Bobby, The Dog

"I was born here," my mother said.

The photo was brittle, the edges thinned to nothing. I held it like breath, afraid it might come apart. On the back, someone had written 1946, five years after she came into the world. The image was mostly dark. If you squinted, you might take the slope for a roof.

Etched against it, 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, burns with the whitest silver.

He held a dog close. She took the photo back.

"This dog. Our father killed it. I heard it whimper. I saw the bloody shovel. I touched it, the warm red. My brother couldn’t get it out of the house like he was told to."

She dragged her thumb across the picture.

"I was the youngest of five. Jack came five minutes earlier. There was something about him. Jack the Fourth, they called him."

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. Her eyes stayed on it a long time. A set of faces piled in a trapeze on a white field. She walked her fingers toward them. Her face twitched, like she was crossing glass.

"We were born into a world you wouldn’t understand," she said. "Parents were obstacles. Brothers were enemies. If love couldn’t hold a family, poverty could."

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

Jack I do remember. He came around, never with a warning. Sometimes you’d find him cooking, of all things.

Sometimes he vanished into the woods and come 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. I could still raise a chick, if there was a bet to be won.

It was said he wasn’t good for much. He could make you laugh until your ribs rustled each other. And that's not bad.

His glass eye, a major feature. A person wouldn’t know it right away. He’d go quiet mid-story, staring at you in absolute serenity, then a loud snore would scare the shit out of you. That one lid still open. "Just talk into my good eye," he’d say, like it was your fault. He wandered, even in his sleep.

There was something off about him, truly. Always a drifter. Always looking for something he still hadn’t lost yet.

I liked him. I mean, kids did. Grown folks didn’t.

"Maybe because 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."

"You kept this?"

"I did, It was your dog. You named it. I wouldn’t let you near it. It wasn’t a pet. Just a mouth to feed, in his best days."

Still 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. She grabbed me, keeping me from going out to him. We watched.

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

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, and I couldn’t handle that. I held her hand and raised a brow. Felt her rub between our fingers, the 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. The rest of us hid ours. She didn’t."

She turned a page. Her.

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

It was an elbow.

"She told him she was pregnant. Took his hand and pressed it to her belly. Said 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. Said he was honorable. What he meant was: let them scare her into ending it."

She figured it out.

"She knew who he was by then. Said she’d kill herself if he told them. He said she was bluffing. They met again. Same tree. She said it again. He laughed."

She looked back 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, made him watch. Foamy grin. Eyes wide and red. Purple lips. Twitching limbs. Stared at him all the way. That story, he still tells it."

What if she had told her parents? Told Jack?

"Nothing would have happened to her. She would’ve had her baby. Can you imagine? At the very least, a parent keeps his children alive."

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.