I was a small boy when my father told me this story. I don’t know if it’s a folk tale, a modern work of fiction or just something my father heard once when he was a small boy. If the reader knows where it comes from I would certainly like you to enlighten me; but if it remains a mystery I won’t be too unhappy. Wherever it comes from it has always seemed to me to exemplify some basic principal of our emotional makeup, which is that love, no matter where it comes from, has some enduring value. I hope that my own rendition does it justice and that you enjoy it.
On the edge of a town that lay nestled in the crook of a long, lazy, emerald green river, a man named Pete lived in a small, drafty, one room shack with his golden retriever, Emma. He had lived in that ramshackle excuse for a house since the age of fourteen and had never set foot in another state, county or town. Pete didn’t like people; he had spent almost all of his life avoiding them and the people of the town were only too happy to keep him at a safe distance as well. Tall, thin, shriveled, blind in one eye and nearly deaf, he looked like a squinting, scowling, slightly crooked scarecrow cobbled together by a bad tempered farmer intent on scaring away kids and giving crows a heart attack.
The room he lived in was full of warped old wooden furniture scavenged from the dump. Decaying stacks of paperback books swollen from rain water, yellowed newspaper and old Hollywood gossip magazines lined the walls and buried lopsided card tables. Inside dusty cabinets, some with doors, some without, were cans of beans, peaches, sardines and assorted bags of dog food.
Pete made a few dollars a week rummaging through garbage, collecting old broken dolls, radios, pill boxes, tea pots, fishing rods and anything else he could repair and then sell to those who were slightly less poor than himself. At night he’d light a kerosene lamp, feed Emma, eat a little food and then smoke his pipe with whatever tobacco he had managed to scrape together. Before he went to bed he would talk to Emma about everything they had done that day, then stroke her head and scratch behind her ears before going to sleep. They always lay back to back, which kept them both warm and comfortable.
Pete had found Emma one day at what he called his office. She had been placed in a bare cardboard box and left at the dump next to a stack of lumpy mattresses and a dresser with only two legs. Pete ran his hands over the trembling puppy to make sure she hadn’t been hurt, picked her up and then put her under his coat to keep her warm. Instead of working that day he returned to his shack, made a small bed and then set out to buy food suitable for a dog her age. It had never occurred to Pete to do anything but adopt the puppy. He had always felt abandoned himself.
They became an inseparable pair after that first day and could often be seen in the dump, fishing or in town, Emma in his back pack and then, in no time at all, trotting next to Pete.
Those years, which were the happiest in Pete’s life, seemed to pass like leaves dropping from a tree. He was 75, then 80, then 86. One day he awakened feeling unnaturally refreshed. His vision wasn’t cloudy, his right knee, which had been giving him sharp pains, moved like new, and he could hear the birds singing outside. He stood up, stretched, and then remembered something someone had said in a book.
“You get up and don’t feel no aches and pains,” the man in the book had said. “Chances are, you’re dead.”
Pete remembered those words with a chill. He turned around, looked down at the bed and, sure enough, there was his body, stiff as a board and white as the belly of a fish.
The old man shrugged and then, light as a feather, walked out the door of his shack. There before him was a marble staircase that spiraled up and up into the radiant clouds above. Pete thought that since he had nothing better to do he’d climb up those steps to see what was at the top. He wasn’t afraid of being dead; and only hoped that in heaven there would be eggs and grits.
After climbing up those hard stone steps for what seemed like hours he looked down but could no longer see his shack or the town below. When he finally got to the top he saw the most beautiful gate he’d ever seen. Pete had spent his whole life walking past old, broken fences made of wood, barbed wire or bent, rusty iron with NO TRESPASSING! signs on them but this gate was made of glittering gold, pure silver, cream colored pearl and huge, sparkling diamonds. As Pete approached it he noticed a man, sitting high above him, who looked even older than himself.
“I reckon you guard this here gate,” Pete said, wishing he had at least changed his shirt and combed his hair before leaving home.
“Yes sir I do and I’ve been waiting for you, Pete,” the man said. He clasped his hands and then hunched his shoulders, which made the folded wings on his back rise up a little. Gold rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. Except for his rather penetrating black eyes he looked like a kindly grandfather about to tell a story or whittle a doll out of a block of wood.
“Well,” Pete said, scratching his head. “I’m here all right. I don’t know what you’re gonna tell me but whatever it is you might as well say it straight out.”
“Pete,” said the old man, frowning. “I’m afraid I don’t have much good news for you. You see, it doesn’t take a great act of heroism or belief in any particular idea from a book to get into heaven. Folks don’t have to pass a test or list all the good they’ve done. Nope, we don’t demand all that much. You just have to be sociable. Why invite anyone in who isn’t at least sociable? But try as we might up here, we haven’t found a single person that will even miss you. Folks in town thought you were just an old crazy codger who hated everyone. It makes me sad to say this, but we just might have to find some other place for you. I’m truly sorry because I’ve seen worse than you get in but, well, those are the rules.”
“I figured on as much,” Pete said. “I guess I always knowed I was an old crazy codger.”
Still, he looked at the beautiful gate with longing. From where he was he could hear laughter and the music of banjos and fiddles.
“Heaven must be a mighty fine place,” he thought. “Can’t says I blame them if they don’t want the likes of me.”
He was about to turn away and walk back to whatever there was to walk back to when he and the guardian of the gate heard a long, low cry of sorrow. It was the anguished howl of a grieving dog.
“That must be Emma,” Pete said, wiping away a tear. “I guess she just found out I passed on.”
The angel stroked his chin, consulted a book for several minutes, and then cleared his throat.
“You come on back here, Pete,” he said. “According to the rules, all they say is that you have to love and that someone has to love you back. There’s nothing says it can’t be a dog.”
“But what about Emma?” Pete said. “She’s the only friend I ever had and I don’t want her to be by herself.”
“We’ll make sure she gets taken in by a good family, and in no time at all she can join you,” said the angel, who had come down to take Pete by the hand.
“Right now, there’s a concert, and plenty of folks who’d be happy and proud to help make heaven your home.”
