The Mutt and the Dark Stranger (from the book: "The Vanquished Plantations"

Chapter Twenty-three

The Mutt and
The Dark Stranger

Soon the old bull-legged dog, Tobacco IV, great granddaughter, to Tobacco I, climbed up to the hillside overlooking what used to be the Abernathy plantation left out in the raw by Caroline Abernathy, the day she hung herself, let the dog run loose in the barn, and then once the dog got her freedom ran loose throughout the fields thereof, and Betty Hightower, kind of did the same thing, but Tabasco produced a litter, before her death, before the rats skinned her alive, and before Better put a bullet in her head to stop the suffering, and killed a half-dozen rats in the process—and from that litter came Tobacco IV, a stray dog for the most part. Behind Tobacco IV, the hillside gradually became nothing; it no longer had a shadow at all.
The Abernathy’s, outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, were gone now, as well as Old Josh the hired hand, the plantation sold off and for the most part and left in dilapidated shape, and the Stanley plantation was in ruins, likewise (as was the Hightower’s and Smiley’s and the two Wallace brothers’ plantation, up in Ozark, Alabama). Betty was dead, and so was her husband and daughter down in New Orleans, and her sister Caroline, and Langdon, and Langdon’s father, and Amos (the helping hand on the Stanley plantation), and Morgan Carter was back in his hometown in Minnesota, from his years in the Army, and tours of duty in Vietnam and living in Cambodia, and his wife Ming, was killed, as well as her girlfriend, Zuxin.
The heavy shapeless land, to the dog was nothing new—in the dimming twilight; dust was like a benediction upon her, upon the day, behind her. She didn’t recall any of this of course, nor did the falling of her slain great grandmother, yawning, as the last lit part of day, got swallow up by night.
There was a shadow of a man sitting by Tobacco’s side, he just showed up all of a sudden, just like a that, faster than a blink of an eye, he called himself Nick, he told the dog—briefly and sharply, “Soon it will all start all over again, perhaps on the opposite side of this hill.” And the dark figure, knew he’d, or they’d cross his path fatefully—just like everyone does sooner other, that is, everyone who dies in his territory.
“Here was a place,” the old dark figure mumbled “where once there were strong and sturdy walls with houses, and barns with burly beams, and fences tall and wide, and branches of trees, and autumn leaves, and green, green grass and sunlight for the harvest, and bees chasing kids,” and Tobacco, he just closed his eyes and listened to the wind and the old man’s soft hum of a voice, as if he didn’t like his job. “And some of hearts and minds of those folks that lived here, and even those who lived all the way down in New Orleans, and up in Ozark, Alabama, and over in Asia, they all have shadows reaching back here, trickling back here, like inverted shoes, without legs.” And the Dog yawned again. He was very old, perhaps seventeen, in dog years, that is older than near eighty-five.
For a clear moment, the mutt seemed to understand, he climbed closer to the dark figure, “You got to be prepared to die, just like the living got to be prepared to live,” said the old man, before his dark cathedral of a night, both sitting for a while, empty as a dried-up well. “That is the way it is Mutt, you know that, as well as I do. Man he tries to change the world, make it his kind, and Jesus he don’t even try that. And they all get old before their time. And then I come along, like now. I’m like gravity, but I work in the opposite direction,” and then the old man mumbled to the dog, in an even softer voice:
“The best thing they all learn, that they learned in their life, that they’re ever going to learn, was what they learned at the age of ten-years old, or by that age, since then, they just kept on learning it over and over and over, I firmly believe that, they keep a-learning, it over, and over the same ole thing, until they get it right. And I learned myself every one down here is looking for something they haven’t got, because what they got didn’t make them happy for very long, but what they ain’t got, is what they want to be happy for, and that makes them unhappy until they get it, and when they get it they want more of what they ain’t got again, its kind of a circle. I don’t rightly know if dogs feel the same way, or if they use that instinct for the same purpose of seducing life and everything around them.”

The dog—he was yellowish red in colored patches, something likened to a Golden Retriever, but was a mixture of breeds, nothing pure, more on the mutt order, but a handsome looking mutt. If dogs understand, if they can sense things beyond food and danger—and he knew they could dream because he watched them dream more than once (so he claimed), then he could understand who the stranger was, and his purpose, if indeed, there was any kind of understanding or reasoning for a dog in that area.
Consequently, the stranger put his hand on the dog, said, “You fool, ya ole fool of a dog, you can’t climb this hill anymore, your legs are too thin, and they wobble, we got to stay here tonight and die together I reckon. Except, I don’t die, until the last soul on earth dies.”
In the middle of the night the stranger saw that the dog was dead asleep on his knee, I mean, really dead, and had fallen to sleep on his knee, and said to the corpse, “Okay, now the plantations are vanquished, completely…of it’s old roots.” knowing he was the last of the line of the his decedents, as were the Abernathy’s and Hightower’s.