“Bogue went out fighting. There is a note of rightness in that,” Louis said.
Lloyd was digging a hole in the garden for the dog’s body, while Fanny, weeping, painted a rock with his name.
“Why now?” Lloyd asked Louis. “How many times did he bark at that spaniel when it walked by the house?”
“One time too many.” Louis sat in a chair on the lawn, watching mother and son prepare the grave.
There had been nothing sweet about the public Bogue. Privately, he was a cuddle. In the morning Bogue burrowed his way beneath the sheet and counterpane until he found Louis’s feet, then draped his hairy body over them and snored, starting every once in a while—chasing a rabbit in his dreams, Louis supposed. Often, before Louis began writing, Bogue had already put in a good day’s work, announcing through the hedge with fierce barks that the crowing rooster next door should not strut too confidently, that the moment of judgment might appear as suddenly as a new opening in the shrubs. Before breakfast scraps arrived in his bowl, Bogue had already chased some hound down the road, striking a blow for all small dogs in a big dog’s world. Occasionally, he left the intruders with wounds.
“Why did he have to do that? Chase every dog he ever saw?” Lloyd’s voice cracked with anger at the needlessness of Bogue’s death.
“Simply his nature,” Louis said. “He probably was the last of his litter to get at his mother’s teat, or some such injustice. Made him feisty.”
“He would just throw his body into the fray,” Lloyd said. “It was never an even fight.”
“Maybe he knew that life is not an even fight,” Louis mused. “Given the odds, it’s the stand one takes that matters.”
THE TROUBLES IN Ireland weighed heavily on Louis’s mind of late. In reading about a particular Irish family caught up in the violence, he began to see his own fate tied in to theirs. Two years earlier, in 1885, an Irish Catholic farmer in Kerry named Curtin had been murdered when he resisted a robbery by Irish nationalists who wanted his firearms and ammunition for their cause. Curtin’s children, including two of the older girls, fought off and killed one of the intruders. When the Curtins gave police the names of their father’s murderers, the family was boycotted. No food or supplies could reach them, ostracism being the price for their betrayal. Anyone who violated the boycott to assist the family would risk murder.
As they sat by the fire after dinner, Louis lit a cigarette and explained the strategy that had been shaping itself in his head all day. “Just imagine, for one moment,” he said, “how significant it would be if a well-known person—a famous writer—went to the Curtins’ farm and brought the world’s attention to that beleaguered family.”
Fanny looked askance at him as if he had lost his mind. “What are you saying?”
“I am saying that I am willing to go to that place, that farm, after telling the press what I am doing. Don’t you see? It could bring an end to this absurd boycott.”
“Or you could end up like that farmer. Dead,” Fanny said. “When did this cause become so close to your heart? Yesterday? Don’t you hear what you are saying? You want to commit suicide.”
“Well, and why not?” Louis got up and kicked a basket full of kindling wood. “I’d rather use up what time I have left as a spendthrift than die daily in the sickroom. In the end, what matters is the stand one takes against the inevitable.”
“Oh, Louis, for God’s sake.”
A few days later, when he spoke again of going to Ireland, they were eating breakfast. Fanny eyed him calmly. “You haven’t touched your eggs or sausage. When you are well, I will go with you. But for today,” she went on in her low, singsong way, “we must simply get you outside. The sun is shining.” She rose from the table before he could protest.
Fanny was humoring him now, but he knew if he got himself to Ireland, there would be no use trying to discourage her. She would go, for better or worse, and stand with him.
Louis allowed Valentine to dress him in layers of knitted and boiled wools. It was May, and catkins on the big beech tree had begun to open. They had been in Bournemouth for three years, but he felt as if he’d been a householder there for forty. He was a weevil in a biscuit. His body was growing more useless by the day. If he could get himself to Ireland, he could hurl his ruined carcass into the fight in one wild, final, noble act. How much better that would be than to slowly disintegrate further.
It was with these thoughts that he turned the brass knob of the front door to find a red-cheeked delivery boy coming up the walk with a telegram from Edinburgh. Louis opened it quickly and found it was from his mother.
Come as soon as possible. Your father is dying.