Brad was Brad Watson’s middle name. The name he was supposed to go by was Wilton. Wilton Watson.
What a mouthful. What could such a name portend for a white Mississippian born in the summer of 1955? Well, anything could happen and some things even did. He didn’t dream of becoming a writer, certainly.
A presence on stage or screen perhaps. He was good-looking, a bit roguish. He had charm, that Southern charm.
He fathered a child and got married when he was but a junior in high school. It seemed he was always getting married and fathering a son and getting divorced, but that happened only twice. Then suddenly he was forty and had written a wonderful book, , a collection of stories.
Each one excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild. And within each, its blazing core, its irreducible essence, was a dog—a memorable, tragic, honorable, thoroughly realized dog. “A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned,” Watson states quite correctly.
“He is who he is and his only task is to assert this.” Watson’s dogs are close to divine, his people—strange, piteous, futile, and fickle things—hardly. In the title story, a wife euthanizes her faithless husband’s dog Spike, just to be mean of course, but compounds the evil by confessing that after the fatal injection she begged the dog not to die, to come back to her, to them, the marriage.
Only occasionally does a human rise to the level of redemption, achieve that state of faithful abide, that is a do.
