Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 51

“Bogue went out fighting. There is a note of rightness in that,” Louis said.
Lloyd  was  digging  a  hole  in  the  garden  for  the  dog’s  body,  while  Fanny,  weeping, painted a rock with his name.

“Why now?” Lloyd asked Louis. “How many times did he bark at that spaniel when it walked by the house?”

“One time too many.” Louis sat in a chair on the lawn, watching mother and son prepare the grave.

There had been nothing sweet about the public Bogue. Privately, he was a cuddle. In the morning Bogue burrowed his way beneath the sheet and counterpane until he found Louis’s feet, then draped his hairy body over them and snored, starting every once in a while— chasing a rabbit in his dreams, Louis supposed. Often, before Louis began writing, Bogue had already put in a good day’s work, announcing through the hedge with ?erce barks that the  crowing  rooster  next  door  should  not  strut  too  con?dently,  that  the  moment  of judgment might appear as suddenly as a new opening in the shrubs. Before breakfast scraps arrived in his bowl, Bogue had already chased some hound down the road, striking a blow for all small dogs in a big dog’s world. Occasionally, he left the intruders with wounds.
“Why did he have to do that? Chase every dog he ever saw?” Lloyd’s voice cracked with anger at the needlessness of Bogue’s death.

“Simply his nature,” Louis said. “He probably was the last of his litter to get at his mother’s teat, or some such injustice. Made him feisty.”

“He would just throw his body into the fray,” Lloyd said. “It was never an even fight.”

“Maybe he knew that life is not an even ?ght,” Louis mused.  “Given the odds, it’s the stand one takes that matters.”

The  troubles  in  Ireland  weighed  heavily  on  Louis’s  mind  of  late.  In  reading  about  a particular Irish family caught up in the violence, he began to see his own fate tied in to theirs. Two years earlier, in 1885, an Irish Catholic farmer in Kerry named Curtin had been murdered when he resisted a robbery by Irish nationalists who wanted his ?rearms and ammunition for their cause. Curtin’s children, including two of the older girls, fought o?

and killed one of the intruders. When the Curtins gave police the names of their father’s murderers, the family was boycotted. No food or supplies could reach them, ostracism being the price for their betrayal. Anyone who violated the boycott to assist the family would risk murder.

As they sat by the ?re after dinner, Louis lit a cigarette and explained the strategy that had been shaping itself in his head all day. “Just imagine, for one moment,” he said, “how signi?cant it would be if a well-known person—a famous writer—went to the Curtins’ farm and brought the world’s attention to that beleaguered family.”

Fanny looked askance at him as if he had lost his mind. “What are you saying?” “I am saying that I am willing to go to that place, that farm, after telling the press what I am doing. Don’t you see? It could bring an end to this absurd boycott.” “Or you could end up like that farmer. Dead,” Fanny said. “When did this cause become
so  close  to  your  heart?  Yesterday?  Don’t  you hear  what  you are  saying?  You want  to commit suicide.”

“Well, and why not?” Louis got up and kicked a basket full of kindling wood. “I’d rather use up what time I have left as a spendthrift than die daily in the sickroom. In the end, what matters is the stand one takes against the inevitable.”

“Oh, Louis, for God’s sake.”

A few days later, when he spoke again of going to Ireland, they were eating breakfast. Fanny eyed him calmly. “You haven’t touched your eggs or sausage. When you are well, I
will go with you. But for today,” she went on in her low, singsong way, “we must simply get you outside. The sun is shining.” She rose from the table before he could protest.
Fanny was humoring him now, but he knew if he got himself to Ireland, there would be no use trying to discourage her. She would go, for better or worse, and stand with him.
Louis allowed Valentine to dress him in layers of knitted and boiled wools. It was May, and catkins on the big beech tree had begun to open. They had been in Bournemouth for three years, but he felt as if he’d been a householder there for forty. He was a weevil in a biscuit. His body was growing more useless by the day. If he could get himself to Ireland, he could hurl his ruined carcass into the ?ght in one wild, ?nal, noble act. How much better that would be than to slowly disintegrate further.

It was with these thoughts that he turned the brass knob of the front door  to  ?nd  a  red-cheeked  delivery  boy  coming  up  the  walk  with  a  telegram  from

Edinburgh. Louis opened it quickly and found it was from his mother.

Come as soon as possible. Your father is dying.