I climbed down in the hole and scraped the dirt back with my bare hands, and I hollered up for the boys to shut that machine off, because it was not the thing you dread when a man buries something where he knows it will never be dug. It was a box. A wooden box, tarred over to keep the wet out, and heavy, and on the lid, carved by hand, a dog.
I got it up out of the hole and worked the lid loose. Inside, wrapped in a piece of wool blanket, was a leather collar with a worn brass tag that said BLUE, a chewed-up rubber ball, a faded photograph of a big yellow dog, and a folded newspaper clipping. And a letter.
The clipping was from the Nashua paper, going back near thirty years. LOCAL DOG ROUSES SLEEPING FAMILY, PULLS OWNER FROM FIRE. It told how a house on this very street caught fire in the night from a bad furnace, and how a dog named Blue woke the whole family, herded the kids out barking, and then went back in and would not quit until he had dragged his owner, down and choking in the smoke, out onto the front lawn by his shirt sleeve. The dog made it. The house was saved. The man in the story was the fellow who owned this place before us, and Blue was his dog.
The letter was his. He wrote that Blue lived another six good years after that night and died old and gray on the kitchen floor, and that he could not stand the thought of burying him somewhere a future owner might one day pave over or drop a shed on without ever knowing what was there. So he buried Blue things in the one spot on the whole property he knew, by law, nobody could ever disturb without first hauling out that oil tank, and he sealed a letter in with them.
This dog gave me back my life and gave my kids their father. Whoever you are, digging this up someday, please be gentle with old Blue. He was the best of all of us.
I sat down in the dirt of my own side yard and, I will not lie to you, cried over a dog I never met, dead thirty years. My boys, who had grumbled all morning about the three thousand dollars and the muddy hole, went quiet and pulled their caps off.
We did not throw a thing away. We found a good corner of the yard, under the big maple, and we buried old Blue box there proper, and my youngest carved a little wooden marker for it, a dog, same as the one on the lid. The collar with the BLUE tag, I hung on a nail by our own back door, where our own kids come banging in and out. It felt right to keep the best dog in Nashua watching over the house he once saved, all these years later. Thank God I did not walk away from this old place over three thousand dollars. I would have missed him.