Christmas with Tucker
Page 15
Having children of my own, I know how hard it must have been for her. Sometimes the strongest people in the world are the ones who let go so the rest of us can hang on.
In the winter of 1962, I learned how to be a maintainer. Some might think that it wasn’t an important job, but I’m convinced that most of the important tasks in our lives all amount to the same thing: clearing away the burdens that block our way.
Tucker and I had five more warm summers and cold winters together before he became an old man of a dog. Many of those winters had snow days, but nothing like the snow we experienced that year. How it piled up.
Within a few years, I was driving Grandpa’s old Ford truck to school and dating a young woman. Mary Ann had been my best friend on the bus for years. She was an angel in that Christmas pageant. When the pageant was over, I looked at her in a different way. I am still looking at her like that forty years later.
Grandma Cora told me that Tucker could hear me approaching in that Ford truck from miles away. He would begin pacing the back of the porch, his tail wagging furiously and letting out little happy greeting barks when I pulled into the driveway. He was a beautiful dog—the dog of a lifetime.
When I graduated from high school, I went to Vietnam. Tucker and Cherokee County were left behind on a Friday and I would not return for two very long years.
Tucker hardly left the back porch for months. He assumed I would return home after school, just like I did most every other day of his life with us. He thought there was a rule. I knew how he felt—day after day, hoping that someone you love is going to come, as always, right through that back kitchen door.
On an April morning, Tucker became restless. Grandma Cora watched as he got up and looked south to Kill Creek. He whined and ran off for Mack’s Ground. Maybe he was looking for me. Maybe he just knew his end was near and wanted to spend his last days in full flower.
People saw him all over the county that week and they would say, “Isn’t that George McCray’s big red dog?” They would call and let Grandma know that he had been roaming far afield, but no one could ever catch up to him.
After a week, he returned home exhausted but content. He collapsed on the back porch and never got up again. He died there, having led a full and happy life. A truer and better friend I have never known. He was a gift. I will always miss old Tucker.
Grandma Cora and Grandpa Bo found it hard to say goodbye to him, too. They carried him to Mack’s Ground and buried him by the lake, the place where he was the happiest. He still rests there. Grandpa made a simple wooden bench and placed it beside the lake. To this day, my family and I can walk to Mack’s Ground, sit by the lake, skip stones, and, when the weather permits, dangle our feet in the cool water. Sometimes I tell them about Tucker. His collar has hung in the barn all these years.
I’ve got it here beside me now.
Grandpa and Grandma are long gone, too. I miss them more than words can tell. When I come in from a day of running McCray’s Dairy, from working in the barns and meadows and fields that still surround our farm, I take a long drink from this old tin cup that I still keep by the sink. When it’s empty and I’ve quenched my thirst, I say “Ahh,” long and slow.
There is one last thing I will share with my mother. I will tell her that I’ve had a good life on the farm pictured in Grandma Cora’s puzzle by trusting in my father’s simple rule: no matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead.
That’s the only way to keep the roads clear.