Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

I cried and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his head in my arms because we hadn’t done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of myself not to be taking it as well as he was.

“I got to, pup, because you’re in pain and you can’t eat. I got to.” But he didn’t want to know that.

The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and just let it be done.

Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me.

There is a scene in Kazan’s Viva Zapata where a close friend of Zapata’s, Brando’s, has been condemned for conspiring with the federales . A friend that had been with Zapata since the mountains, since the revolución had begun. And they come to the hut to take him to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his friend stops him with a hand on his arm, and he says to him with great friendship, “Emiliano, do it yourself.”

Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don’t leave me with strangers.

So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it away from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he was gone.

I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on the seat beside me, just the way we had come home eleven years before. I took him out in the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself, talking to him in the sheet. It was a very neat, rectangular grave with smooth sides and all the loose dirt scooped out by hand.

I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was packed full of dirt I replaced the neat divot of grass I’d scalped off at the start. And that was all.

But I couldn’t send him to strangers.

1. Is there any significance to the reversal of the word gad being dog? If so, what?

2. Does the writer try to impart human qualities to a nonhuman creature? Why? Discuss anthropomorphism in the light of the phrase, “Thou art God.”

3. Discuss the love the writer shows in this essay. Compare and contrast it with other forms of love: the love of a man for a woman, a mother for a child, a son for a mother, a botanist for plants, an ecologist for the Earth.

In his sleep, Nathan Stack talked.

“Why did you pick me? Why me…?”

Like the Earth, the Mother was in pain.

The great house was very quiet. The doctor had left, and the relatives had gone into town for dinner. He sat by the side of her bed and stared down at her. She looked gray and old and crumpled; her skin was a powdery, ashy hue of moth-dust. He was crying softly.

He felt her hand on his knee, and looked up to see her staring at him. “You weren’t supposed to catch me,” he said.

“I’d be disappointed if I hadn’t,” she said. Her voice was very thin, very smooth.

“How is it?”

“It hurts. Ben didn’t dope me too well.”

He bit his lower lip. The doctor had used massive doses, but the pain was more massive. She gave little starts as tremors of sudden agony hit her. Impacts. He watched the life leaking out of her eyes.

“How is your sister taking it?”

He shrugged. “You know Charlene. She’s sorry, but it’s all pretty intellectual to her.”

His mother let a tiny ripple of a smile move her lips. “It’s a terrible thing to say, Nathan, but your sister isn’t the most likable woman in the world. I’m glad you’re here.” She paused, thinking, then added, “It’s just possible your father and I missed something from the gene pool. Charlene isn’t whole.”

“Can I get you something? A drink of water?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He looked at the ampoule of narcotic painkiller. The syringe lay mechanical and still on the clean towel beside it. He felt her eyes on him. She knew what he was thinking. He looked away.

“I would kill for a cigarette,” she said.

He laughed. At sixty-five, both legs gone, what remained of her left side paralyzed, the cancer spreading like deadly jelly toward her heart, she was still the matriarch. “You can’t have a cigarette, so forget it.”

“Then why don’t you use that hypo and let me out of here.”

“Shut up, Mother.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nathan. It’s hours if I’m lucky. Months if I’m not. We’ve had this conversation before. You know I always win.”

“Did I ever tell you you were a bitchy old lady?”

“Many times, but I love you anyhow.”

He got up and walked to the wall. He could not walk through it, so he went around the inside of the room.

“You can’t get away from it.”

“Mother, Jesus! Please!”

“ All right. Let’s talk about the business.”

“I couldn’t care less about the business right now.”

“Then what should we talk about? The lofty uses to which an old lady can put her last moments?”

“You know, you’re really ghoulish. I think you’re enjoying this in some sick way.”

“What other way is there to enjoy it.”

“An adventure.”

“The biggest. A pity your father never had the chance to savor it.”

“I hardly think he’d have savored the feeling of being stamped to death in a hydraulic press.”

Then he thought about it, because that little smile was on her lips again. “Okay, he probably would have. The two of you were so unreal, you’d have sat there and discussed it and analyzed the pulp.”

“And you’re our son.”

He was, and he was. And he could not deny it, nor had he ever. He was hard and gentle and wild just like them, and he remembered the days in the jungle beyond Brasilia, and the hunt in the Cayman Trench, and the other days working in the mills alongside his father, and he knew when his moment came he would savor death as she did.

“Tell me something. I’ve always wanted to know. Did Dad kill Tom Golden?”

“Use the needle and I’ll tell you.”

“I’m a Stack. I don’t bribe.”

“I‘m a Stack, and I know what a killing curiosity you’ve got. Use the needle and I’ll tell you.”

He walked widdershins around the room. She watched him, eyes bright as the mill vats.

“You old bitch.”

“Shame, Nathan. You know you’re not the son of a bitch. Which is more than your sister can say. Did I ever tell you she wasn’t your father’s child?”

“No, but I knew.”

“You’d have liked her father. He was Swedish. Your father liked him.”

“Is that why Dad broke both his arms?”

“Probably. But I never heard the Swede complain. One night in bed with me in those days was worth a couple of broken arms. Use the needle.”

Finally, while the family was between the entree and the dessert, he filled the syringe and injected her. Her eyes widened as the stuff smacked her heart, and just before she died she rallied all her strength and said, “ A deal’s a deal. Your father didn’t kill Tom Golden, I did. You ‘re a hell of a man, Nathan, and you fought us the way we wanted, and we both loved you more than you could know. Except, dammit, you cunning s.o.b., you do know, don’t you?”