My mother keeps a cardboard cutout
of a sheepdog in the lounge. Portrait of
a huntaway: all lop-eared alertness,
those classic orange eyebrows raised
expectantly in his dark face. Spitting image
of our last loyal working lad, retired to town
when my parents left their land. Buried now
out on the pasture’s edge.
My father helps me move home from the city.
On the ferry away from my various failures
we sleep in a dog-friendly cabin.
A complimentary shit-proof plastic bag
and femur-shaped biscuit on each bed.
At the end the dog was deaf and mostly blind
so stiff in the hips I spent the summer’s family trip
lifting him up and down from the car to piss.
Black hairs stank up my yellow sundress.
Yet he was puppy-happy as ever to sniff
and mouth our hands, his trusting head
forever drooling on our laps. If there was pain,
we thought, he hardly felt it.
After my father shot the dog, he told me first
that Mum had done it – taken the mutt to the vet
to have him put to sleep. As though I wouldn’t talk
to her too, who says she didn’t, says she just said
“something has got to be done about that dog”,
and right away Dad bundled the poor sod into the truck.
Drove him to our last slice of mountainside.
Dug a hole. Pulled a trigger.
At home, Dad says, the cardboard dog haunts him.
Sitting on its haunches at the window
like our old boy begging a little love –
chin scratch, thrown bone –
some spare firelight glowing
on his kennel in the snow.
The sea is chasing something in its sleep
and all the dogs we cannot see
awaken to start barking
their good news through the cabins.
As I left, the husband
I never quite got around to marrying
told me he felt like a dog
being shot once it was no longer
useful on the farm.
Dad had said that
part was easy. Point blank
finger twitch: a light switch
flicking off. Who among us now
has not looked deep
into a pair of loving eyes
and set him running free
across the big green paddocks in the sky?
Nobody ever asks the dog
what he thinks.
Not even the dog.
