Canter Bridge

When we agreed to foster Sammy, we were making a Faustian bargain with our own inclination toward loving dogs. We knew deep inside, though the unspoken pact required that the agreement never be mentioned in conversation, that we could never ‘give him back’. It was a clandestine adoption, an under-the-table bargain by which Sammy would instantly become a member of the family while we politely lied to ourselves that any such thing was happening. It was a rescue disguised as a holding pattern. He would be ours, but under the fiction that he was not. From time to time, the language of ‘returning him’ surfaced in a hypothetical way, though we both knew that there was not a them out there to whose company Sammy could be restored if things didn’t work out.

It was a most amenable fiction. It was the whitest of lies.

As this was happening, we knew that Sammy would never see. His right eye completely clouded over with cataracts and his left eye half-way down the same, sightless path, Sammy came to us a certifiable blind dog. He would never be anything else, but that was more than enough for us.

All that changed—or threatened to do so—on the day of his first baseline checkup at our Michigan Road Animal Hospital. Dr. Hurd explained to Linda that there just might be some sight to be recovered in that right eye. Only a specialist could say, he cautioned my already cautious spouse who in due turn ramped up the cautionary note still further when she made her report. But I, of hopeful heart, felt some inner cardiac sinew—some rapacious little nerve greedy to cling to the fantasy that Sammy might run seeing through the park—twitch in response. Perhaps Sammy was not irrecoverably blind. Perhaps he would wrestle with Rosie as her equal one day on the front lawn or chase Lucy next door along the invisible boundary of her electronic fence.

The hope grew slowly, inexorably, irrepressibly as we awaited word from Karen, the miracle-working local representative of the Rhodesian Ridgeback Rescue Association (RRRA). This latter council of remote sages had in recent weeks developed a shadowy, elitist cast. One imagined them holding court around campfires in some deep forest in the dead of night. Surely old manuscripts were consulted, oracles beseeched, as the fate of rescued Ridgebacks—Simba in Miami and Rascal in Billings and Kawtabi in Portland—hung in the balance.

After conversations with Karen, some time would be requested for her to ‘consult’ with the ‘national’ people at the RRRA. They became in our little world a kind of illuminati, the quasi-gnostic custodians of Sammy’s fate. One imagined them mingling with society by day. Here a stockbroker, there a store clerk, this one the owner of a court recording business, that one third violin in some medium-sized city’s symphony orchestra. Then, I almost felt, a good tracker might follow them into the forest where secretive Ridgeback Rescue rites were performed far from prying eyes.

Would they or would they not fund the consultation with the canine eye specialist? And what of any surgery to follow?

In truth, I had not imagined that canine eye specialists existed. I had never had need of them. Are they few or many? Do such people select pre-veterinary courses with perhaps a minor in history or sports medicine at select undergraduate colleges? When duly graduated, do they move on to veterinary med school, gathering on Tuesdays and Thursdays around ‘their’ canine cadavers, dissecting deceased little Fidos and Neros and Pumpkins who once curled up in laps and barked furiously at out-of-reach squirrels? Do the best of them shout gleefully as grades roll in and dreams of choosing a specialty in canine ophthalmology become careerist opportunity? Do they exhaust themselves in canine eye residencies in the finest canine eye departments of venerable canine eye teaching hospitals in places like Columbus, Los Angeles, and Westchester County? Are they given plastic models of canine eyes by drug company reps who are first made to sit in small-scale humiliation in the waiting room before being admitted by stern nurses to the inner sancta on Fridays at noon—by appointment only—where they ply the good doctor with their canine pharmaceutical samples and well-labeled plastic eye sockets over ham-and-cheese sandwiches with reduced-fat mayonnaise?

The mere suggestion that such a cadre of specialists exist in service of blind dogs like Sammy and that the shadowy powers of the RRRA might cough up the no doubt considerable funds required to secure their services began as a remote hope, like a cloud on the horizon no larger than a man’s hand.

But it grew.

Soon all eyes—the functioning, human ones, at least—were on the calendar, where a date with a specialist loomed. I was off in Seattle at the time, stumping from meeting to meeting with important people who seemed by all appearances to know nothing of canine ophthalmology and the little Midwestern drama taking shape back home in Indiana. They were interesting, curious folk, yet their lives seemed dreary with no Sammy in them.

Then came Linda’s call. Matter-of-fact as always, she reported that Sammy had no residual vision and never would. In fact, both eyes will need to be removed. They are already causing the poor boy pain and might rupture at any time, a dénouement that received no elaboration but seemed ominous enough just by the pure, unadorned sound of it.

I came home with pangs of grief bordering the joy of seeing how much confidence Sammy had gained in the week I’d been away, how spontaneously our voices now elicit robust wags of his tail, how happily he gums his sister Rosie, opening his vast mouth and moving it around in her general direction on the outside chance that she’ll wander into it. I recalled with a sore nostalgia how just two weeks ago I had made my peace with Sammy’s blindness and wanted nothing more. Now it seemed wrong that he should not.

Sammy will never see.

That evening I walked Rosie and Sam at a brisk pace through the park together. He trotted proudly from start to finish as though surveying his vast domain.