They were the oldest couple on the cul-de-sac. In fact they had been married longer than half of their neighbors had been alive. The neighborhood had changed since they had bought their house the first year they had been married. Most of the other young couples who had bought with them, had raised their families and moved to warmer climes.
There was, however, a new generation of families and the old couple, who had never been blessed with children of their own, basked in the sounds of young children running around the front and back yards. She would bake cookies and he made paper kites for the windy days. The children weren’t their own, but they served as informal grandparents.
He was a civil engineer who was nearing the end of his career. As the most experienced man in his firm he was often sent out on remote jobs that meant one or two nights away from home. She was lonely when he was gone and so they got a companion to keep her company when he was away. That’s where the dog came into their lives.
They went to the local animal shelter and for her it was love at first site. The puppy was rumored to be a lab/ Irish setter mix. He had a reddish brown coat and gigantic paws. The shelter didn’t know his parentage and they had guessed what breeds had gone into producing what she called “the most beautiful dog in the world”. So of course they brought him home.
In less than two days he had gone through two pairs of shoes and a leather purse that she had gotten from her mother. She claimed she had never really liked the purse, and wrote it off to puppy exuberance. They bought him a nice stuffed cushion for a bed and placed it in the laundry room where they had also placed the training pads that were supposed to help in “house breaking” the young dog. He managed to figure out how to open the door to the room and they found him the very next morning sleeping on the floor next to their bed.
He turned out to be a very smart dog that quickly learned to do “his business” outside on the frequent walks that she insisted he needed. Once they started buying the leather chew bones, he left shoes and purses alone. In fact in a very short time he had become a beloved member of their family. His wife said she felt ever so safe when he had to go out on a business trip because she had her protector in the house.
She and the dog became neighborhood traditions with the children all coming over to pet the dog whenever he was taken on one of his walks. She would chat with the mothers as the children all marveled at how soft his fur was and how warm his tongue was as he repeatedly licked their faces.
Eventually the day came when it was time for the man to retire, and then the two of them would take the dog out for his walks. The man claimed that he had never known that they had so many children for neighbors. His wife said he was just an “old stick-in-the-mud” who never looked past their own front yard.
It started about two years after he retired. His wife started to feel a little tired after some of their walks. If the weather was bad, she would beg off and ask him to take the dog out by himself. He said he wasn’t crazy about taking “her” dog out, but he really didn’t mind. They would start out and the dog would hold back, looking to see why she wasn’t with them. She would stand in the doorway and wave and that seemed to calm the dog down and they would go on their way. When it was just him and the dog they would venture farther out and go into the park that abutted the development. The dog loved the new smells and the man could pretend that he was going to the great outdoors. In short they had fun.
Time passed and her condition worsened. Except for the rare excursion, barely around the cul-de-sac, she didn’t go out with the dog. Still in the house the dog followed her everywhere she went. At night he still slept on the floor next to her side of the bed. They had given up long ago with the idea of having the dog sleep anywhere else and had moved his cushion next to the bed.
Her energy levels seemed to drop by the month, and then by the week. A doctor confirmed problems with her heart, and prescribed medications that helped but did not cure. She ventured out of bed, but not farther than the living room. The man learned to cook their meals, and they settled into a quiet life.
One morning the man got up, made the morning coffee, and brought a cup for her to sip while she remained in bed. He found the dog with its head on the bed and her hand on its head. She didn’t move when he put the coffee down on the nightstand. When he touched her to wake her from her nap, her hand just fell away from the dog. The man checked and found what he had feared these past few months. There was no life left in her.
The doctor came and confirmed that she had left them. When they took her body away the dog tried desperately to get into the ambulance. Of course they wouldn’t let him and he howled as they drove away. The man and the dog stayed in the bedroom, with the man sitting on her side of the bed and the dog’s head in his lap for the rest of the day.
He went out and made the preparations for her funeral, and three days later they buried her in the cemetery on the other side of the park, some six miles out of town. He returned home, and for the next week he did little else but take the dog out and sit in the living room, with the TV off staring at the chair that she used to sit in.
Finally, it was the dog that seemed to snap him out of it. He went out with the dog and was returning after a short walk when the dog refused to head back to the house. Instead he literally dragged the man over to the park where they used to go for their private walks in the wild. For nearly an hour the dog went around the trails they had ventured on before his wife had left them. By the time they returned to the house the man admitted that the dog was right and they had to get on with their lives.
They fell into a routine. Every morning he would wake, make that first pot of coffee, and feed the dog. Then after he read the first section of the paper they would go out for their first walk of the day. Often, it would coincide with the children leaving for school and they pretended that they had come out to see the children off. Each child would pet the dog and then be off to their buses. The man and the dog would finish their walk and return home. After lunch they would venture out again, and then once more just before dinner. Finally in the evening, they would take one short walk and then retire for the night. The neighbors got so used to the man and the dog walking that they claimed they could set their clocks by the time the two of them passed each house.
The years passed. The man began to take it slower on the walks and the distance became a little shorter. The dog didn’t seem to mind as his muzzle was beginning to show some grey hairs and his hind quarters had the start of a little rheumatism. They still went out at the same time each day and the neighbors would come out and greet them each day. During the summer the children, who were now mostly teenagers, would stop whatever they were doing to come over and give the dog his pets.
It was a brisk autumn morning, with the leaves all red and orange. They crunched beneath their feet as they took their post-lunch walk. The dog was finished sniffing the pile of leaves he was sure had been visited by the poodle down the street, when he realized that the man wasn’t holding on to his leash. He went back to the man, who for some reason had decided to lie down on the path. It took but a moment for the dog to realize that there was a problem and the man needed help.
The dog started to howl. He would go a short distance back the way they had come and bark, but then came back to the man and howl. It took only a few minutes before all of the dogs in the neighborhood took to howling as well. The neighbors all came out of their houses to try to figure out what the problem was. One of the women noticed that all of the dogs were pulling in the same direction and yelled that she hadn’t seen the man return from his walk with the dog. Someone else confirmed that she hadn’t seen the man and the dog either.
The neighbors started to follow the path that they knew the man took and as they got closer the dog started to bark louder and louder. They found the man lying on the ground and one of them called for help. The emergency people came and took the man into the ambulance. The woman who had first noticed the pair was missing held on to the dog’s leash while he strained to get to the man.
It was too late for the man and he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Three days later they buried him in a grave next to his wife.
That first woman who found the man kept the dog in her house. She would take him out for walks and whenever they returned the dog tried to get into the house he had grown up in. If they went anywhere near to the park he would drag whoever had the leash back to that spot where the man had died.
Months had passed since the man had died and the dog was still determined to find the man where he had left him on the park path. The weather had turned cold and he radio was forecasting a rough winter. It was in the first week of December when the first snow of the season was falling, that the woman asked her oldest son to take the dog out for a short walk. “Be careful” she shouted as they left, “The walks are slippery.”
It was only supposed to be a short walk, so the woman started to worry when after a half an hour the pair hadn’t returned. Finally, nearly an hour after they had left, the boy returned. He was crying and his clothes were wet. “I tried to stop him,” they boy said through his tears. “I tried to stop him, but he pulled the leash out of my hands and ran toward the park.” The woman immediately guessed that the dog had once again gone back to the spot on the park path where the man had died. She told her sobbing son not to worry and to change into some dry clothes. Then she put on her coat and went out into the storm to find the dog.
The snow had been falling steadily all day and the tracks of her son and the dog were almost completely gone. She wasn’t worried because she was sure she knew where the dog had gone off to. When she got to that path in the park she could see that the snow had been disturbed. There were tracks all around the area where she remembered the man had laid. The dog, however, was nowhere to be found. She went farther down the path but failed to find the dog. Finally chilled to the bone she returned home.
That night after dinner when the dog still hadn’t returned, the woman’s husband and her son bundled up and went out looking for the dog. Nearly two hours later they returned. Her husband was practically dragging her son through the door. The boy wanted to keep looking but his father insisted that they had looked in every possible place. Her husband was banking on the dog being smart enough to find shelter in the storm, and guessed that come morning he would be back for his breakfast.
The husband was wrong. The dog didn’t show up that day, nor the next. They printed up posters with a picture of the dog they had taken at Thanksgiving. Her son went out with a hundred copies and returned empty handed. He said he had put one on every lamp post and any wooden post he could find in the neighborhood. Soon after that the phone began to ring with all of their neighbors calling to say they would look for the dog. The dog after all was known to everyone in the neighborhood.
Christmas came and there was no word on the dog. Many of the neighbors had called to say that they had been out looking for the dog. Some had even taken their dogs to the spot where they all knew the man had died and tried to get the dogs to follow a scent, with no luck. There was no trail for the dogs to follow. The winter was brutal with the snow falling in unprecedented amounts. The TV weatherman said they had set new records for snow falls.
Finally spring had come and the snows had melted. It was a sunny Easter week and the woman, seeing all of the bulbs bursting through the ground, thought she would take some tulips out to the cemetery where the old couple was buried. Tulips she remembered were the old woman’s favorites. She drove the six or seven mile out to the grave site, and brought the flowers with her to the graves. She could tell that the site had been overgrown since there were leaves piled over both graves
.
As she started to brush the leaves away she stumbled backwards. There were bones under those leaves. She had her phone with her and she called to her husband to come out to the cemetery.
When he arrived she pointed to the graves and said she saw bones on the graves. He went over and started to brush away the leaves. There he found the bones of a dog draped across both graves and amidst the bones the collar of the dog he had search for that cold winter’s night.
