“Who will remember you but the body that birthed you.
Who will remember you but the clouds that swallowed you.
Who will remember you but the moon you threw sticks at.
Who will remember you but your double buried under the apple.” ~ Marion McCready, from “Ballad of the Clyde’s Water”
Monday afternoon, warm and humid with showers, 80 degrees.
I’m not really sure how far I’ll be able to get with this post. Between everything that’s happened and dealing with the aftermath, the best way to describe it would be pure chaos with a lot of drama and pain.
Let me back up.
Corey went over to see Dallas on Friday last, but couldn’t find him anywhere. It was around 4 in the afternoon. You can usually tell if Dallas is home or not depending upon where his various vehicles are parked and where all of the dogs are hanging out. Corey didn’t see the tractor, and the Geo was there, so he assumed that Dallas was somewhere on his tractor. When Corey returned on Saturday around 2 p.m., everything was exactly the same, so he began to get worried.
When he looked around, he saw Dallas’s tractor sitting upside down at the bottom of the hill on the side of the property; it’s a fairly steep decline. Corey’s first thought was that Dallas had been taken to the hospital, but something made him go down the hill. He found Dallas laying about 20 feet from the tractor, and he was dead.
Corey ran to the neighbor’s house, which abuts the property, and someone called 911. From that point on, it’s been pure chaos as news spread very quickly, as it tends to do around here. Unfortunately, the human vultures have been hovering near the property, ready to claim anything that isn’t bolted down. It’s truly repulsive.
“HUMAN SONG: Perhaps it is the case that you never get over things. You decide you will no longer engage with them. You answer with silence until you are reminded once again of the wound and requested to be human.” ~ Ken Chen, from “You May Visit the Cosmos but You May Not Speak of It (or on the Tackiness of Elegy).”
Corey came home late Saturday afternoon to tell me the news. Obviously, he was very shaken as his immediate thought was that if he had looked around more on Friday, he might have been able to find Dallas. I tried to assure him that it would have been virtually impossible for someone Dallas’s age to survive such an accident. The general consensus is that Dallas probably crawled from the tractor, but didn’t get very far. One of his puppies was by his side when he was found. It’s likely that Dallas swerved to avoid one of the dogs, and that’s how he fell.
We went back to the property to find a wrecker crew trying to bring up the tractor, so we went next door to see the neighbors, Brian and Robin. It’s funny. They’ve been in an ongoing feud with Dallas for months now over various things, but you’d never surmise it from their comments.
People are strange. People around her are an entirely different breed of strange.
Animal control had been called, and they scooped up all of the smaller puppies, which still left about 12 dogs. Corey and I brought home four puppies, one of which is a girl from the same litter as Freddy, and the neighbors were able to find about five of the dogs, but not all of the dogs had been found. It was a stopgap measure, at best.
“In the mind there is a thin alley called death
and I move through it as
through water.” ~ Anne Sexton, from “For The Year Of The Insane”
Tuesday morning, cloudy and cooler, 71 degrees.
The autopsy showed that Dallas had a heart attack but no broken bones; he had been dead 24 to 36 hours before Corey found him on Saturday. The reality is that Dallas would have absolutely hated it if he had been found after the accident but then had been incapacitated in some way, and he would have loathed dying in a hospital. We have to console ourselves as best we can, and I like to think that he died as he would have wanted: outside, under the open sky on a summer day, near his animals and on his property.
We have no idea what his blood alcohol level was, but Corey had found half a bottle of brandy near the trailer, so he may or may not have been drunk. But I’ve seen Dallas drive that tractor drunk many times, so I still think that he may have swerved to avoid a dog as all of them ran loose all over the property.
Now there are all kinds of people showing up, talking about how they were friends with Dallas, how they had known him for years. I was telling Corey yesterday that a lot of these people reminded me of the goblins in Harry Potter: the goblins believed that if they made something, that it belonged to them in perpetuity, that anyone who bought an item from them only owned it through their life and couldn’t pass it on to descendants, that it should be returned to the goblin who made it. We’re hearing a lot of things like “I sold him those horses, so I’d like them back,” or “I gave him that dog, so he’s mine.” It’s weird and very repugnant, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
“See,
there are degrees of loss–
speeds at which pain travels
through the body.” ~ Caitlin Roach, from “Gardening, a Mother Gives a Daughter a Lesson on Mass Loss”
Months ago, I had made a promise to Dallas that if anything ever happened to him, I would be sure to take care of his animals. I had meant it at the time; I still meant it, but the reality of it was overwhelming. We’re talking at least a dozen horses, a couple of foals, about eight cows, a bull, three donkeys, about six pigeons, several fully grown dogs and lots of puppies from two different litters.
Our house has been pretty chaotic the last few days. At one point, we had 11 dogs in the house, far too many. Yesterday, we spent two hours trying to find the Dickenson County animal control so that we could drop off three of the puppies. When we were looking around the property on Sunday, we found another puppy all alone and hiding in the barn. Robin had wanted to try to keep on of the puppies that we had, a beautiful boy named Charlie, so we took him to her house first.
Neither Corey nor I were thrilled about going to the shelter as it’s not a no-kill shelter, and it used to have the highest kill rate in the state. Fortunately, we found out that an organization called Brother Wolf helps the shelter in placing animals, and we were told that the puppies go quickly. Once we finally found the shelter, the guy there told us that they had rounded up the last of the dogs on the property that morning, but fortunately, most of the first group had already been placed in homes or with the other organizations, so that made it easier to leave the three puppies there.
We decided to keep Freddy’s sister as she is very sweet and calm, and then we decided to find a dog that Dallas called Boy as he’s fully grown and might be hard to place. He, too, is very sweet and relatively calm around all of the dogs except for Freddy, so we’ll have to see how that goes. Once the rambunctious puppies were gone, things got much calmer in the house; I know that our dogs were pretty stressed from all of the animals and noise. The humans were extremely stressed, too.
“Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts; the moonless midnight of the mind.” ~ Dean Koontz, from Fear Nothing: A Novel
Ultimately, there’s a lot of guilt to go around. I had just told Corey on Thursday that I wanted nothing else to do with Dallas, that I was tired of all of his bullshit and heartbroken over Napoleon. And I had really meant it. I had resolved that I wouldn’t go to his house again. The only consolation I have is that I never had any bad words with Dallas even though I had wanted to do so. The truth of the matter is that Corey and I, but especially Corey, did a lot for Dallas and put up with a lot. We were often tired of trying, but there was always the sense that he had no one else but us. He was estranged from his son and daughter for reasons that are unclear, but we never once saw them at his house.
Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I just want my horse back, and a few old things that I know that no one else would want, like an old chair that was in his basement, and the saddle the he promised me. I did say that if no one else wanted it, I would really like to have a silver and garnet ring that he wore all of the time; it would be a nice keepsake. Apparently, his kids don’t want any keepsakes from him; I’m saddened by how fractured his relationships were, and it scares me that my own relationships with my kids won’t be repaired.
Ultimately, I think that we’re both still in shock. Corey is having a harder time than I am as Dallas’s death is more immediate for him. I think this will all hit me more at the funeral, at least, I’m hoping there’s a funeral. Dallas wanted to be cremated, but we have no idea if his son or daughter will even want a funeral. It’s best now if we just keep our distance from the immediate drama and ultimately hope we can get Napoleon back home soon. I’ll update if anything major changes.
More later. Peace.
P.S. Wrote but couldn’t post until this evening. Had to go out and then had a helluva time downloading images for the post.
Music by Saint Claire, “Haunted”
Animalistic Hymn
The red sun rises
without intent
and shines the same on all of us.
We play like children under the sun.
One day, our ashes will scatter—
…………………………………….it doesn’t matter when.
Now the sun finds our innermost hearts,
…………………………………….fills us with oblivion
intense as the forest, winter and sea.
~ Edith Södergran (Trans. Brooklyn Copeland)
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 