The Runt
Butch was, effectively, my family’s mascot. Born from a mid-size poodle father and a very small Boston Terrier mother, he was sadly predisposed to looking like a gremlin, with wavy hair, a half-snout with a prominent underbite, bulging terrier eyes, and a poodle’s frame without the curly hair to provide extra bulk. He looked half-feral, and was so flea-ridden he had chewed the hair off around his own tail. But what better pet than a Gremlin for a family of half-Orcs anyway.
Butch began life as the runt of a litter of four. He had no name, he was “the runt, y’know, with the spot” on his head. None of Fletcher and Lizzie’s progeny had names then, as they were not planned or expected right up until they were born. We were going to get them up to weaned and then give them away. But one day, all the puppies were chasing each other through the upstairs of my grandmother’s split-level, and all the older children were chasing each other through the bottom level, until it boiled up into the top level, and because no innocent act goes unpunished, my cousin ended up stomping on the runt, with the spot on his head.
He was dead, we all knew. But we took him to the vet, we being someone in the family that was not me, being seven and all. He came back, was given six months, “or until his brain grows into the indent of the skull” and hemorrhages, to live. I volunteered to care for the doomed creature, as it was wrong to give someone a puppy that was likely dead before it could know its name. My dad, ever insistent on doing right whatever dumb thing you were doing, rigged together a baby-bottle with a straw-nipple I or my sisters could tape to our finger to let him suckle. He grew, and within a few weeks was on to solid food, and as his siblings disappeared, he got more and more. After a long debate within the family, the only constant of which was “Je-sus not Spot” we landed on Butch, named after a Boston Terrier TY Beanie Baby, as was the style at the time.
Butch quickly became our mascot. He was loud, mean to strangers, constantly hungry, and he communicated in headbutts and scratches more than verbally. His favorite pass-time was to chase the cat up the stairs until she turned and chased him down, where at the bottom, he’d turn and remember he was bigger and chase her back up. When we moved to the townhomes, he was perpetually angry at the wall for making noises, but he had access to The Woods. My older sister, Stevie, would often volunteer to walk him, just to hang out with a boy, usually. But for weeks, every time she took him out, he’d return with a stick. Once, I went with her, and my 11-year-old self had to hear my 16-year-old sister’s newest “boy-who-is-a-friend, leave-me-the-fuck-alone-mom” warn her about the “and-a-condas” in the Kentucky woods, after which I decided to just wander away and play fetch with my dog for what I assume to be rather obvious reasons.
I had tagged along only to witness the phenomenon Stevie had laughingly related a day or two before, when she’d told a story about our “dumbass” dog to drown out a commercial– or maybe Joe Buck, an equally abysmal thing to listen to. I threw the stick Butch had kept in the kitchen by the door for a day now, and he ran straight past it and out of sight, and then came stumbling back with an entirely different stick. This happened almost every time Butch went into The Woods, until one trip with my younger sister, Samantha, and me, the stick he brought back was about 3 feet long and a little over an inch in diameter, roughly. This branch was about twice as long as Butch himself, but he was insistent on bringing it home. He made it to the door, carrying it proudly at the halfway point, trotting confidently, when it hit both sides of the doorway. As Samantha and I laughed at the cartoonish display, he backed up, tried again, and failed again. Then, he backed up, tilted his head in confusion, before he seemed to have a tiny dog eureka moment and strutted in confidently. After a few days, my youngest sister, Carol, hit Samantha in the back with the stick, and it was confined to the patio. Butch was so distraught that he sulked until he became an Outside Dog.
When they put Butch down, I was sixteen, maybe seventeen. I was digging in the garden, installing the pond Mom wanted and Dad was willing to maintain when she ultimately abandoned it. The metallic beige minivan pulled back up the drive, past the tree I can still smell blooming, that I can still remember screaming with cicadas, cicadas Butch would eat until he got sick the year we moved in, on up the drive to where our family had put handprints into concrete to celebrate the permanence of a house we lost within six years. My mother got out first and approached me. Dad came around from the back of the van, the long way, past the cargo door. I didn’t stop working and I didn’t let that tiny spark of what wanted to be hope breathe at all. My mother started off tearful, explaining he was in pain, it was what was best for him, there was nothing that could be done. My lack of response was rude, I’ll admit, and cold, and I took no small revenge in watching her fingers twitch in restlessness. But the problem with a well-intentioned lie is that it is still a lie. And so I continued digging her pond as she lied to me about my dog. When she finally got fed up and left, I glanced up to my father, who had the decency to look away.
“The worms had gotten to the point they were digging holes in his gut.” “It would’ve cost a thousand to put him through the treatment to force’m out,” “another who knows how much to patch up the damage already done,” “and then we’d have to deworm the whole front and back yard.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “He was a good dog.” He wasn’t. I nodded anyway, wondering if it was pity or envy that burned where his human hand had sat on my shoulder. Dad walked inside. I let the Orc rage take me, when I felt my face leak against my will. The hole for the pond was about a foot too deep, and I had to fill it back in a bit the next day.
The people that bought the house removed it.
Jeremy Ray is an aspiring educator, a conflicted veteran, an escaped Kentuckian, and a feral child, listed in reverse chronology. His work aligns itself against light and its encroachment upon the dark while still attempting to explore the dark himself. He also takes himself just a bit too seriously and should probably calm down. Someday.