Down The Hill and Across The Road
He sat beneath the small overhang, watching the light rain gather like seeds of glass on the pine boughs. It was the first cool day of September, and a breeze was steady from the southeast. He shivered just a bit and was glad for the jacket he’d donned before coming outside.
The house down the hill and across the road was tawdry in the rain, old feed sacks and trash scattered in soggy piles on the steps and across the high grass in the front yard. Though few of his faculties still functioned well, his eyesight was good and he was watching the dog.
It belonged to the sullen man who owned the house down the hill and across the road. He was rarely home and when he was, he performed few of the duties we think of as homeowner’s tasks. His dog was some sort of heeler mix, lean, brindled, with a high, proud tail. The dog was circling the front yard, hopping onto the porch from time to time, exploring with his powerful nose, then back to the grassy yard where he played with some of the trash there.
The dog’s regular place was a chain-link kennel beneath two linden trees. It contained a bucket of dirty water and an empty metal food dish. The gate, usually closed and locked, was somehow open. The old man watching the dog from his porch had often been tempted to make his way down the hill and across the road to free the dog from its prison. He had no desire to start some sort of war with the bitter-eyed owner of that place, but what truly stayed him from acting was his own frailty. Ever since the little piece of plaque – no bigger than a flake of black pepper – had broken free of a blood vessel and deprived part of his brain of its oxygen for a short period, he had not been able to walk without a cane. Nor could he speak intelligibly any longer. Had he been able, he would have called to the dog to run across the road and up the hill to him. He believed the dog would have done so.
A late-migrating hummingbird moved up to the old man’s face in a slow arc. It had been sitting out of sight on a low pine branch and knew the man on sight as the benefactor who filled its feeder with sugar-water. The man smiled at the high-pitched call of the little creature, and he tracked it with his eyes as it flew around the side of the house towards the back garden where the feeder hung. He scanned the tree’s branches, looking with close attention from branch to branch, bough to bough, but saw no other hummingbirds. Two doves were on the ground below the tree, bundled against the rain in their gray dress clothes, moving with their rolling liquid gait as they searched for seeds.
The sound of an engine drew the old man’s attention, and he looked down the hill and saw a flatbed truck coming up the gravel road. It stopped in front of the house where the dog was sitting on the porch, alert and still. The owner opened the door and got out, and the dog yipped once, a high, happy sound, and ran to him. When the dog reached him, the owner slapped the dogs face so hard the animal tumbled sideways and fell to the ground. It lay there, belly and legs up, looking up at the author of its misery.
The man watching from above sat up straight and thought of bellowing out a protest, an action of which he was capable. But he feared that any interference might worsen the poor creature’s situation, so he remained silent. His fingers gripped the arms of his chair and he leaned forward, watching with eyes as fearful as the dog’s.
Down the hill and across the road, the angry man grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged it through the wet grass to the kennel. He was saying something, but the old man couldn’t understand the words. He could understand the whimpering of the dog, though, and the sound cut his insides like ground glass. He watched the man kick open the gate and step inside, knocking over the bucket of murky water, spilling it onto the already-wet ground. The man flung the dog inside the kennel and shut the door, winding a length of chain around the gate and the gate post. He said something else to the dog, who was trembling in a tight ball in the rear corner of the pen. He turned and stomped over to the house, unlocked the door and went inside, and then returned after a minute. He shut the door behind him and went to his truck and started it up. He seemed to be watching the dog for a moment, then swung the vehicle onto the gravel and turned around and headed back the way he had come. The watching old man kept waiting for the owner to look up the hill and see him there, but the owner never did.
When the engine noise had faded from the air and left only the faint hissing of the rain on the natural world, the old man noticed for the first time that the top and one side of the dog’s kennel was covered in morning glories. He knew that local farmers called the plant “tangle weed” because of its fast-growing and invasive nature, and he had no doubt that if the owner ever noticed it on his dog’s kennel, he would have referred to it by this name.
The old man watched the road for a few minutes, and then returned his attention to the dog. He could only see its ears now as it lay in the mud. The mud. He looked at the overturned bucket just inside the kennel door. His knees cried out in protest as he gripped the chair-arms hard and started to rise. He wondered if the owner would return soon, and he felt in his pocket for his car keys. The hummingbird flew up near him again and called to him. He said a word to it, and it whirred over to a branch in the pine tree and sat, shifting side-to-side in a familiar dance, watching the old man. The rain began to fall harder, and the cane’s handle was slick and cold when the old man’s hand took hold of it.
~ S.K. Orr