A Boy and His Dog- a Roland McCray Story
A boy’s dog is his closest friend.
As the school bus rolled to a stop, my cousins, Matt and Martha, and my sisters and I got out of our seats and headed for the exit. We lived on the same lane and were the only ones who got off at that stop.
“There’s your dog, Roland,” Rocky said. I just looked at him; he lived about a mile farther down the road and was a jerk. Of course, my dog would be there; Susie waits at the bus stop for me every day. She follows me up there in the morning and when the bus is out of sight she goes back home. Mom says Susie spends most of the day playing in the yard or roaming the woods behind the house. Sometimes she naps on the covered front porch or in the deep green grass that grows under the huge sycamore trees in front of the house. Then, somehow, she knows when the bus will get back, trots up the lane and waits for me to get home. I never understood how she knew what time to be there; I lived in my great-grandfather’s old farmhouse at the end of a quarter mile long dirt lane, far out of sight of the road. It is possible she could hear the bus coming from that far away, but, even if she could, I did not know how she managed to get from the house to the bus stop in time to be waiting for me. It did not seem possible, yet she was always there when I got off the bus.
My dad says some dogs are like that, they just know those. As though they are psychic or have some unseen connection with their owners. I did not care how Susie knew when the bus was coming, I was glad she met me when I got home every afternoon. She would run up the lane ahead of me, circle back and then run ahead again, all the way until we were close to the house, and then she would stand on the front porch, tail still wagging.
When Susie was a puppy, dad had told me she would be my best friend and she was. I did not know why Rocky had to announce it as though it was something new; Susie always met me there.
“She done got herself run over,” Rocky said and laughed. I thought he was just being his usual self. Then, through the front window of the school bus, I saw a large, dark colored splotch on the road. It did look like blood, as far as I could tell, so an animal must have been hit by a car, right near the lane my house was on. Susie was not sitting in her usual spot, and I started to panic. Something must be wrong if she was not there to greet me, but I did not want to think about it, so I ignored Rocky and circled around the spot on the road, then walked, fast, past Matt’s house, past the old barn and blackberry patch, the red trumpet flowers that showered from the top of an old cedar fence post and then through the almost too-sweet scent of honeysuckle vines that tangled the barbed wire fence on one side of the lane and then down the long stretch between two crop fields to my house. Susie was not waiting in the yard, either, and my mom stood on the front porch.
“Where’s Susie?” I asked, then saw the despondent look on her face.
“She’s on the back porch, Roland. I’m sorry.” I ran through the house toward the back door. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked up at me then nodded toward the door and I rushed outside. A large cardboard box was in the corner of the covered porch. I stopped dead, then slowly approached the box. A bloody sheet covered something in the bottom. I pulled the sheet back. Susie. My first and only dog since I was six years old. Dad had brought a puppy home in a cardboard box with an old sheet in the bottom on my sixth birthday and now, ten years later, she was in a sheet in the bottom of a cardboard box again.
The puppy I had cried about because she did not look like Lassie, or Rin-Tin-Tin. Those were real dogs; that little puppy in the cardboard box was just another hound dog. When I asked for a dog for my birthday, I thought all pet dogs were collies or German shepherds. The only hounds I had ever seen were my uncle’s hunting dogs that he kept penned up; they were big, loud, and nasty. Not pets. My parents were upset with me because I had told them I wanted a pet dog, and they had gotten me a dog, but it was a hound! Dad said she was a Beagle hound, different from the big hounds used for hunting, and that beagles make great pets. They are smart dogs, he said, and very loyal. “A dog,” dad said, “is a boy’s best friend.”
Being a typical six-year-old, I felt cheated and stomped out of the house. They promised I could have a dog for my birthday, but they got me a hound dog instead of the type of dog I thought of as pets. I refused to name it, but my little sister started calling her Susie and the name stuck.
And dad had been right; Susie was smart and loyal and, before long, she followed me wherever I went, when I let her. We lived in town then, but the house backed up to a national park where we had woods and fields and creeks to play in. The only place I would not let Susie go was near the main road by our neighborhood. After moving to the farm, I did not worry about that anymore; the country road only had cars come by every few minutes, not four lanes of constant traffic. Plus, we lived back off the road, right at the edge of the woods. Susie could run free, the way most dogs want to live. And I would never keep a dog on a chain. I thought that was a cruel thing to do to any animal, let alone a pet dog. My dad came out to the porch then and saw me looking at Susie. She had come to me as a puppy on a sheet in a cardboard box, and now she was on a sheet in a cardboard box again. Dead.
“I was going to dispose of her,” dad said, “but your mother said you’d want to bury her, so I brought her home.” I knew his way of “disposing” of Susie meant taking her to the dump, the county landfill, and was glad mom had not let him do it.
“What happened? Hardly any cars go down the road out there and Susie’s never even stepped foot out into the street.”
“Someone left a gutted deer carcass in the words across the road, and she must’ve smelled it,” dad told me. “It looked like she was trying to drag it back across to this side, and you know how people just fly down the road.” He shrugged. “She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Why would somebody just throw a gutted deer decide the road?” I was angry; some irresponsible deer hunter had gotten my dog killed! “I’ll bury her,” I said. “I cannot carry a shovel and… Susie, at the same time. I’ll go dig a hole where that big tree came down by the pond, then come back for her.”
“It’s going to be hard to dig a hole down there.”
“I know. But I’ll do it anyway. It was her favorite place to play.” I looked at Susie, lying under a bloody sheet in a cardboard box. It would be easy to bury her in one of the fields around the house, but her bones might be turned up when the fields are plowed in the spring. I would never let that happen.
~ ~ ~
I got a shovel and picked up my hatchet in case I had to cut through any roots the shovel could not handle. As I walked toward the pond, the way I so often had with Susie, I felt tears welling in my eyes. I stopped at the clear area near the old pond where a tree had fallen, and grassy weeds and wildflowers filled it now. Susie loves- I mean, she loved, I guess, to play back there, looking for animals to chase or ducks to frighten off the water. The pond was near the swamp in the woods behind the farmhouse and was one of the first places I took Susie when we moved to the country, and it became her favorite place to run and sniff out small animals or whatever she could find. I fished for bream and pike in the pond and some of the wider pools in the swamp and Susie would run ahead of me.
If she spotted snakes, I would not have seen them and her high-pitched barking and jumping up and down gave me time to avoid them. Most were brown water snakes, not poisonous, but they did get big; other times she came across a copperhead that blended so well with the leafy forest floor I would not have seen it until I stepped on it. Water moccasins, as poisonous as copperheads, lived all around the pond and swamp, but they were far easier to see. Susie was smart enough to never get within the snake’s striking distance and they usually just disappeared into the brush rather than face a barking dog. Susie was never afraid of anything. She was my early warning system.
One time, though, a snake frightened her. I was not fishing that day, just exploring farther up the swamp. A rotten, mossy tree trunk had fallen across a narrow section of the swamp and Susie hopped onto it and ran to the other side. Obviously, I could not run across the log, so I walked behind her, looking at the black water flow just a few inches below my feet, being careful to stay off the wet, moss-covered sections. When I reached the end, I jumped onto a dry, leaf-covered patch of ground on the other side. I had learned the hard way to not step too close to the edge of the swamp where dead leaves can cover black, smelly mud.
Susie had already disappeared into some of the undergrowth around the trees. Within about a minute, she let out a yelp like I had never heard and ran out of the bushes and back across the tree trunk to the other side of the swamp, then stood there looking toward me. The hair on her back rose and she held her tail straight up and snarled. I had never heard her yelp so loud or run away from anything. Something she had found in the bushes must have really scared her. Then I saw it: a snake’s head as wide as a baseball slid out of the undergrowth, tongue flickering, tasting the air for prey. Then it saw me and turned to the side. I watched its long, bronze-tinged body move silently over the leaves. The middle of the snake was the size of a softball and its body had to be eight feet or longer.
It was just a huge, brown water snake and not poisonous, but I had never seen one that large. Poisonous or not, it could inflict a serious bite and even though it was moving away from me, I followed Susie’s lead and went back across the log. Like her, I did not want to be anywhere near that creature.
Whenever I could not find Susie in the yard, if I wanted her, I would go to the edge of the field, call her name, and she would come running at full speed out of the woods and across the field to where I stood. Other times, she would be traipsing through the tall weeds on the opposite side of the field, head down, sniffing everything, hidden from my view except when her tail showed flashes of white through the weeds. Beagles were originally bred to hunt rabbits and could track one through the toughest brush and into any tunnel the rabbit hid in. Susie certainly fit the bill: she could easily follow rabbit runs through weeds, fallen tree branches and briars, places larger dogs could not reach, but I knew she would never be able to catch up with one if it reached an open field.
Of course, she tried anyway but she never caught one when she was young and at almost ten years old, she was not as fast as then. She would be panting, tongue hanging out of her mouth ready to slobber all over me if I let her. Dad had been right about the beagle hound my sister had named Susie; she was smart, loyal, and the best friend I could have had growing up.
~ ~ ~
I chose a spot where I hoped there would not be too many roots, but the digging was a lot harder than I expected and there were a few large roots I used my hatchet to get through. I was dirty and dripped with sweat by the time I dug a hole large enough for Susie. I sat and rested for a few minutes, then went back to the house. I put away the shovel and hatchet.
“Roland,” mom said from the kitchen door. “Dinner’s ready, why don’t you come in and eat before you- take care of Susie, honey?”
“I’ll eat later. It’s almost four already and I must do this before dark.”
She nodded. “Okay, I made pig-in-a-blanket hot dogs, fries, and baked beans. I’ll keep a plate warm for you.” Dinner was hot dogs, baked beans, and fries- hot dogs! Of all the days we could have hot dogs, mom had to pick that day. She did not see the irony of me burying my dog in a blanket and then coming home to a dinner of “pig-in-a-blanket hot dogs”.
“Okay, Thanks,” I said then picked up the box with Susie inside. Somehow, she seemed heavier than I remember. Dead weight. Tears streaked through the dirt and grime on my face as I carried the box with Susie inside to the old pond near the swamp where she had loved to run around, scaring small animals to chase and splash in the shallows, sending ducks into the air. I knew it would be the last time Susie went to the pond with me and the only time I had ever had to carry her. When I reached the grave I dug, I set the box on the ground then carefully lifted Susie from the box with the sheet wrapped around her and gently laid her, my Susie, into the ground. Tears rolled down my face and fell into her grave as I pulled soil over her.
After I refilled the hole and tamped it down good, I raked leaves back over the area, then sat with my head on my knees and cried, letting the tears flow as my body was racked with sobs. It would never be the same coming down here, not without Susie prancing around, staying ahead of me, always on guard against threats to me, real or imagined. After I cried for a while, I felt a little better and sat there and looked around. I looked at the huge fallen tree. It must have come down during a storm, roots pulled right out of the ground. The root mass was at least six feet high and the tree trunk four feet across near the base. Most of the tree trunk was still held off the ground by some of its larger branches and Susie had found a place where she could climb one of the branches and get onto the trunk. She had followed it, tail wagging and sniffing everything along the way, and went farther out over the water than I ever would have. The fallen tree had left a hole in the forest canopy allowing sunlight into the new clearing. Grass and weeds and wildflowers already filled the area and by the end of summer, brush, bristly bushes and small saplings will grow, and eventually the hole in the forest would be filled again. Just like the old pond had once been far larger, but over the years most of it had filled with silt. Grasses and shrubs had replaced the water and the forest was reclaiming the land as its own.
When I was twelve, I got sick and stayed home from school for three weeks. I was an avid reader and ran out of things to read. Everything in the house I had already read, at least once each. I had free time and could not go outside, so one rainy afternoon, I started digging through the chest of drawers in my bedroom and found the King James Bible my grandmother had given me on my sixth birthday. It was in the back of the bottom drawer, hidden by sweaters, so I pulled it out and opened the book at random. It was the book of Proverbs. I read that, and it was surprisingly good, so I read more. Eventually I read the entire Bible, except the “begats”. I thought about what I had read in the in the book I thought was called, Ecclesiastes*.
The author, the “Teacher”, wrote that there is a time for everything and all things under the heavens have their season. A time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to mourn and a time to dance. When I first read that, I thought it was a little depressing because everything good ends but now I understand; there is nothing new under the sun. All things that exist now have been before and will be again. Everything changes yet stays the same. Like this forest, trees grow, and trees die, but the forest remains. The birds and the squirrels and the deer and the multitude of other life die, and others are born to take their place. A tree dies, and another takes its place. Trees are cleared, and a pond is built; the pond fades away and trees return. Through it all, though, the forest remains. I realized then that nothing truly dies.
Susie will still live, in the grasses and trees that spring to life, feeding on Susie. She will still live. I took comfort in that thought. Susie would live in my memory, and in all the life that replaced her body with new life. Nothing ever truly dies. Susie was the puppy I had not wanted, yet I knew I would never forget her; she would always live, only in a different form- in all the things that fed on her body, the plants that will grow from her body’s nutrients as it becomes, again, soil. All the animals and insects that feed or live on the plants will have some small part of Susie within them. Life is a cycle, as the Teacher said, all that is, has been before, and will be again. And all things are a part of that cycle. Nothing is ever lost. All things have their season.
And a dog really can be a boy’s best friend.
*Ecclesiastes 3:15
~ ~ ~
Thank you for reading this short story. It is from my book Finding Roland McCray.
If you enjoy reading about Roland, more of his stories are listed Here.
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