Charlie’s Dog

Charlie Moss starved to death. I carried Charlie up to the Greenville Sanitarium. I had no money to pay. The doctor looked at Charlie despite it, but Charlie died all the same. They said it was pneumonia, but I knew better. It was hunger did in ‘Ol Charlie.

The work ran out a while back. Most everybody else had already hopped the cars for Nashville or Birmingham, but Charlie got sick, so I stayed with him. That shanty was cold, and Charlie was thin. Hell, so was I. The way things were going for us it wouldn’t be long until I would be too weak to cut the wood for our fire, and then we would both freeze if we didn't starve first. I couldn't cut enough wood alone to heat the plywood walls of that shack anyways, but I did my best to keep Charlie warm. With all of that though, there wasn't much to do about keeping him fed. It was just a damned shame, is what it was.

I’d known Charlie my whole life. We’d gone to school together back in Bristol. I even courted Charlie’s sister until she ran off with that traveling drummer. She never did come back home. I always wondered if it was that town she ran away from, or was it me?

I will say that it hurt some when Charlie died. I cried a bit when I got back to that shanty, and then I kicked that dog for watching me do it.




The car was empty, but for me. Everyone else had left the shanty-town before the cold moved in. I jumped the train on the eastern slope when her speed was down, the wind shivering me in my shirtsleeves. I looked back once and that dog was still running alongside, but she couldn't hang with it for long, could she? I would have brought her along, but how was I to hold on to a damned dog, run along-side, and jump the car too?

The rough plank floor of that car was graveling my ass with every clickety-clack by the time we started down the western slope. I tipped my slouch hat down for a nap, but I couldn't stop thinking of Ol' Charlie. They’d buried Charlie with everything he owned, excepting that dog, of course. Charlie sure thought high of that bitch. I expect he starved himself due to slipping his slivers to it. That was the kind of friend Charlie was, even to a dog. That dog had licked Charlie’s face right before I toted him into Greenville. Charlie had smiled, and had wrapped her up in his arms. That there was the last time Charlie Moss ever smiled on this Earth, I reckon, and he’d wasted it on a dog.

Charlie would have been plumb sorry to hear of it, of me leaving his dog behind to chase after that train, but damn it, if I didn't find work I was going to starve too, then what would that dog do? Hell-fire! She's the one who would be all right. She'd go right on catching rabbits, I reckoned, while I withered away in that durned shack!




I left the train as she was sailing down off of the Cumberland Plateau. It was a fast stretch, but the distance was mounting. If I was going to ditch her, it would need be soon. I hit the gravel feet first, but from there it was ass-over-tea kettle, so that it hurt pretty-good when I finally stopped rolling. It would be a long, cold, hungry walk back to that shanty, and would cover every bit of this mountain, but that damned dog would be there waiting, lying across Charlie's old army blanket, never understanding why she was left there alone with no fire, nor food.

I don’t reckon I'm the man to betray a friend, not even a dead one... nor his damned cur dog either.