The Dog Harlan Left Behind

“Wade, I am not angry. I am going to say this once, because I love you and I won’t say it twice. That dog is not your decision. You did not ask me. You went around me and told my friend to be gentle with me, like I was a child who had to be handled.”

“I just don’t want you alone with a sick animal and a bill,” he said.

“I am alone, honey.” I said it as gently as I could. “That was already true the day your father died. A dog is not what makes it so.”

I heard him breathe.

“I will know when it is time. Dr. Lund will tell me, and the Lord will tell me, and so will Chief. You were not asked. And I am not asking you to agree. I am asking you to stop.”

“Okay, Mom,” he said. It was the voice of a boy sent to his room.

I hung up and sat at the kitchen table with my face in my hands. Chief walked over, slow, and laid his chin on my knee. I cried then. A little. And it was not for the dog.

For more than two weeks after that, my son and I were polite as strangers. He called Sunday evenings at six, and we talked about the weather and the price of beans, and we both knew what we were doing.

The Sunday after, Pastor Tom Hess preached from Proverbs, and I do not believe it was an accident. Chapter twelve, verse ten. A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.

That was Harlan’s verse. Wade’s wife Jenny had stitched it on a sampler one Christmas, and it hung in the mudroom fifteen years. “Regardeth, Della,” he would say. “It’s right there in the Book.”

He always stopped at the first half. The second half of that verse is a hard one, and Harlan was not a man to wave a hard verse at his own son. Neither am I.

I did not know that in four days that old dog would have his say for me.

The ice came on the second Thursday of February. The radio had warned us all week, freezing rain by late afternoon, and by dark the fence wires wore it like glass sleeves.

The power went out at twenty to seven.

But at eight o’clock, I remembered the hens.

I keep eleven laying hens in the coop behind the shed, with a heat lamp and a heated waterer. Neither works with the power out. It would be a hard night, down into the teens, and I did not want to lose eleven birds that Harlan had picked out himself.

Harlan had a little Honda generator on a shelf in the machine shed. I had never started it in my life. But last summer he had written out instructions on masking tape and stuck them inside the lid. Choke here. Switch here. Pull slow. I had laughed at him.

I went to the mudroom for my coat, and my hand found Harlan’s instead.

It was his sheepskin barn coat, the heavy one. It had hung on the hook by the back door since the second Thursday of October, because I had not been able to make myself touch it.

It smelled like him. Old Spice and diesel and hay. I stood in the dark with my face pressed into the collar, and I could not breathe for a minute.