Passages

There’s snow on the ground today. I wish you were here to see it, girl. When I walked up to your grave after I got home from work, I thought of how much you loved the white stuff, how you’d throw yourself into banks of it and run around like your tail was on fire, how you once tricked your Mama by hiding a vole in the snow and then redirecting her attention, and how you’d scoop a small pile of it onto your nose and run to me, knowing that I’d laugh like a fool. I used to accuse you of being a Viking dog, do you remember?

The house is so quiet now. You were always such a presence. Forever making some kind of noise. You were either click-clacking your way across the hardwood floors, or thumping down on the landing atop the steps, or popping your jaws at me to get me to play with you, or yipping and whimpering in your paw-jerking dreams on the floor, or yawning with that exaggerated, rusty-hinges, attention-seeking noise, or barking at the UPS driver, or sighing in contentment from your bed near the wood stove. Several times in the last few days, I’ve jerked upright, my heart hammering at my ribs, convinced that I heard you in the next room, expecting to see you come around the corner with your wide smile and your mind on a piece of cheese. But the silence has remained.

I took your little sister for a ride in my old truck. Dixee is a calm little ride-along companion, and she had a nice time, I think. She’s your Mama’s dog, and she is clearly in mourning for you, but she’s doing all right. We went for a grand tour of all the places you and I used to go. As we bounced along, she sat in my lap and craned her neck to look out the window, and I pointed out the field where the enormous buck once raced across towards you and me and crossed the road, almost giving you a seizure with excitement. I showed her the wooded field near the cemetery where the mountain lion screamed from the trees behind us that snowy night, and I described for her how your hackles stood up and how you growled like a werewolf and how you lit out in a dead run, dragging me down as I held your leash and pulling me across the field and onto the road on my belly, and how we both ran for the house and stood inside, panting and looking at each other.  I pointed out the field with the fallen log which I tried to step over one day, while you whimpered and pulled me away forcefully and repeatedly, and when I went around the other side to see what had you so agitated, I saw the large copperhead coiled up and sunning himself right at the spot where I would have stepped. We drove by the farm where the two barky boxers used to run out and torment you from your perch in the truck, and we saw the road where you and I took our first walk together a decade ago. When we got back to the house, the sun was shining in such a way that I could see the smears on the passenger side window from your nose, where you had pressed it against the glass the last time you and I took a ride.

You must have been so scared when you were first rescued.  You and your litter-mates were deposited into a dumpster behind the Walmart in Bristol, and who knows how hungry y’all were when the Good Samaritan found you? You and your mates were eventually separated as you were offered to different homes, and you thought you had found a real home…except that your puppy exuberance led you to tear up the carpet in that house, and the owner must have beaten you with a broom because all your days with us you would cringe and grow wide-eyed and slink away when we fetched a broom to sweep the floor. Then you went to another home and by all reports you got along fine with the toddler there, the child who pulled your tail and clambered all over you with nary a peep of protest from you. But that family had to move away, relocating to an apartment where dogs weren’t allowed, and you went back to the shelter, and how scared and confused you must have been.

But then that nice lady who knew my wife saw you, and had the shelter people call my wife, and they brought you to her, and she called to tell me that she was bringing home a visitor. I remember the afternoon I saw her pull up in front of the house, and I looked in the car and thought, “Look at that big dog!” And I came outside to meet you, and you looked up into my face with that earnest expression, and your brushy tail wagged from side to side, and I led you inside on the leash and showed you around. Do you remember your first night with us? You curled up near the hearth, and I made you a bed there with a comforter, and you spent the evening there, almost motionless, watching our faces with intense curiosity, your great copper-colored eyes squinched down into nervous slants. The rest of your life, I would tease you for being a Chinese hound. Do you remember that, Bonnie-girl?

And then when it was time for bed that first night, we moved your comforter into our bedroom, in the corner, and my wife was so nervous that you would bark, or pee in the floor, or do something to alarm her in the night. But you were as quiet that first night as the house is tonight. You never made a sound, never moved. In the morning, you were happy and perky, and we knew we were going to keep you. By that afternoon, you made your first play with me. We were sitting on the floor together, and you shook your head sideways and lifted both paws into the air and clumped them down as if saying, “Come get me!” And I did. And we never stopped playing, did we? My wife quickly became your Mama, and Mama would watch us romp and play, and she would tease me that if she ever called me to report that an airplane had crashed into the house, my first words would have been “Is Bonnie alright?” It was funny because it was true, and you were in on the joke, my red dog.

Oh, you were a force of nature when you were younger. You would tear through the house or the yard, chasing tennis balls and knocking me off my feet with the impact of your enjoyment. You chased every cow that ever ventured near our fenceline, and you yipped with your head thrown back as you chased rabbits in the woods, and you romped with the collie from one farm over, and you tormented the kitten who appeared at our chicken coop one Fourth of July, the kitten who grew into our wizened and hilarious barn cat, the barn cat who loved you and came to you to rub all over you whenever you were in the back yard, the barn cat who is looking for you even tonight, wondering why you don’t come out to sit with him on the snowy knoll next to the kitchen garden.

The kitchen garden…you liked to sprawl among the tomato plants, and you enjoyed digging the soft earth and resting in it during the heat of the evenings. The kitchen garden, where you once performed a perfect clip on me from behind, knocking me ass over teakettle into the dirt and then jumping on my back like a canine velociraptor. Jurassic bark. When red dogs ruled the earth.

Bonnie-girl, do you remember our weekly runs to the landfill to take the trash, and how the men there loved to talk about how beautiful you were? Do you remember the bank teller giving you dog biscuits? Do you remember the three times I ever saw you bare your teeth? Once was when your Mama brought a rescue poodle home for an abortive visit and he went all puppy on you and wore you out and wore out his welcome. Plus, he peed on the rug on which you liked to sit and watch your Mama cook supper. The second time was when the barn cat pushed his bottle-brush tail up in your face one time too many on a hot August afternoon while you were trying to rest in the shade along the fence. And the third time was when your sister Dixee tried to nudge you out of the way when you were lapping some buttermilk from a plastic cup.

Those were the serious teeth-baring incidents. The whimsical ones came every single night, when I would be sitting right here in this chair, relaxing and reading or watching a movie or chatting with your Mama. You would decide that it was bathroom time, and you would come up to my elbow and nudge me with that snout and grin at me, and I would say, “Do you wanna go out?” and you would freeze, staring at me with your bottom teeth showing, looking like Jeremy Irons, making me laugh while I tried to stand up to let you out.

Oh, that snout. You were the most snoutable dog. How many mornings you roused me from sleep by jabbing me with it, cold and wet. How many times you made your Mama scream when you ran up behind her — almost always when she had her arms full or hands occupied — and goosed her hard enough to lift her onto her tiptoes. You knocked Dixee aside with that snout as neatly as a hockey player slaps a puck. You lifted that snout into the warm breeze on many a sunny afternoon, eyes half-closed, tasting the scents on the mountain air. And you sat many times while I kissed you on the snout, just where it joined your face below your eye. I never willingly allowed you to lick my face, but I kissed your snout just about every night of your life with us.

Your Mama could always tell when you had stolen one of my shoes and were going to bring it to me. She said the very tone of your claws on the floor was different, a bright clatter that heralded your entry into the family room, your head held way high, the shoe or boot clamped in your jaws, prancing like a Lipazzaner retriever, eyes rolling in your face like a rabid dingo, which I often accused you of being, and you never took offense, but you always paid me back with a snout in the face while I slumbered.

When you began to slow down and your face grew frosty and you struggled to rise from the floor, I would look in the mirror at my silver beard and knead my aching joints and I would say to you, “Oh, Bonnie…we grew old together, didn’t we?” And you would sweep that tail and woof a soft assent and smile that crazy clown smile, and we would agree that, yes, it was indeed time for you to have a pork skin, or a piece of cheese, or a bit of buttermilk in your dish. And I would join you, except for the “in your dish” part, because my joints ached and you would refuse to help me up. But you would be jabbing, jabbing, always jabbing. With that snout.

But oh, Bonnie…last Saturday was a beautiful, happy day, a day that bled into another day, another day that became one of the saddest days of my life. All day Saturday, you had a good day. You romped and played, you got several treats, you coaxed me into playing in the floor with you, you napped in the sun, you tormented Dixee, you barked at the Fed Ex driver who delivered your food, and you sat and gazed into my eyes while I stroked your ears back and told you what a no-account old hind-end dog you were. You sat up with me late into the night after your Mama went to bed, dozing next to my chair while I finished a book.

And then, when my eyes grew grainy and tired, I stood up and said the exact same words to you that I said almost every night for years and years and years. I scrubbed along your spine while you stretched and yawned, and when I straightened up, I whispered, “Love you, Bon-dog. Sleep good, you old dog.” And I went off to bed and left you stretched out next to my chair.

The next morning, the Marine Corps Birthday, you didn’t meet me at the bedroom door. When I let Dixee out while calling for you, I noticed how curiously slow and deliberate and grave her gait was. I opened the door for her, still calling for you, then peeked around the corner into the family room. Could you hear me calling to you, Bonnie? You were lying exactly as I had left you, but you were as still as a dog carved from cedar. Your beautiful eyes were half-open. And I knew at that moment that you had gone away, and that I would have to wait until my own passing to see you again.

The three vets, who knew you through the years and had great affection for you, said it was your heart, and I am grateful for the manner of your death, if not the timing of it. I am grateful that you didn’t suffer, and that we never had to make a decision about how and when your days should end. You had a vast, loving heart, and in the end, it simply gave out. It gave out at the end of a good, good day.

Did you hear me panting and wheezing as I dug your grave up in the woods, Bonnie? Did you hear me cursing the rocks and slashing at the frozen soil with the mattock? Did you hear me choking with grief as I wrapped you in the peach-colored sheet you loved and laid you in the cold embrace of the Clinch Mountain dirt? Did you hear me talking softly to your Mama while we placed your favorite leash and a bag of pork skins and a slice of American cheese and a doggie biscuit and your chew toy next to you? Did you hear me trying to sing in my broken voice as I returned the dirt over you and laid you to rest, facing the east? Did you recognize the song, even though I could hardly get the words out? It was “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean,” and I sang it to you every single time we were riding in the old pickup truck together, and you used to smile at me and do what your Mama called your epizootic dance. I’ll bet you recognized your song, poor rendition that it was.

I miss you every day, Bonnie. The ache is so painful that I can’t talk to anyone about this except your Mama, because she is the only person who is allowed to see me cry, and I cannot talk about you without crying, not yet. I miss you every day, and right now it seems as if I should be able to go to the back door and call you and watch you run to me with a small mound of snow on your snout. In a little while, I will rise from this chair and go to bed. I will stroke Dixee and tell her goodnight, and I will look for you out of habit and perhaps out of hope, but you will not be there. In the morning, I will awaken and I will drink my coffee from the cup that bears a photo of you, a young Bonnie proudly offering your Mama a rabbit’s hindquarter, presented to her as she shrieked in horror but still managed to take the picture. And there was snow on the ground in the photo.

Some, perhaps many, will think me silly and foolish and maudlin to express such thoughts, especially in a public forum. I do not care what they think. Nor do I care that they think me eccentric for believing –not hoping, but truly believing — that I will see you again on the other side of this life. I believe it as surely as I believe you loved us, as surely as I delighted in every day of your life with us. I hope you’re watching for me, because when I am gathered to my people and I come into that far green country, I will surely be searching the pure horizon for you, for a red dog with a magnificent snout and deep, deep eyes.

Your name was Bonnie Orr, and I loved you, and there was never a dog like you.

~ S.K. Orr