Back with you again, Facebook Friends!

Doggone if it’s not hot here. Plant stems are boiling out their juices and drooping their heads. For a while Northport, AL had rain everyday. Then the clouds lost their way and couldn’t find a path back. I need to chat with the weather maker up here to see what’s going on! As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know!

My lady is posting a dog story (of course!) tonight. This is a story about dogs she lost in one way or another. Not me. Oh No. I’m not lost. I’m right here, checking out her every move. Those of you who know me will understand the last paragraphs. Those of you who don’t, just remember that I adopted these people when they needed me most. They had been covered over with grief for years, it seems. I brought a brightness to their lives. They adore me for what I gave them. I love them for what they gave me. We’re kindred spirits. Much like what Mr. Wilburn Hudson says:

The World According to Wilburn Hudson

We are continually called to “answer the same old question. . . . Am I my brother’s keeper?”

I believe we are. Brothers – Sisters – Mothers – Fathers- Aunts- Uncles – Neighbors – Pets.

               Let It Rest

 My life is punctuated by mistakes. Many mistakes. One of the most serious occurred when I was a sophomore in college. Driving home one night, I saw a weak, scantly-furred dog wobbling down the side of the road. I stopped. The dog was rib-cage thin. I knew that if he didn’t have help, and soon, he would die.

Icy rain didn’t keep me from getting out of the car. Rain struck my face like steel needles. I scooped the dog up and put him in the passenger seat next to me. He huddled down and made no attempt to rouse his head.

At home, my mother reprimanded me for bringing in a stray dog. “Don’t we have enough dogs as it is?” she asked.

I put him on a towel in the center room next to the large coal-burning heater and waited for my daddy who could cure any dog of any ailment to get home from work. I tried to get the dog to eat bread. Nothing. I tried warm milk. Nothing. He lay on the towel watching me, as if he had accepted him fate.

That he would die, Daddy confirmed when he came home. “That dog won’t make it through the night,” he said. I assured him that he could fix the dog. He had fixed every dog that had ever had an ailment for as long as I could remember. “Just let the dog rest,” he said. And he went to bed.

I sat with the dog after all lights were out. Intermittently, through the night, I would reach over, stroke him and check to see that his heart was still beating. Sometime during the early morning hours, his breathing stopped. I cried. I sobbed over a dog I had known less than one night. I had so wanted him to recover, and he had refused to live.

Daddy got up to go to work at 3:00. There I sat, cradling the dead dog in my lap, wide awake. “Here,” he said. “Let me take him out and bury him in the garden.” He bent down and took the dog out into the darkness, a flashlight in his jacket pocket. When he came back inside, I was still by the stove, sitting cross-legged as if I rocked the dog in my arms. “Go to bed,” Daddy said. “You’re tired.”

I went to bed. My mother, not knowing that I had been up all night, woke me at seven to get ready for classes. I walked into the kitchen, my pajamas barely wrinkled.

“You had no business bringing that dog in here,” she greeted me.

“I thought Daddy could fix it. He could have fixed it if he had tried.” I felt more tears rising.

“That dog had distemper. You should have known that. Now you’ve brought it in here and exposed all your daddy’s dogs.”

My knees sagged beneath me. I had no idea. I knew how Daddy valued his dogs. I would have thrown myself in front of a truck before I hurt one of them. And now I had done this. Why didn’t he tell me when he first saw the dog? Had he told me, what would I have done? I couldn’t have killed the dog. That wasn’t in me.

In retrospect, I have wondered if Daddy told her that the dog was diseased. She knew little about Daddy’s dogs and cared even less. She would not have recognized the symptoms of distemper any sooner than I would. Distemper is a disease that never entered Daddy’s kennels. It spreads like Egyptian plagues. Perhaps even faster. There was no cure. It killed all it touched.

My daddy never said one disparaging word to me about what I had done. Once the dog was in the ground, the incident was over. He understood what my intentions had been. He saw no need to undermine my intent. But I think my guilt in exposing his dogs, if I did expose them, if the dog did have distemper, might have been easier to carry had he railed at me with sharp words. But that was not his way.

I did kill a dog. A dog on Highway 69. I can show you the place. Describe the dog in exact detail. I often see the dog, right where it happened, when I drive into Northport. He, too, or perhaps this time the dog was she, was on the side of the road.

The little dog resembled a lap dog mix. Gray and white. Muddy. Thin. Unkempt and matted. Obviously lost. The dog trotted up the highway, then turned around, I observed in my rearview mirror, and trotted back the way she had come.

I recalled the incident with the wintertime dog. This time I won’t screw up, I thought. I turned around and pulled into a road that cuts through Vestavia. I parked the car and got out, calling the little dog back. She trotted on, meeting traffic that flew through the dip and up the hill toward me.

Then she did the unbelievable. With no on-coming traffic, she crossed the road, coming toward me. I stood near the middle of the highway. She ran toward me.  Out of nowhere came a monster of a car. The car hit the little dog right there in front of me. With me standing in the other lane, the car ran over the little dog. Then another car, right behind the first, picked up its bloody body and threw it toward me. I stood there in Highway 69 screaming and crying, the dog at my feet. Neither car stopped.

I lifted the broken mass and laid it on the grass away from the highway, and I came home. When I entered the door and saw Tom, I broke. I wept so hard he could barely understand what I was saying.

“I killed a dog,” I sputtered. “I killed a little dog. We have to go back and bury it.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Did it run out in front of you?”

“No, I was standing in the middle of the road and the dog was coming to me so I could bring it home and feed it and a car came and hit it and another car came and hit it and I killed it.”

“No, you didn’t,” he assured me. “Somebody else killed the dog. The person who let the dog get lost killed the dog, not you.”

“But I called her to me. If I hadn’t. . .”

We did not return to bury the dog. I saw its body melt into the ground as it weathered away each day as I drove to work.

Now here I sit, facing it. Another dog is at issue.

We have a chance to get a puppy the same breed and same age as Cooper. I think we both need the puppy because Cooper brought us so much joy. He loved us both unconditionally, as no other dog ever has.  Logic tells me I didn’t kill the roadside dog. I didn’t sicken any of Daddy’s dogs. I didn’t actually kill the lap dog. But logic doesn’t always reign in my world. I tend to be ordered about more by my heart than by my head. So I hesitate. I drag my feet and the reality of the puppy gnaws at me.

Why can’t I face getting another puppy? Not because I think I’ll kill it. Thought had I been more attentive the day Cooper was killed I would have had him in the house, rather than outside. But I refuse to carry a burden that is not mine.  That burden belongs only to Fate.

I can face the truth. I hesitate about getting another puppy because I am afraid that Tom will be disappointed in a different puppy. And that would be my worse mistake yet.