Cherished (3 page)

John and I went to Australia for a couple of weeks. John said later he'd said good-bye to Isha, but I left without a thought. Things were the way they were, just swell. Nothing else crossed my mind. Several days passed before we even got in touch with Clara, who was taking care of the house with Chris. They had woken up one morning to find Isha really ill. Had gone down to the general store to get some ground meat for nourishment. It was one of those monumental August-in-Topanga days — about 120 degrees. Out by the side of the house, in the dirt, Isha died in Clara's arms.

Clara and Chris dug a hole in the brick-hard ground out on the crescent, wrapped Isha in an afghan that had belonged to Lisa's old boyfriend, a Vietnam vet, and covered the grave with large flat stones to keep the coyotes away. Then they called Lisa, who was heartbroken. In a few minutes, Lisa called back. “Are you sure that dog's dead?” she asked. And then, in a few more minutes, the phone rang again: Chris picked up this time, and Lisa impersonated me. “This is Carolyn See. I'm calling about my dog, Isha. Are you sure she's OK?” And finally, one last call to Clara: “FYI, Clara, you know mom and John have only been gone a few days. And then the neighbors see you and your boyfriend digging a shallow grave out on the point. Don't you think they'd be justified in calling the cops?”

Just Lisa, bopping Isha's head in the last way she knew, the sound of a champagne cork opening at a party that's already stopped.

I
'm preparing for the first meeting of my creative writing class this semester. What I've been doing so far this morning is selecting a group of quotes I want to hand out. The quotes, from famous writers, are about why we write and what the real subjects of writing should be. They offer tips about the best way to get emotion into your fiction and poetry, mostly, it seems, by not looking directly at it.

Every hour or so, I take a break from quote harvesting and go out to the garage. Our sixteen-year-old cat is curled on a blanket out there. He has an awkward cast on one of his hind legs. I broke the cat's leg three days ago when I accidentally backed over him in my car. The cat is deaf, or nearly so. He was sleeping under the car and must not have heard it crank. I felt the little bump of the wheel going over his leg and then saw him limp away, dragging one useless leg.

James Merrill says, “You hardly ever need to
state
your feelings. The point is to feel and keep the eyes open. Then what you feel is expressed, is mimed back at you by the scene.”

After the first day in the cast, the cat — his name is General Sterling Price, after a cat in a John Wayne movie — did not move off his blanket. I have to put his food on a little paper plate and place it near his head. He eats what he can reach without getting up and then pulls the plate closer with one paw. Once I came out and he was asleep with his head in the plate.

Charles Wright says, “What you have to say — though ultimately all-important — in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.”

On the day I broke the cat's leg, my fourteen-year-old son said, “This cat has been with us for all my life.” Though he said it in a surprised tone, as if he'd just realized that fact, I thought, thanks, that's something I really needed to hear.

Before the accident, The General — for some reason we always referred to him with the article — was looking elderly. He had lost weight and was finicky about what he ate. Like I said, he had mostly lost his hearing, and his eyesight wasn't great. A little dog in our neighborhood would sometimes escape from his fence and come to bark at The General. The General would be asleep in his favorite spot and the dog would come up behind and let go a tremendous chorus of soprano barking. The General would continue to sleep peacefully.

“All you need is one emotion and four walls for a short
story,” says Willa Cather.

The General doesn't like it in the garage. He's an outdoor cat. The first day he was in the garage, he would drag himself toward the door when I opened it to get the car out. In his youth, he was a real fighter, a night prowler. I know for a fact that he once tangled with a raccoon and held his own. He would slink in mornings with patches of fur missing or a gash in his shoulder. His ears are ragged as old battle flags.

Even as a kitten, The General was the bold sort. One Saturday afternoon when we had had him for only about two weeks, I was lying in a hammock in our backyard. The General, just a little orange rag of a thing, was chasing down grasshoppers. I think I dozed for a bit. Then I heard The General's plaintive meowing. At first, I couldn't locate him. Then I saw him perched on a limb of the pine that held up one end of the hammock. He was twenty, thirty feet off the ground.

I didn't have a ladder that long. The trunk of the tree was limbless nearly up to where The General was stranded. He was starting to panic, and so was I. I dashed into the house and grabbed a pillow from our bed. I got back just in time to see the kitten hanging by his forepaws on the limb. His claws lost their grip, and I caught him in the pillow, a Hail Mary for sure. He seemed unfazed and went back to stalking grasshoppers.

Just now I had to clean up a place in the garage where he crawled off the blanket and urinated.

“It begins with a character usually,” William Faulkner says. “Once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil [or
pillow] trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

When my son was an infant, The General, when we weren't looking, got into his crib and peed on his head. I think the cat was feeling ignored, and probably territorial with this new animal. Though neutered, The General always remained a tom, aggressive, combative. When we played the catch-the-string game, I would suddenly find him halfway up my arm, his claws fastened to the sleeve of my shirt. He played rough and would quickly lay flat his ears and yowl threateningly. He was a biter. Given all that, and his dislike of our newborn, The General became a full-time outdoor cat.

“A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality,” according to Flannery O'Connor.

We moved from our small starter home when The General was about four years old. He had been curious about all the boxes and commotion of moving, but curious only in the offhand way of cats, sniffing a crate of books or climbing through the maze of a disassembled bed. I had devised a plan for how we would move him. He would be the last thing to go. When we had everything ready at the new place, I put him in a cardboard box. Except for his first ride to our house as a tiny kitten, he'd never been in a car before, because we had a vet who would actually make house calls (it was his marketing pitch). So, I got The General in the box and we went to the new house, some eight to ten miles away.

“A poem is one of the few opportunities you have to say two things at once,” according to Robert Frost. “For me the
initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. No surprises for the poet, no surprises for the reader.”

After three days, The General disappeared. Not even the old trick we had of shaking the treat box would bring him running. We shook the treat box all over our new neighborhood. We put up signs and offered a reward. We called “Gennnnneral” as we walked, like frightened soldiers calling for their leader. But to no avail.

The next week the people we had sold our old house to called. “Didn't you have a big orange cat?” the man wanted to know. “Yes,” I said.

“Well, he's here. He's hanging around in the shrubs.” The General had not been able to see the route we took to the new house. He would have had to cross a sizable creek, railroad tracks, and a half-dozen busy roads to get home. How he did it I will never know. I retrieved him, and he decided that the new place was home.

The General has pretty much stopped drinking. He'll lap up a little milk if I put the bowl under his chin. The broken leg has developed an infection. When I took him in for the cast, the vet said that his kidneys were failing. He hasn't moved off the blanket for two days, other than to try to pull clear of it to relieve himself. I know how this story is going to end. Pretty soon, I've got to decide when it will end. The General's story will be concluded, but it won't be finished. That may be the truest thing about a story. Even when it's over, it's not over.

L
ast night I dreamed I placed a classified ad. “New home needed for our cattle dog, Mercy.” A kid came over sporting a backward baseball cap and baggy shorts, his body language spastic. “Totally!” he belted. “Totally! I love dogs! I'll take her!” And before I could hand her over — the canine love of my life, her smell like bark-o-mulch and oil, her rounded forehead and puppy eyes — I woke up with a start.

“That is a horrible dream,” said my boyfriend, Don. He looked at me ruefully, judgmentally, as if I'd actually done it, given away the one being that reliably gave us joy.

The dream could have been fueled by the conference I'd returned from the night before. My friend Jim lost his dog while he was there. His daughter had called him at six am, crying. “My dog died,” he kept saying. And people stopped briefly to tilt their heads and make sorry eyes. But nobody grabbed him in a feverish embrace or wept. I imagined losing our Mercy, and a cold pang went through me. “I'm so sorry,” I said. “I don't know how we'd manage if we lost our dog.” I must have looked horrified, because Jim smiled at me.

“You guys are really attached to Mercy, aren't you?” he said as we rode the escalator down through a light-filled convention center.

“We don't have kids,” I said.

“Yeah, before we had kids I guess we were really attached to our dogs, too.”

Or maybe the dream hurled itself from deeper in my subconscious. Before I was born, my parents had a vizsla, Major. Our refrigerator still honors a picture of him, his strong, athletic build; muscles that rippled when he ran; brick red coat; and golden eyes. My mother returned from her teaching job each afternoon to throw a ball into a field for him, over and over and over — the dog that, like Mercy, was supposed to get her past the heartache of moving from Brooklyn to Nashville, to Salt Lake City, to Eugene. The dog galloped and returned, galloped and returned, until his eyes grew grateful, his body leaden, and he and my mother would retire to the brown velvet sofa.

Then I was born, and the dog's life changed. One day, when I was two, I ran into my bedroom squawking, holding a box of Cheerios in my hand. Major, asleep under my crib, startled awake and, in a flash, ripped the skin under my eye. I have no memory of this, but all my baby pictures prove it — that ugly plum-colored scar underlining my eye socket.

“It wasn't a difficult decision,” my mom said. They took Major to the vet that day and put him to sleep.

But I've always wondered about it, the actual scene. Something about my mother's lack of emotion struck me, even as a kid, as inauthentic. How could it not have been difficult, traumatic, to lose the dog that had been their baby for so many years? And I wondered, though I never asked, if she stayed with Major when they injected the fluid. Did he look at her with those trusting golden eyes as he grew strangely sleepy?

Or the dream is an amalgam, taken partly from these cues, and partly from another story about a childhood dog. A story I don't really want to revisit, even for the time it will take to write an essay. It's a story that requires a bit of history.

My mother died after a nine-year illness — and after she died, I threw myself, deeply shocked and exhausted, into work. I wrote in the mornings, and in the afternoons, six days a week, I taught. Composition, vocabulary building, literature, fiction writing, and memoir writing. In a short time, I parlayed this frenzy of activity into a book deal and a tenure-track teaching job in Santa Fe, New Mexico.