The Dog Harlan Left Behind

I stood at the window and watched his taillights go down the lane. Then I put my hand on Chief’s warm head and said what Harlan used to say when the world got too big for either of us.

“Well, Chief. It’s you and me.”

My name is Della Mott. I am seventy-four years old, and I live on a hundred and sixty acres two miles outside Tobin, Nebraska, in the farmhouse my husband’s grandfather built. Harlan and I were married fifty-two years.

For fifty-one of them I kept the books. Harlan farmed, and I wrote the checks. He could read the sky better than any man in the county, and he could not have told you what he paid for diesel to save his life.

Chief came to us thirteen Octobers ago, inside Harlan’s coat.

Harlan had gone to the co-op to sell a load of beans. He came home with a yellow pup the size of a loaf of bread, one ear torn, ribs like a washboard. Someone had dumped him by the scale house in a feed sack.

“Harlan,” I said, “we are too old for a puppy.”

“Well, he doesn’t know that,” Harlan said.

By the second week the pup had climbed into the passenger seat of the pickup and sat there as if he owned it. Straight up, looking out the windshield at the fields, like a man inspecting his holdings.

“Look at him,” Harlan said. “Thinks he runs the place.”

That was the end of any other name. He was Chief from that hour on.

At four o’clock every afternoon, when Harlan quit work, Chief would be waiting at the machine shed door. Harlan would take off his cap, rub that torn ear, and say, “Quitting time, Chief.” And the two of them would walk to the house together.

The one time I saw Harlan truly frightened was the summer Chief was five. He got into rat poison that a neighbor had set out by a grain bin. Harlan found him foaming in the yard at midnight and carried him to the truck like a child.

The nearest emergency vet was in Grand Island, fifty miles off. Harlan drove it in forty minutes, which is not a number I would repeat to the highway patrol, and sat on the floor of that clinic for four hours with the dog’s head in his lap.

At two in the morning he wrote a check for six hundred and forty dollars. This was Harlan Mott, who once drove to Kearney because a hardware store there sold bolts for less.

I know the amount because I am the one who entered it. In the memo line, in his big slanting hand, he had written one word. Chief.

Harlan died on the second Thursday of October, in the machine shed, at about half past eleven in the morning.

He was seventy-six. He had quit farming three years before, and our neighbor Gene Kasten put in the crops on shares. But Harlan could no more stay out of that shed than a boy could stay out of a creek. That morning he was greasing the auger on Gene’s grain cart, with the farm report on the radio.

I called him for dinner at noon, twice from the back step. In fifty-two years I had never had to call him a third time.

At one-thirty, I put on my coat and walked out to the shed.