Dog Leg
It's just a story, you understand
I’ve flown on an airplane just a handful of times, only once at night.
At night, they dim the lights on an airplane.
I sat by the window, holding the 18-month-old in my lap. He was a soft, slender, mild thing with heavy satin cheeks and soft, strawberry curls. He didn’t eat much, though he liked peach yogurt and milk with peach nectar stirred in. He had big eyes the color of blueberries. Dark, indigo-violet, but dusted with light. Those eyes were closed now. His sleeping head gave me its weight as if, you know, he recognized me. As if he trusted me.
I didn’t know him well. I’d spent more than half his young life away from home, first at Fort Leonard Wood, then at Fort Huachuca. The toddler I held now, in June, was very different from the infant I’d kissed good-bye after a short leave around Christmas.
Beside me, Babydaddy was telling me about a dog who killed his mother’s dog.
Babydaddy’s mother, who died soon after 18-Month-Old was born, was Mohawk on her mom’s side, Austrian on her dad’s. She lived here and there: Syracuse, Rochester, the Onondaga reservation. She favored tiny, yapping, stinking dogs with bad nerves, oozing skin, maybe a limp or a bleary blue eye.
I didn’t know then how to understand my mother-in-law or her dogs. I can’t say I blamed the pit bull mix who nabbed the yip-yap dog and gave it a shake.
Then again, Babydaddy’s mother wasn’t my mother, and Babydaddy’s mother’s dog wasn’t my mother’s dog.
Babydaddy and his brothers, teenagers then, kidnapped the pit bull, took it out in the brush, and tied it to a tree.
They cut off its legs one by one.
The pit bull was alive when they started.
Any one of the brothers might have killed their mom’s dog with an angry kick, you understand, but this pit bull had insulted their family.
I sat on the night-dim airplane, caught between the window on my right and Babydaddy on my left, 18-Month-Old’s slight, silky weight holding me down.
You know how it is, I suppose. With the baby in your arms you breathe slow and easy. You keep your muscles loose. You protect him from even the smell of danger.
I let my body relax around the knowledge that my husband killed dogs alive.
Let’s not exaggerate.
One dog. Just one dog.
A dog who murdered his mother’s dog.
Babydaddy probably wasn’t more than 12 or 13 then, anyway.
I changed my mind about being rescued out of that marriage. I made up lies about the cowardice of anyone I might have bragged would come for me.
He’s just messing around, I think he’s gay anyway, he was just getting a rise out of me, you don’t have to worry about him —
I practiced the phrasing to be sure I’d have it ready. Anyone who cared about me deserved better than to have his legs cut off one at a time.
I looked at Babydaddy’s face. He rarely wore any expression, those years. Playing with the children, he’d smile. That was all.
“Guess the dog had it coming,” I said.
Almost 20 years later, an acquaintance describes animals being prepared for cooking — prepared alive, you understand. Adrenaline seasons the meat. My acquaintance learned about them through some animal rescue charity he supports.
He, or she, could be anyone. Lots of my friends belong to charities like this. Animal rescue. Police brutality. LGBTQ+ rights. They’re excellent causes, and they use the full armamentarium of marketing arts to get their stories in front of potential donors.
Alone in a dim room, lying on the floor and chitchatting on the phone as folks do in the evening sometimes, I hear about those dogs in China and remember that night on the plane two decades ago. I think about that child in Central New York a quarter of a century before that, second-to-youngest of a group of brothers killing a dog.
Maybe I’m oversensitive, but I’m not sure it’s ever a good thing to describe the torture of animals in glowing detail.
Braggadocio, horror — the intent doesn’t matter.
Second hand, third hand.
I saw a white man point a gun at a Black man once, but he didn’t pull the trigger.
Am I doing you harm by telling you this?
I ask you the question, but I’ve already described how they sawed each leg off that pit bull. It took a while, you understand. A while to work through the gristle with a hunting knife or whatever they had. Not professional butcher’s tools, that’s sure.
At what point, while 18-Month-Old slept on my lap, while you read this story, did we realize it was too late to back out?