A Mercy

When people had a sick dog they called Pa because he wasn’t afraid of being hated. The money wasn’t much but enough to feed the chickens, and we ate the eggs and the chickens that didn’t lay. There were a lot of dogs back then and a lot of people without the heart, or the ammunition.

The dawn would shove us out of bed and we’d set to work making the rounds. No food in our bellies til lunch cause Pa said, “You need to know hunger to understand work.” We’d set off on two bicycles, gun on Pa’s back bouncing with the dirt like a newborn, my own digging the groove in my shoulder where it would snuggle til I die.

I remember Mrs. Henderson had a black lab, famed for the nose as much as the bark, the only thing left of her husband, dead ten years. At least that’s what they say when a hunter didn’t return from the pines. The old girl was diabetic, her belly big and sore filling with blood, crying miserable. She couldn’t do it herself. She was too withered.

He wanted me to shoot but I was just a boy and didn’t understand. He’d call me fool, tell me I had to start carrying my weight, and make me swear tomorrow would be the day but he always let me get away with refusal, despite the fuss he made. Maybe he knew. A boy who wants a dog shouldn’t have to shoot one.

So, I would turn around as Pa primed the bullet, watch the pines sway in the mist like they were singing a chorus for the poor old dogs. I wasn’t allowed in them. Pa shunned them, said there were wicked things living between the trees, “Drive a man mad or missing.” I thought the spirits that escort a soul lived there, swore I caught a glimpse of one, looked like a candle flickering from recoil.

Do dogs have souls? Pa acted like they did. After the shot he’d bless himself.

We would go from farm to homestead sometimes riding far as forty miles to the next county. We’d get the orders from carrier pigeons. It was my job each morning to meet them on the porch with a little feed, untie the scroll and tie on a ribbon giving a date for our arrival. Then I’d scrub their shit with an old sponge and bucket. Nobody wanted to do business with a dirty porch.

Some folks thought it wrong to call on Pa. They’d leave their dogs to the woods or let them die in pain. Many a time abandoned dogs formed tribes and stole from their former masters, chickens and eggs—barn cats when they could. Or they attacked children, the old and feeble, mothers expecting a new light in their life. All the feral sprouted up in a dog after a night in the dark. From our cabin we’d hear them yipping as they lapped up the creek.

I saw Pa steady his rifle on the sill, aiming just fine at one of them dogs in starlight, and I knew he could connect the shot, but I never saw him shoot one of them wild ones.

Pa had a lot of rules about life. Said he was a philosopher of the dirt. He’d make me recite them at random as if school was always in season. If anyone ever broke into our house Pa said shoot him in the head, twice. “We don’t want no burglars suing and stealing all the little we’ve earned. Criminal justice these days is justice for criminals. Two shots. Make sure they’re dead.”

One time, Mr. Saxton came by with a potato sack. Said his barn cat been messing with some tomcat late at night and birthed a litter. What use he have for kittens? He wrung that cat’s neck in a fever, kept one fool for himself, said he’d train it right by letting it fare against the rats when still so young. “That’s how you get a tiger,” he had said.

Mr. Saxton was the only man to visit Pa socially. They were in the kitchen, drinking from the two crystal glasses we owned while I pet our pigeon on the porch. All the sound leaked through the siding. Mr. Saxton was excited, news about some community forming, though what community he meant I never knew. Pa didn’t talk. He nodded and sipped, and maybe that was enough for Mr. Saxton to feel like he had a friend.

It was dusk when Mr. Saxton hobbled off down the road. Pa came out on the porch, red in the face, yawning. He handed me the potato sack.

“Take this. Hold it in the creek til the bag goes limp.” He had that liquored sternness in his face that said questions would be answered with whipping.

I trudged down to the creek. The water was all gold, like a current of sunlight. It was what I imagined the road to heaven looked like but then the sun didn’t want to see what I had to do, and the water turned oily.

I crossed the creek and knelt down before the barrier of pines and untied the sack. Those little lumps of life crawled out of there slow and curious and mewing. It was summer. I promised to bring them what little milk we had in the morning.

I felt my way through the dark back to the cabin.

“Did you do it?”

I nodded.

“It’s a mercy, son. The pines is terror. Best thing for them is to leave life quick and painless.”

That night was especially dark. Pa seemed nervous, studied the shapes moving by the creek, fingering the trigger. I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t. We listened together as the shapes made their discovery, and then the wind filled the valley with the sound of crazy. I still hear them. The howling of abandoned dogs.