During all this time of thwarting cockroaches, outlawing, and killing blackbirds, we had a family dog named King. Now I know that everyone says this about their dogs, but King was the best dog a family could ever hope for. He was a huge Doberman that looked like he could eat you whole, but in reality, King would never hurt anyone or anything. He was beautiful, he was faithful, and above all else, he was as loving as he was loved.

Unfortunately, some of us loved King more than others. I know that I would have given up some of my goose gumbo to keep King healthy, but my dad didn’t agree. And when you’re dealing with a macho man, a man’s man, a kid’s nightmare, there’s nothing that you can do but go along with what the master says.

My dad owned us as much as he owned the dog, so the day that he said we couldn’t afford to feed King any more was the day that we all had to say our mental goodbyes. Despite what anybody said and despite what anybody felt, my dad put his foot down. We couldn’t waste any more of our food on a dog.

As days of hunger turned into weeks of starvation, we all watched as King withered away into nothing. His ribs started to show through his unhealthy looking coat and before we knew it, he was nothing but skin and bones. Our previously grand Doberman became a living skeleton. And even though we had the means to do something, we still couldn’t save him.

Being the great dog that he was, King never lashed out at any of us or tried to leave. He never begged, he never whined, and he never let on to how miserable he was. Of course, we knew he was miserable. That was plainly visible. But still, King loved us as if we were the greatest owners in the world — a fact that makes this situation even more haunting.

One day King went inside his dog house and he never came back out. At that point, he was barely a dog anymore; he was nothing more than a fur covered skeleton. King was officially dead and we all knew that we could have saved him at any time.

As was usually the case with my dad, he didn’t show any remorse. In fact, he didn’t show any emotion at all. He just grumbled that we had to get rid of the body. And of course the ‘we’ that he referred to didn’t include him. So we kids crawled into King’s house and removed his corpse. Then we threw away what was left of our dog, our companion, and our best friend.

On that day, I think I threw away whatever might have been left of any respect I would ever have for my dad, too. But as time would tell, King was not the only thing that my father would destroy from the inside out.

Excerpted from "Freedom’s Rein" by Shane Sellers. Copyright 2008 Shane Sellers. Reprinted with permission from Freedom's Rein LLC. All rights reserved.

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