Shades of Grey

A Story by Taylor

A story of a father, a daughter, and a dog.

This is probably a story you have heard hundreds of thousands of times. The names and circumstances may be different, but the people, they stay the same. There is and was and always will be the father, the child, and the dog. It’s that one little fable you hear while sitting in front of a fireplace in your mother’s, perhaps your grandmother’s, arms as a child, too young yet to realize its importance. You most likely only recall that it left you feeling rather unsettled.

I remember first being told this with the heat of a glowing stove lapping over me, feeling my mother’s fingers, roughened from working, running through my hair. Her light and lilting voice deep into a world of fairies and make believe. Of stories.

And this is the tale she wove:

The father was born and raised in the village of Alvey, a small affair founded by a single man too many years ago for even the oldest of the villagers to recall correctly today. Even so, they all seemed to remember that his name was Roland Alvey and that he brought with him to the depressingly bare patch of land exactly three other families as well as his own. All their names have been lost to the waves of time now.

Alvey is the place you find if you go across any Irish road long enough, far after the pavement gives way to dirt. Somewhere the road turns to knotted grass and rocks, increasingly tree-logged and dark. Just keep walking; you’ll find it. The spot of bare in the woods, hardly larger than a rich man’s cottage, with the outline of a single small house in the middle. The walls turned to rubble hundreds of years before and ground into the soil under the weight of passing years. The rest of Alvey, you had already walked past. The other houses were long ago devoured by the earth and trees.

This place is different.

This is where the father lived, where his father lived, and many fathers of fathers before him. The whole of the father’s ancestry lived in the house, in the family’s reputation passed by word of mouth, and it was everything to him.

He was neither rich nor poor, had a good healthy milking cow and even a few chickens on the property. The crops he grew each year rarely spoiled, and when they did it was never bad enough to ruin him for the winter. Not a day went by when someone did not see him sitting beneath the oak tree beside his house with his only daughter, a bright, fire-headed girl. Talking and laughing with her.

He was spoken highly of where ever he went, found a friend in most every person in the village. Trustworthy, they called him. Respectable. A good man and model citizen, exactly like every member of the family before him.

The village ached with him when his only daughter, barely seven years old, ailed with a disease that harshed her skin to a sickly flush and sent her temperature spiking upwards. She coughed often and, teary-eyed, complained to her father about sharp pains in her chest. Sometimes when the coughs wracked her little weak body, blood followed quickly behind. Most of her air came from froggy gasps that made her wince and put a small fist over her chest.

Papa, she would say, fighting back the tears. It hurts.

The doctors were at a loss, as was anyone who looked at the poor child. The best they could provide to the anxious father, who had lost his wife not two winters earlier to a similar sickness, were small gifts with encouraging words. A few eggs here, a thick blanket there, and sometimes even a few coins. To help pay for the medicine, the givers would say. Who could not help, they agreed amongst each other, but come to the aid of such a wonderful man?

One villager brought a dog for the girl. It was a ratty mutt, its hair so short and randomly tufted that it was difficult to place it directly into the category of “dog.” It was not very large, though its small stump of a tail began wagging madly when it first met the daughter, and it let out a joyous bark at the sight of her.

A perfect match, the father joked.

For the first time in a long while, holding a squirming puppy and letting it smother her feverish cheeks with licks, the girl laughed.

As the weeks drew on, the dog grew. It became less awkward, its hair growing longer and thicker. Its bark never lost the high pitch, though it became better mannered quickly. The only time it left the girl’s side was to go outside to use the bathroom.

The girl began restoring, bit by bit. Her cheeks were a softer shade of pink, no longer the bright flush of constant fever. The coughs drew less blood and breathing came easier.

The people of the village pinned the sudden shift in health on the dog.

The father was enormously pleased with how well his daughter healed. He even went out one night to celebrate with a few of the men at the local pub, leaving his daughter home alone with the dog. With enough alcohol filled his system to keep him in a whiskey-tinged cloud for a week, he stumbled back to his house late into the night.

Somewhere in his reverie, the father heard the dog barking. He shouted for it to be quiet, as he was well past the cheerful part of the intoxication and into the angry one. The father called to his daughter, slurring out something about asking how she was feeling. There was no reply.

He stumbled into the daughter’s room, a small space he had to build in when she first took with the sickness to keep himself from catching it. She lay on the bed turned away from him, red hair splayed out on the pillow like a sea of flames, moon shining down on her from the open window. Her dog sat beside her and barked, even more adamantly than before.

This time he told it to shut up.

The father pushed the dog off of the bed and leaned down to attempt a kiss on his daughter’s cheek. Even in the hazy state of mind, he knew immediately that something was not right. She felt cool, as though she had been standing out in a winter wind.

He said her name. Crushing silence.

The father shook her gently before turning her onto her back. Her eyes were shut, making her look the very picture of sleep. If only she were not so white…

He shook her shoulder and shouted his daughter’s name. The body did not respond, no matter how often he jostled and called for her.

The father stood silent for a moment struggling to fully assess the situation while squinting through a veil of heavy drinking, before he seemed to think of something.

Beside him, the dog threw back its head and howled, a deep and chilling sound. The father stared at him and felt pieces of an idea sliding together.

You could call it drunken madness. You could say he never would have done it were he clear-headed. You could say a lot of things.

The father went outside to fetch the axe he had been using earlier in the day for chopping wood. He returned quickly, the dog still beside the bed. It remained silent now, though it fixed mournful eyes on its fallen master. Not so much as a glance acknowledged him.

The axe whistled through the air.

The dog yelped and then went quiet.

It hit the corpse again and again, thumping into its body and splashing warm arterial blood over the floor, the bed, and the model citizen.

He let the axe fall and followed down onto his knees after it, staring with crazed ambiguity at the dog. The look almost seemed to ask what he should do next. Then he laughed at himself and struggled to his feet. Of course he knew what to do. Keep the family slate clean.

You don’t tarnish a good reputation.

The father took up the axe and, carefully, almost gently, began chipping away at his daughter’s neck. At the first impact, she stiffened and gasped, her eyes coming open. Irish eyes crying and taking in their last sight, of the scarlet-tinged father.

The father ignored the lump in his throat and kept cutting at his daughter’s neck until it looked sufficiently like that dog had gone crazy and began attacking her and he could do no more to help her than to kill the feral beast before it could cause more damage. Until she was dead.

He stepped back and observed his work, eyes blurry with wet and scarlet. The dog lay sprawled awkwardly on the ground, something warm and gray spilling out of the rips in his head to the floor. The daughter in her bed with her throat ripped out, serrated ends of the esophagus jutting through her bleeding muscles. Tears drying and her face still contorted in panic.

Satisfied, the model citizen ran from the house calling frantically for help.

The village cried with him at the daughter’s funeral. They buried the dog beside her. Even if it did end her life, the father choked out, it was her closest companion. The villagers praised him for the very idea, his selflessness.

No one could quite understand why the land yielded no crops for the father that year, or for any years to follow. The earth remained stubbornly barren until at long last it was too deeply surrounded by untamed forest for the single bare patch to be seen.

I had shivered, in the light of the fire. That’s a mean story, I said. Why would you tell me a mean story? I didn’t want her to die. Why would he kill her, Mama?

Because, she said after a second to think, he couldn’t help it.