A Herd of Wild Mustang

“Lie down, Amadeus,” the man said, and gave the animal a kind of shoving kick or kicking shove in the ribs with his boot.

The ancient Irish Wolfhound raised a sad eyebrow and then cowed arthritically back to its corner, where it eased itself with a doggy sigh onto its dirty blanket.

“I’m sorry, old pal,” the man said. He ran his fingers from the dog’s head into its wiry furred back.

Amadeus shuddered but ignored him.

The dog, adored by the man’s father, whom the dog had worshipped in return, almost tolerated, and was tolerated by the man.

“I miss him, too,” the man added.

Only now, in the past few weeks, did the reality that his father had truly ended become an undeniable fact. In the initial months, springtime, his father’s death didn’t affect him.

The man now woke up nights imagining he’d heard the manic jingle-jangling of his father’s small, hand-held bell calling him. A non-believer, he had a vague recollection of hearing something about bereavement hallucinations. He wondered how he’d react were his father’s ghostly image to appear before him sitting at the end of his bed. But his father stayed away.

The man’s own weeping surprised him, but then became a constant. Often he realised he’d been blubbering softly, like some ancient widow, without hardly being aware of when he began or what the trigger was that brought it on. And yet, the father he mourned had been responsible for what the man recognised as the ruination of his life. It began long before the crippling illness took hold two years ago. Fourteen, almost fifteen years back, not long after his father’s retirement, the time the man’s mother passed away, marked the time when the foundations on which his future was erected began to disintegrate.

The telegram in which the man learned of his mother’s sudden death undermined the roots he had carefully planted and nurtured in America. Seven years he had toiled on the building sites in the States and had moved beyond the initial stages required in the setting up of his own building firm.

“I’ll hang myself,” his father threatened when the man finally announced his plan to depart again from his home country after putting off his return to the States three months since his mother’s funeral. “On your conscience be it. Your own father. I’ll slit my throat,” he continued, drawing his thumb across his neck.

Assisted by the State, the man supplemented his benefit income by doing the occasional brick-laying job. That ended too. His father couldn’t be left unchecked.

Among the less offensive of his father’s new ways was his arriving at a neighbour’s place with a bucket of water and cloth, which he used, unsolicited, to wash the car parked in the driveway. More disturbing were the times he entered local small-farmers’ properties and worried the livestock with shouts and gesticulations. But positively outraging were the reports of how he urinated in public places: footpaths in the centre of town, and even outside the school.

Once it seemed to be taken as read by the man and his father that the man had awoken from his American Dream and found it no more than just that, his father’s idiosyncratic ways died down.

The arrival of the wolfhound puppy acted, for a while, as relief to the huge tension that had developed between them. Amadeus, the name his father gave the robust two-month-old dog, also became the marker that pinpointed the beginning of his father’s extravagancies.

Soon Amadeus was the size of a small donkey, only more stubborn. It slept where it wished, on the carpet just inside the front door, across the kitchen-threshold, on the rubber mat in the bathroom, or stretched luxuriously on top of the blankets in the man’s bed. The small house reeked of wet dog and piss.

Between the young dog and the man’s father there appeared to be an understanding. At mealtimes, the father addressed his sparse conversation to Amadeus, who sat upright next to the old man’s chair, lending the aged father a ragged nobility. An impish look might come over the father’s face and, with it, Amadeus would bound off about the house and hurl himself against some object hitherto unbroken or not yet battened down. A flowerpot stand, a coffee table.

Like a herd of wild mustang, the years galloped by. The father’s vindictive laughter was replaced by verbal onslaughts that left him enervated and gave his face the incredulous stare of a man aware of his impending end. Amadeus’s ornery playfulness gave way to indifference.

The final sentiment bellowed at the man as he attempted to sponge-bathe his father in his dying bed was the old man’s favourite expletive. In those two words was contained the shadow of his father’s pride and strength as he raged against the crumbling quarterlight. His father’s dark eyes flicked open momentarily, regarded the man with glorious hatred, closed and never reopened.

Nine months on since that day his father had summarised his legacy to the man in the seconds before he sucked in his last breath, it occurred to the man while petting Amadeus that the ailing wolfhound had replaced his father.

“No use to anyone anymore,” he said to the outstretched wolfhound. He dragged his fingertips back up along Amadeus’s spine and into his head. “Not even any use to yourself now.”

Amadeus’s eyes blinked to life and locked onto the man’s. He curled back his lips, exposing off-colour gums and yellowed teeth, his foul breath the stench of rotting vegetables. From the wolfhound’s throat came a steady, pneumatic snarl before his eyelids slid over his black eyes.

“Amadeus,” the man said.

The wolfhound’s eyes reopened, attached themselves to the man’s concerned face, and stayed open.

“Don’t worry,” the man said. “I’ll take care of you.” His father wouldn’t have expected less. Besides, there were daffodil and tulip bulbs he had to get into the earth for next spring before the frost.