Beware of Dogs

“I don’t know about you, ol’ buddy,” Rodney Bowman says, "but I ain’t lookin’ forward to school one bit!”

I don’t say anything. I give him a nod. Rodney has been my friend for ten years. He should know how much I hate school.

We’re walking along South Hill Road, passing out revival flyers for our church. Pastor Laws dropped us off and went to the end of the road, where he and my father will do the same chore that Rodney and I are doing until we meet somewhere in the middle. It’s not a bad job. All we have to do is hand people a flyer, tell them who we are and tell them how glad we will be if they show up to hear Evangelist EJ Easybuck (yeah, that’s his real name).

It isn’t a bad job at all, but it’s almost as hot this afternoon as the lake of fire that I’m sure that Brother Easybuck will warn us about in his sermons! I feel sweat on my arms and chest and I’m afraid that it will start soaking my shirt before long. It wouldn’t look too good if we invited folk to our church in sweat stained clothes!

The houses are pretty sparse on this road, but I see one just a few hundred feet down the road. It’s an old house, probably two bedrooms, with asbestos siding and a tin roof. There’s a large shrub in the front yard.

“Your turn to talk on this one,” I remind Rodney. We take turns making the sales pitch for our revival meeting to the folks.

He nods. I'm shy and usually very quiet. Rodney is a talker and never meets a stranger.

As we get closer to the house, it’s pretty obvious that these folks don’t have air conditioning. The front door and windows are open. There’s a fan in one of the windows and I can hear Marty Brenneman calling a Reds game from a radio inside the house. The Reds are trailing St. Louis, 5-2.

“Sounds like another loss for the Little Red Machine,” Rodney says as he rolls his eyes. We both root for Cincinnati, in spite of the fact that they have fallen on hard times in the last few years.

We walk into the front yard of the house. We’re almost to the front porch when we hear a man’s voice coming through the front window. Whoever he is, he sounds like a guilty conscience.

“That dawg,” the voice wails, “is gonna eat them boys alive!”

The dog is a German Shepherd. He walks around the house and growls. It’s one of those growls that comes from deep inside of the animal.

Rodney stops in his tracks. He has a pale complexion and freckles to go along with his red hair and he looks even paler than he usually does, like the blood just drained out of his face.

He responds to the voice from inside the house. His thin, tenor voice goes up an octave and he develops a stutter.

“D-d-does the d-d-dog b-bite, sir?” he asks, sounding frail and cowardly.

A tall, tanned young man, probably a few years older than Rodney and I, bursts through the front door, bounds off of the front porch and grabs the dog by it’s collar. He drags the dog around the house and out of sight.

A few seconds later, a tall, scarecrow of a man clambers out of the house and onto the front porch. He’s probably in his early 70’s, silver crew cut hair, big overalls with no shirt or shoes.

“You boys just got real lucky!” he says in that guilty conscience voice of his. “That there dog is a killer and he’d have bit your heads off given half a chance! Good thing my grandson was here to pull him off! Didn’t you boys see the sign?”

“Didn’t see no sign!” Rodney responded. His hands and voice were trembling.

The old man stomps over to the shrub in the front yard. He starts pushing the branches of the plant around. Eventually, we see a “Beware of the Dog” sign. Evidently, he had placed the sign before planting the shrub and the shrub had grown around the sign.

“Now, what did you young fellers want?” he asks.

Rodney stammers his way through an invitation to our meeting and hands the old man a flyer. He looks at the paper and shakes his head.

“I ain’t much on religion, boys, but if I reckon as dangerous as you two live, you’d do real well to trust in the good Lord!”

“Thanks for your time, sir,” Rodney says, his voice has almost dropped to the ordinary pitch.

With that, we leave the yard and continue walking down the road. As soon as we’re out of earshot of the old man, Rodney says, “Well, I bet he won’t be coming to the revival, Scotty!”

I shake my head and laugh.

“I can’t believe you didn’t see that sign, Rodney!”

“It was hidden in plain sight,” Rodney says, shaking his head. At that moment, we see Pastor Laws’ old van coming down the road toward us. The van comes to a stop. I open the door, we climb into the vehicle and have a seat.

“How did it go, boys?” Dad asks. He is riding shotgun and the preacher is driving. Dad and the preacher are similar to Rodney and I. They've been friends since they were little boys. Dad is a quiet person while the preacher is loud and outgoing. We're all Baptists, but people say that Pastor Laws would be better suited to being a Pentecostal.

Rodney blurts out the entire story about our encounter with the elderly man and his dog.

Pastor Laws laughs at the end of the tale. He reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a New Testament, and hands it to Dad.

“Read Phillipians 3:2, Brother Roy,” he says to Dad. I think these boys have given me an idea for my Sunday Sermon.”

Dad finds the text in the Bible and chuckles. He reads aloud,

“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision."

“What’s the concision?” Rodney asks.

“It don’t matter much,” I tell him. “It couldn’t be worse than a mean German Shepherd!”