The Legend of Ole Black

He killed an unkillable tree.

I will never have another dog because no dog could ever compare to the Legend of Ole Black.

Blacky was a Walmart puppy. 2002. Half lab. Half chow. One hundred percent menace.

My brother named him. Don’t worry, he’s just unoriginal. If the dog had been white, he’d have been Snowy. Brown? Brownie. The dog was black, therefore: Blacky.

When Blacky was about six months old, my dad hated him. The dog was wild. Destructive. Impossible. To be fair to my dad, he wasn’t cruel. He was overwhelmed. We were teenagers who desperately wanted a dog, but were way more interested in being with our friends than helping take care of an unhinged Walmart puppy with criminal tendencies.

So one day, my dad dumped him somewhere out in the country. I know. Horrible. Shameful. Fully acknowledged.

Two weeks later, my dad opened the front door to leave for work and Blacky was laying on the porch like nothing had happened.

My dad immediately started cussing. Loud enough to wake up the whole house.

“The fucking dog came back!”

And honestly? I imagine my dad spent that entire workday focused on one thing: getting rid of Blacky again the second he got home.

So he did. This time, he drove him two counties away.

A month later?

That damn dog came back.

At that point, the universe had spoken.

And when I tell you my dad and Blacky bonded after that, I mean it was unbreakable. My dad saw himself in that dog. Crazy. Intense. Hardheaded. Impossible to contain. Survived everything. Kept coming home anyway.

That dog knew no limits. He wasn’t fixed. Couldn’t be contained. Half the time he wasn’t even home because he was out running with what I can only describe as a neighborhood dog gang in Commerce, Oklahoma.

The police knew Blacky. The neighbors knew Blacky. Farmers definitely knew Blacky, which probably explains the buckshot we once had removed from his ass. That dog moved through town like local folklore.

Sometimes he’d disappear for weeks and we’d have to stand in the yard begging his stubborn ass to come back into the house while bribing him with sliced cheese and ham bones like hostage negotiators.

He’d disappear for days and come back cut up, limping, filthy, smelling like creek water and bad decisions. The amount of times we had to drag that dog to the vet to get stitched up or patched back together is honestly unbelievable. And we did. Every single time. If he had an injury we knew we couldn’t handle ourselves, it was immediately: vet. We’d nurse him back to health and he’d do it all over again.

Hit by cars. Ice storms. Fights. God knows what else.

Tell me how this fucking dog lived long enough to die of old age.

He loved butt rubs and would slide himself along couches and walls rubbing his own ass like some kind of possessed Roomba. Blacky had the fluffy curled chow tail too. Curled up over his back like a signature. Unfortunately, this also meant his asshole was constantly on display for the entire world to see. He hated baths, but had absolutely no issue coming home caked in mud. And for reasons known only to him and God, he absolutely hated kids on bikes.

He always brought girlfriends home. Always.

Bob Barker is probably rolling in his grave, but I KNOW without a doubt Blacky fathered generations of chaos across northeastern Oklahoma.

Blacky was my dad’s dog, but he was mine in a different way.

You know the difference between a girl bond and a boy bond?

My dad and Blacky had mutual respect. Me and Blacky? That dog knew my soul.

If my dad was yelling at me, Blacky’s back was against me and his eyes were on my dad. Ready to go if he needed to.

And when it was just me in the house, Blacky could usually be found sprawled across my bedroom floor while I watched scary movies and ate Cheez-Its.

I didn’t cry over boys. Life was heavier than that.

And Blacky would just lay there beside me while I cried into his fur.

Steady. Unmoving. Like it was his job.

There was a terrible ice storm that hit the Midwest in 2007. We lost power for what felt like forever. We were poor. We didn’t have generators.

One of our neighbors did, though, and they ran an extension cord over so we could at least have a light in the kitchen. That became the central hub of the house.

Meanwhile, my brother’s dumb ass was warm in OKC.

I was 20. I dragged my mattress into the warmest part of the house and built me and my smelly dog a whole fort out of blankets and couch cushions while the world outside froze solid.

No power. No heat. Just me and my dog sharing warmth in the dark.

And honestly? I disappeared into my imagination through the entire ordeal. In my head, it wasn’t poverty or survival. It was just a girl and her dog surviving Snowpocalypse together.

It’s one of the memories that hurts the most now. Not because it was good. Not because life was easy. But because we were together. My crazy parents. My crazy dog. Me. Still inside the same story.

He was so imperfect that he matched us perfectly. Maybe he chose us because no other family could handle him. Outlaw dog for an outlaw family.

I think what I loved most about Blacky is that he kept choosing us.

The dumps. His second life as some kind of wilderness warden. The fights. The roaming. He always came home.

Blacky died in his sleep at 16 years old. Curled up at the foot of my dad’s bed beside his favorite space heater.

An ordinary death for an extraordinary dog. Honestly, maybe that was the most extraordinary thing about him.

And now he’s buried under the evergreen tree he killed by chewing all the branches off.

Feels right.