THE WAY DOGS DIE
By Ashley Rice
 

Our family has never been much good at talking to each other. Like many families these days, we communicate mostly through our dogs.

On a Wednesday I call up my father to ask him about income taxes. I’m 25 and should know how to do them, but am terrible with math. “Why hello,” he says, when he answers (he has caller-i.d.). And then he immediately puts the dog on. She breathes heavily. “Hey Pup,” I say. (We’re not good with dog names: our 1st, mine, was called Dog. Our 2nd, which my brother named, was Dog#2. The 3rd, which my sister got for Christmas, was Christmas Dog. Then my dad and mom named the 4th one “Pup.”) Like all the dogs we’ve had, Pup is a big mutt. We get them at the pound near my parents’ place to save them from being killed. Also they’re free.  

My father comes back on. “Did she tell you all the news?” he asks. 

“Yes. She shouldn’t talk so much. It’s annoying.”

My dad tells me he and my mother have bought an indestructible bed for Pup because, lonely and restless with no Kids tearing through the house anymore, she tore up the other one.

“What is an indestructible bed?” I ask. He explains it to me. It has to do with the thickness of fabric. Then he also tells me about a dog he once had, named Skippy. Finishing this dog story (“I would hit Skippy lightly on the paws, to box with him. Why? Well, I thought that he was boxing back”) he says, “Have you talked to your grandfather lately?” and when I say “No” he says “Well you know he’s sick. Been getting sicker. Maybe you should give him a call.” 

My dad and his don’t talk often these days (or years, really) due to irreconcilable differences which are rooted in how, when my father got a scholarship for college, he left the farming life for good. Ever since I was young, though, I’ve related well to my paternal and only grandfather because my favorite animal has always been hogs. But the private hog-farming sectors of the South are dying if not dead already -- my grandfather himself got rid of his last hogs 7 years ago when he could no longer make the rounds to feed them – and recently all this has caused a lack of specific things to talk with him about. Which is probably why (in addition to the usual Extreme Busyness) in the past 3 months or so, I have not called. 

“Why hello,” my granddad says, when he picks up. And though we don’t generally talk about “pets,” just animals in general, we also (like my father and I) end up, on this particular Wednesday in income tax season, talking about, well, dogs. 

My brother and sister and I used to visit his hog farm when we were little, and I remember there were always around 14 stray dogs: lying under the pickup truck, standing in the weeded-over tracks which passed for a driveway, lounging on the front porch steps, wandering in and out of the house. The last time we visited, though, I suddenly remember, there was only 1 single dog. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? 

I ask my grandfather what happened to the rest. 

“Well, yes. Laddie’s the one I’ve got now. You saw him here last year.” Then he tells me the stories of the old dogs: Snowball, Buddy, Pumpkin. Dogs with more original names, I’ll admit, than ours. “Well sometimes they like to get out on the road and they get to where they can’t move very good and someone hits them,” he explains to me (This is what happened to Skippy). “Snowball got a bone in her. She ate a chicken bone and it got turned sideways in her and killed her. That’s the young ones. Old dogs don’t cause much of a ruckus…no, most times they just lay down in the road and die. 

There’s a pause. My grandfather sounds tired.

Suddenly I remember a letter he sent me the month before. He wrote out, word for word, the same letter for my father, but for years my dad has thrown his father’s letters away unopened, because, after reading 1 or 2 of them (when he first moved away from the farm life) he said “they make no real sense.” In his short letter to us my granddad explained why he does not accept his social security benefits. The note did not make sense to me, either. But staring at the income tax stuff – W2’s -- on my lap, as I talk to my granddad about his dogs (I’d forgotten to ask  my father how to fill out the forms) I am thinking right now that, social security aside, the letter itself explains something different.

My father once told me a story about dogs dying one by one, on an afternoon, in the road. He was 6 or 7 years old, and was walking home from playing at a friend’s farm when he spotted a man in overalls backing his car up over a burlap sack in the middle of the road and then stopping. After he had stopped, the man got out, went around to the back left tire, picked up the smallish sack, carried it to the side of the dirt road, and emptied its contents into a weeded-over ditch. Back at the car, he reached into a cardboard box, took something else out (another pup) and placed it in the sack, which he then replaced beneath the tire. Then he got in the car and backed up over that dog as well. My father stood there as the man did this several times, then ran home. When he told me this (he had come up to me as I was trying to buy my first car) I waited for an explanation, which was not forthcoming, so finally I asked “but dad I mean why?”
 
My grandfather later explained to me the following: “Well a man would do that if he had no way to feed them. Dogs were more often than not shot. I don’t know why a man used a car instead…Well…that was his preferred method, you see,” he said. So maybe I understood some things already that day. Maybe I understood things, too, in a different way, when my father had first told me that story. I didn’t understand really, though, not in a greater sense, until now.

In the short letter my grandfather said he did not want “you all’s generation paying for mine. It’s not right.” “Rubbish,” my father said, when I insisted on reading him the note over the phone. Maybe in an economic sense yes. But to me it sounded like my father’s father was saying good-bye.

“Do you feel like talking anymore or do you want me to call again another time?” I ask my granddad. He’d just told me what happened to the rest of the missing dogs, though you can probably guess by now: (in the years 1994-1998) not accepting his social security, he’d shot them. 

“Maybe you should call back soon,” he says, “I think I need to go lie down.”

I say okay and he says good-bye.

It’s only after hanging up the phone that I put together what my dad said about his dad’s sickness with what my granddad said about old, no-ruckus dogs. 
 
 

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ASHLEY RICE is the author and illustrator of Girls Rule and the forthcoming Friends Rule. By day she works as an e-card and greeting card designer. She grew up in Texas and now lives in Texas, where she is trying to finish her M.F.A. thesis. She has also lived in Northern and Southern California, New York, Boston and New Jersey.