Just An Old Leather Coat

Just An Old Leather Coat

             There was nothing strange about where I got it.  The old man that lived up the road died and since he went to my dad’s church and had no family, it fell to Mom and Dad to go through his things and distribute the good things to the needy in the area, including the hobos up under the trestle.  There were two piles, one for the good stuff and one for the dump or burn pile.  There it was right on top of the burn pile.  I asked Dad if I could have it and he said, “Sure, what did I want with it?”  I told him the truth.  I planned to cut out the sections that weren’t worn thin and cut them up for hinges on my rabbit pens.

            Somehow I know it would have been different if I had just carried the coat home but it seemed easier to wear it.  In spite of the obvious miles on it, the leather wasn’t really all that worn but the lining was translucent thin at all the wear points and had been carefully repaired several times by a loving woman’s hand.  The coat itself had obviously been rubbed many times with bear-grease and bees-wax.   It was way too big for me but it seemed to wrap me in more than material.  It immersed me in a feeling; an aura of condensed forests and mountain streams distilled in ageless wisdom.  It moved me.

            The next day I was home alone, as was usually the case, and on the way out the door instead of grabbing my usual play coat I put on the old leather one.  I went down back and fed my menagerie, as my Dad called it, and let Duke, my six month old setter, out of his kennel.  My plan was to head up back and see if I could get Duke on a grouse but something drew me in another direction.  It pulled me back to the old man’s house a mile or so up the dirt road and into the back yard.  There under an apple tree with the ground strewn with small apples and some grouse droppings I could see what looked like a fairly fresh dog sized grave.

            I remembered what Mom and Dad had said that after his wife died the only thing keeping him going was that little dog and once she died he just threw the switch and checked out.  He waited; he didn’t want her to die on her own without him.

            Standing there by that tiny grave I had a reverent feeling come over me.  And then I noticed that Duke wasn’t tearing around like his usual crazy self but was sitting calmly beside me.  I don’t remember ever hearing the dog’s name but suddenly I knew it was Molly.  “Molly” I said “I don’t know much about how these things work but I reckon’ you guys are all together now and maybe all things considered that’s a good thing”.

            On the way home I thought about the old man.  I didn’t really know anything about him.  I would see him and his wife at church every Sunday.  They would walk across the back of the sanctuary and up the far aisle to the third row from the front and sit reverently waiting for the service to start.  Sometimes as we sang some old hymn or another, tears would move slowly down his suntanned cheeks and he would wipe them away with knarred hands.

            He was always friendly to me but I didn’t think much of it as everyone was always friendly to the preacher’s kids.  When he heard I got a bird dog pup he would always ask about him.  If I knew then, what I know now, I would have taken Duke up to see him.  Why is wisdom always wasted on the old?

            On the way home that day, I felt something in an inside pocket of that old coat that I hadn’t noticed before and discovered a small brass bell with a tone you could hear a long way off.  But more importantly, over time, I discovered that when I wore that coat I had more fun.  I had more patients with people and the dogs I trained.  In fact, the shenanigans a dog would pull didn’t upset me anymore.  I actually got a charge out of them.  When I wore that coat I just seemed to know things I didn’t know I knew.  I was a better fisherman; I enjoyed mountain mornings when no one else was awake yet.  I could name stars after only looking them up once.  I can’t really describe it but life just felt richer when I wore it.

            In a couple of years I had grown into it and mom stopped bugging me to wear a coat that fit me.  I mostly only wore it in the woods so it never really was an issue.  I wore it off and on for twelve years.  Then one day I drove my old pick up to the abandoned house the old man left behind.  I put that brass bell back in that inside pocket.  I dug a hole next to where I remembered Molly being.  Then I wrapped Duke in that old leather coat and laid him in that hole and covered him with damp dark earth.  I was never so sad before or since but in spite of that I felt that old coat would help Duke find his way to a man no longer old that would know how to take care of a good dog until I got there.