what was the scent of an angel?
The witch smelled like soot and lavender. Ghosts smelled like gunpowder—this I knew, for ghosts were plentiful, spirits of slain Indians and fever-killed babies and all the witches the Pilgrims had hung. The smell of ghosts hung everywhere over the wood lots and cornfields, especially at dusk or on nights of the full moon—but ghosts were not the same as angels. What did an angel smell like?
I had no idea.
Angels had to be scarce.
I trotted along a rutted wagon road with my stubby snout uplifted and my pink nostrils whiffing the damp air. I smelled mice and shrews and voles in the hay. I smelled worms and robins, bugs and bluebirds. I smelled beech trees and red squirrels and rabbits. I smelled springwater and moss and a distillery midden. I smelled deer turds. I smelled something dead enough to roll in somewhere. Or maybe
that
was the scent of an angel?
It wasn’t, but I rolled anyway, then trotted on.
Three days later my paw pads were cracked and raw, I was starving hungry, I no longer cared to roll no matter how ripe the carrion; I was so weak I could barely walk. When I whiffed a good smell of potatoes and mutton simmering, I turned toward it, staggered to a farmhouse and sat whining by the kitchen door.
“Where did you come from, puppy?” exclaimed a woman’s voice. She came out, picked me up in gentle hands, patted me. She said softly, “I believe the angels sent you.”
She fed me, then filled a washtub and bathed me—I did not like that part, but bore it without biting because she had given me soft cooked meat to eat. After she had soaped me clean, she rubbed me with a feed sack and made me lie on the warm hearth to dry. I dozed, and when I awoke she was brushing my fur with her own hairbrush. She brushed me all over until I lustered like white velvet. “Good puppy,” she whispered, her eyes red and weary and intent on me, her hands taut and intent.
Finally she took me upstairs to her daughter, who lay sick in bed. The little girl hugged me in her arms.
That was long ago. Although I slept on the child’s bed and licked away her tears if she cried, and lay close by when she was too weak to hold me, I do not remember her name or how long I stayed with her—a week, a month? But I do remember the night she died. Snuggled against her side, I lay dozing when her shallow breathing stopped. My head jerked up and I nuzzled her face, but she did not move, and in the room I whiffed—something, a fragrance that made me tremble, scent of sunfire, white wild roses, lightning—I could not say what was that shiversome aroma. Scent of glory incarnate—but just as I sampled it, in a breath it was gone. I lay yearning and whimpering until morning.
“The angels took her,” the woman said.
When she put me outside, I trotted away. I trotted on to track my own angel.
* * *
I headed any direction whence the breeze blew, so that every breath of air carried to me the scents of carrots and newborn calves, mud and marshes, birchbark and timothy grass, lamb slaughter and wood smoke, horse manure and pig manure and sheep manure and cow manure and a dead woodchuck baking in the sun—all the scents of the world, but never that otherworldly scent for which I searched.
I traveled far. I was larger than a cat now, and instead of my puppy fuzz I had grown fur that hung in white feathers from my belly and legs. I had learned to kill rats and rabbits to eat, I had learned to lift my leg when I peed, and sometimes I turned aside from my road when I whiffed the sweet aroma of a she-dog in heat. Sometimes, but sometimes not. The memory of that other warm, fierce, ethereal scent abided strong in me, sweeter even than the scent of lust.
That was long ago, and I am no longer sure of my memories. Things happened; perhaps then, perhaps some other time.
It may have been then—yes, I am almost sure that it was during those days that I saw a wagoner lashing his patient draft horses up a steep hill, roaring and laying on with the whip as they strained and stumbled and dripped sweat. I leaped into the wagon and bit him in the leg as hard as I could. He screamed and dropped his whip, then turned his wrath on me, and I led him a lively chase as his horses rested, baiting him out of the wagon and down the road and across some old woman’s turnip patch before I left him in a thorny bog and trotted on my way.
It may have been during those days that I saw the freckle-faced boy with the bamboo fishing pole. Grubbing in the loam of a creek bank for worms, he turned up a nest of baby vipers instead, and thought he had found himself a lucky, rare sort of squirmy bait for his hook. I tugged with my teeth on his shirt tail before he could touch his own death, distracted him with play and led him romping away. All that day I stayed with him, until the serpents had slithered away and nightfall saw him safely home.
It may have been during that time that I saw the raccoon lurching along a footpath in stark daylight, teeth bared, red eyes glaring, drool dripping from his jaws. Rabid. Mad. I fled, running ahead of the raccoon, and encountered a barefoot young woman ambling along with her eyes on the sky, daydreaming of her lover perhaps. I jumped on her, whining, entreating her to turn back. She shrieked and struck at me because I had muddied her long white apron with my paws. In looking down at me, she looked down the path ahead of her also, and then she saw her danger, screamed anew, and fled without thanking me.
And it may have been during that time that I saw the scrawny old man sitting on his porch long after dark, sitting in his shirt sleeves in the cold and just staring. I went to him and whined, and still he stared into nothingness. I laid my forepaw on his knee, and his slow gaze shifted to me. “Puppy,” he murmured as if from another world. He stared at me now, and I gazed back. After minutes had gone by, he said, “Puppy, are you hungry?” and he rose stiffly and tottered into his house. “Nothing in here to eat,” he murmured. “I ain’t been eating.” But he found me some stale bread, then lay down on the davenport to sleep, and I slept on the rag rug beside him. The next day, because he had to feed me, he hobbled to the neighbors and got food, and he ate with me. I stayed with him until I made sure the neighbor woman was looking after him, then trotted on my way.
And so it went. I followed the breeze, searching it for the scent of an angel, and it led me where I was needed. Why I gave aid to the folk and creatures in my way, I do not know. I felt as if I could not do otherwise, even though sometimes I had to stay with some lonely, suffering soul for weeks or even months, interrupting my search—I could not help it, perhaps because I myself knew what it was to suffer, or perhaps—perhaps it was simply my nature. I am, after all, a dog. I give of myself without stint or reckoning. Such is my being.
It seems to me that this went on for a long time, and I considered that I was getting nowhere. I despaired of finding my angel. I trotted on, when no one needed me, following where the wind led, simply from habit. Perhaps in our lives we all make shining choices that turn in to shadowy habits. I trotted on, but I felt no hope any longer.
It is odd the way things turn out. Without my knowing it, the wind led me back to where I had begun.
* * *
To my eyes at first it was just another village where I might beg a scrap of bread to eat—but then, I did not yet know why, my heart trembled and began to howl. And then I saw—that cowshed, it was—yes, it was where I had suckled at my mother’s belly before she had stuck her hungry head into the bear trap after the bait. Before she was killed. And that was the very farmhouse where the fat woman had given me many curses and a few scraps. And that cottage…
That was the cottage where the witch lived. On the breeze I smelled soot and lavender.
On the breeze also, I heard the sound of weeping.
I wanted to trot on to the cowshed, for it was home of a sort. I knew I would never see my mother again, but my heart yearned for…something. Perhaps I might find some of my litter mates still there?
But—that soft, weary, sobbing—who was weeping?
That tired, muted sound would not let me pass the cottage by. My heart would not let me. Limping with soreness from the stony road, I turned and trotted that way.
On the grassy hill behind the cottage, under a huge oak tree with its limp leaves hanging, I found the bent old woman on her knees, hunched over something that lay on the ground, black.