The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

Every few miles he sighed, a big Lab sigh that fogged up the window.

I drove with my right hand on his head and my left on the wheel, and I talked to him the whole way, the way you do.

I told him he was going home. I told him Dale was waiting.

I told him the beans were coming off and the cats had kittens in the machine shed and the swing still squeaked in the same spot.

I do not know what he understood, but he listened to every word.

When I turned onto our gravel road his head came up off my leg.

When I turned in at our mailbox he was standing on the seat with his nose pressed to the glass, his whole body shaking.

I opened the door and he got down slowly, one leg at a time, and stood in the yard and smelled it.

The grass, the gravel, the lilac bushes by the pump house. Then he went straight for the porch steps like he had been gone a weekend.

There are four of them, wooden, painted gray. He put his front feet on the first one and pushed, and his back legs would not follow.

He tried again. He got one hind foot up and it slid right off.

He looked back over his shoulder at me. Lord help me, he looked embarrassed.

A dog that used to take those steps in one bound, in and out a hundred times a day, looking at me like he had let me down.

I went to help him, and he tried a third time on his own, and his hips just folded.

He sat down hard in the grass at the bottom of the steps and stayed there, looking up at the porch where his place was.

That is how Dale found us. He pulled in from the field about six in his old blue Chevy with chaff all over his seed cap and his shirt, and he got out, and he looked at Moose sitting at the bottom of those steps, and then he looked at me.

He did not say one word. He walked over and rubbed Moose’s ears with both hands, and then he turned around and went straight to the machine shop.

I heard the table saw start up. Then the drill, and the radio, and the saw again.

I sat on the bottom step with Moose’s head in my lap and listened to my husband build something, which is the way Dale has said most of the important things in our marriage.

It was a little over an hour before he came out. He was carrying a ramp: a long piece of three-quarter plywood with two-by-four rails screwed down the sides and a strip of old brown carpet from the basement stapled along the top, so a dog’s feet would have something to grip.

He set it along the side of the steps, from the grass up to the porch floor, and tested it with his boot, and moved it two inches, and tested it again. Then he squatted down at the bottom and patted the carpet.

“Come on, old man,” Dale said. “Try that on for size.”

Moose looked at it for a while. Then he walked up it, slow and steady, all four feet on the carpet, and at the top he turned around once, the way he always did, and lay down by the swing, right in his old spot. The boards there are still a little worn from him.