But as the nice, sad lady at the vet’s office handed her to me, covered in a Winnie the Pooh blanket, topped with her empty collar, I cynically wondered, Well, Lord, do you reckon you could stop the rain long enough to let us get her in the ground?īut I guess you don’t stand much of a chance with the Creator when you ask for something as a smart aleck, and it rained all day, again. I have never prayed a lot and, frankly, as a prolific, almost redundant sinner, have seldom asked for or expected help from on high. We never knew her age, either, but believe she was about eight or so when she died, with us long enough to get used to, to root out a place in our minds. We fed her and so she became part of the place, for seven years or more, till the hateful combination of a rare tick-borne disease and pneumonia-I blamed the constant cold and damp for that-finally killed her, early on a Sunday afternoon. She was just a stray that walked up one day in the yard, part redbone, foxhound, and a dozen other bloods, an old-fashioned, outside, Alabama brown dog that survived abandonment and starvation and bloody battles with coons and coyotes and wild dogs. She was so lean, so long-legged and light, she seemed to glide without effort or even the pull of gravity when she flashed through the pines and the rocky places up high, running down a deer or just some distant sound, and she would sprint across a mountain to make sure a scent on the breeze presented no threat to her people, her porch, her place. We called her Skinny, because she was two dogs high and half a dog wide. The people who discarded her, who threw her away, called her something else, but we never knew that name.
Or it might be it all just seemed that way, on the day a good dog died. The weatherman offered no hope, night after night he might as well have been a cardboard cutout with a fixed, final forecast, and the rains fell, till the end of the world. My mother began to see it as a sign, and it did seem odd, as the weeks slogged by. I have often heard old people in Alabama pray for rain, but never so hard against it. It even caused a kind of moldering in the mind, an absence of optimism, like we had tracked the red mud into our finer nature.
Things rusted that never had, doors swelled and jammed, and roots of hundred-year-old trees lost their grip in the liquid soil and fell under their own weight. By March the low places ran with muddy water and washed whole lifetimes away, and storms tore up some parts of the South like they were held together with shoeboxes and glue. Mostly it was dank and cold, and the sky was low, like the ceiling of a coal mine, the clouds the color of asphalt. I’m sure a weak sun came out once or twice but never long enough to get used to. It rained every day for three months, from late fall till spring.
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