"The Kindness"

THE KINDNESS

There it was again—the scratching.

In the gloom of the curtained living room, over the etching of the electrical fan, Lorna Horn detected the faint sound, and halted the progress of her embroidery. She angled her graying head to the left as if dialing in the noise to authenticate its source, and then, satisfied, she set her needlework on the lamp table to her right, and unhinged her great frame to rise from the ancient upholstered chair.

Angular and big boned, Mrs. Horn—as she had insisted her students call her throughout her nearly 40 years in the classroom, preferring even former students, some of them well past middle age, to address her with this appellation—stepped heavily off the room’s central oriental rug and onto the wooden floor. Draped in her customary black frock, her head barely clearing the low lintel separating the rooms, she trod heavily to the tiled surface of the immaculate old kitchen and the screened-in back door. She then glided past the carved oak table, over which she and Mr. Horn had shared countless meals and conversations, and peered through the screen onto the small porch in the back yard. Just as she had suspected, it was a dog—a black Labrador retriever, looking gaunt, its ribs showing beneath its patchy coat, whispers of grey streaking its muzzle.

Mrs. Horn eyed the animal. “Hello, boy,” she called gently, her usual huskiness evident in her voice. “What’re you looking for?” The Lab peered up at her shadowy form, wraith-like behind the screen. His tail began to wave enthusiastically, and he panted softly. Behind him was a large span of lawn, bordered by a thick stand of old walnut and oak trees. The light of the dying sun streamed over the trees, bathing the lawn and the back of the large house in final warmth, and leaving the forest in gloom, as if in a separate world. Mrs. Horn, her face aglow with patterned sunlight, smiled almost wearily at the dog. “You hungry?” she asked. Again, the tail wagged eagerly. She turned the handle of the door and cracked it open about a foot. “Well, come on in, then,” she said.

The Lab entered with only the slightest hesitation. Mrs. Horn gestured to a small, well-worn rug by the door. “Sit!” she said, with the air of someone accustomed to others heeding her commands.

THAT’S HOW IT BEGAN, IN MY IMAGINATION, BASED ON THE STORY MY FATHER TOLD ME ONE DAY NOT SO LONG AGO….

As my father’s health declined during the last year of his life—he died on New Year’s Day, 2007—he intensified two undertakings that he had begun after his retirement from dentistry in the mid-1990s: (1) organizing and labeling everything he considered valuable, in many cases in order to include them succinctly in his will, and (2) giving things away.

Such was the case on a summer’s day in 2006 when I was upstairs in my parents’ house, speaking with Dad in his den. He was in the mood to show me some of his guns and to tell me their histories. He knew that I was far more interested in the histories than in the guns themselves, but he also suspected that I would find more personal value in the guns if I knew the stories behind them.

With a twinkle in his eye, Dad dug into his elegant, dark-wood gun cabinet and extracted what I believed at first to be a toy rifle—only 33½ inches long, with a thin cherry-wood stock and a narrow, dull-grey barrel. Embedded into the right face of the stock was an Indian head nickel with the buffalo side facing outward. Dad handed the rifle to me, and I held it awkwardly, exaggerating its smallness as if I were handling a B.B. gun. “Is this real?” I asked.

“It’s a real gun,” he said. “It was my first rifle.”

In my hands I was holding a .22-caliber, thumb-operated rimfire long rifle, a Model 722, with a rolling block. It had been manufactured probably between 1902 and 1914 by the Hopkins & Allen Arms Company of Norwich, Connecticut. I turned it around several times, sighted down the barrel, and read the manufacturing data engraved in the metal. “Where did you get it?” I asked.

That was the opening that Dad had been waiting for. He took the rifle from me and held it up like a trophy. “One of my old teachers gave it to me when I was about seven,” he said, and then he regaled me with the story of Lorna Horn, a large, imposing woman who had lived in Logansport, Indiana, and had taught for decades in the tiny nearby town of Walton—my father’s hometown, and his father’s before that, and his father’s before that, and his father’s before that. Mrs. Horn had been teaching in Walton so long that she had taught my father’s father, who had been born in 1898. My own father was born in 1932.

By the time my dad was old enough to be a student in Mrs. Horn’s classroom, it was 1939. The Great Depression was still casting a pall over the economy of the nation, and across the Atlantic, Hitler’s forces had just overtaken Poland. Mrs. Horn lived alone on the outskirts of the city of Logansport, and, although her teaching income was meager, she lived well as a widow off the pension of her husband, who had died young. My grandfather had apparently been a favorite student of Mrs. Horn, and she had remained friendly with him as he grew up and became a dentist with an office in Logansport. Consequently, my father became a ready favorite almost just by showing up, and one day—late in the school year, I believe—Mrs. Horn approached my grandfather and asked him whether it would be all right for her to give an old family gun to my dad. My grandfather said that was just fine with him. And so Mrs. Horn presented the rifle to my father, who was delighted to have his own gun, and who personalized it by tracing an Indian head nickel on the gun stock, gouging out a hole in the dark wood, and then gluing in the coin, buffalo side out. For many years in the deep hardwood forests bordering the area cornfields, my dad hunted squirrels and other critters with that gun.

But there was more to the story, and my father didn’t learn the full truth for many more years....

When my father was in public school, one of his best friends was Ted Beckley, son of the local butcher. When the two of them were in Mrs. Horn’s class together, occasionally the teacher would stop Dad’s friend and say, “Ted, could you please tell your father that I’m all out of liver, and I need some more for my cats?” Sure, Ted said; he could do that, and the next day he’d arrive at school with several pounds of beef liver wrapped in white butcher paper. Mrs. Horn would voice her appreciation, and Ted would smile, knowing that he was doing his part to keep his teacher’s cats contented and well fed.

The truth, however, is that Mrs. Horn didn’t own any cats. And she didn’t own any dogs. And she wasn’t eating the liver herself. But she did need the meat.

NOW THINK BACK TO THE BLACK LABORADOR RETRIEVER FOR A MOMENT….

After the hungry hound entered Mrs. Horn’s kitchen, he was treated like a king. From her refrigerator Mrs. Horn pulled a thick beefsteak and dropped it into a cast-iron skillet already sizzling with vegetable oil. As the meat cooked, she filled a clean metal bowl with fresh water from her sink and set it on the floor for the dog, which was salivating already from the smells of browning beef. When the steak had been cooked through, Mrs. Horn used a large fork to lever it onto a cutting board and expertly sliced it into bite-sized pieces, which she then dumped into a second metal bowl and set on the floor beside the water. Ravenous, the dog made short work of the repast and soon was lying contentedly on the rug, quite logy from his feasting.

But the black Lab was not there to stay. After she had cleaned the dishes and wiped up the floor, Mrs. Horn opened her back door and gently ushered the dog outside. As she followed the animal out, she bent to grab the .22-caliber long rifle and moved with her canine companion out into the growing gloom of the backyard. Then, as she had done to countless unsuspecting felines and other unwary dogs, she dispatched her newfound friend with a single shot to the back of his head. Some quick shovel work later, and any trace of the dog had ceased to exist.

According to my father, Mrs. Horn’s actions, taken in the context of the times, amounted to nothing more than a mercy killing—a kindness. All around the country, people with barely the wherewithal to feed their own families, had abandoned their pets and left them to fend for themselves. Many, if not most, of these animals starved to death or became feral and were eventually killed. Mrs. Horn, he said, gave each of her pets one last good meal, and, like a skilled executioner, put them out of their misery quickly and humanely.

Dad told me this story with a smile for the irony behind the gift he’d received and with admiration for the woman who had been his teacher. Then he handed the rifle back to me and told me it was mine now.