Today was not a good day.
I suppose you
could quibble with that assessment—there’s that old Zen story involving a man
and his horse and the repeating line “how do you know?” The point being that
apparently good events can lead directly to apparently bad events, and vice
versa. Non-attachment, non-judgment, and all that stuff, which is all well and
good, except there’s also a story about a Zen master who cried when his son
died—when his students said “but aren’t all things illusion?” the master
replied “yes, but this is a very convincing illusion.”
Anyway.
I had plans to
interview Joy today. I was supposed to meet her down by the barn after
breakfast, since she had a few hours free for barn chores, and the plan was I
could help her work as we talked. She got held up by something, though, and
when I got to the barn she was nowhere in evidence. So I wandered around for a
while. I had a vague desire to go look at the sheep in their pen, or maybe find
a barn cat willing to let me pet them. I’ve always found the sheep relaxing,
somehow. But then I heard a noise.
It was an odd
sound, a kind of animal roar combined with a high, surprised yelp, then an
eruption of barking, coming from inside the barn. I ran towards the noise, and
found….
Remember they’d
used straw bales to build a kind of divided pen in there for Eddie’s dog, the
supposedly untrainable animal Eddie was supposed to, non-the-less, train as a
therapy dog to earn his mastery. He’d been making a lot of progress, of late,
but the dog was still touchy, and spent all his unsupervised time in the pen,
away from people and other animals who might get hurt if his fear-aggression
got triggered somehow. And I guess he’d gotten triggered, because what I saw
when I came in was Eddie, clinging to one of the angled beams that support the
rafters of the hay loft, his body curled up, as high off the ground as possible,
holding himself away from the dog, who was barking and lunging beneath him. I
couldn’t see clearly, having just come in from the brighter light outside, but
there seemed to be something dreadfully wrong with Eddie’s right arm.
I stood there
for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a few seconds, not
knowing what to do, not sure if either man nor beast knew I was there, and then
Eddie half turned his head in my direction and shouted “No! Wait!” and then
something exploded right behind me and to the left. The dog yelped and
stumbled, recovered, turned, and leaped towards Joy, who of course stood right
behind me. She strode forward, shot him again, and this time he fell, his head
blasted open.
In movies and
such, when this sort of thing happens, people shout “NOOOOOOOO!!!” and tear
their hair and look towards Heaven. Eddie did nothing of the kind. Speechless,
he dropped from his perch, landed awkwardly on a straw bale, tripped backwards,
and stumbled towards the dog, favoring his arm, which I could see now was all
bloody and torn. He hovered over the animal, his hands waving helplessly, as
though he were trying to think how he might put the ruined body back together.
“Don’t touch,”
Joy warned, “I’m not sure he’s not carrying something.”
Eddie obeyed,
but looked up at Joy helplessly, unable, I suppose, to make sense of so many
emotions.
“But he was
doing so well,” he said, and my heart just about broke for him.
“He was going
to kill you,” Joy told him. “Get Charlie,” she told me, over her shoulder.
Charlie is a
certified wilderness first responder, as well as a fair herbalist. Unlike Joy,
who’s a vet, he’s trained to treat humans. I ran off and found him without
difficulty, but moving back and fourth across campus on foot takes a while, and
by the time we got back, Joy had cleaned the wound and stopped the worst of the
bleeding, veterinary degree notwithstanding.
Charlie
examined Eddie from head to foot, found a probable sprained wrist and broken
tailbone, from the fall, as well as the multiple bite wounds and numerous
splinters. He re-washed the wound, directed Eddie to knock back a shot of cayenne water, to stop the capillary bleeding, bound up the wound tightly to
keep the more serious bleeds from starting up again, and then set about pulling
out the larger splinters while Eddie cried. Charlie, typically, neither
encouraged nor discouraged the tears, he just let them happen and worked with
quick, professional efficiency.
“I’m not going
to bother wrapping any of the rest of this,” he said, speaking for the first
time since we arrived, “I’ll let them do that at the emergency room. You mind
if I carry you? You’re in no shape to walk.”
“That dog—I’m
supposed to train him for my Mastery,” said Eddie, wiping his eyes. As if his
primary concern were academics.
“There are two
kinds of mastery,” Charlie told him. “The one based on success and the one
defined by failure. The first kind you can achieve anywhere. The second kind
you do better to get here, where you’re not alone.”
“You set me up
for this. You did this on purpose,” accused Eddie, wiping his eyes again and
passively allowing Charlie to scoop him up. Seeing him in the bigger man’s
arms, I for the first time saw Eddie appear girlish. Maybe it’s only that he
looked childlike, limp with mixed-up emotion, vulnerable in a way men are not
supposed to be, but sometimes are anyway.
“You are
seriously overestimating our ability as fortune-tellers,” said Charlie, and walked
out of the barn, carrying the little man.
I collected
Charlie’s various med-kit items, which he’d left scattered on the barn floor,
knowing I’d return them to his office. Joy put away her rifle and came back to
stare at the dead dog with me.
“He looks so
little,” I said. I’d never thought of him that way when he was alive.”
“None of us
have ever seen him relaxed before,” said Joy. “Poor boy was terrified every
minute he was here.”
I was about to
say something to the effect of its for for best that he’s dead, when Joy
suddenly spun and kicked savagely at a straw bale.
“I hate killing animals,” she raged. “I
Goddamn hate it.”
“But--” I
started to ask. I mean, she slaughters chickens and sheep and so forth as a
regular part of her job. But she held up her hand.
“Not now,
Daniel,” she said. “Not now.”
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