By Ron Ennis
For as many weeks as he could remember, Gord’s Uncle Chris had seen the dog in the same yard, always bitin hard at sometin in the dirt, rootin like a fuckin pig she was. He told Gord to get the something she wanted. It had never been his inclination to pay attention to stray dogs. A lot of skinny dogs runnin round Galway and it’s better to stay away from em. Most of em, Uncle Chris had said, they have a fuckin attitude, snarlin and sneakin. Still, one day Uncle Chris gave her a piece of black pudding that had got all crusty and hard the way puddin does, and starting that day the dog would follow him as he walked to the public house to have some pints with the rest .He took his only meal of the day at the pub and when he was done, he brought his scraps to the dog. Don’t you waste all that, Uncle Chris would say to the rest and they too started to give their scraps to the dog. Took near a month, Uncle Chris told Gord, but we got rid of the bones poking out from er fir.
In Doolin, the only time everyone in the same room – his mother and the dog, his father and his uncle – was during the argument. It was his mother that had caused the brothers to argue. She had never cared for Uncle Chris.
“What is to become of the dog when we go back to Dublin at the end of the summer?” Gord’s father asked Uncle Chris. “We certainly cannot bring it with us.”
Uncle Chris said, “The dog lived this far on her own. She’d do much better in a nice town like Doolin than on the dirty streets of Galway. Why not let her keep the boy company for the summer?”
Before heading back to Galway – better for all of us that I stay just the night – Uncle Chris brought Gord and the dog down to the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of Ireland. It was a short walk through the fields from the house.
Look a er! Uncle Chris had called through the wind. So appy she is!
Gord looked on his uncle’s face, bright and youthful, the sound of his voice clear. Gord preferred to remember his uncle the way he was that day, by the ocean, watching the dog run. Gord preferred not to remember the other ways his uncle often was.
Uncle Chris told Gord that Doolin was a special place, a place he and Gord’s father had come to many summers to stay with their grandfather and grandmother. Oh, to be boys back then. So free! So way before the rest of it starts. Uncle Chris took a bottle from a pocket in his shirt. The pocket was sewn on in an unusual place, on the side where his uncle’s elbow would cover it. Enjoy this now, Uncle Chris told Gord. This are the times to remember things from. Uncle Chris took a drink from the bottle. Don’t worry yourself about tomorrows just yet. Before you know it, you’ll have to start thinking bout fuckin yesterdays.
His uncle stood quiet for a time. They looked at the expanse of swaying grass, the rocks stoic, all that sea and the way it touched the sky. The ancient people, the real Irish people, they too thought this a special place. Those stone things you see everywhere aren’t just piles from clearing the fields. The ancient people, Uncle Chris said, they thought they had to mark this place. Uncle Chris pointed out into the wide space of the Atlantic Ocean. They thought they had reached the end of the world.
For each day after during that summer, it was always the ocean where Gord and the dog would go. It was a place they were allowed to run free. At the pubs and the shops on the town road the keepers did not like it when Gord brought the dog in, and the dog did not like to wait outside. At the house, Gord learned to keep the dog out of view of his mother and the dog learned to stay on the old rug behind the bed, out of sight from the hallway. Near the ocean, they preferred places just beyond the fields marked by stone walls, places where the ground was open and uneven on the promontories, away from the well-worn footpaths.
Even during the laziest of walks, the dog was always running, running in all directions, Gord serving as the hub to which the dog would return. From his boy’s mind Gord remembered the dog as the fastest animal on earth, and how he liked to watch it race across the uneven green next to the Atlantic Ocean. The dog crouched down as she ran, a low bullet of an animal, going so fast that Gord still remembered the feel of the dog passing and how the dog would need to run far by him before she could turn and run back.
They would go down to the ocean waves, climbing on boulders until the smaller boulders near the water made pools at low tide. Gord (and the dog would wonder at the thousands, millions of black-violet mussels clinging to the rocks. The dog would pick one, pry it from the rock and crack the shell with her back teeth. Gord would laugh whenever she showed her front teeth as she grabbed at the meat, working until she got enough of the mussel’s flesh to swallow it quickly. When she had finished, she would run along the rocks, bounding over the uneven earth and boulders. How well the dog, in mid-step and in mid-air, could so easily adjust to the changing terrain of sand and rocks.
“Is the dog coming back to Dublin with us?” Gord asked his father.
“We’ll see, Gord.”
“Is the dog coming back home with us?” Gord asked his mother.
“I told your father not to let his brother give you that dog.”
With her ears back, the dog watched Gord move around the room as he packed for the trip back to Dublin. He tried not to look at the dog’s eyes, but he must have looked at them for he would always remember how they were that day.
He would remember too how it was raining when they left Doolin, a hard and spite-filled rain.
The dog was so fast that it took Gord’s father three turns of the steering wheel and a long straight stretch of road to outdistance the dog. Gord screamed as he watched the dog gaining and fading out the back window. From the front seat, his mother tried to hit Gord’s face, and when her slaps could not reach him, she punched Gord on his back and legs. Gord saw the dog kicking up spray as she ran on the road, the water trailing behind her like from the wheel of a bicycle. His father took another turn and Gord would not see the dog again.
The house in Doolin had been in Gord’s family for seventy-one years. His great-great grandfather built it. After the summer Gord’s grandmother died, that same summer Gord had his only vacation there, Gord’s mother instructed Gord’s father and later convinced Gord’s Uncle Chris to sell the house.
“You two aren’t going to take care of it,” she declared in her manner so definitive.
She was definitive too when Gord’s mother predicted Uncle Chris would die soon after he had gotten the money from the sale. “Drink himself to death, he will soon.” It would be difficult to argue that three years was or was not still considered “soon.”
Fifty-six years later, Gord was thrilled that the same house was available for rent for the summer. He had been watching the house for several years on the internet and knew that it came up for rent from time to time. Gord planned to stay the months of June, July and August, longer than he had stayed when he was twelve. Gord’s wife would fly in whenever she could get away, and his daughters and grandchildren would come for one week each on different weeks in July.
It would be grand to see them all, he thought. So grand to be in this happy place – this time with happy people. Gord hoped his daughters would not notice too much his change. If not that, perhaps they would all pretend that Gord was the same as he had always been.
Gord knew this was most likely his last summer, and he came to this understanding agreeably. He was past the fear, past the anxiety. He was past the need to think about it every day. It has been a good run, he thought, not much left to do. He had been told for enough time that the cancer would not stop and he could do nothing but remain hopeful he would have a full summer before the pain became too pronounced, or he lost his ability to walk, to stand, or to sit happily on a high stool in a local pub.
Of the three famous pubs in Doolin, McDermott’s turned out to be his favourite. He liked to go there in the mid-afternoon, when he found the place less with tourists and he might find a local to share some chatter over a pint. Some of the old timers, older than him, remembered Gord’s family, his grandfather and grandmother, his father and his Uncle Chris. “If you take away the tourists, Doolin is a small place.” After the conversation had moved along enough, Gord would take out the photograph of himself and the dog.
“That is an unusual looking dog,” a man said.
It was the only photo Gord had of the dog. It was a black and white photo, square and old fashioned, with a once white border faded yellow, like the photograph itself. He had hidden the photo in the small wooden desk in his bedroom in Dublin until he left for college with it and had left his parents’ house for good. He thought the photograph still showed well enough the dog’s broad chest, her sleek stomach and powerful hind legs.
“You favour your Uncle Chris when you smile,” some of the old timers told him.
“Do you know if anyone ever took the dog in?”
“Oh, so many dogs back then left to run free. Not like now days, when they lock the dogs up. Kill ‘em, I even hear.”
Having been raised in Dublin, on its well-heeled streets south of the Liffey, the only quay his mother would stroll, the twelve-year-old Gord was surprised that there were dogs left to run free. He would learn, would research, that most of the dogs on the planet are free, not taken care of as pets. Owning pets was a relatively new and primarily a Western tradition. Dogs, even when free, were still dependent on humans, that they had evolved and adapted alongside humans. It was a species agreement made very long ago. The dogs would provide alarm and companionship, if the humans would allow them their discarded items.
The beginning of the walk was easy enough along the road that went by the ruins of Kililagh Church. Only now, on this trip, did Gord come to learn that the church was built in the 15th Century and it was not until it was abandoned in 1840 were people buried in and alongside what was left of the church. He often had to shoo the dog away from digging at the graves. Uncle Chris had said fuckin Cromwell burnt it while people were inside having mass. Fucking Cromwell forced all the good people west to live with all these rocks. He kept all the good land, land where you can grow stuff other than fuckin potatoes and cabbage, kept it for the traitors with money or the idiots moved here from England.
When the road ended, Gord found it more difficult to continue down to the ocean. There were footpaths he could take but he wanted to go along the promontory without using them. He wanted to walk along the uneven ground and then climb down to the rocks.
So strong how place is attached to memory.
Gord still and always thought the dog a profound failure in his life. Not the only failure he would have, but one of the few that remained with him. To allow his parents to leave the dog, to allow them to abandon the dog the way they had, Gord still and always found in himself unforgiveable. He would never forgive himself simply due to his lack of power, a trait he would keep his whole life. He had never developed a skill for rationalization, could never stomach those who would tell of the things not their fault, and so he could never hide behind the fact that at the time he was merely a twelve-year-old boy. Too many times he thought of all the ways he could have helped the dog. He could have better influenced his parents over the last weeks of that summer, could have started earlier. Failing that, Gord could have gone around to the different houses, asking for someone to take her. He could have asked someone to look after the dog while she moved about the town. He could have left a tremendous stash of food for her somewhere, filled a washtub with fresh water and placed it in the shade.
For longer than it should have, that autumn after returning from Doolin felt like the end of the world to him. Gord now knew it was simply the end of his childhood. It was then when Gord began to grow his lifelong hatred of his mother, would grow to hate her more and more for reasons more substantial than leaving the dog. Mostly how she wore his father down into a long defeat, wore him into a shadow until he mercifully died.
Silent and unspoken, through to now the end of his life, Gord would remember – would feel – that last night when the dog had licked the tears from his face.
The narrow path down to the shore was difficult to navigate. Gord felt every step in his damaged parts. He used his arms on the taller boulders to brace himself and he was thankful no one could hear his breathing. When he finally reached the water, he was happy to see mussels stuck to the rocks in numbers as great as in his memory. Still, the mussels and the pools and the rocks seemed smaller now, as did the house, and the ruins of the church. Even with the pain, the walk felt closer to the pubs.
Gord looked out to the Atlantic Ocean. It looked wide and forbidding and beautiful. Why had not the ocean played a larger part in his memory? The raw wideness of the west coast of Ireland, he should have come here more often. Like his Uncle Chris had once told him, the ancient people thought this was the end of the world, that nothing lay beyond it. Now, he could easily imagine the same thing.
Ron Ennis is recently retired, traveling full time, looking for what surprises may come next. He has published several stories in literary journals. His stories “Water Street” and “On The Ice” were nominated for prizes, Pushcart and Biblioasis respectively. Atlantic Places, his debut novel at age 63, is scheduled for release in February 2025 by Galileo Press.
