ELIZABETH WELTYThe Day Dewey Died
Mr. Matthews didn't know it was coming or just wouldn't
admit it. He didn't want to hear about the tumor growing
in Dewey's chest or that fourteen was old for a lab. Mr. Mathews
just politely asked about the best food for a sensitive stomach
and when Dewey threw that up too, whether beef or chicken
would be better, and made general pleasant conversation,
while Dewey lay on the floor, his legs splayed out, and groaned,
since that was all he could do to protest having his nails trimmed.
And when it finally did come, and Mr. Matthews walked
the almost white black Lab through the clinic for the last time
and then later took off Dewey's collar, he didn't want to talk at all.
He just sobbed like he'd lost his only child.
What Wasn't Written
When the owner of the local
country store put out the milk jug
to collect donations for the woman
whose house had, until yesterday,
stood for forty-seven years, nobody
who put in change
from gas and cigarettes knew
about the seven dogs who had long
protected the house against
intruders seen and unseen,
or about how they must have clawed
and bit at the doorframe as the flames
leapt from the couch to the curtains,
or how, finally, the last Doberman
must have laid down and gently
nosed through the fur
on the body of its dead
brother, until
ultimately, everything
was gone.
When Julianne Freedman Stood Outside Listening
The storm that came in the winter of 1993 took them all
by surprise since the meteorologists had only said light rain
and maybe some wind. And when the word came
that the storm had married another and the light wind
would really turn out to be tornadoes and rain,
four feet of snow in the North and storm surges in the South,
the eleven o'clock news was long since over
and everyone had gone to bed for the night
listening to, but not thinking about, how much
the wind had picked up. Julianne Freedman
was lucky, but not because her sister had called her
around one telling her that central Florida was under
a tornado warning, and not because when she was sleeping,
as she had through the twelve other warnings that year,
her bed lifted and something knocked her out, and not
because her trailer rolled, lifted, and landed
with its innards around its outsides, but rather,
when she came to, she was outside desperately listening
to the wind and the silence of her four neighbors
whose trailers had landed on top of them
and not around them. And it was silent.
Not even the wind was as loud
as the silence.