Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  Luckily, it’s a semester when we’re off work, more or less. We have freedom to move, and can take Arden up to the house in Provincetown much earlier than we’d usually go to our summer place. We arrive in April, when it’s leaden and chill, and the house seems glad to see us, suddenly lit with lamps and fires and habitation. To be there is a huge, immediate relief: Arden can live on one floor and spend as much time outside as he likes. We don’t have to worry about getting him quickly in and out, and if he doesn’t make it outside one day, it’s not a problem—these old wood floors have already seen two hundred years of action, and nothing’s going to hurt them. Plus he’s known this house forever. It’s a fine, easy place to be old.

  And, so, six weeks pass, as the calendar moves toward Arden’s sixteenth birthday, sometime in April, then on into May.

  Dr. Kaiser is gentle with Arden, and wouldn’t dream of doing anything invasive. I like him; he’s soft-spoken, curious about the creature before him. Though he is physically large, he does not seem to think of himself as such—the way Newfoundlands, say, seem vaguely apologetic for their size, a bit of slow delicacy in their largeness. Dr. Kaiser thinks it’s great that Arden’s had such a long span on earth, and he knows how attached to him we are. He makes no unrealistic attempts or promises or offers at all. Now it’s all about comfort; he understands that, at this point, whatever life is left to this old survivor is, as they say, gravy.

  Arden, naturally, does not like Dr. Kaiser as much as I do. He puts up with him, though, and cautiously accepts the liver-flavored vitamins the vet holds out to him.

  Now the nickname that Paul has always favored for Arden seems the best: Tiny. Brave fellow, huffing along, figuring out how to move that uncooperative body from spot to spot. “Where is that Tiny,” we say. Napping under the budding forsythia, out on the gravel staring at sparrows. Although we sleep upstairs, Arden soon abandons any notion of coming up with us: he’s happy to stay downstairs on the living-room rug, or, if we’ve built a fire that evening, on the bare floor of the dining room, where it’s cooler. As spring comes on, he’s more and more in the garden, staying in one place for long stretches. We have some little outings: trips to the vet, followed by a drive to the beach. The last time we go, he’s clearly too sore and tired to even get out of the car, but we leave the tailgate open so he can look out and breathe in that current of Atlantic air.

  And then he’s in the kitchen all the time, where his food and water are, on the cool quarry-tile floor. People always said to me, You’ll know when it’s time, and I never believed it—not with this dog, who wanted so much to stay in the world. I was terrified that his body would fail him, would refuse to go another step, an awful sprawl beneath him, and he’d be looking at me in a confusion and panic, just wanting to live.

  Dr. Kaiser says, “Call me any time, I’ll come to the house. You’ll know when it’s time.”

  Arden seems nervous, his breathing’s hard. In pain, I think. The Triumph goes unfinished. He falls, and I try to reach beneath him and lift up those crumpled hindquarters, and he cries out terribly.

  There’s a Friday morning when I wake up and hear him crying before I’ve even walked into the kitchen, and there he is, sprawled on the floor in a puddle of urine and feces he’s been trying to drag himself out of, completely helpless. And the look on his face—well, I know what it means, beyond any doubt.

  I clean him up and call Dr. Kaiser, who understands the situation but can’t come till Sunday. Certainly, it’s better for us that we have a little time. I think it’ll be all right; we can take care of him. What I’d imagined I wouldn’t be able to stand was the feeling that Arden would still want to live, that he’d have every intention of going on no matter how helpless his body: hell on earth. But that isn’t the case; what was entirely plain to me in his face that morning was that he was through, that he’d welcome an exit.

  Once I’ve made the call, Arden seems to lighten, to change, as if he knows the path is clear. He still can’t move, but he seems at ease, distraction giving way to that old, clear gaze, his tension evaporating. It’s as if there’s an element of relief for Paul and me, what we’ve so long known was coming here at last, and Arden must feel it, too.

  And now we give him the warmest and lightest weekend we can. He seems to relax utterly. We spend time brushing and stroking him. We cuddle him up and talk. He sleeps in the garden, his last night, in the cool air under the stars, and Sunday morning has grilled chicken for breakfast, and he’s sprawled sleepily on the gravel by the gate when Dr. Kaiser comes. My sense, for whatever it’s worth, is that he knows perfectly well where we’ve arrived. Does he give one little growl at the vet, as if for old times’ sake? As if it were his duty, and he’d be some other dog if he didn’t?

  This is unmitigatedly awful and not so at all; I remind myself this is exactly what I’d want, for someone to love me enough not to allow me to live in pain when I don’t want to; that it’s part of our work—this is what Dr. Kaiser has said to us—part of our stewardship, seeing Arden out of the world.

  I have my face down against that smooth muzzle, the ears that still smell, as they have all his life, of corn muffins. Paul’s holding him from the other side, so that we can both be in his gaze. We each speak to him quietly. First, there’s a shot to relax him, to make sure the second shot will work, and I don’t think he even feels it. And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he’s gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

  We’d long planned to bury him in the garden, near where Beau lies, in his favorite spot under the forsythia. But when it came to it, truly we couldn’t do it. Wasn’t Arden a dog who always really just wanted to be with us anyway? Leave it to Beau for commingling with all things wild; Arden preferred his human company. So, we let the vet take his body to be cremated, down Cape someplace, his ashes to be returned in a few days. Dr. Kaiser lifts him—still a serious bulk, though he looks so light now—and then, oh! what empties out my heart all over again, how his neck lolls like a loose flower on a stem. Just like Wally’s; how, after months and months of rigidity, the gradual paralysis afflicting his nervous system and muscles pulling his head tightly to one side—and then, suddenly, in death, that tightness released as if it had never been there. Who knew that Arden had been holding his neck with all that tension? He’d worked so hard, old soldier, to hold himself upright, to will his uncooperating hips to the next step, the next position. I’m remembering the tension in his shoulders, the way those muscles worked overtime, to compensate. And now, all effort released, the neck just floats.

  The vet sets his sweet body in the back of the black pickup truck. I can’t help it, I have to rearrange his head and neck so he looks comfortable, even though I know it’s absurd. The vet understands my gesture, and we thank him for all he’s done for us, and then he drives away.

  We try our best. A good end, we tell ourselves, a fine end, the best we could do. We talk about Mr. Arden and the stories of his days, and then we don’t, for a while, and we each allow ourselves to weep—usually one at a time, because somehow doing it together just seems too much for us to take. A long life, we say, a fine life, and not nearly enough.

  Sometimes the house is so empty we can hardly bear it, and then sometimes it seems like no one’s gone—isn’t Arden in one of his favored spots, watching us? Won’t he, in a moment, come around the door? He’s an absence and a presence both—the way he will be, to greater or lesser degrees, for years to come.

  We keep collecting his hair in its little dark puffs from the floor.

  Paul finds an empty can of Triumph in the recycling bin, and we put the hair in there, on the mantel.

  We make a memorial ad, as people in our small town like to do, to tell the community about the passing of loved dogs, and take it down to the newspaper office. The fellow who takes our ad has an old dog, too. We bring a photo of Arden on the beach, and his name and dates, and a stanza from the most unabashed elegy for a dog I know, Robinson Jeffers’s “The Hou
sedog’s Grave,” in which an English bulldog named Haig speaks from his grave, outside the window of the house where he’d lived:

  I’ve changed my ways a little, I cannot now

  Run with you in the evenings along the shore,

  Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,

  You see me there.

  Wouldn’t you know that the most misanthropic of poets would write the warmest of elegies for his dog? I e-mail the poem to people who’ve known Arden, to tell them he’s gone. I cut out the last words, and put them on the table where I write, next to a photograph of Arden in the deep green of the summer garden: I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

  They help a bit, those lines.

  Paul and I are strangely unanchored. We take ourselves out for strolls to the bay, go across town to look at the marsh, amble back, noticing the gardens and the new shops. We stop for coffee. We sit a long time, on the bench in front of the coffee bar. No hurry. This feels strange to me, unfamiliar. For sixteen years, there has been someone at home, waiting to go for a walk.

  Envoi

  Toy Wolf

  For Christmas, one of the things I give Paul is sponsorship of a wolf cub in Yellowstone or Alaska, one of those programs run by an organization for wildlife; for a small donation, he gets the pleasure of knowing he might be helping a creature to thrive.

  I figure he’ll get a certificate or a card, and I’ve more or less forgotten about it, in December, when a padded envelope arrives. I give it to him to open, and inside’s a stuffed, not unreasonably cute little wolf. When you squeeze it, the toy lets out a poignant, quite effective mechanical howl, the sort of thing that both tugs at your emotions a bit and makes you laugh, all at once.

  I figure this is a gift I’ll never see again. But sure enough, in a while, I notice it’s sitting on Paul’s nightstand. Then, one day, it’s in the bed, I discover, when I roll over and it lets loose that plaintive yowl.

  I’m not sure which of us does it first, but soon the cub is positioned up near the pillows, when one of us makes the bed, and the next thing you know, he’s recumbent in some bedding made from a T-shirt or a scarf. We’re making a space for him.

  We aren’t ready for another dog quite yet—Arden’s and Beau’s are big pawprints to fill, and we’ve had years and years of elderly pets, and there’s so much travel in our lives just now, so the time hasn’t felt right.

  But now and then, one of us will go into the bedroom for something, and then the other will be startled by that funny little cry.

  Acknowledgments

  The author’s deep gratitude to Terry Karten, for good advice, close reading, friendship, and ready help, and to Danny Mulligan and Julia Felsenthal, as well as to the Corporation of Yaddo and the University of Houston. To Carol Muske Dukes and Amy Hempel, readers without peer. And to Paul Lisicky, who is in his way the other author of these pages.

  About the Author

  MARK DOTY’s seven books of poetry and three books of nonfiction prose have been honored with such distinctions as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a professor at the University of Houston and lives in New York City.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY MARK DOTY

  Poetry

  School of the Arts

  Source

  Sweet Machine

  Atlantis

  My Alexandria

  Bethlehem in Broad Daylight

  Turtle, Swan

  Memoir and Nonfiction

  Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

  Firebird

  Heaven’s Coast

  Credits

  JACKET DESIGN BY MARYSCHUCK

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  Copyright

  DOG YEARS. Copyright © 2007 by Mark Doty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2007 ISBN: 9780061842436

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