How the Mouse Met Jesus (A True Story)

The boy worked the night trick in the L&N's Choctaw Yard, a lonely place on the Mobile waterfront where box cars awaited their ship. For this bright young man, keeping accurate records of the comings and goings of the "exports" left him virtually unemployed. He was, for the better part of every night, bored or asleep, alone on the waterfront with box cars for dreams.

But on one of those boring nights, just after the start of his trick, not in a dream, the boy found a small black dog, apparently sick to its death, lying near the switch stand between tracks four and five. The sight of the dog frightened the boy. All his life he had been told that a sick dog was dangerous. It might be rabid or driven by pain to viciousness. Certainly it was to be avoided, so all night when the boy's work brought him into the vicinity of the dying dog, he found reason to veer away. But this boy -- the "genius" -- felt a greater and deeper fear than his fear of the dog. Death was near, less than 30 yards away, slowly creeping into the body of the dying dog. The boy feared invisible strangeness more than he feared the palpable threat of a sick dog -- a feeling unaccountable in one so young.

Near four in the morning death completed its work. The dog ceased all movement. The froth on its mouth hardened into a dry caulk. Its blind eyes, like chalkie marbles, reflected neither light nor life. The animal was dead, no longer a threat.

But just as the boy finished his nightly chores, just as the light of day reached the chocked-up caboose that served as an office, a man appeared at the door, propped one foot on the stoop, and called to the boy. "I have a sick dog here. Could you come out? We may be able to do something for him."

The boy stepped outside. The man stood straight and looked straight into the boy's eyes. He seemed okay, not just another hobo. He was dressed in neat khakis and a blue checkered Eisenhower jacket, and was wearing a peaked cap of the sort worn by baseball players. But the boy paid only brief attention to the man's clothes, for in his outstretched hands the man held the limp and lifeless body of the dead dog, its eyes frozen open, arid as sand and seeing nothing.

"I found him over by the rails," the man said. "He seems to have been there for some time. Did you see him earlier?"

The boy almost lied; he didn't want to admit he'd seen the dog and done nothing. Maybe the soft blue of the man's eyes created the guilt.

"Yes, I saw him," the boy answered, pleased with himself for telling the truth. "I thought he was dead. I was afraid to go near him."

"Well, I can understand that. It's better to play it safe around strange dogs with unknown illnesses."

"You don't seem to be afraid," the boy said.

"Well, you see," holding the dog higher, "he's really harmless."

The man seemed not to notice that his reply made no sense. He knelt and gently laid the dog's lifeless body across the cinders, carefully resting its head on a tuft of grass.

"I think the little fellow's going to be alright," he said.

"I don't know," the boy whispered, almost as though afraid to contradict the man's quiet confidence. "He hasn't moved all night. He looks pretty bad to me."

The man looked up into the boy's eyes, his hands still caressing the dogs fur. "Yes, I suppose you're right," he said. "He does look bad. But then you look okay to me and perhaps I look alright to you, but who knows what the next moment holds for either of us."

Again, the man's words confused the boy. They didn't seem a proper response at all. The boy understood the words in their normal sense, the way his mother might have intended them, but the man seemed to intend the words in a personal, private way, as if the future were not the thing of mere happenstance implied by the trite saying, but a concluded arrangement holding for the boy a determined and certain unfolding.

But the boy could not bring himself to grasp that special meaning. How could he? The man was kneeling beside a dead dog and treating it as though nothing were wrong with it. The boy did not want to say anything the man might find disrespectful, but he had to say something. The words came out slowly. "My future seems a little brighter than that dog's."

In a stronger voice, he asked the man where he had come from. "I haven't seen you around here before."

"I spent the night here in your rail yard. And the night before, and the night before that one."

The man's trousers were trimly creased. "You don't look like you spent the night in a box car." The boy knew every car in the yard was loaded and sealed. He had been writing the seal numbers in a report when the man arrived.

As though the question of his appearance were not worth considering, the man turned again to the dog. Looking first to the boy, then to the dog, then back again to the boy, he quietly uttered words the boy has not forgotten as the years have passed.

"You think this animal is dead because he seems dead. You think yourself alive because you move about and do things only a person alive is able to do. But if the dog, though dead, is alive, if he is in fact healthy and robust, could it be that you, though alive, are dead?"

The effect would have been the same if the man had slapped the boy's face. No one, much less a stranger, had ever spoken such serious words to him. It wasn't so much the vague familiarity of what he said, though it was that, too. It was that he spoke so confidently, without a trace of concern. He seemed not anxious at all that the boy might doubt him. The man seemed sure the boy in the rail yard would feel nothing but what he intended him to feel.

But the boy, feeling too much of everything to feel anything, lowered his eyes and leaned back against the caboose. The man tilted his head to one side and dropped his chin slightly as though to peer upward into the boy's face. Sensing an unspoken question, the boy shook his head, denying the essence of the moment.

The man smiled. He stroked the dog's fur again in what seemed a final gesture, then rose from his kneeling place beside the dog and put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Why don't you go in and call someone for the little guy. Perhaps that's all there is to do for him, cart him off."

For a moment the boy stared into the kindest and, yet, the most accusing eyes he had ever seen. As he gazed, all his knowledge suddenly left him. Before, he had been as truly certain of nearly everything as the brilliant and nineteen can be, but in that waking moment, as the man's eyes convicted him of sins for which names had not been invented, the boy knew that, all along, he had been ignorant of everything including his own ignorance.

Afraid to ask the questions boiling inside of him, unable to make sense of their sounds, the boy lowered his eyes and numbly muttered: "I'll call Charley Watson, the humane officer. It's early, but he'll come."

The boy managed to take his eyes off the man and went inside to make the call. The number, along with fifteen or twenty others, was written on a card tacked to the wall. The boy needed only a moment to learn that Watson's phone was busy.

When I walked again into the sunlight, the man was gone, and the little black dog was at my feet, leaping joyfully, licking my hand, healthy and robust.