A Day No Cows Would Suffer

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On the drive home Friday, I was thinking about how nice it is to be able to leave Jinx in the house while we’re gone, and how pleased we have been that he has never displayed the slightest inclination to destroy anything out of boredom. When I arrived home, I saw him poking his snout through the blinds, waiting for me to let him out.

When I approached the door, I noticed something odd about Jinx’s appearance.

“Odd,” I thought. “He looks like Stonewall Jackson. I wonder when he grew a beard?”

When I opened the door, I got my answer.

At some point during the day, Jinx had opened the bottom of his plush pet bed and extracted much of the stuffing. He had scatted a lot of the dark-brown material around the dining room, but had a large hank of it stuck to his bottom teeth, giving him the appearance of having grown a decent beard.

The spotted dog stared up at me with wary eyes, perhaps expecting me to raise my voice or my hand. I suspect he had a bit of both in his puppyhood with the man from whom I obtained him. I didn’t say a word; I just opened the door wider and let him slip out into the late afternoon sun to relieve himself and chase squirrels.

As I tidied up, I thought of how some people would lose their temper at such a discovery, and how they would be willing to assign Jinx’s actions to malice, to being a “bad” dog. Perhaps I would have done the same at some  point in my past. But I know Jinx, and that makes all the difference.

I have known people who have enjoyed reputations as “nice, kind, decent” folks in the communities in which they lived, reputations that stunned me because of my personal knowledge of what these people were really like. Busying myself with repairing Jinx’s bed, I thought back to one such fellow.

He was a prosperous farmer with many sources of income, known as a shrewd businessman and bargainer. When he died, his obituary contained the usual glowing remarks about what a “good” man he’d been. My experiences with him were somewhat at odds with the newspaper tribute. I found him to be a cruel, avaricious man, every bit as clasping and covetous. I personally saw him mistreat his own animals with a callousness that was shocking and enraging. But in the end, the local newspaper lauded him as a Good Christian and a valued member of the community. Such is the way of the world, and I should not be surprised by it.

The weekend walks with Jinx were wonderful, literally wonderful. We watched the sun come up across snow-dusted peaks while red-tailed hawks rocketed through the luminous air. I watched my dog run at a flat-out gallop to a distant ridge, throw himself to the ground, wallow in the thin snow, then leap up and toss his head back and bark in silver, undiluted joy at the heavens, telling them, declaring to them what a grand day it was and how pleased he was to be under their ceiling. I listened at dusk to a stillness so deep it seemed that some great event was about to occur; the birds were hushed and the very weeds along the fence seemed to be holding their collective breath. I spoke to a beautiful old oak beside the humped lane, telling him how lovely he was and how I appreciated his titanic presence. Then I touched with my gloved hand and spoke to a stump next to the oak, musing aloud that the stump was no mere monument to a formerly living tree, but rather an oak in its retirement years. My thinking was and is that if the rocks and soil are alive, as I think they are, then a stump which once had sap flowing in it and which sent down roots into the rocky soil to bring up water and lifted its leaf-hands to the wheeling sun for light and food, then it surely must still be alive and sentient in its arboreal way.

I watched the birds feed and frolic, I watched them bathe in the fresh water I provided, I watched the squirrels do their acrobat’s act high in the boughs. I listened to the discontented bulls calling from across the valley, and the lone sheep who keeps company with the herd of Black Angus as he lodged his own complaints. I let rooster crow and hen cackle soothe me as I trudged along, with gravel and straw beneath my boots. I noted the coating of moss on so many still things, and I pressed my fingertips into sheets of mud and stroked them across the queer surface of a frozen puddle in the road.

I did all these things knowing that such hours of peace and stillness are passing things, rare things, and that I must return to the world of men on Monday morning, and here it is Monday again, and how did it happen that the hours bled away as they did? And how is it that my walks across the living earth are now, in this moment, mere memory?

Thanks be to the living moments. They come on in force, and they leave like vapor. But they live inside my Southern chest, always with me. Moments of life, moments of earth, moments of me.

~ S.K. Orr