The Dog Who Would Not Eat
Brad had to lift Duke into the back seat. Duke could not make that jump anymore, and Brad did not know it, and for a second he just stood there holding the door open and waiting on a dog who was looking up at the seat and then back at him. Then he bent and got an arm under Duke’s chest and another under his haunches, and he lifted him the way you lift something you are afraid of breaking. I will say that for him. He was gentle about it.
I handed the sack through the window.
“The white ones are his thyroid,” I said. “The tan ones are for his hips. One of each, twice a day, with food. Never the tan ones on an empty stomach.”
“Okay,” Brad said.
“He needs warm water on his food.”
“Okay.”
Tina got in on the passenger side. She looked at me then, once, quickly, and I could not read it.
Duke had his chin on the top of the back seat. He watched me through the rear window all the way down the driveway and out onto the street. He did not bark. He was never a barker. He just watched until the truck turned the corner by the Methodist church, and then there was nothing to watch.
Jeff came and stood beside me.
“I could still catch them before the highway,” he said.
“I know you could.”
“You want to tell me why not?”
“Because he’s not a rope,” I said. “And because that boy just buried his dad.”
Jeff carried the chairs to his pickup one at a time, which is what my brother does when he is angry and has nowhere to put it.
It is seventy-five miles from O’Neill to Norfolk. Duke would be in a strange house before five.
I want to be fair to Brad, because I have had time to be.
What he said was true. Dennis did pay for that dog. It was the spring of the second year we were married, and Dennis and Brad had driven out toward Atkinson to a farm sale, the two of them, one of the few days that year they spent in each other’s company. A man there had a litter of Lab pups in a stock tank with straw in the bottom. Dennis wrote him a check for six hundred dollars on the hood of the pickup, and Brad held the pup on his lap the whole way back to town.
So in Brad’s mind, that dog began with him and his father on a good day. I do not think he ever updated the picture. Why would he? He was not there for the rest of it.
Dennis came through the back door that afternoon with a cardboard box and a look on his face like a boy who has brought home something he knows he is going to have to explain.
“Now, before you say anything,” he said.
I looked in the box. Nine weeks old, fat as a loaf of bread, asleep on one of Dennis’s work shirts.
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Duke.”
“Of course it is.”
Dennis ran a motor grader for the Holt County roads department. He did it for thirty-one years. In winter, when it snowed, he was out the door whenever the phone rang. He loved that dog. He took him along in the pickup on Saturdays and he walked him along the shelterbelts every fall on the pheasant opener, and there is a picture on my refrigerator of the two of them with three roosters laid out on a tailgate.