My Dog Skip (11 page)

On the Fourth of July there was always a political rally in some large and dusty clearing in the middle of the woods.

The barbecue and potato salad and sliced homegrown tomatoes and corn on the cob and biscuits were stacked on long tables and served up by country people, and I sat on the grass with this steaming feast in my lap, splitting some of it with Skip, lethargically eating and listening to the preachers and politicians.

But mostly we liked the little creeks and streams that trickled out of the hills into the flatland, and most of all the river itself in the summertimes, the river of the vanished Indians, the Yazoo, which flowed slow as could be past the giant cypresses and elms and weeping willows, southward toward the Mississippi. We basked in the sun along these banks and watched the boats drift by. Why did the gnarled, bending cypresses always seem to be trying to tell something to me? It was a river not to be tampered with, but it had a grace to it nonetheless: the way it opened up and wound around, the moss hanging over it from the cypress trees, the decaying old houses along it that Skip and I explored. One of these houses stood only a few yards from the river, with a ruined sagging veranda and high ceilings and an oak tree that had grown tall through a collapsed place in the roof and these words carved on a wall in what must have been the kitchen:
Your cause is a hard one and I pity you. Lt. Thompson. Illinois 36th Inf.
We were
in
this house one day when a heavy thunderstorm came, and the trees all around and even the old house itself swayed and moaned and the river beyond made rippling murmurs.

One summer after I had reached high school I served as “public relations director” for the town's recreation park, where I was chief assistant to the high school football coach, and supervisor of a radio program each afternoon. The park was only three or four blocks from our house, and Skip and I strolled over there every morning that summer. He became a fixture among the children as he observed with interest their softball games and Ping-Pong matches and shuffle-board and horseshoe throws; some of them called him Uncle Skip. The football coach and I, accompanied by Skip, collected a carload of children every day at four and went to the radio station for our daily broadcast. We interviewed them about their participation in that days various activities and announced the winners and their scores.

The program was a hardship, however, on those days when no children at all turned up at the park; then the football coach and I would have to talk to each other on the air for half an hour, about anything we could think of that would fill up that time. During these broadcasts Skip sat on the floor under the microphone. After a long silence one day when we were depleted of things to discuss, the coach asked, “Skip, what did you do at the park today?
Skip¡ “
and with that loud declarative Skip began to bark at some length, and the disgruntled radio station manager was later heard to comment, “Now they're interviewing
dogs.”
Once the coach and I talked for five minutes about a Ping-Pong table we had just nailed back together, and then about a bark blight a certain elm tree near the shuffleboard had
caught, and another time we discussed at some length why the Nicholas children, who lived just across the street from the park, failed to show up on that day. The football coach surmised that they had probably gone out of town for a while; no, I speculated, I had seen them that morning eating Popsicles in front of a grocery store. On
one
particular day when it had rained for several hours and no children whatsoever came to the park, the football coach and I, with Skip in the backseat, cruised all over town in his car looking for a child to interview. We had run out of talk ourselves, and anybody would do.

Ten minutes before our program was to go on the air, we spotted a little boy walking up Main Street in the rain. It was Donnie Fulton, who spoke with a stutter. The coach drove the car up to the curb and shouted, “Donnie, come get in with us.” The little boy dutifully got in the car, and the coach whispered to me, “Don't let him go now we Ve got him.” The boy made a motion that might have suggested escape, but Skip, sensing something a little untoward perhaps, growled the boy into tentative submission. We trundled him down to the station and interviewed him for twenty minutes.

One night that same summer Skip and I were sitting on the front porch when suddenly we saw a large Delta Airlines passenger plane as it began curiously circling low over our neighborhood, then started an odd descent toward our dirt airstrip two miles away What on earth was this meant to be? I ran to the DeSoto in the driveway, Skip following
closely behind, and we sped out to the airport just as the passenger plane came to a skidding halt in the muddy runway Everyone, like us, who had heard its motors had also reached the airport as the lost plane landed—we later learned the pilots had mistaken the lights of town for the Jackson airport forty miles south. A sizeable crowd had gathered near the airliner. Henjie's father, who was president of the chamber of commerce, was carrying a steplad-der, and when Skip recognized him he followed him toward the plane. Henjie's father put up the ladder and said to each frightened passenger as he climbed down it into the mud, “Welcome to our little town.” The next week there was a photograph in the newspaper, on the top of page one, of Henjie's father and Skip greeting the passengers.

During one of these summers before the tenth grade Skip accompanied me to Camp Kickapoo, the Boy Scout camp situated in deep sequestered piney woods thirty miles south of us, for our annual organized outing. The scoutmasters knew him from our weekly meetings and our brisk intervals of kick-the-can afterward and said it would be fine to bring him along. He really admired that scout camp—the nightly sessions around a roaring fire when the scoutmasters told ghost stories and recited “Casey at the Bat” and “The Barefoot Boy,” the raucous play, the swimming pond where the others and I practiced our strokes for the coveted merit badges. I had been appointed the camp bugler
responsible for reveille and taps, and Skip faithfully climbed the hill with me before every dawn when I sounded my notes on my silver trumpet to rouse the slumbering boys, and again at night to induce them into reluctant sleep. On the evening before we left for home, as we sat around the fire, the members of the troop unanimously voted Skip an honorary Boy Scout. There was a heartless price to be paid, however, when we got back into town, for Camp Kickapoo richly deserved the nickname it had been given through the decades: Tickapoo. My father discovered about two dozen ticks on Skip's back and stomach, several of them severely bloated, and even found several on
me
, one behind the lobe of my ear. “Ticks are a bad business and deserve to be respected,” he said, and forthwith drove us down to Dr. Jones, the vet, who one by one removed them from us by modern hygienic methods.

The intrepid Henjie and I had taken canoeing lessons from the scoutmasters at Tickapoo, and just before the start of school that year we borrowed his older brother's canoe for an excursion down our river. We would spend the night camping out. We accumulated our provisions, including the usual sliced bologna for Skip, and put into the river just below Main Street. Skip sat between us, as well-behaved as he had ever been—
reflective
, almost, it seemed, much as he had been that day long ago on the steps of the deserted tenant shack after the storm—as we slowly paddled out from town into the encompassing countryside. This was another
of those memories that would last, a memory of the spirit, really, and not so much of the brain; I guess it had to do with the very earth itself. Amid the surrounding swamplands and thickets the grassy banks of the bayous were lined with the familiar willows, and the duckwood was thick and emerald green in the melancholy brakes of cypress, and the cattails danced in the whispery breeze. Turtles lay in the sun on logs in the water, and when two or three of them concluded to get up and jump in the river, Skip observed them with his quizzical lift of the face.

It was early September, and there was the most subtle touch of autumn all round. You could not see it in the leaves, but you could sense it: a vagrant coolness, evanescent light and shadow. Henjie and I pretended that I was Tom, Skip was Huck, and he was Jim, even though he was not the proper color. In the distance were old Indian mounds where we had come as children in search of arrowheads and earthen fragments of pottery; in the eternal flatness they resembled miniature grassy hills. On both sides of us in the great fields the cotton blossoms were beginning to turn white. Dozens of black people were chopping with their hoes, and Skip's ears twitched as their muffled song drifted out to us:

Farther on down, in the dwindling afternoon, Skip dipped his snout into the brownish muddy river for a drink of water, then unceremoniously spit it out: “too thick to drink, too thin to plow,” I had read in Mrs. Parkers class on what Mr. Twain said of the bigger river to the west, so I poured some water from one of our canteens into a container for him. With the arriving darkness we tied the canoe to a cypress and camped near some willows, and after supper Skip drowsily settled in the crook of my legs and we went to sleep to the sound of Henjies snores and a million cicadas.

One evening of high summer when I was in the eleventh grade Skip did not come home. I had not seen him since morning. In all our years together this had never happened. I asked my father if he had seen him.

“He's probably off chasing squirrels,” he said. “Hell be back.”

I telephoned Rivers, Henjie, Peewee, Muttonhead, Bubba, and Big Boy, but he was not with them. After supper I went out looking for him on my bicycle. I rode all over town, calling and whistling for him everywhere. I could hear my own sad echo off the facades of the accustomed old houses and buildings:
“Skip, where are you?”

I rode everywhere that he usually went when he made his rounds. There was a boxer puppy on Main Street that he liked to visit. And a Scottish terrier on Calhoun Avenue. And a big, shaggy dog, part Lab, part Saint Bernard, that he
admired on Jefferson Street. And a hybrid old hound on Brickyard Hill. All over town people were outside watering their lawns, and I asked if they had seen him. I half-expected to see him coming out of someone's yard, bounding through the bushes when he heard me whistling. But he did not come. I rode until dark before I gave up. I put my bike in the garage and sat on the front steps until bedtime waiting for him. I telephoned Sheriff Raines, telling him of my missing dog. It felt strange to go to sleep without him in bed with me. I was used to pushing him out of the way so I could turn over. That night the bed seemed too big for me. I tossed and turned all night, sitting up every time I heard a noise, hoping it was him scratching at the door to be let in. I remembered the night he had been poisoned, and the time we had saved him from the quicksand in the woods.

At first light the next morning I began riding around again, retracing my earlier routes, then going on to the football field and the cemetery and the bayou and the dump and the waterhole and the river and the park and every alley in town. I made more telephone calls. I went to the backyard and sat under the elm tree, alert for any sound of him. Had he been run over on some country road? Drowned in the river? Bitten by a copperhead?
Kidnapped?

I had to give it another try. Once again I got on the bicycle and began riding in a neighborhood of dingy shacks not far from the dump. I had already been there the day before, but I repeated the search, calling out for him all the while.

In a desolate stretch of this vicinity something suddenly caught the corner of my eye: an old, rusty abandoned refrigerator at the edge of a vacant field. I had noticed this derelict refrigerator three or four times in our recent jour-neyings around the locality, but the sagging door to it, I recalled, had always been ajar. I was drawn toward it compulsively now, as to a magnet. I got off the bicycle and approached it. I was not sure, but I thought I heard something inside, some strange rustling movement—or was it my imagination? I could hear the pounding of my own desperate heart. I reached out and yanked open the door.

Who should leap out of that refrigerator but Old Skip¡ He was a little limp and weak, and when he saw it was me he crawled slowly toward me and lay at my feet. I got on my knees and rubbed him around the lungs, the way we had been instructed in first aid in the Scouts. He gulped in the fresh air and began wagging his tail. He was all right¡ We remained there a long time, until the whistle from the sawmill across town blew I shivered at the thought of what had happened. In his normal investigative spirit he must have crawled into the refrigerator, his movements causing the door to close behind him. He had been trapped all the time in that awful refrigerator—he could have been dead in a few hours. What must he have been thinking in his insidious entrapment? Was he just waiting there for me to come?

“Skip,” I said to him, “please never leave me again!”

W
HY,
IN CHILDHOOD
and youth, do we wish time to pass quickly? We want to grow up—and yet again we do not. This is the way people are, and have always been, even before the telephone, television, electricity, jet airplanes, and fax machines. You want to grow older, and yet you don't. Can anyone explain it?

As my high school years began to close, Skip remained constant in his companionship. Rivers Applewhite and I, too, were a steady pair. When we double-dated with Big Boy and Daisye, or Muttonhead and Janie Sue, riding around town on Saturday nights along the streets of our childhood, Skip rode around with us, until we let him off at my house and went on to the midnight movie at the Dixie. Our baseball team won the state championship that year, and in the parade down Main Street, with the
crepe paper decorating the lampposts and the marching band playing our fight song, he rode in the back of a flatbed truck with my teammates and me. They gave the team shiny red-and-white jackets with
State Champs, 1952
on the back, and he loved that jacket so much that when I spread it out for him on the floor or the bed he would go to sleep on it, and on chilly nights I would wrap it around him with only the top of his head above it. At the graduation ceremonies in the school gymnasium that June, when my friends and I marched down the aisle in our mortarboards and gowns to the strains of
Tannhäuser
, he tried to go inside but was mindlessly turned away. Afterwards, however, he attended the midnight-to-dawn dance, a tradition at graduation among all the boys and girls in all the Delta towns of that day, with its black jazz bands and matronly chaperones and exhilarating air of ceremony and frolic, and Skip stayed up all night with the rest of us.