PART 2
I called 911 while I ran. The nearest fire station was fourteen miles away.
Fourteen miles. On gravel roads. In the middle of the night.
Those babies didn’t have that long.
I ran up the porch steps and pulled on the front door. Locked. Vernon always locked it.
I beat on it with my fists.
“Vernon! VERNON! Wake up!”
Nothing.
I ran around to the back of the house. The kitchen door was locked too. Old, heavy oak. I threw my shoulder against it. It didn’t move. I’m sixty-seven years old. I didn’t have the strength.
Then Moses pushed past me.
He walked right up to that back door, turned around, and kicked it with both of his back legs.
Once. The frame cracked.
Twice. The door flew open and crashed against the wall.
I’ll never forget it as long as I live.
Smoke poured out. I pulled my nightgown over my mouth and went in.
The fire was in the living room. An old extension cord behind the TV had sparked and caught the curtains. Vernon was in his recliner, right next to it. He wasn’t moving.
I grabbed him under the arms and pulled. He’s a big man. I don’t know how I did it. I dragged him through the kitchen and out onto the grass.
He started coughing. He was alive.
Then I ran back in and up the stairs.
Abel and Sunny were in the back bedroom, hiding under the bed, holding each other. Abel had put a wet T-shirt over his little sister’s face, just like they taught him at school.
“Come on, babies. Hold my hand. Don’t let go.”
We made it down the stairs and out the back door just as the living room ceiling started to fall.
The fire trucks arrived twenty minutes later.
By then, the downstairs was gone.
We sat on the grass in the dark, watching. Me, in my sooty nightgown. Vernon, wrapped in a blanket, with an oxygen mask over his face. The kids in my lap.
And Moses, standing right next to us, his broken chain still hanging from his neck.
When the paramedics finished checking him, Vernon pulled off the oxygen mask.
He looked at me for a long time. Then at the donkey.
“I left him with no water,” he whispered. “I put a gun on you. And you both came back for me.”
He started to cry. A seventy-year-old man who never waved at anybody, crying on the grass.
“I’m sorry, Bev,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Vernon and the kids stayed with me while his house was rebuilt. Four months.
It turned out he wasn’t cruel. He was drowning. His wife had died four years earlier. His daughter was overseas. He didn’t know how to take care of two children and a farm by himself, and he was too proud to ask anyone for help.
So the church ladies brought casseroles. And this time, he said thank you.
When his new house was finished, Vernon walked over to my porch with a piece of paper.
It was Moses’s bill of sale.
He’d signed it over to me.
“He’s yours,” Vernon said. “He always was, really.”
Then he and Abel built a gate in the fence between our two farms.
Now Abel and Sunny come through it every morning before school.
They bring a bag of apples.
And Moses is always waiting.
THE END.
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Kindness given to an animal is never wasted. Sometimes it’s the very thing that comes back to save us.
Do you believe animals know who loves them? Tell us in the replies.