Charlie's Dog

   

                                                                               Charlie's Dog


   Charlie Moss starved to death. I carried Charlie up to the Greenville Sanitarium. I had no money to pay. The doctor looked at him despite it, but Charley died all the same. They said it was pneumonia, but I knew better. Charlie Moss died from hunger.

   The work ran out a good while back. Most everybody else had already hopped the cars for Nashville, or Birmingham, but Charley got sick, so I stayed with him. That shanty was cold, and Charley was really thin. Hell, so was I. It wouldn't be long until I would be too weak to cut the wood, and then we would both freeze, if we didn't starve first. I couldn't cut enough wood on my own to heat the plywood walls of that shack, but I did my best to keep Charley warm. With all of that though, there wasn't much to do about keeping him fed. It was a damned shame, is what it was.

   I knew Charlie my whole life. We went to school together back in Bristol. I even courted Charley's sister until she ran off with a traveling medicine drummer. She never did come back home. I always wondered if she ran away from that town, or away from me? I will say that it hurt some when Charlie died. I cried a bit when I got back to that shanty, and then I kicked that dog for watching me do it.

   
   

   The car was empty, but for me. Everyone else had left the shanty-town before the cold moved in. I jumped the train on the eastern slope when her speed was down, the wind shivering me in my shirtsleeves. I looked back once and that dog was still running alongside, but she couldn't hang with it for long, could she? I would have brought her along, but how was I to hold on to her, run along-side, and jump the durned car too?

   The rough plank floor of that car was graveling my ass with every clickety-clack by the time we started down the western slope. I tipped my slouch hat down for a nap, but I couldn't stop thinking of   Ol' Charlie Moss. They buried Charlie with everything he owned, excepting that dog, of course. Charlie sure thought high of that bitch. I expect he starved himself due to slipping his slivers to it. That was the kind of friend Charlie was, even to a dog. That dog had licked Charley's face right before I toted him into Greenville. Charlie had smiled, and had wrapped her up in his arms. That there was the last time Charlie Moss ever smiled on this Earth, I reckon.
   
   Charlie would have been plumb sorry to hear of it, me leaving his dog behind to chase after that train, but dammit, if I didn't find work I was going to starve too, then what would that dog do? Hell-fire! She's the one who would be all right. She'd go right on catching rabbits, I reckoned, while I withered away in that shack.

   
   I left the train as it was sailing down off of the Cumberland Plateau. It was a fast stretch, but the distance was mounting. If I was going to ditch her, it would need be soon. I hit the gravel feet first, but from there it was ass-over-tea kettle, so that it hurt pretty-good when I stopped rolling. It would be a long, cold, hungry, lonely walk back to that shanty, and would cover every bit of this mountain, but that damned dog would be there waiting, lying across Charlie's old army blanket, never understanding why she was left there alone with no fire, nor food.

   I reckon I'm not the man to betray a friend, not even a dead one... nor his damned cur dog either.

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