Fagan

“Dead,” I thought.  Then, “What a shame.”  The corpse on the narrow mountain road was clearly that of an English Bull Terrier, a rare breed here in Greece.  But as I drove past, something made me glance in the side mirror.

Yes, one ear had flicked.  The dead dog was alive.

I slowed the car, stopped, reversed.  In the back of the station wagon, my own dogs – four ill-behaved canines, three of them foundlings – burst into frantic barking, thinking that the reverse meant they would soon be set loose to race down a dirt road, their daily exercise.  Selfish as they are, though, as we stopped beside the terrier they suddenly fell silent, their faces pressed against the windows.  I got out with the water bottle and a dish, and went to meet him.

His head was blotched with pink, and hugely swollen.  What should be tiny, deep-set eyes were sunken out of sight and packed with pus and ants.  There was a huge seeping bite on one rear leg.  Everything else was only bones.

His ears shot up at the sound of water pouring.  He struggled onto one leg, two, three, and drank like a dog drowning in reverse, snuffling wildly.  The dish was empty.  I refilled it.  Frantic strangling noises.  Empty.

He knew what a leash was for.  He let me lead him, limping on all four legs, off the pavement.  An hour later, I returned, having taken the dogs for their run and dropped them off at home.  The water dish was empty.  Flies and wasps swarmed around the – missing? – eyes.  I had to lift him into the car:  he knew what to do, but could not raise his front feet, let alone jump up.  He lay down on the floor and waited to leave that place.

That was August, 2006.  Fagan weighed 37 pounds.

 
By October, 2007, he weighed 60.  That blind, silent skeleton whose waist I could encircle with my fingers was now a portly gent with a droll sense of humor and the gait of a drunken sailor.  The swollen, sunburned face had resumed the shape it was meant to have, like the hard, curved carapace of some primeval insect.  His tiny, vivid eyes glittered with fun.

He had learned that people talk to dogs, and he talked back, in sprawling paragraphs of yowls and rumbles, like the sound track of a  Martian sitcom.  Dancing for joy, he was Sebastian Cabot tangoing on ice skates.  He swam with the grace, buoyancy and sound effects of a steam calliope.  His chuckles, snores and snuffles reminded me irresistibly of my beloved Dutch great-grandfather who had died in the 1950’s.  With that huge snout, tall ears, tiny eyes, broad shoulders and stubby legs, he resembled nothing so much as a child’s modeling-clay triceratops.

He immigrated to Virginia, to live with my son Tom in Richmond, in a household of artists, chefs and musicians.

There was no shadow on his life.  He had none of the psychological clutter that any human might suffer in such a situation:  he might have been born the day I found him.  His name had always been Fagan.  He was a kind, funny, homely, attentive dog who loved people, and now only waited – with feigned patience – for his supper.

Good boy, Fagan.