The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

But his habits and appearance required strangers to alter their conception of an aristocrat to one who can afford to be himself.

Thus he began a book of dreams raised up against his family’s failure and the everlasting whimper of the wind, a blueprint of the world to come. He would bring this world about by becoming a great surgeon, reading a paper before learned men in France, standing aside while strangers spoke of his mother’s beauty and his father’s kindness.

And truly her beauty—useless and careless as a butterfly—was hard to forgive, and so was her quick smile and proud carriage.

“Good? A man once called me kind, not good. I don’t fool myself. That’s my virtue. If you notice, it’s almost always what a man wants is to have his son better than he is. Rose, I’ve noticed that. And then, I never had much confidence. But every man lacks something.” And thus do we excuse our failures, by admitting them.

“Oh,” and Johnny smiled, “I guess it’s funny that it’s so hard for a father to speak. Maybe my own father found it so. Maybe that’s why he never did. But I’m going to say just once what I mean. And what I mean to say, Peter, is that—I love you.”

“I would tell you, Peter, never to mind what people say. People can never know the heart of another.”

“Well, then. To be kind is to try to remove obstacles in the way of those who love or need you.”

but you do wonder sometimes if people are what you think they are, or if you only think that they are and they are what they are and not what you think.

In other words, he knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.

For some miles, the Governor was silent, considering the remarkable failure of people to enjoy each other, or even to communicate.

The worst of it, they couldn’t face the fact that their day was over, over and done.

Take what I’ve got. You’ve been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he’d felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.

But Phil knew, God knows he knew, what it was to be a pariah, and he had loathed the world, should it loathe him first.

Deliver my soul from the sword, My darling from the power of the dog.

It is a brilliant and tough book and belongs on the shelf of hard-eyed western fiction along with Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Track of the Cat, Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine.