What Earl wouldn’t do

In the mid 1960’s, a mad dog had been running loose in the farm town of about 50 residents a few miles south of my own little downstate Illinois hometown. This dog was a ferocious pain in the ass, scaring the heck out of just about everybody everyday. The townsfolk got together and decided they should do something about getting rid of this problem dog and decided on just the guy to do it.

This guy was named Earl, a farmhand who’d come up from Kentucky 20 years before when migrant workers in those days would come from the backwoods there. Earl couldn’t read or write. His neck was permanently red. I’m not kidding about that. I was around 12 when I started working summers at the same farm with my best friend, Linz, whose father owned the spread. I’d often heard the expression redneck but never really knew what it meant, but I could imagine and nothing I did imagine was anything very nice.

Bill was another farmhand who worked and lived on that farm. He was walking with Linz and me along a gravel lane when he abruptly stopped, dug the heel of his boot a few times into the rocky road, and then dug his other heel about six inches from the first spot. He bent down and with his index finger brushed away the dirt, picked up a mole by the tail, swung its head against a fence post and tossed the mole aside. He brushed a little more of the gravel away, plucked a second mole by the tail, whacked it against the post and tossed it aside, brushed his hands across his dungarees and kept walking like there was nothing at all to it. It only took a few seconds. Like Earl, Bill was uneducated and unlike Earl, a man of few words. How he knew animals were burrowing beneath us was a mystery to us then and has been to this day.

Bill was as nice as the day is long. Earl could be nice, too, but really wasn’t the most pleasant company. Onetime during a work break, out of the blue he told Linz and me a story from his Kentucky childhood. There’d been a swimming hole that featured a muddy embankment where kids could slide down and when they’d reach the bottom they’d splash into a pond. It was their place to frolic and cool down. But some “nigga boys” began using it, too, at night when the pond was abandoned. Not for long. Earl and some other white boys slid razor blades into the mud, sharp-side up of course. The boys then hid, waiting until nightfall for their fun to begin. When his story came to what happened that night his bright blue eyes bulged and his round face turned beet red. Mucus dripped from his nostrils and a string of slobber hung from his mouth as his body convulsed with laughter until he noticed that he was the only one to laugh at all.

So, I’m sure with that story in mind, the townsfolk knew they’d picked the right guy for the job.

They approached Earl and he agreed to do it. The fateful day came. He set his shotgun behind the seat of his pickup, drove over to where the dog had been safely penned at the edge of town and took him to where he thought would be the best place. He took a firm hold of the rope that served as a leash and tied the now-cowering dog to a small tree, returned to the truck to load his shotgun. As he approached the dog, he took a deep breath, sighed and tried to steel himself to aim the barrel and pull the trigger.

A few seconds went by. Then a few more. His shoulders slumped. He put the gun down, walked back to the truck and put it away. Earl took the dog home. He called him Lucky.

That dog was just as ferocious as ever, just not to Earl. Everyday as Earl would drive his tractor to the fields, Lucky would follow, up and down the many long rows Earl would ride. Lucky would follow him home — every day this happened until Lucky got old, and even then he’d follow Earl out to the fields, rest at the near corner and follow him home at the end of the day. To each other, Lucky was as loyal as Earl was kind.

The thing about all this is, what Earl wouldn’t do to a dog he could and maybe even would do to another human being. Fifty-five years have passed and I still cannot get over it.

Earl did have another dog. By the time I came aboard to work summers there, Earl had a golden retriever named Goldie. She was really old. Earl liked to say she was a golden oldie. Goldie’s paws were turned inward; she was severely bow-legged. Getting up took great effort. The only time she moved was when it was hot. Then she’d trudge over to the shade. And when it was cold, she’d trudge into the sunny spot.

A litter of kittens would crawl onto Goldie’s back and lay there, waiting to get a piggyback ride into the shade or the sun or wherever Goldie might go. As sweet as this scene might seem, it was actually the ultimate humiliation for Goldie, who would shake off and thrash those kittens if she could. But she couldn’t and the kittens knew it. Goldie would look up, hoping to find a sympathetic face, meaning, “Won’t you do something about this for me?” But would always get, “Isn’t that just the sweetest thing?”