Ever by My Side (15 page)

The cows, all big black-and-white Friesians, were over on the other side of the field, drifting toward a gate that would lead them down a path to the milking parlor and the promise of early-morning relief. Most of them had their heads down, still working on great clumps of grass or chewing the cud until this little black demon appeared, darting among them, whooping it up with her piercing and interminable bark. She made no attempt to bite them and her efforts to round them up were pretty pathetic but she clearly found them irresistible. Despite the disparity in size, Bess’s speed and fly-by barking were making all the cows extremely ner vous.

Dad acted quickly, tethering Whiskey to the trunk of a tree, taking no note of the retriever’s expression, which surely said, “See, it’s not just me!” By the time he had run into the center of the field, with at least a hundred yards between him and Bess, an old forest green Land Rover was pulling up to the gate and from the driver’s seat emerged the farmer, Jack Shepherd. Dad saw him reach into the passenger seat of his vehicle and grab something long and metallic that glinted in the morning light. Even from where Dad stood, he knew exactly what it was. It was written in the way the man carried the object folded across his chest, in the precise expression contorting his ruddy face as he fought down the anger, savoring his power and the certainty that he could make all this fuss instantly disappear. By the time the gate began to swing back on its hinges, farmer Jack Shepherd had two cartridges slipped into each barrel of his shotgun.

“Wait!”

The cows were charging back and forth, bellowing, spraying up mud, fear in their huge brown eyes, and Bess was lapping it up, coursing from one to the next, buzzing and completely unreachable.

“Wait!”

Dad was screaming, breathless, closing in as the man in the distance squared his stance, pulling the stock of the gun tight into his shoulder as the barrel came level, eyes narrowing down the sights.

Bess saw the man, or maybe she felt his presence, the aura of someone who would stand his ground, and this stopped her in her tracks. Dad watched as the man pivoted ever so slightly, focusing on Bess’s chest, ready to fire both barrels, the kill certain to be quick and clean, so long as she stood still.

“You know as well as I do,” said the farmer, his words slightly distorted by his brawny fingers as they slipped inside the trigger guard next to his right cheek. “I’m well within my rights to shoot. Dog off a leash, frightenin’ my cows. No questions asked.”

Maybe it was the exhaustion of the run across the field, or maybe it was fear and the absolute certainty that Jack Shepherd would pull the trigger and walk away, taking his cows off to milking without a second thought. Whatever the reason, my father crumpled at the knees, collapsing to the ground, ready to plead and beg for his dog’s life.

“I know,” said Dad, sounding as though the round had already been fired, as though Bess were already dead. “I know it’s your legal right to do it. But it was an accident. Somehow she slipped her leash. Look. There’s my other dog, tied up to a tree.”

The barrel never moved and neither did Bess, but Dad noticed how a squinting eye relaxed, looked away, followed the direction in which my father was pointing and found a golden retriever tethered in place.

Later Dad told me that in that moment, waiting to hear the
blast, he thought he understood the man with his finger on the trigger. He sensed that any attempt to argue would have been a mistake.

The moment stretched, lingered, reached its silent crescendo, and came to an end, the barrel slowly lowered.

Neither man spoke, but the farmer cracked open the breech of the shotgun, pulled out the shells, and walked back to his truck. Leaving the weapon behind, Mr. Shepherd began herding the cows, compressing them into one corner of the field. This forced Bess to tighten her circles, eventually giving Dad a chance to hurl himself in her direction and grab her.

He didn’t tell her off. He didn’t curse her out. Dad held on tight to her scruff, reattached her leash and turned to Jack Shepherd, giving him the kind of resolute stare that transmits gratitude and a tacit appreciation of a stranger’s gift, a second chance he thought he might not get.

“Sometimes,” said Dad when he arrived home and relayed the story, “ ‘a still tongue makes a wise head.’ ”

I considered him with furrowed brow.

“Did you just steal a line from James Herriot?”

Dad affected outrage that gave way to a smile.

Not that it really mattered. Diplomacy may have saved the day, but this kind of incident could never happen again. This was, after all, farming country, where tolerance of and respect for livestock were mandatory. Bess’s bovine obsession would be a difficult flaw to work around. Once again my father had been made acutely aware of his failings when it came to the appropriate socialization of one of his dogs.

By now, you will have noticed that my connection with Bess and Whiskey was quite different from my connection to Patch. Please
appreciate that I did cherish their place in our family, loved the notion of having dogs (plural) jostling for leashes and open doors, padding around and book-ending me on a sofa, faking toothy snarls and throaty growls, hamming it up as they acted out their pretend dogfights. Their presence reestablished the natural order of things and best of all, these two disparate creatures had slipped in effortlessly, eased our family gracefully back into the world of dogs. At that time of my life, hoping to head off to college, there was a certain solace in knowing a familiar domestic harmony would fill my absence. It was like slipping on a pair of jeans, a wallet in my left-hand pocket, a set of keys in my right, the comforting awareness of a precise personal balance. Whiskey and Bess had become this kind of combination—they felt just right.

In order to study and properly prepare for my final high school examinations I decided to become a total recluse. Though this meant abandoning my friends and our preliminary forays into underage drinking on a Saturday night, in truth I missed out on very little. For the record, in England the legal age for purchasing and/or consuming alcohol is eighteen, and back then no one carried a photo ID. In other words, one’s ability to walk into a pub and order “a pint of your best bitter, my good man” came down to whether or not you
looked
old enough. Rightly or wrongly (obviously wrongly when discussing the dangers of alcohol with my own kids) this “talent” set in when I was just fifteen years old. So, for some time, and long before we could drive (in Britain you cannot begin to learn to drive until you are seventeen), Nigel, myself, and two other “mates,” Simon and Phil, would stroll downtown in order to familiarize ourselves with the effects of hops- and yeast-based beverages. Simon and Phil were friends from our days together as Boy Scouts, an organization we all abandoned pretty much as soon as we discovered girls. And please, I am at pains to point out that by
discovered
I mean
“became aware of” rather than “achieved any measure of familiarity with.” We were all horrendously inept around the opposite sex. Pimples, fashion faux pas, and a slew of dreadful one-liners guaranteed every evening concluded in much the same manner: wandering back to Nigel’s house in order to raid his mother’s refrigerator, watch old horror movies starring Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, and explain away the inadequacies of our earliest attempts at “chasing the birds.”

Now, I think you can appreciate that I wasn’t really giving up all that much to study for my final examinations—the ones that would determine whether I would be accepted to veterinary school or not; the ones that would determine whether my future and my dreams converged. In the midst of my cramming Dad came to me with a proposition.

“We were thinking of taking a short vacation, son. A family vacation, before you go away to college.”

A self-absorbed teenager, fearful of being parted from friends or missing out on some momentous social event, I viewed the offer as an invitation to vacation at a maximum-security prison, with Mum, Dad, and Fiona my chatty cell mates.

“What about the dogs?” I offered, playing to a weakness, rummaging for an excuse.

“I know,” said Dad, “we won’t all fit in our little car but Grandma says she’d be chuffed to look after them.”

“What! Marty will think it’s Christmas—devour Bess, realize he has room for seconds, polish off Whiskey. You know he will.”

“Now, son. Marty’s not the dog he used to be, and besides, you know as well as me, Whiskey and Bess are usually fine around other dogs.”

“But Marty isn’t just another dog. You might as well suggest a sleepover with a canine version of Jack the Ripper. He’ll be munching
on Whiskey’s throat like it’s corn on the cob as fast as you can say ‘jugular’!”

Dad pursed his lips.

“If I didn’t know better I’d think you didn’t want to go.”

I thought about this. We never went on family vacations. If my father wanted to go somewhere requiring more than one tank of gas, if he was prepared to be separated from his dogs, this trip had to be important.

“Where are we going?”

Dad smiled his crooked smile.

“Surprise,” he said. “Just you focus on your studies.”

And I did, drowning in factoids and formulas, devouring textbooks, finally getting my chance to prove I had learned something as I embarked on a series of written examinations testing everything I had studied for the past two years in the subjects of math, chemistry, biology, and physics. And when the proctor said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your pens down” for the last time, I walked home and took off my uniform, and my high school career had officially come to an end. These days I have noticed that Nobel Prize and Academy Award winners have more understated celebrations than most high school graduates, and I don’t mean to sound all “bah, humbug” and crotchety, but back in England, in my day, there was no prom, no formal graduation ceremony, no yearbook, no certificate, no gown, no “Pomp and Circumstance,” no hail of mortarboards, no nothing. All that remained was time. We wouldn’t find out our examination results for two months. A full eight weeks stretched before me with little else to do but stew about my final grades. Veterinary school had offered me a place so long as I made the grades. Any combination of three A’s and one B and I was golden. Anything less and I was screwed. Not a lot of margin for error and room for an eternity of doubt. Suddenly a family
vacation seemed like a welcome distraction from this inexorable countdown.

As soon as we began to head north up the M1 motorway, I had a pretty good idea where we were going.

“The town of Bedale,” said my mother, quoting from a tourist guidebook, “is like walking up ‘the garden path’ to the Yorkshire Dales. From there it’s a short drive to the market town of Leyburn, and now, you are at ‘the front door.’ Step beyond this threshold and Herriot Country lies ahead.”

Obviously I was tempted to challenge the pushy realtor analogies, curious to discover “the kitchen” and, more important, “the lavatory,” but I kept my mouth shut. Both my parents appeared to be captivated by the surroundings, overcome, and I sensed this journey had become the veterinary equivalent of a trip to Mecca. They had finally made it to their Holy Land, and to be fair, as our little car dropped down into the winding roads of Wensleydale, space expanded and stretched, my eyes filled with hills and valleys, all blanketed by an immense, verdant, patchwork quilt subdivided by dry stone walls, and it was hard not to be impressed. I managed stunned silence and Mum and Dad seemed pleased.

There followed several days of sightseeing and it didn’t take long before Fiona and I realized what was happening.

“Do I recognize that house?” I asked.

We were standing on a cobblestone street in the village of Askrigg, staring at what appeared to be a large three-story brick building guarded by black wrought-iron railings.

“That’s Skeldale House, son. Remember?”

“Skeldale House,” I thought. “First official residence of one James Herriot.”

Now I saw it. As I sidled into position for a photo op, I realized we were crisscrossing a trail blazed by the original production assistants
from the TV series
All Creatures Great and Small
as they scouted the perfect locations for each scene. We moved on to the Drover’s Arms, the ford through which Herriot’s Austin 7 splashed in the opening sequence, Mrs. Pumphrey’s Manor, Bolton Castle, and many more. My parents weren’t just trying to visit Herriot country, they were trying to put me inside it, as though I might understudy James Herriot in every conceivable and memorable still from the show.

For a while I played along, unruffled by any fanatical undercurrent to our tour, genuinely enjoying the beauty of the countryside and the distraction from my exam results. Then on the Wednesday afternoon, my father asked me to join him on a trip to the nearby town of Thirsk.

“Someone I want you to meet,” he said.

This time there was no attempt at surprise—the dozen or so American tourists burdened with newly purchased books and the brass plaque on the outside of the building were too much of a giveaway. And suddenly, there he was, shaking my hand, a surprisingly small, unassuming, even shy man, scratching his name on the page of a book with an arthritic hand—James Alfred Wight. Here was the real James Herriot, a man who had brought joy to countless millions of people all over the world, and what struck me more than anything else was how uncomfortable he appeared to be as the center of attention. He seemed to be astounded, almost embarrassed, as though it were completely new to him, as though his book had only just been published, and this obvious yet restrained humility was palpable. In my eyes, this common touch, this ability to be ordinary only made him all the more extraordinary.