Part 1 – What the Rain Didn’t Wash Away
They shot my dog on a Sunday morning, and I still brought in the harvest that year.
People don’t ask much after a line like that.
They shift in their chairs, maybe offer a grunt, and go quiet. But that’s how the world works out here. No parade for pain. No committee for heartbreak. Just dirt, wind, and the weight of things you carry whether you want to or not.
My name’s Luke Harper. I’m forty-two years old and I run what’s left of my daddy’s farm, ten miles outside Ash Grove, Missouri. Been doing it since I could walk. We had Angus cattle back then. Rows of soybeans. Corn as high as a man’s shoulders come July.
And we had Hank.
Hank was a mutt. Big head, floppy ear, scar over one eye from a fight he didn’t start. He came limping onto the property one fall day after a storm in ‘09. Left front leg hung crooked like a busted broom handle. You could tell he’d been hurt bad—maybe car, maybe worse.
I gave him a bucket of water and a fried egg. He never left.
That first winter with Hank, the barn roof caved in during an ice storm. I was broke, insurance didn’t cover a damn thing, and I remember standing out there in the sleet, hands numb, trying to pull the boards down before the whole thing collapsed.
Hank stood beside me. Just stood. That bum leg didn’t stop him. He didn’t bark. Didn’t whine. He just watched me like he was waiting for orders that never came.
We got through it.
We always got through it.
Now I’m not what you’d call a sentimental man. Grew up with calluses on my hands and silence in my house. Dad was the kind of man who believed emotions were for Sunday sermons and weak whiskey. He taught me to work, to sweat, to keep my mouth shut unless something needed saying.
But Hank? That damn dog taught me something different.
He’d sleep by the back door every night, even in July when the air was thick as stew. Wouldn’t touch a biscuit unless I said his name. When storms rolled in, he’d nudge my hand with that crooked snout like he could smell fear on me.
And when Mama died in ‘13, it was Hank who climbed into bed with me. Not a word. Just warmth.
I didn’t cry. Not even at the funeral. But I held onto that dog like he was stitched to my ribs.
By 2020, things got hard again.
Corn prices were trash. The irrigation pump needed replacing. And I’d started limping too—not just from age, but from the kind of tired that settles in your bones like mold. The kind of tired you can’t sleep off.
That’s when the new developer showed up. City boy with polished boots and a drone he flew over our fields like he owned the damn sky. Said they were buying land for a solar farm. Promised jobs, money, “green growth.”
I told him to shove it.
That land wasn’t just dirt. It was Daddy’s sweat, Mama’s canned peaches, my first kiss under the silo light, and the footprints of every Harper who’d ever loved something more than they could explain.
He didn’t get it.
They never do.
The trouble started when Hank went after one of their trucks.
He never liked engines. Something about the sound set him off. But that day he must’ve snapped—ran after it full speed, barking like the old Hank I hadn’t seen in years.
Driver swerved. Stopped. Got out shouting.
I came running. Saw Hank lying there, breathing hard, leg twisted under him worse than before.
They said he was aggressive. Said they had “rights.” Said it was “policy.”
The sheriff looked at me like he didn’t want to be there. But he was.
They shot Hank before I could even say no.
Right there, on the dirt road between the soybean rows.
I buried him by the oak tree out back. Same spot Daddy buried his coonhounds in the ’70s. Used a spade instead of the John Deere. Felt more proper that way.
The ground was hard. My knees gave out twice. But I kept digging.
And when it was done, I sat there until the moon rose.
Didn’t go inside. Didn’t eat.
Just sat.
Because something about that silence felt more like prayer than anything I’d said in church.
Folks think farming is about crops and cattle. It’s not. It’s about loss.
You lose seasons. You lose rain. You lose parts of yourself every year, and somehow convince what’s left to keep going.
So I did.
I fixed the pump. I patched the barn roof. I worked sunrise to nightfall with no one but my shadow and the wind for company.
And that harvest?
It was the best I’d had in ten years.
Corn tall and straight. Beans thick in the pod. Even the old apple tree by the fence gave me two buckets full for the first time since Mama passed.
I stood in that field, dirt under my nails, sweat on my back, and I swear I could feel Hank beside me.
Not like a ghost. Nothing spooky like that.
Just… something solid. Like a memory that still breathes.
Now it’s 2025.
They got their solar farm three miles down the road. Big black panels stretching over what used to be Milo Garrison’s hayfield.
People say it’s progress.
Maybe it is.
But I still get up at five. Still check the fences. Still whistle when I walk the rows, even though no one’s there to come running.
The house is quieter now.
But the oak tree out back? That’s where I sit most evenings. With my thermos of coffee and a folding chair that creaks like an old friend.
I talk to Hank sometimes.
Not out loud. Not in that crazy way.
Just… in the way only someone who’s loved a dog like that understands.
You don’t ever really own a dog like Hank. He owns part of you. The part that keeps standing when everything else falls down.
And no matter what else life took—jobs, family, time—I kept that part.
The part the rain didn’t wash away.
The part that still knows how to love something crooked, scarred, and loyal.
Just like me.
