The miner Fluharty fussed around with bird dogs, and he’d earned a few red and yellow ribbons on the field trial circuit, “way back when,” he’d say modestly. Beside his house stood the upturned blue barrel where the old man made them stand, their claws pinned to the curving sides, to learn steadiness as he murmured, “Whoa,” and circled them, keeping eye contact as they puzzled over the situation with their doggy brains. He flushed training birds with his foot from tip-up traps and made the dogs stand quivering through their temptation: “Whoa, whoa.” Fluharty could steady a dog, all right. The yard was full of cast-off kennel equipment, steel bowls, detritus.
“Our people,” the current Senator’s uncle liked to say, “are adept at turning money into junk. But why shouldn’t they? A poor people should have as much right and opportunity to do stupid things as the rich, and with just as much questionable ostentation. That’s why they leave their belongings scattered in the yard: they want you to know. But unlike rich households, they want you to stop by and talk about it.” The Senator’s uncle (who’d been the secretary of state and then the state treasurer) was the speechifier and the glad-hander and everyone’s darling, “just an old ’Tally boy,” he liked to say. Yet the man could be loving, too, and more than once was reduced to tears. “Our people,” he said, “will endure.”
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