Joe Lansdale: The Bottoms

Daddy was out in the field plowing with Sally Redback, working the plow around a stump that was still in the field. Now and then he chopped at its base with an axe and set fire to it, but it was stubborn and remained.

Daddy stopped his plowing when he saw us, took the looped lines off his shoulders and dropped them, left Sally Redback standing in the field hitched up to the plow. He walked part of the way across the field to meet us, and we carried Toby out to him and put him on the soft plowed ground and Daddy looked him over.

Unlike most farmers, Daddy never wore overalls. He always wore khaki pants, work shirts, work shoes, and a brown felt hat. His idea of dressing up was a clean white shirt with a thin black tie and the rest of him decked out in khakis and work shoes and a less battered hat.

This day he took off his sweat-ringed hat, squatted down, and put the hat on his knee. He had dark brown hair and in the sunlight you could see it was touched with streaks of gray. He had a slightly long face and light green eyes that, though soft, seemed to look right through you.

Daddy moved Toby’s paws around, tried to straighten his back, but Toby whined hard when he did that.

After a while, as if considering all possibilities, he told me and Tom to get the gun and take poor Toby out in the woods and put him out of his misery.

“It ain’t what I want you to do,” Daddy said. “But it’s the thing has to be done.”

“Yes sir,” I said, but the words crawled out of my throat as if their backs, like Toby’s, were broken.

These days that might sound rough, but back then we didn’t have many vets, and no money to take a dog to one if we wanted to. And all a vet would have done was do what we were gonna do.

Another thing different then was you learned about things like dying when you were quite young. It couldn’t be helped. You raised and killed chickens and hogs, hunted and fished, so you were constantly up against it. That being the case, I think we respected life more than some do now, and useless suffering was not to be tolerated.

In the case of something like Toby, you were expected to do the deed yourself, not pass on the responsibility. It was unspoken, but it was well understood that Toby was our dog, and therefore our responsibility. And when it got right down to it, as the oldest, it was my direct responsibility, not Tom’s.

I thought of appealing to Mama, who was out at the hen-house gathering evening eggs, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. She’d see things same as Daddy.

Me and Tom cried awhile, then got a wheelbarrow and put Toby in it. I already had my twenty-two for squirrels, but for this I went in the house and swapped it for the single-shot sixteen-gauge shotgun so there wouldn’t be any suffering. Kids back then grew up on guns and were taught to respect and use them in the manner they were meant. They were as much a part of life as a hoe, a plow, and a butter churn.

Our responsibility or not, I was nearly twelve and Tom was only nine. The thought of shooting Toby in the back of the head like that, blasting his skull all over creation, was not something I looked forward to. I told Tom to stay at the house, but she wouldn’t. She said she’d come on with me. She knew I needed someone to help me be strong. I didn’t try hard to discourage her.

Tom got the shovel to bury Toby, put it over her shoulder, and we wheeled old Toby along, him whining and such, but after a bit he quit making noise. He just lay in the wheelbarrow while we pushed him down the trail, his back slightly twisted, his head raised, sniffing the air.

In a short time he started sniffing deeper, and we could tell he had a squirrel’s scent. Toby always had a way of turning to look at you when he had a squirrel, then he’d point his head in the direction he wanted to go and take off running and yapping in that deep voice of his. Daddy said that was his way of letting us know the direction of the scent before he got out of sight. Well, he had his head turned like that, and I knew what it was I was supposed to do, but I decided to prolong it by giving Toby his head.

We pushed in the direction he wanted to go, and pretty soon we were racing over a narrow trail littered with pine needles. Toby was barking like crazy. Eventually we ran the wheelbarrow up against a hickory tree.

Up there in the high branches two big fat squirrels played around as if taunting us. I shot both of them and tossed them in the wheelbarrow with Toby, and darned if he didn’t signal and start barking again.

It was rough pushing that wheelbarrow over that bumpy ground, but we did it, forgetting all about what we were supposed to do for Toby.

By the time Toby quit hitting on squirrel scent, it was near nightfall and we were down deep in the woods with six squirrels – a bumper crop – and we were tuckered out.

There Toby was, a cripple, and I’d never seen him work the trees better. It was like Toby knew what was coming and was trying to extend things by treeing squirrels.

We sat down under a big old sweet gum and left Toby in the wheelbarrow with the squirrels. The sun was falling through the trees like a big fat plum coming to pieces. Shadows were rising up like dark men all around us. We didn’t have a hunting lamp. There was just the moon, and it wasn’t up good yet.

“Harry,” Tom said. “What about Toby?”

“He don’t seem to be in pain none,” I said. “And he treed six squirrels.”

“Yeah,” Tom said, “but his back’s still broke.”

“Reckon so,” I said.

“Maybe we could hide him down here, come every day, feed and water him.”

“I don’t think so. He’d be at the mercy anything came along. Darn chiggers and ticks would eat him alive.” I’d thought of that because I could feel bites all over me and knew tonight I’d be spending some time with a lamp and tweezers, getting them off all kinds of places, bathing myself in kerosene, then rinsing. During the summer me and Tom ended up doing that near every evening. In fact, ticks were so thick they gathered on weed tops awaiting prey in such piles they bent the weed stalks over. Biting blackflies were thick in the woods, especially as you neared the river, and the chiggers were plentiful and hungry. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, the mosquitoes rose up in such a gathering they looked like a black cloud growing up from the bottoms.

To ward off the ticks and chiggers we tied kerosene-soaked rags around our ankles, but I can’t say it worked much, other than keeping the bugs off the rags themselves. The ticks and chiggers found their way onto your clothing and body, and by nightfall they had nested snugly into some of the more personal areas of your person, sucking blood, raising up red welts.

“It’s gettin’ dark,” Tom said.

“I know.”

I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.

“Don’t think I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”

“Daddy may not see it that way, though.”

“Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”

We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.