Pet Theology, a nice story with some others not as nice

Short Story

Pet Theology

Bayard Touchstone

When he was five, following the death of their beloved terrier, he had asked if Patches would be in Heaven to meet them at the end of it all. Grandpa had smiled and left the table. Grandma had said there was a dog-Heaven, probably. Mother had said that that was a good one for the preacher, and so he had filed it away in his questions-for-the-preacher box in the back of his brain, to be retrieved on Sunday.

When Sunday finally came, they churched in another town with other Grandparents, and just after the greetings had been had by the church door, he asked, as if on cue, “Reverend Harmon, will Patches be in Heaven?” This seemed oddly comfortable for everybody except the Minister, and there was some polite mumbo-jumbo about reading in his Catechism lesson, which all within hearing knew would, as answers go, be unsatisfactory to the boy. But nobody blamed the Minister; he was just doing his job. Anyway they were now out of church officially, and off to Sunday dinner downtown at the Coffee Cup.

The restaurant on the square was brightly lit and interdenominational, with each table asking its own blessing as it saw fit. Nothing more was asked about the unfortunate Patches. And Catechism sounded like something the boy wanted no part of. If asked, he would have defined Catechism as the antithesis of fun, at least from the sound of it. It sounded like cataclysm, something also to keep away from, he had heard.

Nagging, this question of Patches going to dog-Heaven or regular Heaven was of the utmost interest. Still, he knew better than to speak of it at the table, other than at home, even at his age. Certain heady subjects were safer in the home kitchen, where mistakes in Theology and Hygiene often went unnoticed. Conversation was spare and plates were near clean, when the boy asked the center of the table, giving anyone seated round it the authority to answer, “May I please have some more cornbread?” The butter was the real point of his desire, but did not need mentioning, he felt.

His father said yes, and gave him a slip of yellow paper that the waitress had brought over earlier and left on the table. He was told to go give it to the lady so she could add the nickel to the ticket when he asked her for the extra helping. The boy did exactly as he was instructed and returned to the table with his cornbread in one hand and the altered ticket in his other, and as his father reached out his hand to take it, his grandmother fairly shouted, “No! Give that to me!” Then, when the child began to obey her, his father barked in contradiction, “No! Give that to me!” After this the boy froze, and all present watched his small face go red and contort painfully, confusedly, as he burst into tears.

This was not the outcome anyone had expected, or wanted. The efficient waitress was on the spot with an old trick that has, in these enlightened times, fallen sadly into disuse. In the dissuasion of the loud public crying of an otherwise inoffensive child it is a solution that is without peer. She thrust a glass of cold ice-less water into his bawling face and “helped” him urgently to drink it all down until the bottom of the glass loomed down at him; he was satisfied somehow, that crying was now unnecessary. The bill was paid with no further ado.

Regrets were expressed and hugs were had, and a penny was given to each child to toss into the real and factual wishing well outside the Coffee Cup, through whose chlorine water could be seen a thick layer of shiny coins.

The myriad wishes made there, closed eyed and tight-lipped, by the rim of that well were, and are, long forgotten; but not this one, it never could be. This one would just come true, that’s all. He was told by the older children to wish first, and then throw. If it was ever to work at all, that was the only way; this fact was commonly known. If you wished afterwards, well, you needn’t bother; you had just thrown your money away. It seemed unfair, but those were the rules.

The boy looked down at the glittering bottom. His face was still red and hot following his crying jag; he felt a bit strained, trying to come up with a reasonable wish on the spot. His mind raced for a good one, there seemed to be a lot at stake. After a long dumbfounded moment he finally just wished he could have all the money on the bottom of the well, and then added his penny to the ones down there.

He watched his penny flip into the water, and take its’ place among the others- at least he thought he could still tell which penny had been his. His eyes darted to a dime and a couple of the nickels, and when he quit caring about the penny and the loss of it, it suddenly occurred to him that he should have wished for something else, something to do with Patches. That certainly would have been kinder than to wish for some stupid money. He rushed with a new and urgent frenzy to his father’s side and said, nervously, “Please Daddy, give me another penny, I wished the wrong thing…!” He downcast his face all the way, then raised it slowly to receive the sensible rejection he anticipated.

His father was fixing to give the talk about wishing wells not actually working, except as a metaphor. Or it may have been the talk about how expectations can be a premeditated resentment, when he raised his son’s chin, and caught the wistful desperation in the eyes of his child. He fidgeted, embarrassed of himself. Then he reached in his pocket, and squatted down after removing a coin, and looking at it. When he was at eye level, he asked his son, “What is it, then?”

The child replied, “Patches!” and then tried to read his father’s face to see if that was even alright to mention. He quickly added, “Just so he could go to our Heaven and not just dog Heaven…” He dared not to pray out loud for something selfish with no chance of it happening.

“Well, I sure hope it works” his dad said as he handed him a dime, the only coin left in his trousers. “It should.” Then he smiled at the boy’s mother, who was already smiling at him. He ran back to the Well, and he knew when he mouthed the wish and tossed the coin in perfectly, that it was a just a formality; the thing was already done. The wish was granted, the prayer answered, though unspoken. He would address God about it later.

The long ride home that evening from Texarkana to Marshall was mostly quiet, and the boy reflected on his growing understanding of religion. He reasoned that maybe Dog Heaven wouldn’t really be Dog Heaven unless the Dogs could actually be in charge. And that meant that the humans would have to do whatever the dogs said, which would not be much fun for the humans, at least not the adult humans. Even the kid humans would get tired of that after a while. He asked his dad about that point, and was told that as long as all their people were there with them, that the dogs would be so happy that, indeed, that would be their Heaven.

That satisfied his mind for a moment. Maybe, he figured, there was another Dog Heaven for those dogs who chose, for whatever reason, to not have to fuss with humans anymore. Anyone could see that made sense.

But what about Cat-Heaven, he wondered. Surely if there was a Cat-Heaven, it could include no dogs, and vise versa. He knew for sure that Patches would regard any cat that dared show itself in Heaven as a real mistake- an intruder needing to be banished forthwith. Then what? Where would the cats have to go?

“I’ve been workin’ on the railroad” was started in the back-back of the station wagon, where surplus children lounged long before seat belts, and soon the father, who was driving, said, “No more railroad-workin’, ok? - sing something else!” Dinah in a kitchen somewhere fizzled into paper rock and scissors, while the boy tried to read in his Catechism booklet about the Chief End of Man while sitting between his parents on the front seat with his feet on the hump.

The book was so small he thought it should be easy. But that stuff in there was so far in the future, and so far in the past, and out in space. Patches was already gone and there was little to be done about it, but still he was fraught to know where, indeed, Patches was. And he didn’t think this little brown book was going to tell him. Perplexed, it brought him to prayer; earnest, silent prayer. “Dear Lord, please do your best for Patches, he was so good, You know how he was. Please let him in Heaven. I know you will. Thank you. Amen.”

In all the various interpolations and sidetracks under review regarding the animal afterlife, nothing had ever been suggested out loud of a worrisome nature- that somehow there might be, even for bad pets, a Dog- or Cat- well, you-know-Where. God clearly had way too much Love and far more important things to see about without worrying everybody with that kind of thing. Dogs and cats both deserved some kind of heaven. So what if they didn’t all get to speak English or fly, or order from a menu; they still had a heaven coming to them, and one worth having. Maybe there, dogs and cats would finally make friends; Heaven might this way be more easily consolidated.

When he asked his dad about these dogmatic tangents, he was wisely told that it was all far too complicated for mere mortal minds, and that more would be revealed by and by. As acceptance of this set in, and after a nicely held silence, his mother started singing an old hymn, with the words “By___and by___ When the morning comes…” Pretty soon there was three part harmony with beautiful call and response in that station-wagon, which lasted as long as the song did, which was three full verses, with extra choruses. It was like his daddy had said- there was just no substitute for memorization. Yet some time later in the ride, whenever he did forget the words of a Hank Williams song he was singing, he shrugged it off with, “Well, you know what they say: When the memory goes, forget it.”

After a mile or three things quieted a bit; then naps and doldrums commenced and melted into the vrrrrr-ing of the car. Out the window the boy watched and heard and felt the rhythm of the endless electrical poles fly by on the side of the road, in some perfect mathematical relation to the pistons of the car and the gentle swerve of the steering. Over and over- and under and under- and against the blue and buttermilk sky the long black electric lines rose up to meet the pole, dipped down, rose up, and dipped down again. Blackbirds dotted the smooth eternal scallop with the bumps of their bodies here and there, and they fluttered into ashen sparkles as the child drifted off and into the edge of sleep.

Suddenly, his dad brought him back to the land of the living with a declaration: “You know, I guess it just wouldn’t be Heaven if Patches wasn’t gonna be there.” The boy looked up at his mother, who dropped her jaw down, with her mouth closed, which meant, “Sounds right, I guess.” He parked his head in her lap and slipped into a long slumbering smile.

Later, upon waking, he didn’t even think about Patches for a while, and when he remembered, there was no pang of cold in the bottom of his stomach, like before. He was glad of that and pictured Patches romping around celestially on a lawn that never needed mowing. He was satisfied that a dog so good as he could not have escaped God’s notice, considering His Eye upon the sparrow and all.

During a final conversation on the subject, the boy’s older brother had suggested that maybe bad cats had to be servants to dogs in Dog-Heaven, and bad dogs had to be servants to cats in Cat-Heaven. At least until they could get into real Heaven. He could imagine the uniforms in his mind, based loosely on what the lady at the Coffee Cup had worn. A sort of Pet Purgatory Program.

He considered this possibility briefly before deciding that his brother was most likely kidding him, or at the very least, just plain wrong. With Love, he was now pretty sure, nothing else mattered. Also, he had begun his Catechism training. And he was pretty sure Purgatory wasn’t Presbyterian.