The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Siblings; Small Town & Rural; Westerns; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Thomas Savage's acclaimed Western is "a pitch-perfect evocation of time and place" (Boston Globe) for fans of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain. This new edition, with an afterword by Annie Proulx, marks the return of one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in the literature of the American West.

 

Set in 1920s Montana, this compelling domestic drama tells the story of two brothers -- and of the woman and young boy, mother and son, whose arrival on the brothers' ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the novel's startling first paragraph to its very last word, Thomas Savage's voice -- and the intense passion and cruelty of his characters -- holds readers in thrall.

 

Soon to be a major Netflix film by Jane Campion, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst.

 

 

Release date: September 26, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

In praise of Thomas Savage and The Power of the Dog

“Mr. Savage’s voice is a wonder…. If there were justice (or better taste) in the literary marketplace, surely one or another
of Thomas Savage’s dozen novels would have been topping bestseller lists for the past 30-odd years…. He deserves to be discovered
by more readers.”


—Valerie Sayers,New York Times Book Review

“It is cause for rejoicing that The Power of the Dog has a second chance with today’s readers…. A gripping and tense novel… A work of literary art.”


—Annie Proulx, from her afterword

“Savage testifies that the novel, in the right hands, remains an instrument of sensitivity and power, capable of illuminating
the lives of others and so expanding our own.”


—Theodore M. O’Leary, Kansas City Star

“The voice of Thomas Savage is always a pleasure…. He writes as if Conrad and Ford, and those other technique-conscious storytellers
from early in this century, still mattered…. The Power of the Dog is the finest single book I know about the modern West.”


—William H. Pritchard, Hudson Review

“Thomas Savage is one of the most eloquent writers practicing today.”

—Tom E. Huff, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“The Power of the Dog is a fine novel, conceived on the firm touchstone of Thomas Savage’s moral vision, studded with fleeting insights, and reverberating
for some time after it is laid down.”


—Jack McClintock, Chicago Tribune

“The denouement of The Power of the Dog is a joy. As is the whole of this moving and remarkable novel.”


—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“I consider Thomas Savage’s first novel [The Pass] a minor classic…. The Power of the Dog is even better.”


—Library Journal

“Chilling…. The Power of the Dog is a taut and powerful novel.”


—Publisher’s Weekly

“Thomas Savage’s prodigious talents are on full display in these pages. His descriptions of the Montana landscape are microscopically
sharp, his characters are unforgettably vivid, and his plotting is both subtle and intense. Indeed, the novel offers so many
pleasures readers will be forgiven if they do not immediately notice that it also engages the grandest themes—among them,
the dynamics of family, the varieties of love, and the ethos of the American West. Put simply, The Power of the Dog is a masterpiece.”


—Larry Watson, author of Montana1948 and Justice

“Thomas Savage knows how to tell a story, what to leave out, how to create surprise. He makes you see, smell, hear, and taste
every thing.”


—Dennis Murphy, Tulsa Daily World

“From the first page, The Power of the Dog is about consequence—the colliding consequences of pride, love, and loyalty. The first domino falls, and the rest follow.
Yet nothing is predictable in the world of this fiction. Savage has created a dynamic psychological mystery, with characters
joined in subtle symmetries and events moving toward an end that is as inevitable as it is shocking.”


—Joanna Scott, author of Make Believe

“Thomas Savage has a pitch-perfect ear…. A writer who is underrated, undersung, and long overdue for some grand-scale attention.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Thomas Savage has a magic hand with his characters…. He is not one to waste a whole word if no word will do.”

—Marshall Sprague, New York Times Book Review

“A powerful storyteller…. Savage’s books deserve to be much better known than they are.”

—Roger Sale,New York Review of Books

PHIL always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down first one
and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out, and tossed it into the fire where the
branding irons glowed. There was surprisingly little blood. In a few moments the testicles exploded like huge popcorn. Some
men, it was said, ate them with a little salt and pepper. “Mountain oysters,” Phil called them with that sly grin of his,
and suggested to young ranch hands that if they were fooling around with the girls they’d do well to eat them, themselves.


Phil’s brother George, who did the roping, blushed at the suggestion, especially since it was made before the hired men. George
was a stocky, humorless, decent man, and Phil liked to get his goat. Lord, how Phil did like to get people’s goats!


No one wore gloves for such delicate jobs as castrating, but they wore gloves for almost all other jobs to protect their hands
against rope burns, splinters, cuts, blisters. They wore gloves roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay out to cattle, even
simply riding, running horses or trailing cattle. All of them, that is, except Phil. He ignored blisters, cuts and splinters
and scorned those who wore gloves to protect themselves. His hands were dry, powerful, lean.


The ranch hands and cowboys wore horsehide gloves ordered out of the catalogues of Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward—Sears
and Sawbuck and Monkey Ward, as Phil named those houses. After work or on Sundays when the bunkhouse was steamy with the water
for washing clothes or shaving, fragrant with the odor of bay rum on those about to go into town, they would struggle with
their order blanks, hunched over like huge children, biting the end of the pencil, frowning at their crabbed handwriting,
puzzling over the shipping weight and the location of their postal zone. Often they gave up the struggle, sighed and turned
the job over to one more familiar with writing and numbers, someone among them who had got as far as high school, one who
sometimes wrote letters for them to fathers and mothers and remembered sisters.


But how marvelous to get the order into the mails, how delicious and terrible to wait for the parcel from Seattle or Portland
that might include with the new gloves, new shoes for town, phonograph records, a musical instrument to charm away the loneliness
of winter evenings when the winds howled like wolves down from the mountain peaks.


Our very best guitar. Play Spanish-style music and chords. Wide ebony fingerboard, fine resonant fan-ribbed natural spruce
top, rosewood sides and back, genuine horn bindings. This is a real Beauty.


Waiting for their order to get to the post office fifteen miles down the road, they read again and again such descriptions,
reliving the filling out of the order blank, honing their anticipation. Genuine horn bindings!


“Well, you fellows looking over the old Wish Book?” Phil would ask, standing by the stove and stamping the snow off his feet.
He would look out into the room, spraddle-legged, his bare hands clasped behind him. Over the years a few of the young men
tried to imitate his habit of going bare-handed, maybe seeking his approving smile or nod, but their imitations went unnoticed
and at last they took up their gloves again. “Looking over the old Wish Book?”


“Sure thing, Phil,” they’d say, proud to call him by his first name, but closing the catalogue under cover of conversation
that he might not see them lusting after the pert women who modeled corsets and underwear. How they admired his detachment!
Half-owner of the biggest ranch in the valley, he could afford any damned thing he wanted, any automobile, Lozier or Pierce-Arrow,
say, but he desired no car. His brother George had once expressed a wish to buy a Pierce, and Phil had said, “Want to look
like some Jew?” And that was the end of it. No, Phil didn’t drive. His saddle, hanging by a stirrup from a peg in the big
long log barn, was a good twenty years old; his spurs were of good plain steel—no fancy silver inlays, not such spurs as
crowded the dreams of others; he wore plain shoes instead of boots, scorned the trimmings and trappings of the cowboy, although
in his younger days he was as good a rider as any of them, a better roper than George. With all his money and family, he was
just folks, dressed like any hired hand in overalls and blue chambray shirt; three times a year George drove him into Herndon
for a haircut; he sat in the front seat of the old Reo stiff as an Indian in his stiff town suit, his imperious nose hawklike
under the slate-gray fedora, his jaw jutting. So he sat in Whitey Judd’s barber chair, his long, thin, weathered hands motionless
on the cool arms of the chair while his accumulated hair fell in piles to the white-tiled floor around him.


A drummer, a natty dresser with a flashing stickpin, had once chuckled and questioned Whitey.

“Wouldn’t laugh, if I was you, mister,” Whitey remarked. “He could buy and sell you fifty times over, or anybody else in the
valley except his brother. I’m proud to have him sit in my chair, mighty proud.” Snip, snip, snip. “Him and his brother are
partners.”


Just so they were, and more than partners, more than brothers. They rode together at roundup time, talked together as if they’d
met for the first time, talked of the old days in high school and at a California university where George, as a matter of
fact, had flunked out the same year that Phil was graduated. Phil recalled tricks he’d played on other students, friends they’d
had—high jinks. Phil had been the bright one, George the plodder.


It was something of a joint decision when they sold their steers each fall or bought a Morgan stud to improve the saddle stock.
Each year Phil looked forward to hunting in October when the willows along the creeks had turned a rusty red and the haze
from distant forest fires hung like veils over the mountain peaks. You saw the two of them with their packhorses riding across
the flats toward the mountains, Phil with his stubby carbine, or with his thirty-caliber. It was not unusual to see such a
relationship between brothers, Phil tall and angular, staring with his day-blue eyes into the distance, then at the ground
close by; George stocky and imperturbable, jogging along on a stocky and imperturbable bay horse. They made wagers—who would
sight and shoot the first elk? How Phil did relish a meal of elk liver! At night they made camp below timberline and sat cross-legged
before the fire talking of the old days and of plans for a new barn that never materialized because that would mean tearing
down the old one; they unrolled their beds side by side and together listened in the dark to the song of a tiny stream, no
wider than a man’s stride, the very source of the Missouri River. They slept, and woke to find hoarfrost.


So it had been for years, Phil now just forty. So too they slept in the room they had as boys, in the very brass beds, rattling
around now in the big log house since those Phil referred to as the Old Folks had taken off to spend their autumn years in
a suite of rooms in the best hotel in Salt Lake City. There the Old Gent dabbled in the stock market and the Old Lady played
mah-jongg and dressed for dinner as she always had. Closed off, the Old Folks’ bedroom gathered dust kicked up by the automobiles
—more and more of them every day—that putt-putted up the road out front. In that room the air grew stale, the Old Lady’s
geraniums died, the black marble clock stopped.


The brothers kept Mrs. Lewis, the cook, who lived in a cabin out back, and she found time to clean the house after a fashion,
complaining at every movement of the broom. Gone now was the girl, last of a series, who had waited table and slept upstairs
in a tiny room. Her presence might have looked strange in a bachelor establishment, but still the brothers comported themselves
with almost shocking modesty as if women still stalked the house. George bathed once a week, entering the bathroom fully clothed,
locking the door behind him; silently he bathed, with small splashing and no song; fully clothed he emerged, but followed
by the telltale steam. Phil never used the tub, for he did not like it known he bathed. Instead, he bathed once a month in
a deep hole in the creek known only to George and to him and, once, one other. He looked around before he went there, should
there be prying eyes, and he dried himself in the sun, for carrying a towel would have cried out his purpose. In the fall
and spring he had sometimes to break a crust of ice. In the winter months he didn’t bathe. Never had the brothers appeared
naked before each other; before they undressed at night they snapped off the electric lights—the first in the valley.


Nowadays they ate their breakfast with the hired men in the back dining room, but took their dinner and supper as before in
the front dining room off white linen, and the tools they used were sterling. It is not easy or desirable to slough off old
habits, or to forget who you are, a Burbank with the best connections in Boston, back East in Massachusetts.


It sometimes worried Phil that George got a far-off look, rocking in his chair, for George’s eyes would suddenly stare out
across to the mountain called Old Tom thirty miles away and twelve thousand feet, a beloved mountain, and George would rock
and rock and rock, looking across the flat.


“What’s the matter, old-timer?” Phil would ask. “Old mind wandering again?”

“What’s that?”

“I say, your mind wandering again?”

“No, no.” George would slowly cross his heavy legs.

“How about a little cribbage?” They had kept careful score over the years.

To Phil, George’s trouble was that he didn’t engage his mind. George was no great reader, like Phil. To George, the Saturday Evening Post was the limit; like a child, George was moved by stories of animals and nature. Phil read Asia, Mentor, Scientific American and books of travel and philosophy the fancy relatives back East sent by the dozen at Christmastime. His was a keen, sharp,
inquiring mind—an engaged mind—that confounded cattle-buyers and salesmen who supposed that one who dressed as Phil dressed,
who talked as Phil talked, must be simple and illiterate, one with such hair and such hands. But his habits and appearance
required strangers to alter their conception of an aristocrat to one who can afford to be himself.


George had no hobbies, no lively interests. Phil worked in wood. He constructed the derricks that stacked the wild hay—timothy,
redtop and clover—hewing out the huge beams with adze and plane. With those clever naked hands he carved those tiny chairs
no higher than an inch in Sheraton or the style of Adam; his fingers moved like spiders’ legs, paused briefly sometimes as
if to think, for Phil’s fingers had a private intelligence lodged, perhaps, in their padded tips. Seldom did his knife slip,
and if it did, he scorned the iodine or Phenol-Sodique, two of the few medicines in the house, for as a family the Burbanks
did not believe in medicine. His little wounds healed rapidly once he had wiped them with the blue bandanna he stuffed in
a rear pocket.


Some who knew Phil said, “What a waste!” For ranching was no demanding or challenging occupation, once you had the ranch,
and required brawn but little brain. Phil, people marveled, might have been anything—doctor, teacher, artisan, artist. He
had shot, skinned and stuffed a lynx with skill that would have abashed a taxidermist. Easily he solved the mathematical puzzles
in the Scientific American; his pencil flew. From the pages of the encyclopedia he taught himself chess, and often passed an hour solving the problems
in the Boston Evening Transcript that arrived two weeks late. At the forge in the blacksmith shop he designed and hammered out intricate pieces of ornamental
iron, firedogs, pokers shaped like swords and tridents; he wished he could have shared his gifts with George, who never caught
fire, seldom even smoked, so to speak, who looked forward no longer even to the trips he made to Herndon in the Reo for the
bank directors’ meetings and lunch later at the Sugar Bowl Cafe.


“How about teaching you chess, Fatso?” Phil once asked, looking ahead to evenings before the fireplace. The name Fatso got
George’s goat.


“No, I don’t think so, Phil.”

“Why not, Fatso? Think it’d be a little tough for you?”

“I never was much of a one for games.”

“You used to play cribbage. Pinochle, sometimes?”

“That’s right, I did, didn’t I?” And George would pick up the Saturday Evening Post and lose himself in some cheap fantasy.


Phil was a whistler, and a good one, his tone accurate as a flute’s; he would whistle a merry tune and go into the bedroom
and get out his banjo and pick away at “Red Wing” or “Hot Time in the Old Town.” He had taught himself to play and it was
fine to see those fingers leaping on the strings. Once it was not unusual, when he played, for George to pad quietly into
the room and lie on the other brass bed and listen. But not lately.


Lately after a tune or two, Phil would get up from the edge of the bed where he sat playing, stand straight, put away the
banjo and walk the path through the rustling rye-grass to the bunkhouse.


“Well, fellows,” he would say, blinking his eyes against the white glare of the gas lamp.

Once one of the hired hands always rose to give him a chair, some cast-off chair from the Big House.

“Hey—don’t bother” Phil always said, but someone always did bother—and fruitlessly, for Phil would accept neither chair
nor gift from anybody. His visitations interrupted some discussion of whores, politics, horses or love and caused a silence
that lasted until the clunk! of a length of firewood shifting in the stove emphasized that silence, and some man, terrified of silence, felt bound to
speak.


“What you think of this Coolidge?” a man might ask, for eventually the Transcript found its way to the bunkhouse where it was used as waste and tinder, but only incidentally to read.


Then Phil would frown and roll a perfect cigarette with one hand. He knew the value of the pointed silence. “Well, I’ll say
one thing for him.” Lighting the cigarette. “He’s got the gumption to keep his trap shut.” And Phil would laugh, and there
would be a halting conversation, perhaps of Coolidge. Then maybe one of the younger fellows, hoping to flatter, would ask
advice about ordering a saddle. Did Phil think a center-fire or a three-quarter rig the better? Was the Visalia saddle all
it was cracked up to be?


At last Phil would look a little wistful. “Well, I guess you fellows must want to roll in.”

“Oh, hell no, Phil.” And there would follow more talk, perhaps of the work the next day, the overhauling of the mowing machines
if the time was spring, the whereabouts of a bunch of wild horses, or Phil might tell an anecdote of Bronco Henry, that best
of riders, that best of cowboys, who had taught Phil the art of braiding rawhide. Recently, having finished telling the fellows
a story, Phil looked suddenly out the window over the top of the whispering rye-grass to the lighted bedroom window of the
Big House. As he watched, the window went suddenly dark. George had not waited up!!


“Well, fellows” he said with a sad grin, “got to hit the hay”

When he had gone, one of the new loudmouthed young cowhands spoke right up. “Hey—he’s sort of a lonely cuss, ain’t he? Like
about what we was saying before he come in, do you guess anybody ever loved him? Or maybe he ever loved anybody?” The oldest man in the bunkhouse stared at the young fellow. What the young fellow had said
was unsuitable, even ugly. What had love to do with Phil? The oldest man in the bunkhouse reached down and patted the head
of a little brown bitch that slept close. “I wouldn’t want to be saying nothing about him and love. And if I was you, I wouldn’t
call him a cuss. It don’t show respect.”


“Well, hell,” the young fellow said, blushing.

“You got to learn to show respect. You got an awful lot to learn about love.”

In the fall the brothers with their hired hands trailed a thousand head of steers twenty-five miles down the road to the stockyards
in the tiny settlement of Beech. Unless the weather was miserable, the rain beating out of the north, the sleet cutting the
face or the cold hindering the circulation of the blood, the event had something of the quality of an outing, or picnic; the
young fellows thought of the lunches Mrs. Lewis the cook had put up to be eaten at noon when the shadows hid under the sagebrush;
they thought of the saloon across the highway from the yards and of the rooms over the saloon where the whores lived.


When the sun rose red and the frost fled from the surface of the short, dry grass, the herd was already lined out over the
length of a half mile; caught under the bewitching spell of the dark and that holy quality of the dawn that turns men in upon
themselves, the cowhands were silent and the brothers were silent, listening to the step-step-step of the cattle and the crackling
sound of sagebrush crushed under cloven hoofs; squeak-squeak-squeak of saddle leather and the ringing of German silver bit
chains. The new sun rising above the eastern hills showed a world so vast and hostile to individual hope that the young cowhands
clung to memories of home, kitchen stoves, mothers’ voices, the cloakroom at school and the cries of children let out at recess.
Raising their chins, they fixed their eyes now on an abandoned log shack, opened to the weather, where stray horses in summer
sought a little shade, where years before a man like them had failed; where the road wandered near a barbed wire fence, a
rusty sign peppered with bullet holes urged them to chew a brand of tobacco that no longer existed; ahead, hunched over the
pommel of his saddle, rode the oldest man in the bunkhouse, gray, lined of face, one who like them must have once dreamed
of a little place, a few acres, a homestead, a few cattle, a green meadow, a woman to be a wife; God knew, maybe a child.


Then the sun loomed higher out of the hills and the new warmth nourished their hopes and they talked, laughed, joked; their
plans would materialize; when they got to be old like that fellow up there hunched over his saddle, they would have a little
place. They would have their money; they would make plans. In the meantime the nose of their horse was pointed toward the
stockyards, to the saloon, to the women upstairs.


The brothers, too, had been silent in the darkness, known to each other only by their shapes, the lean one and the stocky
one—by their shapes and the long familiar squeak of the other’s saddle. So, thought Phil comfortably, they had always been
silent at the beginning of a drive, thoughts turned inward upon the past, and the silence now told him that the past had not
changed, not changed much. Yes, he did resent the stage, the dark green Stearns-Knight that nowadays blatted its way headlong
through the herd of cattle—much too fast, if you asked Phil. Once the driver had dared sound his horn, and the noise had
so frightened the cattle that Phil rode right over to the creeping car and, towering up there on his sorrel horse, he gave
the driver a good piece of his mind. You should have seen the passengers in the back seat make themselves small!!


“God damn scissorbills,” he growled. “George, did you hear that son of a bitch honk his horn. Dear good Jesus, they don’t
give a good hot damn how much weight they run off your stock. Like to see every damn car blowed up.”


But George, loyal to the Reo (as he was loyal to all he owned), looked ahead over the backs of the cattle. “Hell,” he said.
“Oh hell, Phil, man’s got to go with the times.”


“The times!” Phil said, and spit. Ten years before there was a proper stage with a real man there on the box, handling the
reins, fine four-horse rig. “What was the driver’s name, Fatso?” Phil asked George. He seldom forgot a name, but here was
a way to launch into the new morning’s conversation.


“Harmon,” George said.

“By God, you’re right.” That got them back into the past, to when they were kids, got them back to where they . . .