Resurrection

I was in the bathroom with Alice our fox terrier. She was due to have pups any minute. I had no ideal what to do. My assignment was to interrupt the Jack Benny radio program if anything happen. Alice just slept. The show ended, everyone headed for the stairs. I went to bed and fell asleep.

The next morning I went to the bathroom not thinking of Alice. There she was with five pups. She seemed proud. I rushed to get my sisters out of bed. We were excited and talked about how cute the pups were. Ash said not to handle them until their eyes opened. Dad called us to breakfast.

We went downstairs. Ash was my big sister, she was ten years old, my other sister Anita was eight and I was six. Breakfast was slab bacon and gravy bread. As Dad was leaving for work he told Ash, “One of the pups was still born”. The pup was wrapped in a dish towel and put in a shoe box. He instructed her to get the shoe box from the back porch then dig a grave under the old pine tree and bury the pup. Dad went to work and we headed outside for our burial detail. Ash carried the shoe box. Anita carried the pick and I drug the shovel.

Ash put the box down and removed the lid. Inside a little black and white spotted puppy was dead. Ash put the lid back on the shoe box and Anita used the shovel to clear the pine needles from the spot she thought would be a really good grave.

It was a challenge but a rectangular hole appeared. I used the shovel to lift some dirt out of the hole. Not being much help I resigned to watch. It took about half an hour of digging and scraping. Ash informed us that the hole was deep enough for the shoe box. She put the box into the hole and Anita covered it with dirt. Ash made a cross out of some wood slats from a bushel basket top. She wrapped the slats together with some string.

The three of us stood there as she pushed the cross into the pile of dirt over the grave. She said a prayer and we made our way back to the house dragging the pick and shovel. Sitting down at the kitchen table we talked about our experience at being undertakers. I didn’t know what that word meant but figured out it was someone who put dead people into the ground.

Anita remembered the Easter story from her Sunday school lesson and wondered if the puppy would come back to life in three days. Ash didn’t think so and I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. Anita and I trekked to the grave as she talked about how the preacher said Jesus rose from the grave, she called it the resurrection. Another new word I didn’t understand. Anita and I spent a lot of time looking at that grave. I assumed the pup would come back to life and dig itself out of the ground.

The next morning everything looked the same. We stood there wondering how the puppy could get out of the grave. Anita wanted to dig up the box and check. I said no, because it was only the second day. All day long we traveled to the grave and looked, but nothing changed.

The morning of the third day, Anita woke me and told me to get dressed. She was anxious to look at the grave. We made our trek again. The grave looked the same, no changes. That afternoon Anita wanted to see if the pup was in the grave or not. We drug the shovel out and dug up the grave. We uncovered the box and sure enough the pup was still there. We put the lid back on the box and covered the grave. I put the cross back and we decided to tell Ash about the puppy not being resurrected.

We went back to the kitchen and told Ash. We sat around the table talking about all the things we had been doing in the past few days. Ash had made some beef stew. As we ate dinner we talked and laughed about what each one of us thought. Some of my questions were answered. After dinner we gathered around the radio to listen to the program, “The Shadow Knows”.