Collected Essays (78 page)

We had a big house, and Arf spent a lot of time inside with us. There was a wide pie-slice-shaped step where the carpeted staircase turned: that was Arf’s special spot. He could sit there and be aware of whatever was going on upstairs or down.

I did start trying to make Arf spend more time outside after our first Christmas together. We had a bunch of house guests and everyone was slipping pieces of turkey and country ham to Arf, and during the night he got very sick, from both ends, in lots of different places all over the house. I asked our guest Eddie if he’d heard anything during the night, and he said, “He was scampering around—and squealing.”

Arf didn’t learn how to bark until he was about six months old, and he never became a big barker. Occasionally he would stand out in the yard barking into the night with all the other distant dogs the way they like to do, “Here I am! Here I am! Here I am!” But he wouldn’t bark at friends, just at menacing strangers—especially if we were picnicking in the woods, where it really helped to have him defend us, what with rural Virginia’s many crazed rednecks. But mostly, Arf would only bark to let us know he wanted something, like to be let in or let out or taken along on an outing.

One of our neighbors put out a doghouse for the trash one day, and I brought it home, probably on the kids’ wagon. I put the doghouse in our open garage so that Arf could sometimes sleep outside. I was always trying to get him to be outside more—I was, after all, allergic to him, as I am to all hairy animals—but it was kind of a losing battle. Arf learned how to open the back screen door by hitting it with his paw. “He’s so bright it’s frightening,” we liked to say, though actually Arf was only bright at things that served his immediate purposes, and not always then.

Two stories about Arf’s doghouse. Across the street we had a bachelor lady with a small female chow dog. The little chow got loose one day and was rumored to be in our doghouse with Arf. When the bachelor lady heard what was going on, she came over in a fury and yanked Arf out by the scruff of his neck—even though the chow was already elsewhere. The other doghouse story had to do with a four-year-old girl who lived next-door to us. She was a grubby brat who wouldn’t learn how to talk properly. She would point and grunt for things she wanted. She wasn’t retarded, she was just spoiled and lazy. Her two big sisters played with our kids quite a bit. One day she crawled into Arf’s doghouse, and her father came and got her out and spanked her. My children, her sisters and I were in paradise.

As well as his special stair-step and his doghouse, Arf liked to spend a lot of time under our front porch. This was a four-foot-high space about forty feet long, with bare red dirt on the ground. Arf liked it in there because it was cool and shady in the summer, and he could dig up the ground as much as he liked without getting scolded. The children liked it under there too, for about the same reasons. Arf dug himself several large crater-like depressions to lie in, and Rudy liked to fill these pits up with water from the hose so that there would be a really good supply of mud. Later we had a discarded mattress that made its way under the porch, and Isabel would sometimes try to camp out down there with her friend Lalla—until they would get scared and mosquito-bitten and come inside.

One problem with Arf being outside a lot was that he would roam all over the neighborhood, and into neighborhoods further and further beyond. He liked to explore, sniff other dogs’ old pee-marks, and make his own pee-marks. And of course if there was a female dog in heat, he wanted to go there. “Arfie ran away ‘cause a girl dog had heat,” as Isabel would put it.

And run away he did, hundreds of times. Not that he was ever
lost
—if we waited a few hours, or at most a day, he would always come home, sometimes looking a bit exhausted and wrung-out. We never found out for sure if he successfully fathered any puppies, although some Lynchburg friends claim they see Arf lookalikes to this day. I hope so.

Once we saw Arf doing
it
with a poodle in front of our garage. It was surprising how little time it took, maybe forty seconds. But those interludes were of key importance to Arf, and it was more or less impossible to keep him from roaming. Especially in the springtime, he’d sniff at the air in a certain way, and you knew that he was going to make a break for it.

The problem with Arf’s roaming was that Lynchburg had dogcatchers who rounded up stray dogs. Sometimes they would phone us up, and sometimes they would bring him home to us and give us a ticket. Sometimes they would just take him in to the pound. I actually had to go to court over Arf’s tickets one time. A dogcatcher came and testified. I had my new short punk haircut and the judge had long blow-dried ‘70s hair. It was like the hair had reversed from the ‘60s.

Arf didn’t just roam because he was looking for dogs in heat, he also roamed because he liked to follow the kids to school. Rudy and Isabel used to walk five blocks to Garland-Rhodes Elementary school, and Arf liked to follow them every day. The kids would die of embarrassment when, now and then, Arf would manage to get inside the school and go tearing down the halls looking for them, with his feet skidding and kids running after him and teachers yelling. Rudy and Isabel said they would sit stiffly at their desks, pretending they didn’t know Arf at all. We had a friend with a fenced yard right by the school, and sometimes he would get Arf and keep him out of trouble there until the kids got out of school.

When Rudy started taking the bus to middle school, about three miles away, Arf figured out how to follow the school bus. It’s hard to see how he could have done it, but he did. This opened up a whole new spectrum of neighborhoods for Arf to explore.

One joyful time Arf tricked the dogcatcher in one of those new neighborhoods. The dogcatcher phoned Sylvia to say that he had Arf and that she should come get the dog and accept a ticket, but when Sylvia got there the dogcatcher was holding a collar and no dog. Because of
habeas corpus
, he couldn’t give Sylvia a ticket! Sylvia brought the collar home, and there was Arf on the porch.

This seemed like a good development. I spent some time trying to teach Arf that he should always run away from the dogcatcher. We sat down together in the driveway, and I moved two little rocks around on the ground to stand for Arf and the dogcatcher. “Dog-catcher come. Arf run away! Dog-catcher bad. Arf run away!” Arf almost looked like he understood, but then he started sniffing at my hands to see if there was food in them.

In general, Arf failed all official IQ tests with flying colors. We had a hall separated from our living room by a glass door. If the glass door was closed, you could get to the hall by going out the other end of the living room and around the back of the stairs. So one night after eating roast chicken for dinner, the kids took Arf into the living room and I put the platter with the chicken carcass on the floor in the hall right behind the closed glass door. Arf could see and smell the chicken, and he wanted it very much. He scratched and scratched at the glass door. “Come on, Arf,” the kids told him, running out of the living room and around the stairs to appear in the hall with the chicken. “Come on around!” Arf stayed right at the glass door whining. Eventually Sylvia and Georgia said we were being too mean to Arf, and he ended up getting the chicken in his dish on the back porch. So, in a way, he won.

Arf never succeeded at things by acting human, he succeeded by keeping on being Arf. He would insist on his way of doing things, and eventually we and the rest of the world would give in.

The children loved to spend time petting Arf. “I like confiding with Arf when the world seems against me,” as Rudy put it. “He’s always soft,” said Georgia, “He’s fluffy!” “If you’re ever sitting on the ground, Arf comes up and sticks his nose in your face to see what you’re doing,” observed Isabel. “The nerve!” Sylvia liked taking him for walks, she was proud of what a cute puppy he was, and of how everyone would comment on him. She particularly admired his high-held feathery tail; she liked to call him “Plume.” And she relied on him to defend the house when I wasn’t around.

I could always count on Arf to come on hikes with me, even if nobody else in the family wanted to come. One day in particular I remember, everyone was mad at me, and I floated down the James River alone with Arf in rubber raft. That day, for some reason he spent a lot of time sitting like a person, with his butt down, and with his back leaning against the fat ring of the raft. I guess the thin rubber bottom of the raft was too unsettling. I took my favorite photograph of Arf that day, a profile shot of him staring off across the water, with his ears cocked and his eyes alert. He had a long, handsome muzzle with a beautiful black nose.

Arf on the James river.

That little day-trip I took with Arf was part of the inspiration for my novel,
The Hollow Earth
, which is about a much longer journey, set in the 1840s. Arf played a supporting character under his own name. I want to copy out some of my Arf descriptions from
The Hollow Earth
, as they’re a good store of things I wrote about him.

At the beginning of the book, Mason Reynolds is about to leave his farm near Lynchburg, Virginia, along with his slave Otha.

Arf got excited and started barking. He had the noble profile and the feathery legs of a retriever. His legs and ruff where white, but his head and body had the tawny coloring of a collie. I’d grown up talking to him like a person. He had a way of moving his eyebrows and his feathery tail so expressively that I often felt he understood me. Now in the farmyard, his tail and eyes were merry as he pumped his barks skyward.

Later I came to always refer as Arf as orange, rather than tan or tawny. I in fact got quite obsessive about this, and started telling people, “I defy you to say that Arf is not orange.” Finally someone did defy me: when I picked up Arf’s body this week, they said he was a red and white collie-mix, while we’d always called him an orange and white collie/beagle. Picked up his body? Yes, this is an elegy.

Speaking of Arf’s orangeness, there was a phrase I always meant to build up into a children’s story: “And there in the middle of the Christmas parade was a confused little collie-beagle dog with a orange saddle on his back.” In
The Hollow Earth
, Mason tries to leave Arf behind, but “Arf slipped out the gate after us, his tail held demurely down. I scolded him, and he cringed, but he kept right on coming.” Which is completely typical of Arf. He follows Mason with a vengeance: to the center of the Earth and back. A few scenes later, Mason and Otha get in trouble and are running from the sheriff. They hide in a boat at the wharf.

Arf stood up on the wharf staring down at us. “Come on,” I hissed. “Come on down here, Arf.” He snuffled and backed off. I lunged and got hold of the loose skin of his neck. Man’s best friend had to let out a yelp, of course, which set off hallos from the sheriff’s torch gang.

Arf had a knack for refusing to cooperate when you needed it the most. Like when we were moving to California and he was howling in the parking-lot outside the motel and we tried to sneak him up the stairs to our motel room of course he had to get his toe stepped on and yelp at the top of his lungs. In
The Hollow Earth
, Mason and Otha get to Richmond where they split up. Arf follows Otha, but soon he ends up back with Mason.

At the sound of my voice, a dog came rushing out of the alley by the
Whig
building and jumped on me. He was white-legged with a tan head and body. He pushed his feet into my stomach and stretched his head up toward my face. His feathery tail was beating a mile a minute. It took me a minute to understand that it was my dear old Arf. ‘Arfie! What are you doing here, Arfie boy?’ Arf licked and whined and rolled on his back. I knelt down and petted him for a long time. He lay there squirming, with his front paws folded over like a dead rabbit’s. When I stopped petting him, he sprang up and shook his head vigorously. The way he shook his head was to stick it far forward and then to rotate it back and forth so fast that his ears slapped like the wings of a pigeon taking flight. The head shake was Arf’s way of punctuating his changes of moods. Now that we were through greeting, it was time for something else. He stood there next me with his tongue lolling out.

There were so many enjoyable things about Arf. The noise he made when drinking water was a particular wonder. He made the water sound so liquid and delicious. Isabel and I used to like to get near the water dish and gloat over the noise of his drinking.

I had a favorite line I liked to use about Arf’s name: “
He’s so smart he can say his own name, and he’s so famous all the other dogs talk about him.
”

I used this line on hundreds of people over the years. I’d dole the two jokes out cautiously; if the person didn’t get the first one, I wouldn’t try the second one. Almost anyone will come up and talk to you if you have a dog, particularly a noble handsome hound like Arf, orange-and-white old Arfie perhaps at ease on his back, his black lip line looking particularly winsome. I’d often see that winsome lip line when Arf would lie on his side and let me brush and curry him, perhaps cleaning his ears. He calmly soaked up any attention we’d give him.