Mongrels

We buried them, the little old sacks of bones, often wrapped in a favorite blanket or outworn sweater, on the small hill to the east of the house, among the shade of the broad-leafed maples and the maidenhair ferns, deep in the clay and chestnut loam, with the sound of the small creek a distant homily. 

They’d made their way to us often by accident or by the cruelty of those who only stopped long enough at the end of the country drive to open a door and cast out a now-unwanted animal. As a child they were like mana, to my mother they were a calling, a leper’s foundlings, an affirmation of her bare-footed sainthood, her ready hearth for the unloved. 

Some we saved, some we could not. Some became familiar, some disappeared soon or later, either by their own volition or by the misfortune of an owl or a fox. But they were all, for however long they spent beneath our eaves, loved by the innocent and the beatified of the wild as the chosen -- all of us, in the end, the unkempt children of a mysterious and terrible master.