Kingdom Of Remnants

I am looking through the glass doors, looking outside at the peach trees Mrs. Orr and I tucked into the earth several years ago, now standing bare-limbed in the cold air at the edge of the front meadow. The trees have never done very well in terms of producing edible fruit, but they are lovely when they blossom and their leaves provide a nice shade beneath which we sometimes sit in the Adirondack chairs in warm weather. Someday those trees will be dead and gone, and perhaps no one in future years will ever know that beautiful peach trees once stood in that spot, on that gentle rise in the terrain.

I had one dog when I was a boy, just one. He was a German Shepherd, given to us by my aunt, who acquired him from some coworker or friend. We named him King.

King had a very short life. As I recall, he was ours for about a year, and then he began to lose weight and weaken. My mother scrimped to save the money to have him checked at the local vet’s office. I can remember the day we took him. Having no car, we walked the dog to the vet’s office, about a mile from our house. King did well on a leash and padded along patiently as we made our way to the clean office where he would eventually be diagnosed with a brain tumor.

In that one happy year, King lived outside in his doghouse beneath a pear tree in the back yard, what we called our “garden,” in what I suppose was a rather English manner. He was a friendly but territorial creature, deeply affectionate with my sister and me but wary and bellicose with strangers. We fed him dry dog food augmented with table scraps. My mother pretended to dislike him, but I spied her caressing him and giving him little treats from her kitchen several times. This was a pattern with her all the years of my life with her, feigning dislike or indifference towards animals, but secretly enjoying and perhaps even loving them. King enjoyed licking Mother’s ankle when she wasn’t watching, and she always scolded him strongly. But I suspect she enjoyed the game as much as he did.

The day after King died, my mother asked me to dismantle his doghouse; she did not wish to see it any longer. I now know that she was grieving and that her request was made to help lessen the sting of loss. To look out and see his empty dwelling place, now forlorn and bereft of a dog’s joyful existence, was something Mother wanted to spare us. I was only seven years old or so, and it was the first time I ever wielded a hammer, but I managed to tear down the doghouse and stack the lumber and shingles neatly in a corner of the garden. Weeds soon grew over the material.

The pear tree beneath which King spent his one leisurely year at our little house continued to grow and thrive, though the grass beneath it, which King’s massive paws had worn away in his time there, never grew back. I used to climb the tree and pick pears and toss them down to my sister. I also used to climb the tree to escape my sister when my lively tormenting got the better of her and she chased me with the serious intention of harming me. I still carry a scar on my right hand where she whacked me with a stick, a stick with a nail in it, as I perched in the low branches of the pear tree. I have often wondered what might have happened if I hadn’t made it up into the tree that day. My sister would likely have blinded me, or worse. This was the way of things between us.

The last time I visited the old homeplace was probably ten years ago. My wife and I took my mother there to see the place, surprised that the house was still standing. Gutted and up for sale, it was a sad shell, tinier than I remembered, and we went inside and moved through the rooms in silence, my wife watching as Mother and I walked wordlessly through the images and sounds and smells from long ago in the chambers, in the catacombs that we both carried inside. In the back garden, the green patch of adventure where I stood and pretended to be Johnny Unitas, throwing my cheap little football again and again onto the corrugated tin roof of the adjoining garage, watching it wobble down and running to catch it, then backpedaling and throwing it again, and again, and again. The garden was no longer that vast plain where I pretended to be a farmer, where I pretended to battle terrible foes with my broomstick sword and my magic incantations. It was a little rectangle of grass and clover. The pear tree was gone, and the grass beneath where it once lived had regrown. I knelt there in the summer sun, low in the sky, and stroked the ground where King had once romped and circled and sat and watched. All gone, and only I held those precise memories inside my middle-aged self. To be of a sentimental nature is to be perpetually at risk for hurt, and it did hurt as I breathed the same air where I once rubbed my long-dead dog’s coarse fur and wrestled with him on that piece of good ground.

I wondered what happened to the pear tree. Did it finally die, or did someone cut it down and haul it away? I examined the perimeter of the garden and saw no overgrown pile where someone might have laid the trunk and branches of an old fruit tree, nor did I see the remnants of the stack of lumber and shingles that once made a castle for a beloved king. And after a while, when Mother and Mrs. Orr were ready, I walked away for the last time, leaving behind me some things that I will never have again, even in my mind, because memories can not only fade, but they can trick me. They can make me believe things that perhaps never were. But I hold them anyway, hard as I can, and I take them out and sift through them on rare days.

Today it is cold, and there is no fruit on any tree or vine or bush here in the mountains. Perhaps there will be again in a few months. I am waiting to see.

~ S. K. Orr