Fishbone's Song Read Free

move in, and as soon as they were there, they’d get next to Fishbone and stick there like they’d been there all their lives, act all old and tired, and sleep next to Fishbone and the rocker unless I went to go hunting. Then they’d jump up and hit out of the front of the cabin like they were on fire.
    They were good to go with if you watched them, watched and listened to them and knew how they acted, and that would tell you things. Where an animal might be, and what kind of animal it was;one sound if they saw a squirrel, another sound—almost like a bell—if they treed a coon or bear, and just howled murder if they saw and chased a deer.
    I asked Fishbone once where they came from when they just showed up, and he said God sent them, said God made them in the forest out of spare parts of other animals, leftovers, and that’s why they were so floppy and loose skinned, and they roamed the woods until they saw a place they liked and they moved in and sat down. Of course I knew that people used them, hunted with them, and that sometimes they ran and got so far they didn’t come back; that’s how the people lost them. They’d start to run a deer and go so far and fast they wound up belonging to us.
    Or maybe I should say they came and laid down. Next to the rocker, sleeping when Fishbone sipped ’shine and did his word-songs, and they went to getting fed scraps and cooked guts from fish and animals I hunted, which we mixed with boiledrice. Went to getting fed and petted. Fishbone said it was the onliest true love there is in the world, the way a dog loved, unless you found the right woman, which he thought he did twice. But was wrong. Or he said some had the true love of Jesus, but he wasn’t one of them, though he thought maybe that was as good as the dogs’ love. Clean, he said, clear and clean and no chains holding. I sat by a tree for a time one afternoon in the sun with Old Blue number three with his head in my lap and wondered if I had the true love of Jesus but no feeling came, and I thought maybe you had to be older, or know more. Maybe later, I figured, when Jesus got to know me better or I got to know him. Fishbone said He was everywhere and that if I listened to him when he sat in the rocker and talked and learned about things, it all might come to me. Or might not. He said it had not come to him, the true love, either with a woman or Jesus, but it was still there, out there, for the lucky ones.In the meantime he said the love from a dog would help me to understand about it.
    Love.
    I’m not sure when I started to learn things from Fishbone. Might have been right away when I came to him, however that happened. I can’t remember much from the first times except that when I was, I think, three or four, he taught me how to pee off the porch on the downwind side so it wouldn’t splatter back on my legs, and to use the outhouse and magazine paper to wipe, because if I did it again in the yard, the dog would eat it and lick my mouth afterward and give me worms in the butt. I don’t know if all that is just perfectly true, but every dog we’ve had has licked my mouth if he caught me off guard, so I figured it wasn’t worth taking a chance. I don’t want worms in my butt.
    After that first learning that I can remember, things kind of came so fast it was all I could do to catch up.
    First the woods. The old cabin we lived in was just barely not the woods, made out of old slab boards left from a sawmill some place far off and long ago. Weathered and gray, and according to Fishbone, older than him, and so full of gaps, he said you could throw a cat through the wall without hurting it. So I asked him kind of snotty, did he ever throw a cat through a wall, because when I was young and didn’t understand how his story-songs worked, I was kind of snotty, or as he said, I was part of a know-it-all. And he had a look he gave me that had no smile in it when