31 Days of Short Stories: Day 16. “Dog Days of Love,” by Barry Callaghan

Posted 16 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From Between Trains

If, as has widely been suggested, Alice Munro is Canada’s Anton Chekhov, then Barry Callaghan is Canada’s Ernest Hemingway. (The comparison is apt, given that Callaghan’s father, Morley, wrote about boxing Papa Hemingway in his classic memoir, That Summer in Paris.) Like Hemingway, Callaghan writes in a spare, terse style about tough guys in a tough world. His characters in Between Trains are gangsters and snipers, ageing blues musicians and concentration camp survivors.

In many ways, “Dog Days of Love” is atypical, since its protagonist is an octogenarian Catholic priest, Father Vernon Wilson, who, we are told “led a quiet life.” This story is more muted and personal than some of the others in the collection, but it is no less affecting and emotional for that.

Basically, this is the story of a man and his dog. Now in his eighties, but still “spry,” Father Wilson inherits a two-year-old golden retriever from a local veterinarian as thanks for the ease at which the priest put the animal doctor in the confessional. The pastor of Father Wilson’s church is initially skeptical about keeping a dog around the rectory, but the diocesan doctor convinces him that animals are healthy diversions for the aged, who tend to live longer in the company of a dog, “maybe because all a dog asks is that you let him love you.” Father Wilson names the dog Anselm, “After the great old saint … who said the flesh is a dung hill.”

Anselm and Father Wilson quickly become boon companions, going on walks together and visiting those parishioners who don’t mind having a dog in their homes. Anselm “listen[s] attentively” as Father Wilson talks about the brutalism of the design of Robarts Research Library in Toronto, which he sums up perfectly as “the triumph of the architecture of condescension.”

But it is when Father Wilson is at prayer just before retiring to bed that he feels closest to Anselm. The dog sits beside the priest as he says the Apostles Creed beneath a replica of the Shroud of Turin that hangs on his wall. The priest then climbs into bed and Anselm takes up a perch by his feet, such that “the old priest was comforted not just by the heat and weight of the animal in his bed, but the sound of his breathing.”

There is a real tenderness in the way Callaghan dramatizes the relationship between the old man and the dog, their deepening companionship and the love that each feels for the other. The dramatic turn in the story comes when Father Wilson returns home one day to find that Anselm has chewed up the Shroud that he so prizes and in a moment of blind fury he raises his fist to strike the dog. Anselm retreats in terror and as the aged priest realizes what he was about to do the only thing he can manage is to collapse onto his bed and repeat, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Looking into the terrified eyes of his dog, “he thought that must have been the real look in Christ’s eyes as He hung on the cross.” There is real irony here, because one recalls Father Wilson lecturing his young pastor about Saint Anselm:

Most people get Saint Anselm all wrong. He was like the great hermit saints who went out into the desert, they renounced everything that gave off the smell of punishment and revenge, and so they renounced the flesh, but only so they could insist on the primacy of love over everything else in their spiritual lives … over knowledge, solitude, prayer … love, in which all authoritarian brutality and condescension is absent …

In moving to strike Anselm out of a sense of “punishment and revenge,” the old priest forgets the very tenets that the dog’s namesake espoused. By refusing to beat the dog, Father Wilson evinces “the primacy of love over everything else,” and he exemplifies the condition “in which all authoritarian brutality and condescension is absent.” Father Wilson’s realization forms a kind of Joycean epiphany in the story, a recognition of his humanity — his fallenness — but also his essential compassion. But its relatively traditional structure should not detract from the subtle emotional power of Callaghan’s story, which effortlessly demonstrates that it is not necessary to engage in literary pyrotechnics to create a potently affecting ficitional experience.

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