CARLTON FLETCHER: Bidding Dixie an inadequate farewell

Maybe she’ll find an island with a shady tree, Just like the one in our backyard.

— Henry Gross

Don’t worry, Ms. Geraldine … I don’t plan to get too sentimental with this.

I spent a good chunk of time this past Saturday burying one of the dogs that lives at the Fletcher compound. As I blistered my hands digging into the drought-hardened dirt in our unofficial pet cemetery, I wondered again how I, long ambivalent on the subject of animal ownership, found myself surrounded by furry creatures: a menagerie of dogs, cats, chickens, horses, goats, sheep and whatever else the animal-loving girls in the house might bring home.

Burying Dixie, some pure-bred — I’ve been told — type of bird dog who’d been, basically, abandoned by her owner and left in the care of the aforementioned girls, shouldn’t have affected me like it did. I had, after all, had only minimal contact with her, occasionally feeding her along with her brothers and sisters when the girls were off on other business.

But, forewarned by my wife that Dixie had been ill to the point of eating very little in recent days, I went out late Saturday morning to wash my car. I saw that the little dog was breathing erratically, and I decided to call my wife. Before I did, though, something profound happened, something that touched me in a very deep place.

As she labored through her last breaths, Dixie let out a wail that was perhaps the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It was a sound that brought tears to my eyes, tears that — surprisingly — fell freely as I watched this little dog fade away.

My wife insists that Dixie was saying goodbye to her longtime canine companions in that last, haunting cry, and that they answered her back with howls and barks of their own bears her out.

But I heard something more in that wail, something that hit me with little to no forethought or consideration, but with a clarity that was alarming.

In that little dog’s cry of anguish, the thing that came to me as I heard it and stayed with me as I dug Dixie’s grave, was Jesus crying out from the cross, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

And while I hadn’t formed any kind of bond with this little dog, my wife told me the amazing story of her 18 years — yeah, I know, that comes out to 126 in human years if you do that kind of math — how she’d been run over three times in her life, was shot once accidentally and had been bitten by a snake. And yet she kept on ticking.

That, to me, is the kind of animal you can get attached to, the kind you can even admire for her courage. That’s the “Old Yeller,” “Lassie” kind of dog that does more than eat and bark and chase cars and all those other dumb things dogs do.

That’s the kind of dog that deserved to have someone who loved her petting her head at the end, not some guy who’d given her a scoop or two of dog food along the way.

One of the things I love to hear my girls do is speak for all their animal friends as if those cats and goats and horses and chickens thought and conversed the way we do. (Oh, the things those cats and goats and horses have said.) For it’s in those quirky conversations that I hear genuine love and affection for creatures that, generally, serve no greater calling than making the people in their lives happy.

That’s why I gave up long ago getting aggravated with each new fuzzy face that found its way onto our property. Those were faces, after all, that brought joy to the people who gave me joy. My only hope is that, somehow, they understand that joy. And when it’s their time to go, they’ll take that with them.

OK, Ms. Geraldine, I lied.

Email Carton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.