Bobby, The Dog

"I was born here," my mother said.

The photo was brittle, the edges thinned to nothing. I held my breath, afraid it might tear it apart. On the back, someone had written 1946, about five years after she came into the world. The picture was mostly dark, and if you squinted just right, you could almost take the slope for a roof.

Etched over the dark, two children. Their faces burned too bright, the way old photos sometimes do, like they’d caught fire from the inside. The one on the left, especially, he glows in the whitest silver. He’s holding a dog close.

She pulled the photo back.

“This dog. Our father killed it. I heard the whimper. I saw the blood on the shovel. I touched it, the warm red. My brother couldn’t get it out of the house like he was told, you see.”

Her thumb dragged across the picture.

“I was the youngest of all five. Jack came four minutes earlier. They called him Jack the Fourth.”

The photo didn’t show a match. One child had shoulders pulled too high. The other, a face like something had deflated it. That was my mother.

She flipped a page and kept her eyes on it for a long time. A set of faces piled in a trapeze posing over a white field. She walked her fingers toward them. Her face twitched, like she was walking on glass.

“We were born into a world you wouldn’t understand,” she said. “Parents were obstacles. Brothers were enemies. When love couldn’t hold a family, poverty would.”

She and Jack didn’t go cold. Not all the way. They hung on. The others, though, are just names to me.

Jack I do remember. He came around, never with a warning. Sometimes you’d find him cooking, of all things. You wondered how the hell he got in.

Other times he vanished into the woods for hours and came back with blackbird eggs cupped in his shirt, whispering how he tricked the mother bird into staying with the rest. He taught me how to warm them, how to feed them, how to make them sing. Tell you, I could still raise a chick if there was a bet to be won.

And then there was his glass eye, a major feature. Some didn’t know that about him. He’d go quiet mid-story, staring into the distance in perfect serenity, like the best listener in the world. Then a loud snore would scare the shit out of them. That one damn lid still open. “Just talk into my good eye,” he’d say it mad, like it was your fault. “I only have the one eye, but I see twice as much as you do.” He’d wait for the embarrassment to settle, then say, “Well, I see two eyes.” Took a second to land, but you had to laugh.

People said he was good for that sort of thing, not much else. How was that a bad thing?

"I suppose they could see how old he really was, and how little he’d done with it," I was about to say.

She shown me another photo.

"That’s you," she said. "With Bobby the Dog. Silly name."

"You kept this?"

"I did, It was your dog. I couldn’t let you near it. It wasn’t a pet.”

Just a mouth to feed, in his best days. Sill a pup in the picture. A beauty.

"I kept it for your uncle’s sake," she said. "I cried when it died."

That morning he brought it.

Jack walked out of the tree line into the yard, like he’d been watching us a long time. He held the dog by a length of old leather. My mother clutched me, keeping me from running out to him. We sat and watched.

He got down on one knee, pulled an iron rod from his boot, drove it into the dirt, careful not to startle the pup, and tied it there. He stood up and looked at it for a long minute. Then he turned, walked back, and disappeared into the trees. Never said a word.

The dog watched him go, frozen on its feet. Then it turned to us. We tried to keep it. We did. It wouldn’t let us love it. Grew up mean. Bit a neighbor boy. After that, there was nothing else to do.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.”

“He wasn’t always like that,” she said. “Your uncle.”

She looked at me crying. I couldn’t handle that. I held her hand and raised a brow. Felt her rub between our fingers, a little squeeze. I felt somewhat helpless. And I can’t tell, really, if I reciprocated.

"Did you know he had a daughter?"

I said no. I was shocked.

"She was mine, in a way. His little girl. My twin’s girl. That’s as close as blood gets."

She turned to the window, easing me into it. She must have read my face.

"This was long before you."

I was born real late in her life, but she couldn’t have been much older than my brothers, if she was at all. The eldest is fifteen years my senior, like most of my cousins. I must have met her as a child. I didn’t ask.

"She was tough. Mouthy. Walked around with welts on her back like jewelry. She didn’t hide any of it, unlike the rest of us."

She turned a page. Her.

"Lovely, isn’t she? She used to meet a boy behind that black oak. See there? I think that's actually his elbow."

It was an elbow.

"Told him she was pregnant. Took his hand to her belly. She wanted to marry before her parents found out."

A brief exhale through the nose.

"That was dumb."

Why?

"He told her they had to tell them, he was an honorable man. But what he meant was: let them scare her into ending it."

You think she figured it out?

"She said she’d kill herself if he told it. He said she was bluffing. They met again. Same tree. She said it again. He laughed."

She stared at me.

"And she drank the poison. Right there. She clenched her teeth on the flask. He couldn’t pry it loose. She went down, pulled him in, made him watch. Foamy grin. Eyes wide and red. Frozen purple lips. Twitching limbs. Stared at him all the way. That story, he still tells it."

I was quiet for a bit. “What would happen if she told her parents? Told Jack?”

“Nothing. She would’ve had her baby. Maybe marry. Can you imagine anything else?”

She could. “She’d rather die than disappoint him?”

“In her mind, she had already disappointed him. They lived together, spoke to him as if she were already dead.”

He must replay that last night in his mind all the time.

“A child will grow out of reach, but a parent should not. That pain of knowing burned long after he buried her.”

She went quiet. Held my hand a long time.

“Jack was different after that. Whatever hadn’t already gone missing, that took the rest. He’s not someone you can bring back. Let him be gone.”

She stared through me like she was burying me too.

"Later on he had an accident. Nobody knew what happened. After that, he divorced and stayed alone.”

She pulled Bobby, the Dog's photo from the album and handed it to me.

“Well son, sometimes he'd find a dog. Keep it for a while. Feed it. Talk to it like it understood. And when the dog got old enough, he'd leave it at someone’s door. Wanted it safe, you see. Then he’d vanish. Like he was looking for something to loose next."

We haven’t seen him in a while.

I worry for her. She's old now, not mobile. She worries for him too. He’s just as old. Older, if you asked him.