I remember when I was about ten an old coon hound kept coming around my parents house. He was an old worthless mutt that just kept returning, unfortunately for him.

My daddy could be an angry man, he took a ball pean hammer and knocked the dog in the head just inside an old barn behind our house. Daddy left the dog for dead, too bad for the dog that he was still alive. I woke up that spring night to an awful moaning outside streaming in through my bedroom window. My bedroom was by chance closest to the old barn.

Being a curious ten year old I got up and went outside to investigate. I found the old coon hound laying on his side with a pool of clotted blood underneath his head. I was revolted and heart wrenched by seeing this suffering dog. Daddy had told me he had killed the stray. I remember wondering frantically what to do, it was obvious even to a child, that the dog could not live but might linger in this tremendous suffering for several more hours.

I often wonder about being able to do what I did that night at such a young age, wonder that is, about the type of person it speaks to me being. I looked around inside the barn with my flashlight until I to found a small sledge hammer and then crying and praying for the old dog to quit hurting, I smashed his skull and watched him twitch. I still feel something of a monster doing that, yet the poor old thing was through suffering.

I spoke to Daddy about what he had done the next day and told him the dog was now indeed dead. He said that he was sorry that I found the dog and that it hadn't died. All I could do was ask him how he could leave anything lying there like that suffering so. I still don't understand.

Odd, I remember also a girl my same age just the year before when we were nine. She and her family were new to our small community and she was quite different from most nine year old girls. She rode the same bus to school that I did and I member her drawing knives with blood dripping off the blade on her notebook paper. She was, I would say now, quite macabre, a word and idea unsown to me at nine. She favored or was given long dresses, I can't remember her wearing jeans or pants. She kind of scared my friends and I yet she was not ostracized for she had even at nine considerable talent at drawing even if the subject matter ran towards knives and falcons and witches. We were all curious about her and she talked freely.

I played on a deputy league baseball team called the cubs, a friend named Todd and I went to practice about two afternoons after school each week. It was in the spring, April it seems, Todd's mom was taking us to practice as we lived several miles from town. Approaching the place where this girl, I don't even remember her name, lived we saw police cars and traffic stopped. As we approached, I saw a little black shoe in the ditch, Mary Janes I think, and then a doll, and the knife-drawing little girl. The sun was bright and the wind calm. She lay twisted her face skyward and her stomach and legs facing the ground. Just a small amount of blood trickled out of a smooth innocent nine year old girl's mouth. I knew she was dead as did Todd's mother, but Todd had not yet understood the significance of a frantic woman running down the road screaming and knocking down anyone in the path to her daughter.

Todd's mom stopped long enough to discover that a one-ton ford truck had struck the child as she ran for reasons she only knew onto the road. We left and continued on to our practice area at a local small college. Todd now knew the girl was dead and cried uncontrollably, he could not stay at practice. I stayed and played ball and kept the little girl in my heart. Yet never did I cry for her, until today. I wonder what she would have done, whom she would have loved, how her parents managed. I was told they moved shortly after their only child's death.

Fate has placed me in a home just down a side street from where she lived so briefly in this area. A car lot now stands where the house did so long ago. I now run in the dark of predawn morning past where her lifeless child body came to rest. I can still pick the spot and see the dress and the face and even hear her voice. So strange I still live and run and she is forever a nameless nine year old girl.

My daddy died a mindless, legless eighty-two year old man in a nursing home with no family around. I remember looking on his lifeless face in the hospital bed of his room. His hair short and gray his skin stretched tight and thin over his cheeks. His face the odd coolness of no cellular respiration. My daddy the hammer yielding dog slayer, had grown up poor and abused. By the time he was the age of the dead little girl, whips had stung his back and plow handles behind a mule had broken his ribs. I prayed as I had for the dog, and the girl, that pain and confusion were gone.

How strange a world, life marked by the killing of an old dog, the body of a nameless nine year old girl in a road ditch and the corpse of my daddy on a hospital bed. The feeling that has never changed in me from nine to thirty-seven and through all these times is the deep desire to be able to fix what was broken. And the tears flow because it is not with in a human to be able to do so.