The World’s Cheapest Dog

 

It was hot. One of the few times it has been hot this summer and not raining. 

Eddie Bostic and his father Hyman and I had found a piece of speckled shade to cool off in next to the truck where we were unloading paving stones the size of door mats. Hyman didn’t need the stones in his yard anymore. 

I did, as a mud-free walkway to the storm shelter during tornado season. Hyman, 87, had insisted on being on the receiving end of the stones coming out of the back of Eddie’s truck and into his hands where he stacked them in two, waist high piles just north of the north wall of my house. 

Hyman Bostic is a marvel. I have known him since his twin boys, Eddie and Michael, played bluegrass for me at my house. I had them in class at Page somewhere back in the 1960’s. The kids at school laughed at their “hillbilly” music, but the boys knew I liked it and used to bring it over to the house, hoping for an “A” maybe. 

Since then, the boys have played that music on stage and in recording studios with Vince Gill, The Whites, Ricky Skaggs, Ralph Stanley, and old Bill Monroe himself, people not known to laugh at hillbilly music. It is music possessed of the wonderful sound of mountain streams tumbling down rocky rills scented with fragrant pine. The music of the simple man, from a simpler time.

Hyman in his day was a carpenter. I don’t know how many houses he built, foundations up to roof peaks. I know he built two for himself, and one for Eddie. I saw him do it. 

In the evenings after work, he taught the boys to play guitar and mandolin in a patch of cool, speckled shade, like the one we were enjoying, next to his house, and let the aches all carpenters have dissipate into pools of sweet mountain music. It was better than a shower. It was a shower. 

Who knew where the boys would take that music. The instruments they played were bigger than they were. 

But, here we were unloading paving stones in my yard pretty much next to the storm shelter I bought for Pam a couple Valentine days back. It was either that, or a new apron, I told the Bostics while we sweated and cooled in the speckled shade. 

Our new German shepherd, “Heidi Too”, we call her, the first Heidi having gone on to her reward, ambled up for a head scratch, and both the Bostics commented on her good looks. At only seven months old, I explained that she had already been bitten twice by copperheads, and, pretty as she was, that pretty much was due to be her role in life: Putting herself between snakes (and other things) and our grandkids in the daylight and in the dark out here on The Branch. A dog’s life, you might say. Not a lap dog: a real dog. 

Hyman wanted to know what I paid for her, not a rude question at all, but a practical one. He’s a practical man. It’s likely Hyman never paid five dollars for a dog in his life, but he came from a place, and a day, where you could still shoot “bad things” in your yard and not go to jail for it. 

It’s hard to convict a dog in court. 

When I told Hyman how much I’d paid for her, his eyes got big as softballs. 

“All I want,” I said, “is for her to slow things down long enough for me to go get my gun.” 

“I bet she’d do that”, Eddie said. 

“Everything else,” I said, “is gravy.” 

While were talking, Heidi ambled off over into the yard and started yapping, a bothersome thing, but common in puppies of all breeds. She kept it up to the degree that it was interrupting our conversation. 

“Heidi! Quiet!”, I said, finally, meaning it.

She would not stop, and now I saw that she was right up against the front steps of the house, barking at something right off the end of her long nose. She had bayed something, cornered it, right there where the front steps and the wall of the house made an angle. 

“Oh, my gosh,” I said slowly, coming to the realization that it was indeed “something”, and not just puppy yapping. 

I walked over to where Heidi was doing a perfect, front paw, kangaroo dance while trying to bark her head off and grabbing at something. It wasn’t a copperhead; it was a cottonmouth water moccasin, mouth agape showing its “cotton” while trying to bite the dog. 

I grabbed Heidi by her collar and pulled her away. A dog can easily survive a copperhead bite. At seven months old, Heidi already has two to her credit, but a cottonmouth? Cottonmouth water moccasins have killed many full grown people; cattle, horses, even. 

Eddie kept the dog back while I went into the house for a camera. I took a picture, which later showed evidence of a little camera shake, for no apparent reason, and then killed the snake with my walking cane. For no apparent reason. 

“Man,” Eddie said quietly, “I’ve never seen a real cottonmouth. I didn’t even know there were any around here.” 

“My grandkids are up and down these stairs all the time,” I said just as quietly. 

Hyman, who hadn’t said a thing, cleared his throat and said, “That dog might be worth five dollars,” more quietly than anything Eddie and I had said. 

Take time off from hard labor to kill snakes at your doorstep? Life is tough, and then you die. The paving stones are in a neat pile. 

The snakes are everywhere out here on The Branch.

© 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen