She-Rain is structured in much the way Hemingway created In Our Time. Vignettes divide the piece, each creating new insight into the world of the tale. Below is one of those brief vignettes, which in its own way stands alone as a story of sacrificial love and the unique and lasting pulse a dog, though brief of years, can add to a human life.

From She-Rain:

My mother told of an ancient widower, Thad Weaver, a kind wisp of a man.
Having outlived his farming legs and been taken in by a daughter, he haunted
the courthouse steps most days, trolling for conversation — his heart surely
lonesome as an abandoned bird’s nest at home. Ma said she always heard his
great-grandchildren treated him as they might an old yard tree — fit for a climb when they took the notion, but mostly ignored, its joy too long taken for granted.

Always strewn under him, without need of leashing, lay a mongrel she-dog, all wags and wallow, gray-streaked black. She became a catch rug for smiles from passing children on the courthouse square. The old man said he called the dog Abe “’cause she’s spindly as Lincoln and a pert near identical likeness of him in her face.”

You might figure, a sweet bitch dog with a man’s name rendered Thad into even more the courthouse novelty. People adored laughing with him at the thought Abraham Lincoln had a namesake that squatted to pee and came
into heat.

One little boy in particular, helping his father on trading trips to town, fell for Abe. He fell hard and deep into love with her. A mutual love — of play and roll and adoring one another on that square.

One of those times, without showing a hint of forethought, the old man, leaning off that bench, said, “Boy, this dog has more in front of her than I do. I want you to take her on. Take my Abe on with you and your daddy here, and be good to her. Take her on now. She’s rightly yours.”

As my mother had heard it, Thad creaked himself down, kissed the animal on the head, and she returned the act with one of those looks only a dog can translate into love. The man wiped at his face, gestured through a long argument full of wig-wag with the father, then told the boy they should wait there until he walked off to make the parting easier on Abe. The boy
knelt petting the dog, who watched her former master gimp up the street. Thinking out loud as boys will do, the child had taken note of the single walking shadow in the morning’s sun, where for years there had been the strolling shade of two.

Thad Weaver stopped coming to the square, and in less than a month he died in his bed — nearly one-hundred-years-old, full of memories that stretched far before the Civil War.

Abe and the boy passed better than five years together in their isolation, far up into the scarps outside Marshal. The aged girl saw him to the edge of adolescence.

He finally carried her — in the burlap wrapping of cut sackcloth he had washed — to her grave he dug at a gravelly creek side. He wanted his Abe to lie near the clear water’s music until the end of the world.

The first time she told me of this, my mother said, “Your daddy would have lived as a far more lonesome boy without that dog. His sweet old Abe. I’m right sure I’m the only one he ever talked to about her. One thing’s for sure: She showed him love’s a thing you earn by the givin’ of it away. That old dog helped draw his soul out to live. His deaf daddy and that old
girl first taught your daddy how to love. It’s a wicked shame, what he snatched up from livin’ in the rest of the world.”