I was ten when my
father killed the dog. We’d refer to it later as The Accident but, in the end,
the dog was dead and my father was the one who’d killed it.
I sat in the front
seat beside him that day, while he drove and sang along with the radio. The trees
had just started their slow turn to fall, and the air was warm enough still to
have the windows down. I stared at the white blonde hairs on my arm, golden
against brown skin. Father squinted his eyes against the sun and the smoke from
the Winston balanced on his lower lip. I watched it hang there with its impossible
ash, bouncing as he sang, tilting upward and getting swallowed by his mouth as
he inhaled. Just when it seemed doomed to drop into his lap and set the whole
car on fire, he flicked it out the open window and lit another.
It was between the
flicking and the lighting that I saw the dog run down the hill from the
farmhouse toward the road. A giant
yellow lab, big and beautiful and stupid, his legs moving faster than his
brain, bounding across the gravel road in pursuit of nothing. I don’t know that
the dog ever saw the car; I am certain my father never saw the dog. He hit the
animal’s hind end, spinning him up and over the hood of the car and onto the
side of the road, fast and heavy and without flair. He pulled the car off the
shoulder and we sat in confusion and silence.
My father got out
first, and slow-jogged to the animal’s side. I hung behind, trying to look
without looking. The dog’s tongue pushed through his rattling teeth and he panted
and whined as my father muttered, shit,
shit, shit. The dog shifted his eyes to his back end, and I saw what he
could not – a twisted mess of legs and tail, every bit of it going not at all
the right way.
Shit.
“Go back to the
car,” Father spoke without turning.
He knelt for a
long time with his back to the car, putting his hand gently here and there on
the dog. I watched through the back window as he moved in so close that I
thought he was hugging the animal. The muscles in his back bulged and tensed under
his t-shirt and we both stopped breathing for a moment. Then he relaxed and
raised himself from the pavement. He rubbed his face hard with both hands, and
knelt again, this time rising with the dog cradled in his arms.
He walked up the
long hill to the farmhouse. By the time he returned, I had fallen asleep in the
sun, my face pressed into the seat back. He did not speak, but started the car
and pulled back on to the road. Loretta Lynn was on the radio.
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