I hated the way she looked at me as she lay there. Out of all the world, she looked at me, and I wanted to say, Look at the trees. It’s the last time. Look at the sky. It’s the last time. Look there, at that ant crawl the grass blade. It will be the last time you see it. That you see any of this.
There was something about her eyes that made me see her death as final. There was no place after, her tears said. This was it. Dying animals have that effect. I think because you never see them in church preparing for an afterlife. You never see them wearing crosses around their necks, or lighting candles in Mass. It all seems so final with them. Their dying is not moving on, it’s going out.
I wiped my eyes with my fists before asking for the gun. Sal didn’t say anything. Just placed it in my hand. I wasn’t sure if distance mattered. I placed the end of the barrel at the side of her trembling skull, beneath her ear, just in case it did.
My hand was surprisingly still. Though I don’t know how.
I could no longer breathe through my stuffed nose, so I drew in deep breaths through my mouth. I looked at Sal, so prepared. I hated him for not crying. I closed my eyes and lightly felt the trigger, its slight curve like a smooth tooth, a fang, ready to bite. I flexed my hand. I needed all my muscle. The gun was the heaviest thing I’d ever held up to that point in my life.
When Granny started to whimper, I threw the gun down and ran. It felt like the only thing I could do. On the way, I tripped over the can and spilled the poison. Even with that, I kept running before stopping by a tree. The sound of the gun made me.
As if I’d been shot myself, I fell to the ground, curling up into myself. I closed my eyes and rocked as I sang an old song Mom sang to me over the cradle.
Down in the hills of Ohio,
there’s a babe at sleep tonight.
He’ll wake in the morn’ of Ohio,
in the peaceful, golden light.
“Fielding?”
I opened my eyes to Sal standing over me, the gun held by the smoking barrel in his hand. “She’s still now. Like water healed of its ripples. She’s calm and at peace.”
“I couldn’t do it, Sal.”
“It’s all right, Fielding.” He sat down beside me. I heard the gun plop off to the ground on the other side of him.
When he brought his hand up to his mouth to bite his nail, I saw the blood on the inside of his wrist.
He saw me staring and lowered his hand. “It got on there from when I was checking for her pulse.”
“I don’t want another dog.” I wiped my nose hard on my arm.
“I never said anything.”
“Folks always say that. ‘We’ll get ya another.’ I don’t want another one.”
“All right.”
For a long time, the only sound made was that of me finding my way back to breathing through my nose.
“Sal?” I took a deep breath. “Not doin’ somethin’, am I a god-in-trainin’, like ya said?”
He squinted, and I thought how like Dad he looked when he did that.
“No. You’re just a boy. A boy holds a gun but cannot fire it, even when he knows it is the right thing to do. A god would never hold the gun in the first place. So you’re a man-in-training. And on the day you are asked to hold the gun once more, you will have to decide whether to stay the child … or finally become the man.”
10
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 1:744–745
WHEN I THINK of her as a grandmother, as old as I was young, with gray hair and a shawl around her frail shoulders to keep out the chill, what happened in those woods becomes something much harder to bear. Granny was my first loss, my first emptying. She was the something that matters for eternity.
I haven’t had a dog since, though the neighbor boy has his mutt. The other day, I watched the two of them together. The dog did his best to catch the ball the boy threw. I tried to teach the boy to throw better, the way Grand taught me.
I didn’t show the boy I framed his photograph, but he saw it just the same and smiled a little too much. I even told him so. He asked if I wanted to drop by his trailer for dinner. He said his mom was making her famous meat loaf and she always made too much of it, he said. I got to thinking about my place at their table.
“Say, kid, I never see your old man around. Where’s he at?”
I knew it wasn’t going to be a clean answer, the way he slowly dragged his finger across the dirt on my kitchen counter.
“Mom says he’s in the jungle, findin’ the cure for cancer.” He kept his eyes on the counter. “Even though he died of it six years ago.”
“Jesus.”
He looked up at me. “So you comin’ to dinner?”