Chapter 6: Theodore, Oliver and Eliza

Will this story have a reader? I know I presume a lot in presuming a reader. But in all times and places hacks have found their willing victims to take in their hackneyed constructions. Ergo the possibility must be there. I guess if all else fails I can count on God. If God didn't exist, bad writers would have to invent Him. Poor God: His omniscience dooms Him to be a captive audience to everything that happens, to deeds and stories and lives that aren't worth the energy or the ink or the blood that underwrites them. This Infinite Passivity of the Deity, this Infinite Capacity for Suffering, is this not the terrible price God must pay to be God?

But if I had a reader, perhaps she or he would be wondering why, in this epic prose poem of my life, I have focused predominantly upon a figure that is not my own self, and, moreover, that is not even of my own species. This is not just because I expect that if I had a reader, she or he would be human (dogs being infinitely more discriminating in their readerly tastes and far more averse to obvious juvenalia) and therefore I needs talk about humans so as to better maintain her or his interest. It should go without saying that the story of any one being is always and already the story of other beings, and that in narrating my own life I must inevitably tell some part of the lives of others. And for a house dog like myself, this means that my life has been to a large extent composed of the lives of other humans.

Obviously, however, I did have my own adventures in those earliest days, that had no reference, or only oblique reference, to Dick. If a farm is a big place for a human being, it's a sevenfold multiverse for a dog, that most curious of creatures. (I don't know where the idea arose that cats were the curious ones... how can something so lazy standoffish and selfabsorbed be considered curious?) Besides the cats, the cattle, the pigs, the horses, the chickens, the geese, the spiders, the grasshoppers, the ants, the migrant birds, and all my other animal cousins, there were at least six to eight other dogs that were permanent residents besides Bessie and me.

Three were my age.

There was my friend Theodore. The humans called him Daniel, if not because of the biblical overtones, then because it rhymed with Spaniel. We were preformed to be friends. Nothing ever came between us, not one single scrap of the most delicious leftovers. Usually we did what I wanted, and usually he would follow my lead. But I never sadistically abused his devotion and he never masochistically abased himself to please me. I saw that happen between Dick and one of his friends and it was something I rather would have not seen.

Then there was Oliver. I guess if I had to admit to a racial bias--a difficult thing, as I aspire to be as open-minded as possible--it would be against smooth fox terriers. Maybe it was just my experience with Oliver, who was the first of the kind I ever met. As much as I was certain Theo and I were preformed to be friends, I was sure God intended Oliver and I to be mortal and spiritual enemies. The horrible irony--that again God must have contrived for some purpose totally obscure to me--was that Oliver's human name was Reggie. It was especially rough whenever Dick would call Oliver over and pet him and say tender things to him with my name. And Oliver would just mildly look over at me and smile that cold smile of his. I was bigger than him, but he was quicker ... and smarter. A thing that took me six months to learn he could learn in a day. The worst thing was that whenever he boasted about his abilities or his accomplishments, or whenever he mocked me for my physical or mental awkwardness, he always did it with a kind of unflappable mildness that made it very difficult to respond to without making oneself look touchy or reactive and resentful. But all those things I could deal with. What I couldn't deal with was the claim he had on the heart of my first love.

That was Eliza. I can't say what she was for sure. Sometimes I look back on her as a cross between truth and beauty. The best I can say is that she had retriever in her. Her coat was thick gold and rust. The smell of it has stayed with me all my days. The Scholtens called her Mischa. I thought it almost as beautiful as her real name. The happiest memory of my earliest years is of the summer day in the tall grass behind the house when Eliza and I exchanged kisses and vowed to each other that one day we would be married. The saddest memory of that same time is of the summer day behind the chicken coop when I encountered her sharing the same kiss and making the same vow with my mortal and spiritual enemy...