Duke

I'm stealing shower time fitting writing inbetween this and that. Cooking up some soup, making things to take to a gathering at my brother's house. My brother....

I was just thinking about him earlier. Loveable needing love heart of gold kinda guy suffering from a heart worn on his sleeve and quiets it with drink... and other things... He is better now. Funny I saw him, he is working down the street from my house for my nephew cutting lawns and stuff, he is proud doing a man's work after a bad hard year... He said to me, patting his belly, "Gettin' healthy.."
"Yeah.." I said and smiled looking at his burning cigarette in the other hand...

I was driving home just a little bit ago from the grocery store listening to Ray LaMontagne who makes me think of my hometown, where I still live, but he puts me back here about 20 years ago or so... takin' my body, body and soul timewarped and I see... railroad tracks in the middle of State Street which had two lanes and Hamilton's Market, down those tracks is the first time I turned down my tubetop and let a boy touch my tiny breasts, right there on past the baseball diamond where I used to hunt for those old glass insulators that would fall off the powerlines next to the track, and then right down from there by the bus barns we would build stuff in the trees to sit on, way 20, 25 feet up... our mother's never knew...

My brother and I had this dog Duke, a beagle, we used to take him back there and let him run. He was always running.... No matter how tight you'd make his collar on Thursday night somehow some way you'd find it dog empty Friday morning on trash day. When I was a little girl he'd drag me around the neighborhood and the only way I could get him to stop would to (whump) sit my bottom down on the sidewalk. Usually I was wearing a tu-tu and an aviator cap and him on a leash out front of me bounding to the next ...whatever, I don't know, he was eternally just... going... Jim, my brother was the same way.... always needing unleashed...

This one day I went to jump the fence to head over to McMillan's house to play and 'round the corner of their house was neighbor Ron pulling their garden hose to put it away, he looked up at me, but didn't smile or wave.... and behind me in my house I heard the phone ring, I looked at him and shrugged, jumped back over the fence into the house to the phone.... I heard it and it was from that breathless boy, Bear Davis, who lived across the way in the big farmhouse (it's still there, they haven't lived their in 30 years, but everyone still calls it the Davis' house..) He said to me, "Your dog's dead. He's laying in front of McMillan's house, Ron Garrett hit him with his truck..."

I remember dropping the phone, heart pounding and running out the back yard, jumping the fence and heading to the front of the McMillan's house to see for myself and there instead were two adult arms that held me back... I still don't know who it was, maybe Mrs. McMillan, maybe my mom... I screamed, "Duuuke..." Saddest I'd ever known myself to be to that point in my 8 years on the planet..

My dad came home and put him in a black plastic bag. My swollen eyed mom was furious, "At least find a box for him Jim.."

My brother was inconsolable.. He and my dad took Duke's body to bury him by the creek where they used to run him, not far off from where I live now. I take the kid's down there and we hunt around for arrow heads and turtles and I wonder sometimes when we find a bone if it's one of my old dog Duke's.

When I see my brother now... piece out of him, his beagle done run off.... and you know how like you can see in an old unused farm field a grove of trees where a house used to sit but it's been torn down? And you know a house was there just by the way the trees are arranged and you can almost see what it ought to look like....