Shek’s Lessons
By: Lina Buividavičiūtė
By: Ruth Mota
Red lights flashing. Ambulance in our driveway.
Two men slide my father out its back door on a stretcher
and mother’s fingers tighten ‘round my hand.
My father lies covered in a sheet; his forehead wound in white.
This is my first memory. On the bush beside me,
crimson berries pop from dry stems – berries that return
in dreams, along with father’s eyes below the bandage
focused on me, full of tenderness veiled in pain.
Our collie, Shek, sits - too still - beside me. We’re cemented there -
the three of us. Only my father glides away like a sailboat on the horizon.
For months he lay in bed, leg wrapped in a cast – foot pulleyed towards the ceiling.
Mother’s skirts swished past me as she scurried between rooms.
Walls echoed words I did not understand: black ice, steep cliff, never walk again
but spoken in tones I knew meant I should stay away. The dog knew too.
So, we teamed up. In the basement we’d chase a ball. Or I’d curl up in musty boxes.
Shek sniffed me out and stared at me with round sad eyes -
nuzzled me to come and play. He taught me how to bark.
Understand. It was a nuanced bark, a greeting like a variation of Buddhist monks -
palms together, saying I see the dog in you. Ears perked, he listened to the clatter
and the sighs above and led me up the stairs when all was clear.
Father walked again, but with a ponderous limp. Shek died
shot by a neighbor who said our dog was bothering his sheep.
He led a secret life he never shared with me.
Before my lessons, his handsome photo graced the front page of the paper
as he leapt, white hair flowing, down the main street of our town.
Gripped in his mouth, a T-bone steak stolen from our butcher.
Sheep molester and thief, he taught me how to watch and listen -
to read a person when they cleared their throat - to fathom an eye’s gleam.
He trained me to follow the music of human talk, not the words.
And when I grew, my teachers often looked at me perplexed:
I was just going to say that! Are we reading minds now?
No, I don’t read minds - bodies, faces, the meaning in a bark maybe. I
learned it from my dog in our basement days.
Ruth Mota was born in Eugene, Oregon where her dog taught her many lessons. She studied English at Oberlin College and was motivated by a reading of Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre to live in a Spanish-speaking country. Although she was sent by the Peace Corps to Brazil where she lived for decade, she also became fluent in Spanish and worked as an international health trainer throughout Latin America and Africa. Now she lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California and focuses on poetry, both writing and facilitating workshops to groups in her community like veterans and men in jail. Her poems have been published in many online and print journals.