It was the summer he turned thirteen, the summer everyone told him that he was now a man, too old for the calluses he’d earn every year walking barefoot through the fields, dodging stinging nettles and pretending to chase eagles through empty skies. This was the summer he would work the farm in earnest for the first time, begin the inexorable process of being sun-dried and work-worn into a clay mould of his father.
Tomorrow he would wake at dawn with the other men, pack a cold sandwich in brown paper, and make his father proud by lifting a bale by himself, and only dropping it three times, and asking for help not even once.
In two months he would convince a visiting friend to take off her bra, because since he had a sister it was all old news to him. In September they would plan their wedding, but he would forget her by May.
The day he found the dog he woke up early for the last time from restlessness instead if obligation, and sought out the fields not because his older brother was a disappointment, nose deep in books about blood and sinews, but because he wanted to remember why he loved the gold-green grasses.
He found the dog under a scrub brush patch just over the rotten fence by the apple tree, cowering and licking a small cut on its front paw. Later it would be a white sheep dog, majestic and bold, but on that day it was a mutt, brown and black and green and sad, scared of life’s sharp kicks.
He coaxed the dog home, proud of the gentle noises he could make to soothe it, calmed somehow by its fear. He needed to be strong for it, and it was so much easier than being strong for himself. He hid the dog in the shearing shed, and all that summer he became a man, he clung to a young boy’s secret pet.
But secrets must out, and though the dog stayed hidden all that summer, autumn was only beginning to feather through the leaves when the dog was discovered. There was anger, and tears, and newly minted manhood threatened by stern words: Get rid of it.
The boy had the fresh grown muscles of a man, minted in the hot forge of summer fields; the pride of a son who took his father’s path; the strength of conviction bred by knowing your world is as small as you have made it; but it wasn’t until that day, those words, that the boy called man became his namesake. That was the moment when the boy grew up, left behind childhood’s secrets, little hidden games and buried treasure.
And the man said: No.
Image by Kieran Macanulty