We’re having biscuits with sausage gravy for dinner, and there’s nothing in the world I love more than sausage gravy. Marty! Ma scolds, nodding toward my littlest sister. Its skin is green, and it don’t suck blood, I say. Halfway between a ghost and a zombie, I say. She dresses up like a witch every single year just so Ma can paint her fingernails black. Halloween is over and gone, see, and already my skinny seven-year-old sister is thinkin’ about the next. What you going to be for Halloween next year, Marty? asks Dara Lynn at supper. Now you tell me how many sixth-grade boys in the United States of America got somethin’ like that to look on! You sit out on the steps of an evening, don’t move even your little finger, and pretty soon a buck will step out of the trees, a doe or two behind him, and parade across your field just as grand as you please.

We live on the side of the creek near the mill, up the lane in a two-bedroom house. I seen plenty of buildings got the date on them when they were built, but I never seen a building got the date when it died. SHILOH SCHOOL-1920–1957, reads a sign above the door, like a gravestone or something. It’s right by this rusty bridge, and just over the bridge, you’ll see the old Shiloh schoolhouse. To get to our house, you go through this place called Little-you’ll know it by the church-and you keep going along Middle Island Creek, wide as a river, till you see this old falling-down gristmill.

It’s because I first saw the little dog here in Shiloh that I named him what I did. Next to Christmas, I guess, Halloween is big in West Virginia-out where we live, anyway, which is the little community of Shiloh, up the winding road from Friendly there on the Ohio River. But sometimes hope seems out of human hands entirely, and when the third thing happened . . . When I first tried to get Shiloh from Judd Travers, who was treating that dog meaner than mud, at least there was a chance that if I couldn’t have him for my own, Judd would let him live.Īnd even after Judd turns his beagle over to me, then starts drinkin’ and talkin’ ugly, there’s hope he never meant it. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell this part until now of all the stuff that’s happened, this was the scariest, and just thinking on it starts my hands to sweat. I guess a dog’s story ain’t-isn’t-ever over, even after he dies, ’cause if you lose a pet, you still go on loving him. There’s one last thing to say about Shiloh before the story’s over.

Saving shiloh phyllis reynolds naylor