Against the Country (33 page)

G
INGER
S
NAP
(1981–?). The product of a black-and-tan hound who had got loose from a hunting pen and impregnated a small, reddish housepet across the road from some friends in the eastern part of the county. Was unusually worried by, and about, herself. Fancied play, and the wedge-shaped boxes of d-Con rat poison my parents put around the place, but would go deathly still whenever I went out behind the house, of a quiet evening, and gazed out over the fields, and into the woods beyond, and gave a sharp yell to awaken, from every angle, the hunting dogs in the kennels all around. Then she would bark and howl back at them, and would look at me as if she did not know what was happening to her, and would not quiet down until I had taken her into my arms, and got inside a car, and shut the door against the world outside.

Asked always, by her eyes, about her true nature, but received no straight answer. Sat and listened, more than any other dog of ours, to the trees, and would jump if the wind shifted suddenly, and would snarl and snap at the air, but was perfectly happy
again if you dangled a toy, or else a box of rat poison, in front of her. Was well liked, this dog, but misunderstood. We were never quite sure whether her agonized barks and squeals on the side porch, as her kin chased deer through the trees and into the northern clearing to be slaughtered, perchance to be slaughtered themselves, constituted an alarm so much as it did a cheer.

Disappeared sometime in the middle 1980s. We assumed she had been found in the woods, ours or someone else’s, and taken off by a hunter to live and run and die with those kennel-bound cousins of hers. She had a good enough nose for danger, after all, and a loud enough bark, and she always chased the deer away from the corn.

J
ACKIE
(1977–?). Not properly a dog at all but rather a gray tabby, come with us from Southern Illinois to teach us something about misery. Had free run of the place until she dared lash out at a puppy we had recently agreed, at our father’s urging, to call Cooper, sweet and round, who climbed the concrete step to the side porch, looking to make friends, and had his left eye scratched by the cat. Was forced thereafter to watch said pup grow into an enormous and unforgiving beast, who more than once stood with a feline corpse in his jaws and glared up at where she now lived, on top of an old wardrobe on the side porch. Spent the rest of her life, that I know of, without once risking the ground again. When not on the wardrobe, or clinging to the mesh of a window screen, or in the leapt-to branches of the magnolia tree in the side yard, she sometimes vanished for weeks. It was rumored that she had managed somehow to access the walls of the house. On one occasion I was sure I heard her in the attic, as no assembly of rats could possibly have made such a racket up there. Whether she hunted these rats, and, if so, what their tainted blood might have done to a creature already mad with fear, I cannot say.

The time and manner of her death are unknown to me.

B
UTTFUCKER
(1981–1984). Was allowed, after the massacre, to roam the yard as if he were one of the dogs, which, henless, he basically was. The door to the coop yard remained open, in case he wanted access to his former manse and grounds, but I never once saw him go in there. When it rained he came up onto the side porch with the others and huddled in amongst them. Stuck to the side yard and moped when the pack went out exploring in the woods and the fields; had tried to keep up but was incapable.

Showed now only bursts of his former violence, though these were impressive wings-out/claws-forward affairs directed mostly at human visitors to the yard. Allowed me sometimes to sit beside him on the concrete-block step and pet his head, as he had seen me do with the dogs. Made little chicken noises all the while.

Never wanted for feed, with the hens dead, but was curious about what his peers were given for breakfast and dinner. Wandered over, one Sunday morning, to the communal dog bowl, where Cooper ate first, and then Brown Dog, and then Blackie (when he came around), and then Ginger Snap, and took exactly one (1) piece of kibble out of the bowl with his tiny beak, whereupon Cooper promptly killed him in a cloud of flesh and feathers.

B. F., he was generally called, in company.

W
EE
C
OOPER
O’
F
IFE
(1979–1992). Placed into my arms on the occasion of my thirteenth birthday, this mutt got from the union of a showdog housed briefly at the juvenile-delinquent facility where my parents both worked (said to have been designed by Mr. Jefferson himself as a waystation between slave-kept Monticello and his work in slave-kept Richmond, at which waystation once bivouacked Cornwallis’s boys, on their way to Yorktown, and where later may have nightmared Sheridan’s) and a giant of unknown origin. Popped, that is, too large, out of a tiny springer spaniel, which I suspect caused her later, dazed
and damaged, to wander off into oncoming traffic in Henrico County and be flattened, which incident my father often made direct reference to when speaking with the sad little pup.

Caught and developed mange while in our care, and so we built a pen in the side yard to keep him isolated from the other dogs, and had him up regularly on the newspaper-draped dining-room table, to slather him with medicine, while everyone gathered around and worried, after which we placed him back in the pen, which he did not understand, any more than he understood why a tiny, massive dog of approximately his same coloring (black, mostly, with touches of white) leapt the pen’s high walls on a daily basis to snarl at and ram him, who wanted nothing more than to make friends, just as he tried to when, let out of the pen one afternoon, he climbed, as we all watched, up the concrete-block step to the side porch and was met, in the cornea, by a tabby’s hateful claw.

Almost died, on this and many other occasions, of infection or crush wound but refused and grew larger, which naturally he should not have, and grew stronger, which naturally he should not have, and in time there was no animal in the area who could match him for size and strength and simple deadliness. Earned, by that size, and that strength, and that simple deadliness, a respect from our father we children could not hope to match, since we never thought to greet the man in the yard with a turtle we were currently chewing to death; nor to lay before him the corpse of a groundhog or a cat we had no good cause to kill; nor to shove our snouts repeatedly into pond water after fish, always missing because we did not understand the principle of refraction; nor to jump up and bite viciously at airplanes, due to a possibly related issue with depth perception; nor to swim around and around, back at the pond, in a seeming schizophrenia, until it was noticed that we were chasing after a dragonfly we had no hope of catching until, suddenly, we raised up out of the water and (
chomp!
) it was gone.

Bounced in the fields whenever everybody, dogs and people, headed back to the pond. Was assumed for years to be bouncing for joy, he did so love the water. Eventually we learned that he was frightening field mice into showing themselves so that he might eat them. Throat-killed a deer, just before I left, and spent most of a day dragging it up into the yard. Had, nonetheless, a retriever’s mouth so soft he once caught a too-low bird on the wing and brought it down to my father, who did not look until the dog got his attention with a “Woof,” at which “Woof” the bird flew away.

Never bit a person, this dog. He may, for all I know, have murdered Blackie, and Brown, and Ginger, and Jackie, and all the rest, but he never did bite into us.

I last saw him many years later, alone but alive in the backyard of a Southern Illinois rancher. He was deaf and mostly blind now, and I did not think he would recognize me, but he did, and he gave me a bounce, and I said I was not a field mouse, and he licked me. I spooned with him in the grass for a spell, as we had when he was just a puppy, and then I let him be. Later, by telephone, I learned of his fate. My father, ailing himself by then, though we did not know it, had come across the near-dead dog in the yard and had gone to fetch a shovel. He began to dig, and by the time the hole was done the dog was ready for it.