Dog eats Bible

Not just any Bible, but one from the 1850's that had been in Alex Anderson's family since before his father came over from Scotland to homestead 100 acres in Wellington County.

Alex was a farmer who lived with his two spinster sisters. For a couple of summers I was the hired man on the farm. That involved back-breaking work from morning to sundown six days a week for less than minimum wage, just like farm labor today.

Alex was a man of very few words. You always knew he thought you were an imbecile; the question was only how high you were on the imbecile scale at any given moment, and he had a way of letting you know with nothing more than a glance.

While I wouldn't say he was a cruel man, the old-school farmers weren't known for their sentimentality. When the barn cat population was getting out of hand he simply stopped feeding them. It was an exercise in applied Darwinism.

Those who were a little bigger to begin with and had the meanest disposition did alright. The rest were slowly starving to death. Scrawny mewling kittens all over the place. I eventually sneaked into the barn with my .22 and helped the process along.

One day we're heading to the the feed mill in the truck when out of the blue Alex says today's his anniversary. Say what? I'd never heard even a rumor of such a thing.

Turns out Alex had been married fifty years ago that day. His wife died in childbirth less than a year later. Their son died too.

After Alex went to the big farm in the sky I bought his Bible at the estate auction. No particular reason. It's been sitting on a shelf in the woodshed since I came to Falling Downs. The top shelf.

Lucy is still going through the "I'm a puppy and therefore I'm entitled to chew everything" phase. There's been any number of hounds lived in that woodshed, in and out of their chewing stage, and it would never occur to me that a dog would go to the trouble of fetching something off the top shelf when there were so many chewing options available closer to the ground.

But I should have known. Lucy eats beer cans and shits aluminum ingots. She's a four-legged recycling machine. She's chewed extension cords down to the bare wire and lived to tell the tale. She ate my generator.

Alex Anderson's Bible never had a chance.