I hadn’t thought about him for years, the old man with the three-legged dog. That summer I laid interlock and dug beds in my front yard I saw him regularly. He always walked north to south, across the bridge towards the general store, and back again. I mentally catalogued the possibilities of where he might live in such an intimate community, to no conclusion.
I imagined he was a house painter owing to his habitual uniform of white, disposable jumpsuit and broken-in, workingman shoes. He was grey-haired and lean, but not so old that employment was out of the question.
His Yorkshire Terrier hippity-hopped behind him, slowly but earnestly, on her good legs, the fourth jutting from her chest at a sad, unnatural angle. “She got hit by a car,” he told me, the only factual thing I knew about him.
I can’t remember when it occurred to me that this fellow might be squatting in the abandoned white and black frame house up the road. Later that year, a friend and I stopped at the property to look around.
I couldn’t bring myself to enter the house. I thought it was reverence for an individual’s privacy, but I know now it was discomfort, shame and fear. I feared the basic human obligation that arises from knowledge. If I were complicit, I would have to act, wouldn’t I? But if I didn’t know that a fellow human being – a neighbour – lived like this, then I wouldn’t have to do anything, would I? A few minutes later my friend returned, alone. He said it looked as though someone had lived there recently, and I wondered if its occupant was hiding in the hay fields, watching us trespass against him.
Was I the only one to notice this ghostly wisp of a man? In a small village his presence should have been of consequence, a talking point, but no one ever raised the subject, including me. I made small talk with him but never asked him his name, shared a sandwich, or offered to take his beloved companion to the vet.
I see that the hole in the roof of the abandoned house is growing, although the walls are as straight and plumb as ever. It won’t be many rainstorms now until a perfectly usable house – a shelter for someone who had none – breaks down completely, returning to the earth, no longer useful to anyone.
I wonder where the old man and his three-legged dog have gone, and when exactly they left. And I ask myself: How did it come to this?