A Season for the Dead

Thirty-Nine

“As I said,” Marco continued, “we bought the dog in sad circumstances. I don’t even recall what gave us the idea. We scarcely even spoke about it.”

Nic shuffled on his seat, feeling uncomfortable. These were memories he didn’t want revived. The past was difficult, painful. From time to time it pricked his mind unbidden, it pointed the way to the future. Sara watched him, saw how he felt. Her fingers briefly touched the back of his hand.

“And there I was one day. Talking to this man with a dog for sale, spouting nonsense, not knowing what questions to ask, whether this was a good idea at all. He was an old farmer with a little smallholding down the road there, a surly bastard who looked at me as if I were an idiot. Which I was, in his eyes. All he kept repeating was 'It’s a dog.' As if that said everything.”

He shuffled in his wheelchair, thinking of what should come next. “I brought him home in my jacket. He peed and crapped in it on the way. The first night he cried, constantly, and none of us slept.”

“That I do remember,” Nic interjected.

“And the second night he cried a little less. By the third he was sleeping, in the kitchen there, starting to make it his home. There was just Nic and Giulia with me then, you understand. Young Marco was at college already. We were three damaged, angry people, full of hurt about what the world had done to us. Full of some stupid, blind fury over a loss that made no sense. And here was a dog, demanding we keep him alive, that we love him, give him so much attention, night and day. And what did you do, Nic?”

“I gave him it,” he answered. “So did Giulia. So did you, less than the rest of us if you want to know, though it was still you he always saw as the boss. Some things never change.”

Marco shook his head. “It was just age. He loved you then. If he had the brains to remember, the strength to play those games all over again, he’d love you in the same way now.”

The old man was right there. Nic had spent hour after hour with the dog, on walks through summer fields full of flowers and the humming of bees. In these lovely, lonely places he would talk to the animal as if it were a human being. They were inseparable. Then he’d grown older, and so had the dog. Time had worked its cruel trick once more.

“One day,” Marco said, “I came home. It was just before Nic left school for college and that worried him, I think. But there was something else too. You remember, Nic?”

He did and he wished he could stop the old man saying it.

“I remember. Is this really…”

“Nic was almost as upset as the day his mother had died and it was over this. He’d come to think about the dog, an animal which has a natural lifespan of—what?—ten, twelve, perhaps thirteen years? He’d come to realize that one day, a day not that far distant, Pepe would be gone. Not in a human lifetime, but in a canine one, which seems so short to us. And he thought what? Come, Sara. You’re the psychic, you tell us.”

She looked at Nic, wondering if it would embarrass him. It was so obvious. It was understandable too. “He thought it was pointless. Owning the dog. Growing to love him. Growing to adore having him around. Knowing all along that one day he would die, and so soon.”

Marco watched her closely. “And is he right?” he asked her.

“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong for a question like that,” she replied cautiously. “I can see his point. I can appreciate why one would think that way.”

“There, Bea! Behold the young. What have we done to bring them up like this?”

The older woman stared at them, amazed. “And you both think this? Sara? Nic? I’m no dog lover. Even that damned animal can see that. But you must take what joy you find while it’s there. Not go worrying about a tomorrow that might never come.”

“And that,” Marco pronounced, banging his glass on the table, “is the wisdom of dogs.”

“Which is ignorance!” Sara declared. “Surely you can see that? A dog has no comprehension of time. Of seasons. As far as it is concerned, life is like a light switch, either on or off.”

“And isn’t it?” Marco demanded teasingly.

“No.” She looked at Nic for support.

“I agree,” he said. “Dogs and humans are different.”

“What you mean is,” Bea suggested, “dogs never read Ecclesiastes. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”

“A time to love,” Marco continued. “And a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. You’re right, Sara. An animal knows nothing of the seasons and that’s what defines him. Are we that different? It was the knowledge of our mortality that informed all those early Christians buried along that old road out there. Today we make death the uninvited guest who sits in the corner, in perpetual darkness. We pretend he doesn’t exist until finally he proves us wrong and then we are shocked—we are offended!—by his presence.”

Nic waved a defensive hand at him. “Point taken. I understand what you mean.”

“Not at all!” Marco insisted. “That was aimed at me more than you, son. I’ve let this damned thing wear me down so much I took the opposite view. I thought there was nothing but death around me. A time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted. This is a farm, remember? Until this blasted disease we fed ourselves from those fields. We turned the land, we grew, we harvested. And look at it now. Bare, barren earth. And for what reason? Because I forgot. Because, like a child, I believed I was the world and without me nothing existed. Which is, I think, the greatest sin a man can commit.”

There was silence. The mood of the evening pivoted around Marco’s confession, and each of them knew it could easily disintegrate. Then Sara asked, “What was this like as a farm?”

“Wonderful,” Nic replied, smiling, grateful that she had asked.

“We could grow anything then. I remember…” His head filled with the recollection of artichoke heads nodding in the breeze, tall rows of tomatoes, verdant clumps of zucchini. “I remember how green it was.”

“Why do you think he eats what he does?” Marco asked. “My son here gave up meat when he was twelve. Said there was no point.”

“There wasn’t. And what we grew was ours. It came from us.”

Marco wheeled himself to the front door. They followed, watching as he unlatched the huge slab of wood, threw it open and turned on the floodlights which illuminated the front of the farm. The cigarettes of the policemen at the gate winked back at them like tiny fireflies.

The earth stood arid and solid under the harsh lamps.

“And the best part,” Marco said, “was the unexpected.”

Around now, he said, they would plant the black Tuscan kale, cavolo nero, for the winter. Sara watched the way his eyes glittered as he spoke about how they were his favorites for the very reason most people would avoid them: their sluggish, steady growth, from seedlings at the waning of summer, through the lean, cold winter months, reviving again, to give nourishment, in the spring. This was a rebirth of a kind, a token that the world began anew each year, whatever happened.

A seedling planted in the earth in July knew nothing of the future that would embrace it when the warmth returned the following Easter—that is, if it survived the winter. This was a peasant’s faith, and one that Marco Costa loved, the fundamental belief that the seasons always returned and good husbandry would be repaid. It was inevitable that the chain would be broken. Some years the crop would fail. Some years the gardener would fail to return to tend the land. Nevertheless, it was the act itself which mattered: the planting, the nurturing, the tilling of the soil.

There had been no winter crop that year. Marco’s faith had failed him, crushed by his disease. “I want to see things growing there again,” the old man said, eyeing the earth. “Tomorrow… I’ll fetch for help.”

Sara looked at Bea and the two women exchanged glances. “What’s wrong with us?” Sara wondered. “We can dig. We can plant seeds.”

Marco laughed and waved a dismissive hand at them. “This isn’t work for women.” They screeched at him.

“Peace, peace,” Nic interposed. “They can start in the morning,” he told his father. “Later, when I’ve time, I’ll do my part too. You can just sit and watch and bark orders.”

“It has to be done properly,” Marco insisted.

“It will be,” Nic replied. “I promise.”

The two men looked at one another and fell silent. The storm never broke. Marco had made his point.

The old man sniffed the air. “There’s autumn inside that heat,” he declared. “You can smell September on the way. I love the autumn. The colors. Sitting around the fire, roasting a few chestnuts. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else when the leaves start to fall.”

Nic walked behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Marco’s fingers gripped his. Nic felt his eyes begin to sting and was grateful for this moment.

“Old Reds like me don’t believe in Hell,” Marco said. “But if I did, do you know what it would be? A place where nothing grows. A place where no one knows the seasons. God save us all from that, if you’ll pardon the expression.”