Born to Bark (3 page)

I not only read those books for myself, but often read them aloud to Skipper
.

It was a good time in my life, until Skipper disappeared. I now know that Skippy had contracted
canine distemper
, a viral disease that is almost always fatal. There is no treatment for it, although now there are effective vaccines to prevent it. Even if there had been a treatment for distemper, however, my family had so little money then that sometimes adequate food for the humans could not be assured. My parents would rather have died than to have sought financial help if that meant that people
would look upon us as being poor and unable to make it on our own. So if our dog became sick, home remedies were all that we could afford to offer, and if they didn’t work, the dog was simply lost.

Distemper is a virulent disease and the symptoms are ugly, with vomiting, diarrhea, discharge from the nose, red eyes, shivering, convulsions, and breathing difficulties. When a dog contracts it, the disease escalates rapidly and death often comes quickly. My parents had decided that this would be too gruesome and traumatic for me to see, since they remembered how hard it had been for me to deal with the loss of Rex. They thought that they were doing something kind when they secretly moved Skipper to the basement, next to the coal furnace where he would be warm but out of sight. Th
ey then told me that someone had accidentally left the door open and Skipper had run out and was now lost.

Today, I know that my parents were trying to ease my pain, but at the psychological level it was the worst thing that they could have said to a child. Death, especially by disease, is not something that carries with it feelings of shame, failure, or desertion. Individuals do not choose to die, and their passing away does not make a statement about those who they leave behind. Abandonment is something else. The idea that my dog had run away when I thought that he loved me and I cared for him so dearly meant that I had personally failed that dog. It meant that I had not communicated
to him how important he was—that I was to blame for his deciding that he did not want to live with me any longer.

When my parents put me to bed that night, I was crying. As soon as they put out the light I dressed myself again and left the house. I was going to find Skipper and let him know that I loved him. I was going to bring him home where we could be together again, and I would never do anything to make my dearest friend unhappy. The police found me wandering the streets calling for
Skippy at around 3
A.M.
When I was finally brought back home my parents were nearly hysterical with worry.

By the next night my parents had spoken to someone who apparently explained to them what might be going on in my head. So my father and my mother tried to tell me that Skippy had gotten very sick and died. They tried to reassure me that it was not my fault and he had not run away. They told me that the only reason they had lied to me was that they didn’t want me to see my dog looking so awfully sick. I didn’t believe them but thought that they were now lying to try to make me feel better, ra
ther than letting me face the horrible truth that I had inadequately understood and loved my dog, and he had left me for those reasons. Truth is a powerful weapon, but only if it is the first shot fired. I had built armor against it by then, and my pain and doubt about Skipper would not be washed away by later explanations.

My mother seemed to know that something further had to be done to lift me out of my grief. So she took the day off from work and had me help her clean the house with some especially nasty-smelling cleaner that was dissolved in water. She explained to me that it was a disinfectant and that we had to disinfect the house so that we could bring another dog into the house and the germs from Skipper’s disease would not hurt our new dog.

I still didn’t believe her. “We can’t have a new dog,” I protested. “When Skippy comes back and finds a new dog he’ll think that I don’t love him and don’t want him.”

My mother knelt down beside me and quietly said, “Skippy is not coming back because he can’t. He died. He is with God now, and he will wait for you. Because he loves you and knows that you loved him, he also knows that you need another dog as a friend. He wouldn’t want his germs to hurt that new dog. So we are going to make our home clean and safe for dogs. First, we will kill all of the germs with this disinfectant, and then we will air the house out for a couple of days. After that, we will see
if there is another dog in the world that God wants you to have, since he has Skipper as his own pet for now.”

It sounded like the truth and only cleaning up after a disease could justify using such awful smelly stuff to wash the floors and walls. It was then that I finally began to believe that Skipper was really dead. I turned to the bucket with its malodorous disinfectant solution and began to damp mop every surface of the house that I could reach—no other dog was going to die in that house if I could help it. I cleaned everything so vigorously that I could barely lift my arms at the end of the day. That night I fell asleep dreaming of God sitting on a white throne, with Skippy cur
led up next to his foot. Skipper was still my dog; he hadn’t run away from me because I wasn’t kind to him. I was sad, but God was a good person whom I could trust to take care of my dog until I got to be with him again.

My mother clearly had a plan for me, because on Saturday morning she took me to the library, pushing the baby stroller that contained my brother Dennis. On the way she explained to me that if and when we got a new dog, it would be a puppy and I would have to learn how to take care of it and to train it. I would have to learn what I needed to know by reading books about dogs.

We bumped the stroller up the library steps and entered through the big double set of doors. The high-ceilinged familiar space was filled with dark wooden bookshelves, and I took in that subtle smell of books that I had come to love. Near the doors was the circulation counter and next to it a few desks for the librarians. There were three alcoves off of the main area. The small one to the right was the children’s section, which I was very well acquainted with since it was the only one that I was allowed to go into with the green library card that was issued to
kids. My mother didn’t even glance in that direction but went to the counter and placed my library card down on it.

“I’d like to upgrade my son’s library card to a regular one,” she said.

The librarian was a thin older lady with glasses and gray hair pulled back into a bun. She recognized me from my twice weekly visits to the library and gave me a slight smile, and then turned to my mother.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Eight.”

“A child must be twelve years old before we can let them use the adult section.”

“He can read well enough to use the adult books,” my mother said quietly, “and he needs material that is not in the children’s collection. For example, there are no books in the children’s section on dog care or training.”

“Well, why don’t you just take those books out on your card and let him read them?”

My mother sighed slightly. “I work and can’t make it here very often. He needs to be able to select the books that have the information that he is looking for and take them out on his own.”

“Some of that material in the main section is very difficult to read for a child, and some books on the open shelves contain inappropriate material for someone his age.”

“You can test his reading skills right now if you like, and I will give you or anyone else on the library staff the right to prevent him from taking out books with unsuitable material in them.”

The librarian hesitated, then leaned down and asked me, “So, you like dogs?”

I nodded. She pulled over her desk chair, motioned for me to sit down, and walked away. A few moments later she reappeared carrying a book with the title
Bruce
and a picture of a
collie on the cover. It was a novel by Albert Payson Terhune, a writer who had died a few years before and was best known for his fictional adventures of collies, the breed that he truly loved. She opened the book to the first chapter and randomly pointed at a paragraph and said, “Start reading here. Out loud, please.”

It was like reading to Skipper, which I had done so many times before. I adopted my best oratorical voice and began.

“Her ‘pedigree name’ was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie—daintily fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke’s Peerage
.

“If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have won immortality by the title of ‘CHAMPION Rothsay Lass.’

“But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest ancestors, the wolves …”

I was caught up in the story virtually from the moment that I began and went on reading with my attention glued to the page in front of me. I had no idea what my mother and the librarian were doing until the librarian tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That’s okay for now. We need you to sign your name right here on your library card.”

That tan-colored card was my key to rest of the library collection. The library did not have a big collection of books on dogs even in the main area, but there was a book on puppies and another on general dog care, which I checked out along with the Albert Payson Terhune novel that had served as my reading test. Over the next year or so I would ultimately read every dog book that Terhune had ever written. Like the dogs in the books by Eric Knight, who wrote about Lassie, Terhune’s dogs were intelligent, empathetic, and courageous, but they were not “cartoon” dogs that could talk. Like
real dogs they reasoned
and acted in response to circumstances. Because of those books my dreams were often filled with beautiful collies, and my ambitions included not only understanding more about dogs, but perhaps someday writing about dogs.

I read the book on puppies and the book on dog care several times. Meanwhile, I checked each morning and on my return from school each day to see if there was another dog in the world that “God wanted me to have” who might have arrived when I was asleep or away from home.

Around a month after Skipper died, my father arrived home carrying something wrapped in a blue terry-cloth bath towel. I followed him the length of the short hallway and into the kitchen where he sat down. Puzzled, curious, and hopeful, I tried to see what he had brought me. He placed the bundle in my arms and leaned over to say, “Give him a name. Give him a life.”

My father smiled in a way that made his gray eyes twinkle. I collapsed into a cross-legged heap on the floor and was staring into the dark eyes of a puppy in the bundle that I held. He would grow up to be a classic smooth fox terrier; his face was dark, long, and tapered almost to a point. His ears were typical of his breed and would grow to be erect, with only the top hanging down to make the V-shaped flap that dog breeders call “button ears.” As an adult he would weigh around 17 pounds and would stand around 15 inches at the shoulder on thin, elegant legs that were designed for running.