Black Dog Rising

A piece of the soul has a hurt, not necessarily from something done to it or by it but a hurt nonetheless, something ever in need of satisfaction. It’s a satisfaction, as John learned, that ought never to be made, and from time to time, when the world becomes a black place, is. And when it is, when the ‘black dog,’ as he put it, has had its way, there doesn’t seem to be much left of the person; the body and soul are but a discarded shell, a testament only to the beast’s emergence and nothing more. John knew it all too well, whether in people he scarred, a broken marriage, or dependence on drugs; it never changed, and it broke lives apart.

And the mind will tend from time to time to take you to another place, it wants to find a place away from things, a place that somehow also knows the madness that’s been spoken out into the world; yet in its seeming sanctuary this place is just another hell in which John or anyone else, desperate and helpless, can only stop, watch, and wait.

The first such place John came to know was the old smoke house his family used to preserve their meat; without the luxury of refrigeration it was all one had. The musky scent of hickory smoke, and the whole hodge-podge of assorted meats that had gone through there and become so familiar to John in his childhood, a testament in its own way to the rhythms and staples of family life, changed forever on one particularly dark day of his youth. When his Daddy, grim and strange, brought young John out to the smoke house and revealed the content of a drenched paper bag, and there in what he saw, the bloody ruins of his older brother Jack’s clothes, John’s life, and the smoke house became something else—they merged into a surreal reality where one could see, even touch, the chaos outside, and nonetheless hide away, think, and mostly cry. Why it was that his Daddy chose the smoke house, and this particular way of telling the boy of Jack’s fatal accident are questions that can’t really be answered. But in truth, something like that wouldn’t really surprise John, nor would he look at it as some form of paternal malice; he knew all he needed: the world had lost its reason, a 14 year old boy was taken, and now his Daddy, when the black dog had come to have its way, had to find a place to go, and he found the smoke house, if just for a moment to weep.

It wouldn’t be right to assume, however, that Jack’s death is what gave lead to John’s own black dog in later years; that wouldn’t be fair to either of them. If anything, Jack only became more of a guiding presence for his brother. And though Jack was always there, John would still in time to come visit places not unlike the smoke house, and not for reasons that can always be defined. Despite the ever present voice of conscience in his older brother, there would still be a hurt in the soul, and John’s personal history is riddled with moments of opening that pain and letting the power of destruction find its course through his life.

The particular points of all the details were never really important to Cash, he never thought much of recounting the horrors of his struggles blow by blow, drug by drug, person by broken soul. And the life of Cash as well tells us more than a story of afflictions, of a frustrated soul who knew his moral measure would time and again be disregarded in various descents into hell. From the story of John’s life and his many troubles is revealed that it takes more than moral consciousness to allow a man to stand up and carry on, that in each person perhaps there is a unique light that inspires us in the grip of total darkness, inspires us to keep moving and emerge again into the world, back with confidence to that place where the black dog can turn us into instruments of destruction, but where our light, as an angel of good will, can aid us in being instruments of life. And as far as John is concerned, we know that angelic light was June Carter, the woman you can only call his soul mate, who was to become his wife, and balance of life.

Yet life with his angel was still no magnificent fairy tale; the beast inside never left John up till the day he died, and on occasion still liked to make him helpless, open up a hurt and take him out to the middle of no where to drink and get high for days, maybe weeks, at a time.

And at some point, just a year before he finally married June, the deception and ruin of his own beast had become too much—at six foot one, and just 150 pounds, John was unable to face an audience, his loved ones, and his God, and he knew it all had to come to a close. He took his jeep out to the wilderness along the Tennessee river into the Nickajack cave. There he knew of a seeming endless system of caves that stretched out for miles, and there he planned to get lost in the darkness of their expanse and find his grave, if only to find a moment’s rest from all the torment done by that dog he couldn’t keep in. He would later recount: he had crawled on through a particular channel for hours until his flash light burned out, and he found the total lack of light appropriate for the moment he had designed. Only against his own will, and better judgment, the light kept shining through him, as he lay there waiting in the black embrace of the cave for God to take him, he was somehow told to keep moving. He had no idea why, or even how to escape this tomb he’d constructed, but his heart nonetheless felt the urge to move. In a time without measure he continued to crawl and found the crisp touch of earth’s breath against his face. There came a light and a way out, and eventually when he emerged from the complete absence of light and reality, he knew not where he was, but for reasons that cannot be explained he had found June there waiting for him, though she was supposed to be in California. His angel had known that he needed her light, and somehow, the very hope of that light, now fulfilled, was all that could have, and did draw John out from the depths of Hell.

In years to come, with time to heal, his angel kept him strong. But it hurts all the same, the soul would still cry out in that pain, and when history’s nightmare became too vivid, it would remind John everyday how good the drugs felt, or how much easier things are off in your camper consuming death so you don’t have to face the living. Wounds that deep are bound to leave scars and tug at you here and there as healing is not always one to forget. The strength to face his itch June could give him, but only John could look into the face of that black dog hollering within. In the end, he knew in some way there would always be a part of him wondering what unholy thing waits beyond the threshold of that dark musky place echoing in his daddy’s tears. And he knew if he was to move on through he’d have to tame that damn hound with Jack’s words. John alone would have to bear his dark responsibility on his back, and he did so by delivering his life over to a grace that one cannot fully comprehend. The hurt’s never gonna go away, and the same daily battle must be fought and won. Ultimately John could endure it, because when evening would come and halt this session of violence, when he and Jack had done all they could, there was his June, his light, his spoils of victory.