The Collie
1.
A little boy is making strange howling noises. He is standing in the dirt in the yard of an unpainted farmhouse. A truck lumbers down the bumpy track toward the main road. A dog scrambles frantically back and forth in the back of the truck. A woman stands with her apron wadded up against her face to hide her tears.
After all the years, Melvin can still feel his heart twisting in his chest as if it could tear itself free and fly down the road. He can still feel his arms lifting as if he could fly after his heart. And he can still feel the smack of his father’s hand on his face.
(This is a fictionalized version of a story told to me by an older gentleman of my acquaintance, )
2.
“Hey, good morning, Melvin.” No response. Jenny leaned over the bed and positioned herself so that her face hovered in Melvin’s view. “Good morning, Mel. Want some breakfast?”
Melvin rose to the surface of wakefulness like a fish in deep water, blinking and smacking his toothless gums. He squinted at Jenny’s face hanging in his vision, backlit by the sun in the window.
“Oh, hey, good morning, Jenny.” Melvin had an incongruously large mouth for such a quiet man. His grin started in front under his nose and traveled back nearly to his ears. Jenny had to smile in return, but her eyes were red.
“You sleep good last night?”
“I always sleep good. It’s staying awake that I have trouble with.”
Jenny laughed, “Well, you just relax. I’ll fix you some breakfast when you’re ready”.
“Thank you.” The smile retreated and Melvin settled his cheek into his pillow for another snooze. He slept most of the time, came up for air only to eat or to have his Depends changed. On rare occasions he and Jenny would chat about the old times, his childhood. Melvin didn’t talk much. He knew that his strange way of rolling words around on his tongue before finally pushing out sounds made him hard to understand. Jenny was patient with him, he could see it on her face. All of his life people had either been patient with him or annoyed by him. No one had ever just accepted him. No person.
He knew what Jenny would do now. She would putz about for a bit cleaning things. Then after a while she would settle in the big chair and read until he asked for breakfast, their routine for months. But that morning was different. Jenny looked different. She looked like she had been crying.
It wasn’t really his business. She was a care provider. She showed up on a schedule wearing her flowered scrubs and a brisk friendly manner. She washed him, cleaned feces off his butt, heard stories about his childhood if he felt like talking, all part of her job. She didn’t talk about herself much.
Maybe it was just allergies, he thought. Maybe she wasn’t crying.
Melvin had cried a lot as a child, but secretly so his father would not know. His dad had been a man of harsh ridges and sharp angles. Even when relaxing in a chair his elbows had stabbed outwards against the air, and his knees had thrust upward like crenellations of a castle wall to keep any children out of his lap.
Melvin had been an expert on his reading his dad’s face: the whole continuum from slack gray-tinged weariness to empurpled rage. He had known the signs of building anger: jaw muscles writhing beneath the bluish skin of unshaven cheeks, eyes glittering through narrowed lids, mouth suddenly shooting sounds like a pistol.
Melvin’s dad could go from still to rampage in a heartbeat, stomping through the house, slamming things against the wall or smashing things on the floor. Once he kicked his foot right through the screen door. After that, the screen door did nothing to keep the bugs out; the gaping hole was like an open mouth, like a yell in the form of mesh.
His dad had been fierce but rarely put a hand to wife or child. The house had been his sparring partner; he battered the walls and floor and the house retaliated with a leaky roof and rot.
The house got its revenge on the whole family: the worn flooring in the kitchen could grab at the toes of the unwary, the treacherous stairs could shift unexpectedly and send people tumbling. The house and his dad had been alike: with both Melvin had been careful to watch his step.
3.
“Were you crying?” Melvin asked. Jenny set his breakfast down on his lap: hash browns and scrambled eggs. She was a good cook. She had cranked his bed up to a seated position. She set a glass of fruit juice in the cup holder.
“Thank you.” Melvin said, noting that she had not answered him. Instead she was standing staring out the window. He speared a fork full of eggs. Then she said, “I had to get rid of my dog.”
“What’s that, Jenny?”
She leaned over and spoke into his face. “I had to get rid of my dog.”
“I’m sorry.” Melvin meant it. He had always had dogs in his life.
He had a collie when he was a little boy. Melvin had no idea how she came into his life. She was just there like his mom and his sister and his dad, except nicer. She never seemed to get angry. Like him, she was afraid of his father but nothing anyone did to her could make her mad.
She lived in the back yard. In those days people never let dogs into the house. He felt bad about it now, wondered if she had been lonely out there. His dog. It was funny how memory worked. He knew that he had spent most of the day and much of the evening with her, every day, even in the winter, but he didn’t have a lot of specific memories. And most of his memories were just random bits of time, like old snapshots in a shoe box.
He remembered what she looked like: what they call a tricolor collie, orangey brown, black and white. He remembered her as pretty, but she probably had been matted and full of fleas. Life was different then. People didn’t know how to care for animals. She had pups. That was another memory: the wriggling bumps in the black sack Dad carried down to the creek. The collie trotting along beside him. Melvin had not gone down to the creek. He did not see what the dog saw. She probably had pups several times and he just didn’t think about it, being a kid.
She would walk to school with him. He had memories of school. Sitting in class. Most of the teachers never called on him to recite. It was embarrassing for them to watch him struggle. He just sat there with the book open in front of him. Schools were different then. The desks were wood and wrought iron and were hooked together with runners, like a sleigh with lots of seats. There was a hole in each desk top for the ink well. Generations of kids had carved initials in the top and little designs like hearts. He had carved pictures on his desk with his pocket knife. Seems like he had drawn a picture of the collie. Maybe years later some kid looked at his drawings and added stuff on. Layers of kids sitting at that one desk, probably most of them better students than he had been. Well, they could hardly have been worse.
Truth was, the desks were probably in a landfill, rotten down to nothing. He had been a child a long time ago.
After school the kids would run out in a herd, all thirty or forty of them, the younger ones scampering and yelling, the older ones paired up, often boy and girl. Just a little country school, seemed like all the kids were related to each other, they all came from the same farmhouses and dirt roads. Kids walked to school back then. They didn’t think anything of walking for miles. He hadn’t thought anything of it either, not even in the winter. She always waited for him in the schoolyard and they walked home together.
That was another memory. A cold day, sky thick with heavy gray clouds, dark green slopes of the mountains, the rugged tumble of the clear cut, him weaving his way through the soggy ferns and salal, taking a short cut that turned out to be a mistake. His plan had been to cut across the clear cut and through the woods, but they got off course somehow. Not really lost. They just spent a lot more time thrashing around in wet shrubbery than he thought they would and, when they finally fought their way clear of the forest, they popped out on the road a half a mile past his house and had to double back.
He remembered her lack of enthusiasm for woods-walking in the wet. He’d had to encourage her, constantly motioning with his hands, pushing branches back out of her way, stomping down the ferns.
By the time they got back to the house they were both a mess. His mom pulled him into the house and warmed him up with dry clothes, hurrying so his dad wouldn’t see him and get mad.
“People just didn’t think about animals in those days,” Melvin said.
“Hmm, what?” She’d gone back to reading a book. She got up immediately came to his bed. “Do you need something, Melvin?”
“I was just remembering that people didn’t think about animals when I was a kid.”
He had left her outside all wet, hadn’t given it a thought. Her bed was out in the shed.
4.
“How come you had to get rid of your dog?” Melvin asked.
He watched Jenny let a long sign, shoulder up, then down, chest in, then out. She was looking out the window again. She was trying to keep her tears to herself.
“We can’t afford our house. I have to move back in with my parents and they won’t let me keep her.”
Move in with her parents? Jenny was in her mid-twenties at least and she wore a wedding ring.
“It’s because the plywood mill closed,” she explained. “There’s just no other work around here.”
The plywood mill. He had once aspired to work there, good paying union jobs. Good job for him, too, because the noise of the machinery would not have bothered him. However, he had spent most of his adult life working as a painter. Not a lot of talk required for that.
He had always worked. Even as a little kid. Trudge home from school, run out to the barn. Weed the garden. Feed the animals. Fix fences, fix the truck, fix the siding on the house, fix the sagging barn door. He and his dad were constantly fixing things that constantly needed fixing. He wondered if farming was still like that.
They had been small time dairy farmers. It wasn’t the Waltons. They raised animals and they killed them. He remembered the killing more than the raising. Another picture from the past: the old horse being led off for slaughter. He had been friends with the horse.
But it wasn’t smart to count on any animal being around for very long.
His dog disappeared about the time he got hearing aides.
“Did I ever tell you that I had a dog?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so. A Jack Russel terrier.”
“No, I meant the dog I had when I was a little boy.”
“No, you haven’t told me about that dog.”
A man showed up one day. Not a near neighbor or Melvin would have known him. The man came over in his truck, a big new Chevy. For some reason, even as a little boy Melvin had known that the truck was a symbol of prosperity, the kind of truck every man wanted on his place.
Melvin had been out in the yard doing something, probably weeding the garden, he couldn’t remember what. He remembered his dad and the neighborman coming around the side of the house, big men in work clothes. He remembered them as gray, like shadows but more solid, side by side, and the neighbor had a rope.
At first he had not understood what they were doing. Then he understood but could not believe it. She couldn’t believe it either. The neighbor man put the rope around her neck and started off toward the front yard. She was a good dog, she always tried to do what people wanted, but she could not understand why she was being led away. She kept looking over her shoulder at Melvin.
He had stumbled along behind them. He had not known what to do. Throw rocks at them? Grab their clothes? Grab her by the leash and run away? By the time they all reached the front yard, he could feel his throat being ripped out, hear at distance the high pitched screams. The neighbor man stood by the truck, hesitating. Melvin’s mother ran out of the house and for a moment of wild hope he believed she would save his dog. But she just stood to one side, her face wrinkled up, her hands kneading her apron.
His dad grabbed Melvin by the shoulders. He knelt down, looked right into Melvin’s eyes. Old face, lined, gray, stubble of beard, strong nose narrow as a knife, eyes sharp as shards of glass. His mouth moved, biting off words that Melvin could not understand.
The truck moved off down the driveway. The brake lights flashed, then the truck rolled around the corner and out on the road. His heart twisted in his chest. He tried to raise his arms to jerk himself free from his father’s grip. His father’s hand released his shoulder, swung out, and connected with his face in a resounding slap. Melvin fell backwards on to the ground.
“I had a dog, but my father sold her.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Melvin realized that she was crying.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. He reached for her hand.