A Late Summer Chore by Daniel Rousseau

“Get rid of that damned dog once and for all,” my father swore, smashing his fist against my cheekbone. I stumbled backwards, away from the breakfast table. Tears burned my eyes as I turned and snatched my Stevens .22 from the gun rack; stuffing a box of Winchester hollow-points into my jeans pocket, I descended the back porch steps. The screen door slammed behind me. I’d catch hell for it later, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting this hated chore done.
I whistled softly for Lady Bayou. She whimpered from where she lay near the steps. Her moist brown eyes were reduced to two pools of agony and she didn’t leap to greet me anymore. There was no royal thrust of her proud head, no long bugling challenges from the ruby-throat of a hound excited by the fresh scent of a new hunt. Instead, she rolled over, dragging herself up, barely sitting, half lying, using toenails of her hind paw to attack a new seizure of itching. Red mange had stripped her once-beautiful black and tan coat until only raw scabs and blood remained. She reeked of the greasy mix of crankcase oil and yellow sulfur I slathered on her. It was supposed to cure, but every night her wailing cries broke my heart.
“C’mon, girl,” I coaxed, kneeling and extending a free hand. “Want some milk?”
She bellied across the dirt towards the tip of the rifle barrel. She sniffed it. Then she trotted at my heels, down the path between rows of scraggly red and purple zinnias.


At the milk house she sat scratching herself while I shooed away a tangle of cats and borrowed a small pail. I filled it with warm milk. I poured some on the concrete so the cats wouldn’t follow, then whistled for Lady Bayou as I opened the corral gate to the lands beyond.
She lagged along, paying no attention to the orange cheddar sun rising above the live-oaks to the east. Her bare, floppy-eared head swung side-to-side, her sagging jowls drooling and her nose chuffing across the grass, skimming the silver dew-diamonds of moisture for scent of whatever may have passed this way.
I led her along the cow paths through the pines to the barbed wire fence at the end of our thousand acres. There I stopped. To the west lay the Slough, stretching to the horizon in a maze of cabbage-palm thickets and marshy flats. There, in the early morning heat, nearly out of earshot of the house and barn, I placed the pail of milk on the ground. Lady Bayou began to drink. Her tongue made those same soft slurping sounds that made me laugh when she was a puppy.
I raised the rifle tightly against my shoulder, squinting down the barrel, aligning the front-sight bead with the V-sight and placing it squarely on the imaginary X in the middle of her forehead. The familiar click of the cocked hammer caused her head to rise. She paused a moment, then resumed drinking.


“Get rid of that damned dog once and for all” still rang in my ears as sweat and new tears stung my eyes. The August morning burned like a blister on my heart. Somewhere in the silence a cardinal began to sing, “pretty-girl, pretty-girl.” I squeezed the trigger.
And on that morning, on the spot where the late summer chore took place, where the only two sounds were the gentle lapping of a hound’s tongue in a pail of milk, and the cardinal’s cheerful call, only the cardinal was startled.