My Dog Skip (7 page)

About the spookiest moment Skip and I ever lived through took place one appalling June night in the cemetery, scene of our previous pranks and hoaxes. Our cemetery, as I have earlier suggested, was one of the scariest in the South. Henjie, Peewee, and Muttonhead had gathered together all their financial capital and wagered me $8.50 that Skip and I would not spend an entire night in my army-surplus pup tent in the darkest and most fearsome section of the cemetery. I took that bet, because there were some items of furniture I wanted to buy for Skip's and my tree house, but only after my sadistic colleagues put me on the honor system, having me swear an oath on a Bible that I would not lie to them that Skip and I had fulfilled the obligation even if we had not, the reason for this chaste and upright declaration being, of course, that Henjie, Peewee, and Muttonhead were not about to visit the cemetery after dark to ascertain our veracity.

Part of the arrangement was that the three of them would accompany Skip and me just before the sun went down to select the most ominous spot. I carried with me the pup tent and a sack of provisions: a can of pork and beans, two Moonpies, some bologna for Skip, a can opener, and a canteen of water, plus two blankets and a pillow. To my dismay my antagonists gleefully chose the most forbidding place in the whole graveyard for me to pitch the tent: a gloomy glade not far from the witch's grave, with moldy nineteenth-century crypts and tombstones all around, and tall, ghostly trees, and dank, sinister shrubs and bushes. All this was part of one's worst nightmares. As I set up the tent in this somber and disturbing terrain Henjie said: “I’ll tell you this, they ain't never gonna spend all night
here.
My share is two dollars and eighty-three cents.” Then the three of them laughed, a chorus of righteous mirth. It was that unfortunate juncture between dusk and dark, close on to Midsummer Night, with still a little light at nine o'clock, and what was left of that light was fading fast, and formidable shadows were accumulating, and I was beginning to have second thoughts myself. I steeled myself to see it through. As the three of them turned to depart, Peewee chuckled and said, “Pleasant dreams!” As I watched them go, I noticed that only a few yards down the road they began to trot, and then to run because it was pitch-dark by now.

“Well, boy …” I said to Skip. I sat down by the tent and opened the pork and beans and gave Skip some of his bologna. A half-moon shone out over Brickyard Hill up
the way, casting over the whole graveyard a dread, shimmering aura. Lightning bugs were around us everywhere, lending grotesque incandescence to the surroundings. Not far away a mockingbird began her nocturnal song. I had always loved mockingbirds, and so had Skip, sitting under our elm tree in the backyard in the summer dusks, absorbing her sweet, adoring call. Who would ever want to kill a mockingbird? But on this encompassing night in the graveyard her lovely voice suffused me with trepidation, as if she were only
mocking
Skip and me in our vigil at the pup tent.

Skip seemed to be having the time of his life, and this angered me: he strolled audaciously among the tombstones and even jumped on top of the gray, lugubrious Darrington crypt to survey the scene. The least anxious thing to do, I concluded, was to climb into the tent and force myself to go to sleep. As I lay down on the blanket I was aware of dancing shadows and the swirling rustle of leaves. Shortly Skip climbed into the tent and snuggled next to me, and I was glad to have him there, I can tell you.

I must have fallen into a long but fitful slumber, filled with odd, shapeless wisps of nightmares, suffused with the sound of shovels digging into earth, when I was suddenly awakened by Skip's rising from my side, and as I anxiously peered through the darkness I saw him standing at the entrance to the tent silently looking out, taut and pointing the way he did with the squirrels in the big woods. I glanced at my Woolworth's wristwatch; it said quarter to two. I
crawled toward him and looked out too. What I saw in that moment in that cemetery chilled me in the blood as nothing in my whole life ever would.

About fifty yards away I made out the form of a battered pickup truck parked at the side of the road. Then, off to the left of it, I sighted four strange men in work clothes bending down before something. In that instant a cloud drifted away from the moon. I tried to rub the heavy sleep from my eyes. Were they actually digging up a grave?

In my impenetrable fright I tried to ponder what to do. Skip was still standing next to me. I recalled the words in a movie I had once seen at the Dixie about the United States Military Academy at West Point:
Duty. Honor. Country.
I remembered, too, my Boy Scout oath as it related to conscience and obligation: ‘On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country/’ These words resonated now in my brain. Perhaps I could identify these insufferable grave robbers. “Let's get closer,” I whispered to Skip. “Don't make a noise.”

Stealthily the two of us crawled in the direction of the villains. We were only twenty-five yards or so from them and hiding behind a tombstone:
Robert Stacy Yarbrough
, 1831-/899. From the farthest distance down in town I could hear the courthouse clock chiming two A.M. I glanced out again over the top of the tombstone. The silhouettes of the four figures were clear to me now. One of them had a gruesome pockmarked face, another a red mustache, but I had never once seen any of them, and from the place-name
on the license plate of their pickup truck, they were from a county many miles away

Then, to my horror, Skip began to bark. He growled, then barked some more. I tried to put my hand around his mouth, but in the act of doing so I stumbled and fell out from behind the tombstone, then looked desperately up and realized that the men had seen us. The one with the pockmarked face began walking swiftly in our direction. In seconds he was standing over me.

“Well, look at this!” he said. “Come join the party!” He gazed down the way. “You been sleepin’ in a
pup
tent? This is some crazy town.” He dragged me by the hand and staggered toward the pickup truck. His three companions amiably greeted me there. They were drunk as could be. My deceived eyes in the cemetery's gloom had convinced me they were robbing a grave, but what they were really doing was drinking beer out of long bottles and getting drunker all the while; I dared not ask them why they had chosen a graveyard in the middle of the night for these revels, and on quick reflection acknowledged I myself would find it difficult to explain my own presence, not to mention my dogs, in these circumstances. One of the men was feeding Skip some peanuts and potato chips and making him feel at home; and then he handed me an opened bottle of beer and told me to take a swig, which I obediently did, and then another. It tasted awful. After the deranged hallucinations of that night, one thing I did not need was beer.

It also must have put me into a long and leaden sleep. I awakened at the first glimmer of light to the sound of roosters up on Brickyard Hill. Somehow my back was propped against a tombstone, and Skip was sound asleep with his head on my lap. I glanced around. The pickup truck was gone and there were empty beer bottles all over the place, and a quart jug with a little corn whiskey left in it.

I will tell you what else was gone too: my pup tent, blankets, pillow, water canteen, can opener, moonpies, and the rest of my pork and beans and Skip's bologna. Henjie, Pee-wee, and Muttonhead dutifully gave me the $8.50, but with all my losses that night I calculated I was down by three dollars at the least, and it eventually took me two years to finally confess to them about the grave robbers.

In this recitation of perils and misadventures and hallucinations, I have postponed the most disturbing until last because even with the passage of the years I find it difficult to write about.

About nine o'clock one evening I went out in the backyard to find Skip lying limp under our elm tree. He looked awful. Perhaps he had grown tired in our interminable jour-neyings around town, and he also must have consumed something bad, some stricken water somewhere, some rotten food maybe. His nose was dry as dust, and so were his paws. I lay on the grass with him and felt his stomach. It was hot and feverish. Also, little strands of warm saliva were
dripping down his mouth, bubbling as they flowed. “Wait, boy.” I went inside and brought back a bottle of aspirin and a wet towel. He was shaking all over now. I put two aspirin under his tongue and made him swallow them, then applied the wet towel to his face.

My father had been working late at his office, and when he arrived home he came outside and looked him over. “I think he's got hold of some poison,” he said. He telephoned Dr. Jones, but he was attending a veterinarians’ convention in Memphis. Then he called the all-night animal clinic in Jackson and described the symptoms. They said to’ rush him there right away.

My father got in the driver's seat of the DeSoto; I sat in the back and held Skip in my lap. Jackson was forty miles away, much of it over the same steep hills with the creeping vine where Skip had attacked the copperhead snake. The vines were sere and gray now in the winter's cold, and the night hushed and desolate under ponderous clouds, and we raced through the bare little villages as fast as we dared. “Don't die, Skip,” I said, and he looked up at me with glazed eyes. After an eternity, it seemed to me, we reached the outskirts of Jackson; far in the distance was the state capitol, brightly lit and imposing, like a picture postcard against the frigid sky. When we arrived at the animal clinic we took him inside. A young veterinarian asked us to wait and took him in back. He returned several minutes later.

“It's poison, all right.”

“Who would want to poison a dog?” my father asked.

“Only bad folks,” the doctor replied.

“Can you cure him?” I asked.

The doctor said he was not sure. Skip was very sick. He would give him the best medicines he had. If he survived the night he would live. He advised us to drive
on
home and come back the next afternoon. My father and I made the journey home in a grim silence. Alone in my room I missed Skip asleep in the crook of my legs. As on the day the brakes had given out on the DeSoto, I prayed to the Lord. I promised Him I would behave myself forever if He would save Skip. I hardly slept that night, and the next morning I did not go to school. That afternoon we drove again to Jackson. At the clinic I held my breath as the doctor greeted us.

“I've never seen a dog come back like that from poison,” he said. “That dog wants to live.” He needed to be nursed a few days, he said, and he gave us two big bottles of pills. All during the following week I made him rest on the sheets in my bed. I brought him water and bologna cut into small pieces and a bedpan to relieve himself, and Rivers and the boys brought him wildflowers. Then, bright and early one morning, I felt him licking my nose as he always did to wake me up. When I opened my eyes he was sitting there next to me wagging his tail. The impish expression in his eyes had returned, and he bit my toes to roust me out faster. “Let's go chase some
squirrels
, Skip!” I said, and he leapt off the bed and waited for me to take him outside—from the valley of the shadow of death he had returned to me once more.

H
E WAS
A DOG
for all sports seasons. Ralph, the photographer in our group, once captured this quintessence in him, having him pose under the oak in my front yard with a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap on his head, the lace of our football grasped between his teeth, his paw in a baseball glove, and in front of him on the grass a basketball, a baseball bat, four baseballs, my baseball spikes, a tennis racket, a volleyball, a football helmet, half a dozen or so sports magazines and game programs, and numerous baseball bub-blegum cards.

I had even created a mythical dog football team of my own devising, consisting of various dogs I was familiar with in the town, and often when walking somewhere alone or riding on my bicycle I would entertain myself by reciting play-by-play accounts of games involving this team, which I called Kennel U. Using my mother's old Kodak camera, I
went around taking snapshots of the dogs on the team, pasting them into the crude replica of an official game program, with thumbnail sketches of each dog, such as Sheriff Raines's Buck and the Hendrixes’ Super-Doop. We operated out of the single-wing offense made famous by the Tennessee Volunteers. Skip was the tailback and, naturally, also the captain.

His dramatic touchdowns in our real football games in my front yard were fabled in the town, of course, but he also enjoyed watching the boys and me shooting baskets around the wooden basketball goal in back, and whenever someone made an errant shot that missed the entire backboard and bounced over the hedges toward the front, he would enthusiastically retrieve it and push it back to us with his nose. His swiftness and agility were likewise legend, and when of the spirit he could move so fast that I desired some specific authentication of his actual speed.

I borrowed Henjie's father's stopwatch one Saturday morning and persuaded some of the fellows to accompany us to the high school football field, where I intended to time Skip formally in the hundred-yard dash. The difficulty was that I knew I must improvise some method that would get him to race from one goal line to the other, exactly one hundred yards, at top velocity and in as straight a path as possible. How to do this? At first I had Henjie, Big Boy, and Peewee station themselves at the far goal line with the stopwatch while I positioned Skip at
our
goal line, in as close an approximation of the classic sprinter's stance before the starting gun as I could persuade him to assume. Then, on a
signal from me, our three companions began shouting,
“Skip, come here!”
at which I would give him a vigorous shove to get him on the way. This did not prove efficacious, producing a series of false starts in which he might sprint fifteen yards in the right direction, or twenty, or twenty-five, then circle around and return to me. After a reflective conference the others and I arrived at the proper solution. Pee-wee would hold Skip at the starting line, with Big Boy and Henjie at the opposite line with the stopwatch. I would station myself at midfield and shout for Skip to follow me, then start running toward Big Boy and Henjie, and at that precise moment Peewee would release Skip, who would likely run after me in a straight line and at full acceleration for the entire distance.