"Now Ernie, you know what you got to do," says my Aunt Pearl, sitting at the head of the Thanksgiving Day table, where we're all a little rattled from the dog that sits on the front stoop crying because its face just got broken.
I saw my cousin do it. He grabbed a two-by-four and took a swing because he wanted an attack dog, one that would fight back when you beat it.
"Ma," I say, "Jacob cracked his dog's face in," but my mother only shakes her head to get the image out and says, "I don't want to know."
So, I don't tell her. I just sit in my chair and let the steam from the corncob rise and make sweat beads on my face. "You're a sick fuck," I say to my cousin Jacob when it gets quiet, because he is and his sister told me so, even though she's not supposed to talk like that, but she figures if her brother can come home drunk and curl up in bed with her and her mother doesn't care, then she can say just about anything.
"Shut your hole," says Jacob and slathers gravy over his entire plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing.
"Look boy," says my father, "save some for the rest of us. Why don't you go on outside and take care of that dog."
"What dog?" says my cousin, like he didn't see the blood spatter from the toffee-brown dog's eye. Like he didn't see way the dog looked at him as if he were the only kid in the world who could save him.
"Jacob didn't mean for this to happen," says my aunt, who is trying to have a nice Thanksgiving. "Now, let's say grace and not think anymore." She bows her head, as my cousin Spring clears her throat to pray to our god in heaven, and I look around the table at my aunt, my uncle, cousin Spring, sick fuck Jacob and my parents, who both glare at me with one eye open, one eye shut, daring me to say more. That's about the point I pick up a good-sized white roll and fling it at Jacob's head.
"Prick," he says, throwing a pickle like a spear at my face.
My father grabs Jacob, my mother grabs me and Aunt Pearl screams at my uncle that there's only one thing left to do.
Grabbing a turkey leg off Jacob's plate, my uncle leaves the table to join the toffee-brown dog outside. He throws the leg to the dog and lights his pipe. We watch him from the dining room table blowing smoke rings at the sky, and I notice a storm cloud moving toward us across the tips of the cornstalks. When he is done, he sticks the pipe in his breast pocket, leads the toffee-brown dog out behind the pig barn, where earlier that day he neutered all the piglets, and he shoots the dog once between its watering eyes so that no one will have to think of this ever again.