📍 Part 8: “The Man Who Waited”
The storm passed in the night, but Blake didn’t towel off.
He sat on the porch, soaked through, his coffee cup long forgotten beside him. His boots were caked in mud, his shoulders damp and unmoving. The rain had run down his arms, over the letters folded in his shirt pocket, and onto the wood beneath him like the floor itself was remembering something.
He stared at the dogwood tree.
Still young, still growing.
But already it leaned ever so slightly toward the house—like the old one had before it.
“Gonna outlive me, aren’t you?” he muttered.
The tree didn’t answer.
But the breeze that passed through its leaves sounded just like breathing.
Blake rarely left the house now.
Not because he was frail. Not exactly. He could still walk the trail behind the shed, still reach the mailbox without panting. He still fed the birds and checked the fence post where he’d once buried a broken compass and two pieces of chocolate from a 1970 ration kit.
No, it wasn’t weakness keeping him in.
It was that everything he needed was here now.
The tree.
The letters.
The silence.
And sometimes—only sometimes—the feeling that Buddy’s paws still circled the porch three times before curling up near the screen door, just like he used to do in the jungle.
He kept the tin on the nightstand.
Sometimes he opened it. Sometimes he didn’t.
But it was there, always—weighty in the way that memories are, like a presence that never quite leaves the room.
He’d added more to it over time: a photo of the second Buddy, a copy of the boy’s letter from Minnesota, a short news clipping from the Nashville paper titled “Vietnam Vet Reunites With Memory of Wartime Dog.”
He’d even scribbled a seventh letter. Just a few lines.
“Buddy —
I don’t think you came back to be with me.
I think you came back to help me remember how to be with myself.”
April turned into May.
Then June.
And one evening, just before sundown, Blake heard a knock at the front door.
He blinked.
No one knocked anymore.
He opened it slowly, unsure if he was ready for the world again.
But it wasn’t the world.
It was a boy—maybe twelve, thirteen—with a shaggy black mutt on a frayed leash.
The boy held a letter in his hand.
“You Thomas Blake?” he asked.
“I am.”
The boy thrust out the letter, awkward and brave all at once.
“I’m Cody. My grandpa told me about you. He said you were the man who waited.”
Blake looked down at the dog.
Its ears perked.
Black all over—except for one tan paw.
He knelt slowly, ignoring the crack in his knees.
The dog leaned forward and licked his fingers once, as if in approval.
They sat on the porch.
The boy talked. A lot.
Blake didn’t interrupt.
He let Cody ramble about his dog, Tank, and how he wasn’t brave like Buddy but did bark at thunder. About how he and his grandpa read the letters together every Friday night and sometimes cried and sometimes didn’t know why they were crying.
“My mom says dogs don’t remember,” Cody said. “But I think maybe they remember the important stuff.”
Blake nodded.
“They do.”
As the sun set, Cody pulled something from his backpack.
A red shoelace.
Not dirty. Not old.
But tied in the same knot.
“My grandpa said you’d know what to do with it.”
Blake held it carefully.
He didn’t cry.
Didn’t speak.
Just laid the shoelace across his palm and nodded once.
Like a soldier receiving orders from someone long gone.
That night, he wrote again.
This time, on plain paper.
Typed, but not corrected.
*Buddy —
I think I’ve told your story enough now.
Others are starting to tell it too.
And that’s how things stay alive, isn’t it?
Not in statues or speeches.
But in boys with dogs who sit on porches and listen.I was the one who waited.
But now I think maybe I was the one being waited for.*
He folded the page, added it to the tin, and laid the shoelace on top like a ribbon on a gift.
Then he took the tin to the edge of the yard, where the old tree roots still curled under the soil.
He didn’t bury it.
He just placed it there.
Let the grass have it.
Let the earth decide.
A week later, Linda from across the street found Blake asleep on his porch.
Hands folded in his lap.
Shoes muddy.
A faint smile on his face.
The dogwood beside him rustled gently, though there was no breeze.
Tank, the black mutt with the tan paw, sat faithfully by his side.
Waiting.
The funeral was quiet.
Closed-casket, like Blake would’ve wanted.
The VFW sent flowers.
So did the boy from Minnesota.
So did the boy named Cody.
Linda took in Tank. Said he seemed to prefer her porch to anyone else’s. But every night around dusk, he’d walk to Blake’s yard, sniff the base of the dogwood, and lie there for ten minutes before going home.
The vet in town framed the photo from ’70 and hung it behind her desk.
The museum kept the collar on display.
And the tin?
Well.
It’s still there.
Unless the dog took it with him.