The Stone

The Stone
It should have been obvious that I was always happy to see you. Before I unlocked the gate, I reached my hand through the mesh to touch your face. My voice would be high with excitement and sometimes I would chant your name as if you were a divine vision whose attention I had to hold or it would vanish.
Minutes before as I drove up the hill, I would wonder, “Will they be waiting for me?” A few times that the others came to the gate and you didn’t, I would scream your name, fearing that you were dead or injured. Usually you came running as I was opening the gate. A few weeks ago, age had pulled you into a profound sleep, and because you were almost deaf, you did not wake until I touched you. For a second you didn’t know where you were, and were startled that something had gotten close enough to touch you, without you even being aware.
Luckily that was not how I found you today. You came to the gate with the two females and left to mark your territory. But you didn’t wander far. Sometimes I had to walk down the road until I saw your whiteness, which was visible even on moonless nights. You always tried hard to both obey and act like you were ignoring me. I thought I understood you. All my life I have been trying to follow demands with a weary resignation: obeying so I would not be punished while acting indifferent so I could salvage some dignity.
I wondered if you were happier to see me than I was to see you, if perhaps I was reacting to your joy or you were reacting to mine. Neither of us could measure our feelings for each other, let alone compare them. I will never know if I was in your dreams, if when your legs twitched, your lips trembled as you slept, I was running next to you on the beach in Ocean Park or if we were jogging up the stony road to the Espíritu Santo River to plunge into a cool river pool. The green light filtered through bamboo on the rock road up to the river makes your whiteness iridescent, and the breeze suddenly transforms the air into rattling exhilaration and our images flicker like green flames.
When I lifted your head Saturday night and it hung limp from your neck: it was no longer yours, yet the body was still warm. Though you walked at times with a limp, were deaf, and had lost interest in eating unless provoked by the unhealthiest food, it was not until the moment that you were dead that I thought of your body as being a burden, something useless.
What strange things sorrow does to us. I kneeled next to you in the rain for a few minutes. I had been soaked when I arrived that night, foolishly gone to the country on a rainy night in sandals and shorts. The cries that came from me at first were wordless. They seemed to well up in my stomach like geysers and then rage up to my head. The misery of the cold rain fit perfectly. Then I chanted your name in a rhythm determined by my sobbing.
At the time, I had no awareness of how I felt, but then pulling strands out of the moment, I sensed anger, despair, guilt, alienation, and pain. For the second time you were a complete stranger to me. An hour before you had been a picture full of nuances and symbols that I read expertly, or imagined I did. Suddenly you were unreadable. You were a foreign language with sounds beyond my pitch, a silence that made me despair because I could not interpret it.
I didn’t want you lying out in the rain, but you were too heavy to move. Dead weight. I slid a heavy black plastic bag up to your neck, as if I wanted you to breathe and hoped that maybe you might quicken. And then I stood again just out of the rain. Tears pushed from my eyes. Blind anguish. I called someone to say that you were dead, but I could only get your name out and the word dead before grief stuck its fist into my throat and I could get no other word out.

You were not mine. Arturo had bought you from a client and then decided that we should wait until we moved into a new house that he had had built. For six weeks we waited and then when we went to get you, you were already three months old. Arturo insisted that you spend the day outside in the hot sun in that walled patio in Condado. I bought a small swimming pool so you could cool off, but you never used it. I tried to come home early to let you in. Then on New Year’s Eve you became sick and almost died. You lay on my lap on the way to the veterinarian, almost motionless, not able to lift your head. From that day on I felt that I had to protect you. For a while you were allowed to spend the day inside.
One other time, you almost died. When I lived alone in the country, I let you and Jobita sleep inside. Arturo had left and we did not really talk. He refused to change his mailing address, so I still picked up his mail and left it in San Juan. The couch got termites and the cleaning lady fumigated. I didn’t know that you slept on the couch, but a few days later you were stumbling and I took you to the veterinarian and he said it was pneumonia. I think the poison made your lungs fill with liquid. After a few days I came to get you and he said that you still had to stay. He wouldn’t let me see you because he said you would get too emotional. The day I finally came to pick you up, you peed in the reception area and twisted around in joy.
Arturo was domineering. He swung between cajoling and sudden outbursts. If he was not in control, he was in anguish. I was raised to fear conflict. I protected you, but gave in. One day he was going to teach you how to walk on a leash. Scared, you reacted by planting your feet on the ground. He dragged you for a block. When he returned, I noticed four trails of blood across the garage floor. He hadn’t seen them, but when I pointed it out to him, he felt horrible. I felt guilty for not protecting you and trapped because I had let myself be dragged by him for years, always giving in at his insistence, forming a superego, an angry father from his admonitions and sudden anger, becoming depressed by a sense of powerlessness. He insisted, but often relented when I became depressed. He himself felt trapped by his need to control. He tried to change, and eventually got tired of trying and became even more despotic, until I fought back. Then the relationship ended and I was left in the mountains with two dogs.
The same day he took you for the walk, I put a chain on your neck. I placed food in front of you and you moved with the chain on. Soon we were walking around the yard. In less than ten minutes, you learned to walk on a leash. I said nothing about this. It was not a time to gloat.
You were the only one who always came to see me when I left for the city. The others sat or lay comfortably in the cool afternoon light. Each time I thought it might be the last time we saw each other. I would park the car and walk back to the gate. Why did you come to watch me, to follow the car down the road with your eyes, perhaps listen to it on the road, chugging up the hill on the other side of the farm.
After the three years alone in the country, I left to study. You became sick. You lost huge patches of hair and stopped eating. Arturo took you to the veterinarian. The professional opinion was depression and anxiety. Was your stare as I left an attempt to form a bond that would pull me back? Was it an accusation? Did you stand there and feel me become a memory again or an intuition of loss, milder than those three years, but perhaps a preamble? Another long separation?
Of course, I could have given your life more joy. I was always aware of that. I had so much power over you. I could have let you in the house when he wasn’t there. I could have taken you for rides in the car, your white hair floating in the car like snow in a glass ball. You loved to climb the bamboo-shaded path to the river, wade into the cool water after the hot climb, to swim to the big rock next to the waterfall. After one of these trips, the next day, you and Jobita would sneak into the car if I left the door open for a second. The night you died, it had been years since we had gone to the river together. Lately it had been impossible even to coax you into the car. The river was beyond your capacity. It was part of a joy from younger years.
That last night you came to the door and I rubbed you. You were wet and shivered. I thought of letting you in, but didn’t. It was not my house. You were not my dog. Four bloody trails across the garage.
Pedro came the next morning. He began to dig a hole behind a row of red cordyline down the hill from the house. He helped me put the body in a wheelbarrow and I guided it down the hill until it hit a hole and turned over. You were stiff and heavy and your tongue had turned gray. I understood why morticians hide the foreignness of death. We lifted your body back in and I guided the wheelbarrow back and forth on the hill to control the descent.
Pedro told me that when he was a boy and his father died, he had been told to help carry the casket and when it was pulled out of the hearse, he had dropped his corner and it had fallen on him. We tried to get the collar off, but your head was twisted and it wouldn’t come easily, so Pedro suggested that you be buried with your jewelry. We laughed.
I called Arturo and after several attempts, I managed to tell him that you were dead. I could tell that he was angry when I told him that we had buried you already.
“I wanted to see him again,” Arturo said.
“He looked horrible,” I said. I thought of the gray tongue, the body hard and twisted. “You wouldn’t want to see him.” I couldn’t say any more.
His tone softened, “I’m coming up.”
I told him how you died. The story was already becoming the meaning and explanation. That you had seemed so normal when I arrived was part of the story, that you were lying out in the rain and I wanted to wake you up so you wouldn’t sleep all night in the rain were facts that seemed to have special meaning. I cried and Arturo clumsily held me.
“Remember when I dragged him a whole block to teach him how to walk on a chain.”
“Neither of us knew much about dogs then,” I said.
He left early and when I went down to the grave again, I saw that he had moved a large stone by himself and placed it over the grave. Pedro had said that he had heard horror stories of dogs digging up other dogs. I knew that Jobita and her daughter would not do that and I think Arturo knew that, too. When you and Jobita killed chickens or ducks, I buried them before you could eat them, and you never dug them up.
I thought that the stone looked so light on the patchwork of overturned clay and grass. It must have weighed seventy or eighty pounds, but I thought that if you suddenly began to breathe again, that it would move.
The first summer I lived alone on the farm, Jobita gave birth to nine puppies. At first she did not know what was happening, and left one on the grass, which died, and then she dug a hole and gave birth to two others. Arturo came to help because I couldn’t get Jobita to move and he finally got her into the pump room where she gave birth to six more pups. A few days later, when I returned from work almost at midnight, I found two of the remaining eight pups dead. At one in the morning, I disinfected the pump room, moved Jobita and the pups back and then buried the two dead ones in a small herb garden near the house. As soon as the first shovel of dirt fell on the bodies, I heard squeaking and desperately pulled them out. What I discovered was that one of the pups had been dead for a while and was full of gas. The pressure of the dirt had forced air out. For a desperate second, I believed that there was life. I had been fooled by a Rabelaisian joke, in part because I wanted so badly to believe that the pups were alive. I want even more to believe that you are still alive, so I imagine it.
You would not have lasted much longer. Everyone tells me that. When you came to the door, you were wet and your hair was spotty. You were shivering and I rubbed you to get you warm, but I wasn’t willing to let you in. You would sleep on the couch if you got a chance. Lately you had done things that you had never done before. You twisted the gate so you and Jobita could get out. Although it was forbidden, you walked through the house, instead of going around. You came to where I was sitting inside and were deaf when I screamed “Afuera. Afuera. Outside. Outside.” You had grown up in a house, but had spent your last nine years in the country where Arturo did not allow dogs inside. I had let you and Jobita sleep in the house at night for three years when I lived there alone, but now I was only a guest. With age came haughty indifference. You did not care.
Of course, since you are a dog, there is something bathetic about this letter to you. So much emotion and thought for something that is not even human.
A letter like this can never end. I have learned that from having lost people. I can’t help but feel that so much has gone with you. The twelve and a half years that you were alive have suddenly slipped away. Nothing worth anything emotionally can ever be contained. Though I do not believe, I like to imagine you getting to know my dead friends, a softer type of non-containment, the imagination to ease the sorrow of death and the horror of dying. Bill Meshey, who died 20 years ago at the age of 85, is stroking your head as he sips his whiskey in his Upper West Side apartment. You are in Ove’s backyard on Fyn in Denmark in the shade of “North Fyn’s most beautiful red beech tree” while Ove, who died ten years ago, a few months after his fiftieth birthday, and I eat lunch on his terrace.
Today before I left, I stood before your grave. The grass has become wild and spread over the red clay. I have thought of planting flowers there or a pitanga bush. This seems culturally programmed and not authentic. I like best the idea of your fitting into the land and the grass covering you. In the tropical light of the late afternoon, the soft contour of the mountains looks alive, many green shoulders of a living being.
And I feel no special affection for the grave. You are everywhere I look; You dart down the hill after sitting on a fire ant hill with me running after you trying to brush the ants off: You chase Harrison, Pedro’s peacock, until that haughty creature is featherless and its long talons are pressed against its breast for its final defense, which I spare it from having to make: You, Jobita and six pups sit with me in the bathroom as we wait out what was to supposed to be a hurricane, you lose your first fight to Jobita; Jobita mounts you to show she is dominant, as if she were the male, and you stand in embarrassed resignation: You pose under the hanging orchids or next to the bird of paradise where you act like you are sniffing the scentless flowers; and when you are just two years old, a friend of mine brings her whole Montessori class to the country, and you canter around the yard smiling with 20 children trying to throw their arms around you. The more incidents I mention, the more I realize that you are more than a summation of experience. The stone, which you would have pissed on if you passed by it, in its hard conciseness, coldness, weight and muteness is just an emblem of loss.