Long Way Home(2)

One terrible day, Buster chased after a rabbit and ran right out into the middle of the road. Mrs. Franklin couldn’t stop her car in time and hit him. I saw it all happen, and I raced into the road where Buster was yelping and whining and trying to drag himself out of the way. I scooped him up, blood and crushed bones and all, and just kept running with him, straight across the street to the veterinary clinic. There were people in the waiting room with their pedigreed dogs and fancy cats, but I ran in, covered with Buster’s blood, crying and hollering, “Help! Help! Somebody help my dog! Please!”

It was summertime, and Jimmy was working at the clinic, and it’s a good thing he was, too, because Mr. B. took one look at Buster and said, “He’ll need to be put down.” At first I thought he meant I should put him down on the floor, but Mr. B. shook his head and said, “The dog won’t live. He’s suffering.”

“No, no, please! Can’t you do something? Can’t you operate on him?”

“I don’t think there’s much I can do. I’m sorry.”

“You have to try! Buster is my best friend!”

“Even if I did work on him, there’s not much chance your dog will survive the surgery. He may have internal injuries.”

I heard what he said but I couldn’t stop crying and begging. Then Jimmy spoke up. “Can’t we give it a try, Dad? I’ve seen how that dog follows her everywhere.”

“The leg can’t be saved. It’s too badly mangled.”

“Then he’ll hobble around on three legs,” Jimmy said. “It’ll be good experience for me to see you do surgery like that.” I saw Mr. B. shake his head as if he didn’t want to do it, and I started losing hope. But Jimmy leaned close to him and said, “The girl just lost her mother, remember?” I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen. Jimmy took Buster from my arms. “What’s his name?”

“Buster.”

“And what’s your name?”

“Peggy. Peggy Ann Serrano. Please try to save him! Please!”

“Okay, Peggety. Now I can’t promise you that Buster will live through the operation, but I can promise that we’ll try to save him. I won’t give up on Buster until we’ve done everything we can possibly do.” I still remembered Jimmy’s words and how he said he wasn’t going to give up. He always saw hope in places where there wasn’t any.

I was over at the clinic every spare minute, taking care of Buster until we knew that he was going to live. Of course, I couldn’t pay for an operation like that, so I told Mr. B. that I would clean the dog pens and the horse stalls for him—whatever he needed me to do. Jimmy became my hero for saving my dog. He nicknamed me Peggety that day and has called me that ever since.

“You operated on Buster nine years ago,” I told Mr. B. now, “and he’s running around on three legs just as good as you please.”

“So he is.” He gave me a small, sad smile and swung his leg inside the cab and slammed the door. A deep, wearying grief had settled over him ever since Decoration Day—the day that Jimmy tried to kill himself. I remembered the day because the village officials held a memorial service in the cemetery behind the church for all the fallen soldiers. I looked at Mr. Barnett’s ashen face now and it seemed as if all hope had bled right out of him. I feared the sadness would be the death of him if Jimmy didn’t get better. That was another reason why I couldn’t give up—for Mr. Barnett’s sake as much as for Jimmy’s.

“Maybe the doctors will be able to figure out why he’s so depressed,” I said, “and they’ll coax him into talking again. Maybe his battle fatigue will be better after he rests in the hospital for a while.”

“Let’s hope so.” Mr. Barnett turned the key in the ignition and the truck growled to life.

The Barnetts lived beside the veterinary clinic in a comforting white farmhouse with bay windows in front and a frilly porch that wrapped around the front and sides. Before Jimmy went to war, that porch used to overflow with his friends on warm summer evenings. The music of the Andrews Sisters and Jimmy Dorsey’s band would spill into the night from Jimmy’s radio. I would gaze at the house from my bedroom window across the road and hum along to the music.

I went into the farmhouse when Mr. Barnett and I got back, calling to Mrs. Barnett from the kitchen door to tell her we were home. “I’m upstairs, Peggy,” she called back. “Come on up.” I found her in Jimmy’s room. It needed cleaning after all the weeks he’d stayed in there with the window shades pulled down to block the sunlight as if he didn’t want to see the view of the distant mountain ridge or the new yellow-green buds that were bursting from the trees. But I didn’t think Mrs. Barnett was in there just to clean. She had been so excited when Jimmy wrote that he was coming home, and she’d made plans to cook all of his favorite meals, including the red velvet cake he always asked for on his birthday. Mrs. Barnett was my friend, too, and more of a mother to me than Pop’s girlfriend, Donna, had ever been.

After we knew that Buster would live, years ago, and I’d been cleaning dog pens and sweeping up for a while, Mrs. Barnett came to me one day and said, “I have a little present for you, Peggy, for working so hard.” It was a boxed set of bubble bath and talcum powder that smelled like roses. Then she filled up the tub for me in her own bathroom. She gave me a bottle of Halo shampoo that made my hair all shiny and nice and said I could keep that, too. When I turned thirteen, it was Mrs. Barnett who took me to buy my first bra and coached me through all the changes of womanhood. I made a regular pest of myself after Jimmy enlisted, running over to his house all the time, asking his mother if she’d heard from him. I knew how much she loved him and how she would suffer if the doctors couldn’t figure out a way to save him. I wanted to help Jimmy for her sake, too.