Just a Dog (8 page)

We buried Moe in the back corner of our yard behind the trellis near the mango tree. Dad dug the hole while I watched and got water for him. It was a hot day and he was sweating a lot.

The hole Dad dug was a big one and the sides were all neat and straight and everything. It looked like a person hole, not like a ‘just a dog' sort of a one. When it was finished I went and called Mum. Grace was asleep in her cot. Amelia wasn't there at all. She was at Grandma's for the day. Mum said Amelia was ‘a bit young for all this'.

Dad pulled back the sheet a little bit so we could see Mister Mosely one last time. I didn't want to pat him and feel him all cold again, but Mum put
her finger on his black tear dot just like I did on the porch. Then she touched the big heart spots on his chest and said, ‘way too big to fit inside. Way too big' and sort of whispered, ‘It's all over, Moe. No more pain now,' before she got all teary and sniffy and put her arm around me.

Then Dad wrapped the sheet back around Mister Mosely and carried him over to the hole. He had to kneel down and lean right over to lay Mister Mosely down in it. It looked a bit like Mum putting Grace into her cot. And it made me think of all these other things too like when Dad lifted Mister Mosely up from under the garage and that time at the vet's when he carried Moe and me to the car and all the other times he carried Moe up and down the back stairs when the cancer made his legs too weak. I had to stop thinking about stuff like that because my eyes started burning.

We didn't say any prayers or make any speeches or anything when we buried Mister Mosely. Mum just said, ‘So long, Mister Moe. Thanks for everything.' And I thought I was going to bawl like a little kid again so I had to blink my eyes and just stare really hard into the hole. That's when I saw the stains on the sheet Mister Mosely was
wrapped in and I knew it was the same one that Uncle Gavin's blood went all over.

Then Dad had to shovel all the dirt back into the hole. Mum said I didn't have to stay and watch that if I didn't want to. I wasn't sure if I wanted to or not. But I did anyway. So did Mum. We stayed and watched and bit by bit Mister Mosely and that old sheet with Uncle Gavin's blood on it disappeared under the dirt.

After Dad finished his shovelling, Mum went and got a packet of seeds and spread them all over where Mister Mosely was buried.

The packet had ‘Mixed flowers' written on the front. Mum told me that when the flowers started to grow it would be like a sign or a message from Moe telling us that he was okay and that we shouldn't be sad for him any more. I guess Mum must have thought I was still a little kid like Amelia to believe that. I didn't mind but. She was only saying it to try and make me feel better.

Mum went back upstairs then to make sure Grace was all right and I stayed with Dad to help him clean up and put everything away. After we
did that I went back out to where Moe was buried. Dad came out too. I liked it there under the mango tree. It was quiet and cool and it was sort of hidden away between the trellis and the back fence. It was a good place for Mister Mosely.

While we were just standing there Dad started talking. He said, ‘These things happen. It's tough, but you just have to deal with them.' He meant Mister Mosely dying. I told him I knew that, and he just nodded and said, ‘Good man.' Then he was quiet some more. Then he said maybe we should have something with Moe's name on it to mark where he was buried. I thought that was a good idea because then it would be a proper grave, so I said maybe we could use Moe's old silver bowl seeing how it had his name on it already. Dad liked my idea and so that's what we did.

I went and got Moe's bowl from up on the porch and I cleaned it up and Dad had a look around his workshop and found a big cement paver that was left over from when he made the front path. We painted it white. When it dried a bit we got some ‘liquid nails' and we glued Mister Mosely's bowl right in the centre of the paver so that his name faced the front. Then Dad showed me how to mix
up some water and instant cement in a bucket and we took everything out behind the trellis.

First Dad dug out a square shape in the dirt at the top of Mister Mosely's grave. When he was finished I poured in some of the cement and Dad put the paver on top of it and tapped it down with a rubber hammer until it was level. Then he made the cement neat around the sides and we pushed the dirt back up to the edges.

After it was all done, Dad asked me if I thought it was a like ‘proper grave' now and I told him yes because it was. When we showed Mum what we'd done her eyes went all shiny and she just said, ‘I knew there was a reason I loved you guys.'

That night Dad got a phone call from Uncle Gavin. Grandma must have told him about Mister Mosely. Uncle Gavin rang up to say he was sorry.

Everything was different without Mister Mosely around. Sort of slow and empty.

When I came home from school the next day there was nothing to do, so I just sat on the back steps and bounced a tennis ball against the wall. I was doing that when I heard the paper man's car down the road. A bit later I heard the paper landing in our front yard so I went and got it. That made me think about Moe and I just started crying. I couldn't help it.

I didn't want Mum to see me doing that because I knew it would make her sad. So I took the paper up the back where Mister Mosely was buried and I sat on the big rock under the mango tree. I told Moe I'd got the paper for him, which I guess was a pretty stupid thing to do.

That's where I was when Dad's car came down the driveway. He was home early, which meant he mustn't have done any overtime that day. I watched him get out of the car. He was carrying his little Esky and his thermos and some work gear. He had dirt and black stuff all over him as usual. He didn't see me because I was behind the trellis.

Dad went under the house and put some of his stuff away in his work room and washed up a bit. Then he got a bottle of beer and a glass out of the fridge and he sat down by himself at the old kitchen table. Dad just sat there drinking and sort of staring at nothing. He looked kind of lonely.

Mum was upstairs in the kitchen. I could see her through the little window near the stove. She was making tea. She was speaking to someone because her mouth was moving. It must have been Amelia, but I couldn't see her. It was funny watching Mum and Dad like that. One upstairs and one downstairs.

Then I remembered that I had the paper. I knew Dad liked to read it when he was drinking his beer so I took it over to him. When I got there he asked me if I was okay and I said that I was.
I was going to go upstairs then, but Dad said to ‘pull up a pew', which means to sit down, so I did. Then he took out another glass and put a little bit of beer in it and he gave it to me. He said we should ‘toast Mister Mosely', which sounds pretty creepy when you think about it.

Anyway, what Dad did is, he clicked his glass against my glass and said, ‘To Mister Mosely.' Then I had to drink some beer. I didn't like it very much but I pretended I did because it was good being there and doing that stuff with Dad. He called it having an ‘awake' or something. We didn't say much for a while but then Dad said, ‘He was a good dog, the old Moe.' Then he smiled, but not much, and said, ‘when he wasn't pretending to be a fish and getting himself caught on hooks.' That made me smile a bit too, because I hadn't heard Dad say something like that for a long time.

Then the weirdest thing happened. Dad and me started to remember stuff about that day with Moe and the fish hook and we started to tell each other. Like I told him how I shouldn't have kept calling Moe and making him try to come home when he couldn't and Dad told me that it wasn't
my fault because I didn't know about the hook being in Moe's mouth in the first place.

We were still talking about the fish hook thing when Mum called from the back porch that tea was ready and for me to come up. I said, ‘In a minute,' because I didn't want to stop talking to Dad. But I guess it must have ended up being longer than a minute, because pretty soon Mum was coming down the steps to find out what I was doing.

I was sure Mum was going to go cross at Dad for giving me some beer. I didn't want her and Dad fighting again. I started to get worried when she came over to the table and she looked at my glass and then at Dad and me. But all she said was, ‘What's this then – secret men's business?' I didn't know if she was talking to me or Dad, but Dad was just looking at the table so I told her how we were having an awake for Mister Mosely. Mum smiled a bit when I told her that, which made me feel better and she said, ‘I see.'

Mum just went back upstairs then, and Dad and me sat there without saying anything. Dad drank all his beer down and told me I'd better head off before my tea got cold otherwise we'd both be in trouble from Mum. And that's what
I was going to do, but we heard someone coming down the stairs. It was Amelia. Then we saw Mum coming down behind her. She was carrying a big tray.

Amelia ran over and pulled around a chair so she could sit right beside me, and Mum came over and put the tray on the table. It had three plates of spaghetti bolognaise and a bowl of ice-cream on it. Mum told us that Amelia had already eaten her tea and Grace was asleep. She said, ‘If you're having an awake for Mister Mosely, then it should be a family thing.'

I told Mum she had to have a drink too so she could toast Moe. I didn't think she even heard me, because she just kept looking at Dad. But I guess she must have, because she said, ‘I could sure do with one.' She sounded pretty sad and worn out when she said that. So Dad got some more beer from the fridge and some soft drink too and Mum went back upstairs and brought Grace down in her carry basket.

That night was one of the strangest nights ever because we all had dinner together under the house. The only one missing was Mister Mosely. But after a while he sort of wasn't, because we
started to tell all these stories about him. It happened when I asked Mum if she remembered the time that Moe got the fish hook caught in his mouth because that's what Dad and me were talking about. Mum said, ‘The poor thing. How could I forget?' And then she started saying some stuff about it and then Amelia wanted to know more because she was only little when it happened.

Dad didn't say much at the beginning, he just listened mostly. But when I told Amelia about me fainting at the vet's and hitting my head and how Mister Mosely had to wear that bucket thing and how Dad had to carry both of us to the car, he said, ‘Two peas in a pod,' which made Mum smile.

Then we just started to tell all the Mister Mosely stories we could think of. One after the other. Like how we got Moe from Uncle Gavin and how Moe got his name and how he cried on the first night when we put him downstairs. And we talked all about the teddy bear and the clock and Amelia drawing on him and that time at the park and the Pink Panther and how he learned to fetch the paper and the time he disappeared and
the time he got hit by the car and lots of other things as well.

Mum and me did most of the talking, I guess. Amelia just asked a million questions, as usual. Dad listened mainly and drank his beer, but every now and then he'd add some stuff. Like when I said it was a pretty good trick how Moe learned to fetch the paper, he said, ‘Yeah, until he tried to steal every one in the neighbourhood.' That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it made us laugh just the same.

So like I said, even if Mister Mosely wasn't there, he kind of was because he was still there in the stories. And that's how come Mum ended up getting me this journal. She brought it home one day and said I should write down all the Mister Mosely stories we talked about and then we'd have them forever. So that's what I started to do. And that's what I've been doing just about every day since Moe died.

Except now I guess I'm finished, because I've got no more Mister Mosely stories left to tell.

This is not really a Mister Mosely story. It's just some things that happened after he was gone.

One day Mum got some black paint and she added a dot and a wonky heart to that white paver Dad and me put on Mister Mosely's grave, the one we glued his silver bowl on. I thought it was great what Mum did. Dad thought so too.

And you know all those seeds Mum planted on top of where Moe was buried? Well, they all grew into flowers. When they were tiny, I didn't know if they were flowers or weeds. I had to wait a long time to find out. But now there are flowers everywhere. Mum says they're ‘just perfect for Moe' seeing how they're all the colours of the rainbow. I didn't really get what she meant, but she told
me when you mix all those different colours together you end up with white, just like Moe. I don't think that's Mister Mosely sending us a sign or a message or anything, but it's still kind of cool when you think about it.

I wish I had more Mister Mosely stories to tell. It was good coming out here every day with my journal and sitting under the mango tree and writing all Moe's stories. Even the hard ones. And every time I saw Moe's bowl with his name on it, it kind of felt like he was still waiting for me, same as always. Dumb, I know.

I still miss him heaps. Sometimes I think I hear his whine or his weird howling bark but it's always some other dog somewhere. And sometimes I think I'm going to see him on the porch or running around the backyard or waiting out the front. But I never do. There's just this big empty space where he used to be.

Amelia wants to get a new dog. She's always bugging Mum and Dad about it. I think it would be weird having a dog that wasn't Mister Mosely. Amelia wants a little fluffy one that could fit inside a handbag but Mum keeps saying that a dog is a ‘big commitment' and we'll just have to ‘wait and
see' what happens with Dad's work.

Dad could be getting his old job back selling TVs and stuff now that the recession thing might be going away. I really hope he does. Maybe that would make him happy and he'd tell jokes and funny stories all the time like before and maybe him and Mum wouldn't be so quiet together and they might even laugh again the way they did that time when Amelia drew all that stuff on Mister Mosely. That's what I want more than anything in the entire world.

But I wanted Mister Mosely to get better too. And he didn't. So just because you really want something to happen doesn't mean that it will. I guess it's like Mum keeps telling Amelia. Sometimes you just have to ‘wait and see'.

Mister Mosely was really good at doing that. He waited for heaps of stuff. He waited on the porch for us to come outside. He waited for ages to get better after the car hit him. He waited all those times for Uncle Gavin to stop teasing him and for Amelia to get tired of dressing him up and for Dad to finish his tea and for Grace to be born. And he waited for me too. Every single day after school.

That's what I'm going to do with Mum and Dad. Just wait. Wait and hope. Same as I did when I waited to find out if those little green shoots on Moe's grave would turn into weeds or flowers.

Maybe I learnt how to do that from Mister Mosely. Maybe it's the one trick he taught me. That sometimes, no matter how much you want something, the very best thing you can do is wait, just like he did. Wait for stuff to happen or stop happening, for things to heal up and get better or for someone to come home.

I reckon that's a pretty good trick to learn, from just a dog.