Cottonwoods, by Vincent Louis Carrella

The dog would not die. He was bred to withstand the rigors of a prolonged fight, and he showed his mettle and he showed his heart in that moment when it counted most. The end. He was the best dog that Simmons ever owned and he owned plenty. Some were bigger and some were smarter, but none were as sweet with the children and none were as tough.

He kneels beside him to stroke his head. He looks into the dog’s eyes and beyond them. He stares at the ground where he lies bleeding and breathing still. He runs his fingers through what had once been the finest soil in all of west Texas. The earth here is dead now, but the dog will not die with it.

He stands in the high sun and casts upon him his own small shadow. He takes aim, and the pistol bucks again. The dog flops up and curls like a fish, and his eyes wall in that strange manner they all did after he laid them down and just before they gave up the ghost. The eyes – dogs, deer, men. It’s always the same. He’s seen too many in the moment of passage. The iris slowly rises, the whites climb like the moon, and blank go the orbs of perception, they roll up and back, up and beyond, searching for some meaning in a last, futile attempt to make sense through sense.

He is a big bear of a dog and the children named him Clyde after that orange monkey in the Clint Eastwood picture where he fought men for money bare-fisted in honky-tonks and where in the end he almost died himself for the heart of a girl. He was still-born to a gorgeous dam whose paper-name was Gold Nugget Princess Eileen. They called her Sadie. There were four pups in the litter but only one survived, the smallest and it was Clyde. Simmons wiped away the mucous himself with the palm of his hand and blew into the nose of the runt like he was inflating a small balloon. He was a sickly pup. He was weak but he was alive. The girls made him peanut butter sandwiches on raisin bread to give him strength and fed him ice scream from a spoon. They gave him cookies and Cheerios and he grew so big around the middle that it was no surprise he could take the bullets, one, two, three like a boar. Now his thick flank heaves and he coughs a bloody foam, but Simmons cannot bring himself to put the gun to the dog’s head.

It was like that with Sarah. The cancer was a bullet fired from the gun of God, and she’d curl up like this too, she’d writhe in the grip of it, with her hands stretched out for mercy or understanding. Something that just wasn’t there and would never come. Her eyes rolled back, and her lids would flutter and often she would repeat his name.

Jeroboam, Jeroboam.

He’d smooth back her hair and shush her, and she’d fall into a restless half-sleep in which the spoken word was like some salve she needed to ease her misery.

Jeroboam, Jeroboam, just send me away.

Like some nursery rhyme from the book of death they wrote together all those months she lay in a roomful of bottle-flies in the top of summer with the heat coming down like a hammer, him fanning her with a newspaper, holding a glass of water to her lips, the bottom of it to her forehead, just to cool her down. All he could do.

Clyde shivers with the palsy of the doomed soul that he is, and his legs stiffen and he bays a long, mournful howl that echoes off in the arroyo and hangs in the air with the smoke. Simmons knows that it’s close now and he watches for the final shudder that will end his long year of waiting. But for what? Miracles. Heroes. A brush with his own violent death. None of those came. He asked for strength and begged Jesus for clarity of mind on those nights when he thought about what he might do when she was gone, but there were no answers given. No angels. No signs.

He crouches under a wide open sky, a vast blue dome, and places his hand on the dog’s muscled flank. He whispers to him now. He tells him it’s going to be all right. There’s no wind and no shadow and the air ripples above the field behind the house in translucent waves that make him aware of so much more than heat and sun and light that passes through disturbed space. He remembers the ocean. He sees ripples in a pond. Eddies that swirl in creeks and streams. Things that ebb and things that flow. Transference. Passage. What fragile things are housed in flesh.

He holds the gun to his own head now and shuts his eyes. He squeezes the trigger to the point of resistance. He can hear the labored breathing of the dog and the cicadas off in the cottonwoods behind the house, click, click, click, where the only shade for miles around is cast by the leaves of those four shimmering trees. Beneath the cottonwoods the earth is cool in the mornings and the ground just below the top layer of loam is dark and compact and hard to dig through. He rose before dawn to chop out the holes with a pick while the dog watched him curiously. They were neat, box-shaped tombs dug to his armpits, and inside they were cool and damp as a root-cellar. He dug four, and it took him all day to do the job, for that’s what it was, as were the killings themselves. A job. Acts of mercy. Acts of faith. But not in God, or anything that lay beyond this earth or within. There is but one idea he can turn to when things go bad and luck runs out. Himself. No one can save you. No one can save anybody. He puts the gun down.

And what did he ever have but that? Before them and after? He, and no other. Sarah came and Sarah left, and between those poles was a man reborn. Sarah showed him how to change a diaper. She showed him how to protect a baby’s head. Sarah sent him back to finish school and got him off the booze. Sarah. She nursed him after the crash, she saved him, and she gave him those little lives that became his own and he bought into the lie. He believed he could grow up again, the right way, by seeing through the eyes of a well-loved child to the world as it should be seen – wondrous, benevolent, kind. He learned how to live that way. But Sarah comes and Sarah goes. And then it’s gone.

He looks down at Clyde and the dog looks back at him. He cranes his head up and back, and there’s a moment of clarity in which the two are once again on familiar ground. Man and dog. Dog and man. Words are often wholly insufficient between them. Clyde can read him in an instant. The look on his face, the movements of his eyes, the slightest changes to his cheek muscles and mouth. A dog knows a man better than a man knows himself and Clyde is now putting the question to him as clear as can be, Simmons can feel it in that place where words can’t go. For the first time ever, the dog stares him down.

You know I had to, Simmons says. You know.

It was true. Clyde smelled the sickness long before the doc ever did and on the day before Sarah died he wouldn’t take his food. He vanished all during the time Simmons was with the children. He was gone all that day and when he came back in the evening he knew it was done and he would not go near their rooms. He would not go up the stairs. The dog knew, but in the end he did not fully understand, and he looks to Simmons now for courage enough to trust him this one last time.

Easy boy, Simmons said. That’s it. Just go to sleep.

He said what he had to say to keep hope alive. He told them shades of truth. He spoke in vagaries and platitudes and, since they were children, they could not read the falseness of his words and so accepted what came from his mouth as law. Just like the dog. He trained them well for that. All their lives the small deceptions. Tooth fairies and Santa Claus. Bunnies that bring eggs. Dog-heaven. Goldfish resurrected in oceans far away, wishing stars, dandelion spores, chicken bones and clovers. He made them smile with animal noises and funny voices and pulled out their splinters when they were distracted by laughter and thus taught them betrayal, but the kind meant to help, not to harm. They knew he did what he had to do to make them feel better later, at some other time, when the pain and the danger would only be worse. Little white lies.

Momma’s just sick is all. She’s gonna get better soon.

The first one comes so easy. The second is easier still. Sins don’t have one damn thing to do with God, sins are what you do to yourself but you don’t understand that until it’s too late to change. How he went from lying to killing is one thing he hoped he’d never understand but that’s where it all began because every lie is the seed of a sin.

The dog shudders and stiffens and then he goes limp. His eyes lose that sparkle of grace that’s in all things living, but the sun is still high above them and Simmons sees that star in the black space where the dog’s life begins to fade. Some light remains. It was that way with Sarah and with little Delia too but Annie, she closed hers like he asked her to. She always did what she was told. He looked her straight in the eyes and taught her to do the same, so folks would feel you deep inside, like a memory they could  never forget.

Clyde trembles. His fine orange coat is matted with mud. He paws at the earth, the air. His big, thick paws. No longer will he hear that tick, tick, tick as the dog patrols the wooden floors at night. No longer will there be floors. No longer will there be home – the tall white farmhouse they had their eyes on long before they were married. A hundred years old and showing it. Stark. White. Alone beneath a stand of golden cottonwoods on that wide open plain, empty but for memories and bright as a tooth it rises at the conflux of the alluvial mouth of some dead river unnamed. The home she made for them. The life. He kept it going as long as he could but when that truck drifted over the double-yellow that morning his luck gave out. That sonofabitch was the ruin of them all. Garret, he was the real killer. He was the one.

He should have seen it coming, the end of the run, not the truck. The beet-red, jacked-up Ford with a hot chrome grill and headlights big as plates. The sun was flaring off the windshield so that all that he saw was white where the face of the driver should have been until it was full head-on and in their lane, and then he saw the fella in a shirt of black-watch plaid and a dark moustache with a look on his face like a boy on a bicycle gone awry. It was Garret. Unlicensed and drunk. He was killed on impact, as was Bill Pope, who never wore his seat-belt out of pride. And that was that. The black cloud of misfortune fell upon him once again. His partner was dead. His best friend. He learned to walk again but he could work the farm no more. And then it hit Sarah, the biological equivalent of a head-on crash with a truck.

He looks down at Clyde and sees that he is dead. He looks up at the sky. No clouds. No wind. Alone again in the hot Texas dust. Simmons sees the shimmer of the earth at the horizon, the low hills flipped upside-down and the sky inverted. He sees the curvature of the plain and the wild undulations where that sun-baked dream meets the low rung of Heaven. Behind the house, beneath the cottonwoods, he hears the rustling of all those golden leaves that shine when the wind blows, and lift, and turn, and catch the sun and glitter like tinsel. He buried them neatly at the foot of the trees where the ground is oddly colored on the mounds. Light comes through the little gold triangles like pixie dust and fireflies. He stands. He looks down at the finest Mastiff he’s ever seen. Through dusk and dust, Simmons wanders in a fugue.

The old porch and the screen door make their customary noises and the carpet gives beneath him in the hall. Every step on the staircase, a galleon of memories. He lies on their beds for a time. He closes his eyes on his own. The white goose down, the quilt, where the little ones were formed and breached and where Sarah herself slipped off into a nowhere known. He smells the warm, sweet gasoline that spills over the floor and the walls and the chairs and his hands. Gasoline. The smell of  a promise, a whisper from a thousand golden dreams.  Evinrudes and motor boats, lawn mowers and mini-bikes, Esso stations, and Sunoco cans and big yellow Shells that slowly spin in hot summers with fumes that rise and blur, the swirly rainbow of hot gases in hot air, hands that are black and swollen and cut, his father’s hands, chainsaws and deadfalls and storms, diesel fumes and trucks, and truckers, men who wave at boys dozing in the backs of station wagons on unbearably long road journeys, where fuel pumps clack and click and ding and buzz beyond the Oil dereks, the cast iron insects, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, and miles to go of heat and sleepy visions, watching the headlights streak across the ceiling of the Country Squire and the smell of Marlboros and the muffler and the smoke, and the hot, dry wood of wishes and dreams.

Simmons smells the smoke and hears the fire from his feather-bed. He hears the children laughing. He hears little Annie singing a song to the rhythm of the tap, tap, tap of Clyde’s paws on the floor. The dog would not die. The image of the dog stays with him all through the burning and beyond.

And in the flames he sees eyes. There’s grandma Bertran and old Alice and that man in the I.C.U. with the tubes in his arms. There’s Ditto and Ray dying there in the mud on Black Virgin Mountain so long ago in Vietnam. There’s Samson, the sire of Clyde, dead beneath the tires of a car. And there’s Sarah, and Delia and Annie and Clyde. There are the eyes again, doing what they do. The eyes of the almost-dead look to the sky and search among the stars for answer, for access, in that sunset moment when all things that see with eyes, can see at last – the end.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vincent’s debut novel, Serpent Box, chronicles the life of a deformed boy, born inside the hollow of an old lynching tree, his quest for God, meaning and the secret mysteries of faith. More at www.serpentbox.com