A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY a short story by Russell Banks

Two threads run through the story. The story of Sarge the dog intersects the story of the dissolution of a family. Ostensibly the allegiance of Sarge to the protagonist, the man who left, the father, sustains the threadbare sense of a unit until, tragically, the father accidentally hits the dog and kills her. Or possibly doesn’t kill her; the children suggest kindly that the dog must have been dead, must have just died of natural causes, otherwise she would have moved out of the way.

The authoritative voice of the father describes the decision he’d taken to leave and move down the road with a clear knowledge that he can’t prove it was a legitimate action. He doesn’t say so. On the contrary, he asserts that he finally had had to go, and it’s clear from the tone that he’s been through the arguments, within himself and with others, and that he’d done what he had to do.

There are two kinds of helplessness that bring light to each other in this story. One is the confrontation with random tragedy. And the other is frustration that has no end, no satisfactory answer.

After the dog has been killed the man attempts to dig a hole in the frozen ground and, speaking, as he does throughout, in the first person, he describes the ineffective vehemence with which, with increasing intensity, he wields his pick, trying to make it possible to bury his dog, the last vestige of blind love, the victim of his own action.

And the children are unable to find a way to organize their young minds around the loss of the dog. The dog was very old and had stayed close at hand. It had become a fixture, frail but by living on and on, through the family’s trauma and its own weakening status, a refutation of endings.

The participation of the father in the event of the death may not have implications to the children. Perhaps the father only projects the weight of it. Perhaps the children will associate cruelty with the death. Sometimes they cannot but do that, and having the association will be a cruelty itself. My sense of the story is that it is the loss itself that truly frightens them. It is not because the dog symbolizes the family and with its death sets them free. It is the death itself.

There are other resonances: eternal culpability, as impossible to escape as it was impossible for Orpheus to save Eurydice.

This story brings to mind The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which I read when I was ten or eleven. The failure of the species to bring reason or direct causality into play even or most of all when dealing with death was not something I had dealt with before in such an implacable presentation, either in life or in literature. I suppose it’s not really a failure, it’s simply something we can’t do.

I really like the story. The picture of the father knowing the limitations of his will, and poignantly reminded of this by the death of the dog, and then by the absence of the kids, is heartbreaking without either exposition or even sadness. The picture is of the need to go on, sometimes, without anything to reassure one.