I Am Ahab: September 2008

We’re doing something a bit different this month, since Todd’s brother Joel, who collects and transcribes these columns, has indicated that Todd is having a particularly difficult time writing lately. With his case caught in the machinery of the appellate courts and no real end in sight for his ordeal, we can’t blame him for not being able to write. This provides a great opportunity to give him a break as well as allow a glimpse of Todd’s life before prison, since he’s always been the writerly type. This piece originally ran in the October, 2005 issue of the Toilet Paper.

Everlasting Covenant*

“Sweet Jesus!” I felt my whole body convulse with the kind of involuntary muscle movement indicative of the fight or flight response, sucking in a panic breath as my lungs tried desperately to oxygenate the blood now surging through my veins.

I stood on the back porch of my parents’ house, my little brother smoking a cigarette as we talked. A clicking-clacking sound, joined at a lower frequency by a fleeting thump that betrayed a surprising degree of physical power, had attracted my attention ahead of the dark and violently quick apparition that leapt the fence: a mangy, disheveled canine that seemed very comfortable finding himself in my parents’ yard, evincing none of the unsettling surprise that I was feeling at that particular moment.

These new neighbors had moved in not more than a week prior, their arrival heralded by a new set of dogs in the backyard and a minivan parked out on the street, bumper stickers proclaiming some kind of affinity for our current self-inflicted federal overlords.

Prowling briefly around the center of the yard, the beast suddenly turned, darted, and again leapt the fence, disappearing as quickly and unexpectedly as it had arrived. “What the fuck?” were the words, but the images in my mind were stealthy attacks and wanton destruction, the actions of an animal unrestrained by barriers or training, or (so it would seem) even by the force of gravity. I made some comment about needing to talk to the neighbors about their dog, but left it at that, the passive momentum of suburban apathy sweeping over me, the desire to avoid conflict overpowering my annoyance and my unwarranted sense of righteous indignation.

Every so frequently, with a calculus that remains inscrutable to either my powers of reason or those of prediction, my mother’s desire for me to attend church services reaches a pitch that seems beyond reasonable denial. And so, on that particular Sunday, I found myself in church, reliving the boredom and philosophical dissonance of my youth, while trying to appear less than indifferent to my surroundings. Much of the sermon slipped past me in the pleasant, almost transcendental haze of sleepiness and distraction in which I had cocooned myself. Fading in and out of attention, I pieced together that the sermon had to do with some comparison drawn between the terrible destruction of Louisiana and Mississippi and that of the Biblical flood, the gist of the thing being that the story of the flood has to do less with the wrath of God than with the mercy of God and the opportunity for redemption. I remember wondering how merciful God seemed to those people who weren’t Noah.

I arrived back at my parents’ house in that pleasant state of cohesion that I feel when I know I’ve made my mom happy with a simple act of empathy. My mother screamed, “Oh my God! The neighbors’ dog!” Looking out the window, I could see the animal struggling wildly. Running outside, the crisis became immediately apparent. A dog house sat immediately on the other side of the fence, one end of the chain attached to the dog house and the other to the dog’s collar. The first few jumps over the fence must have been fun. Now it was all desperation and madness.

Initially, I approached the pathetically twisting animal, compassion overwhelming judgment, until I saw the foaming of the dog’s mouth, the intense clawing and crazed countenance of a creature moved to such panic as to be exceedingly dangerous. My dad called Animal Control, explained the immediacy of the crisis. In less than five minutes, an Animal Control officer arrived on the scene, but it was already too late. The chain wrapped and dug deeply into the fence, the dog hung from its own collar, eyes glazed over and slightly bulged, mouth still open as though struggling to breathe, tongue a deep purple and hanging limply to the side. For some reason, the wild manginess of the dog’s fur struck me, the very slight sway of the body in the breeze, and most especially the deep scratches in every picket within range.

The Animal Control officer freed the dog from its restraints, covered it, left a note for the owners. I stayed well away from the backyard until they reclaimed the body, took it off to wherever animal bodies go. Those scratches on the fence won’t let me forget that poor dog’s suffering, won’t let me stop questioning what I might have done differently. I feel somehow complicit in the dog’s terrible demise, in the mercilessly infinite detachment of a dispassionate and disinterested universe.

*Excerpted from The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion, by Barbara Brown Taylor.

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