My Dog Skip (6 page)

I never saw such a transformation in him. Up till now he had been wholeheartedly indifferent to cats of all sizes and species, ignoring them to the point of regally walking away from them when they appeared fortuitously in our neighborhood, but when that little kitten hobbled up to him he rose and looked at her, then began licking her on the face, and when she lay down in the shade of the elm, he lay next to her. He felt sorry for her, I suppose, but he was also smitten by her, and his response to her struck something in me, too. The little kitten tugged at my heart.

Like Skip, I had had no experience with cats, and had been as apathetic to them as he ever was, but it took no genius with cats to see that this little one had just about given up. No one in my household knew about cats either—we were all dog people, and always had been—but Rivers had two cats, whom she doted on. I went inside and telephoned her, and she was there on her bicycle in five minutes. She examined the kitten, then held her closely in
her arms. “Take care of her/’ she said. Til be back in a jiffy.” She returned with an infant's milk bottle with a nipple on top, a can labeled “Milk for Motherless Kittens,” and a tablespoon of medicinal ointment. In the next two or three days, I was touched by the sight of Rivers and Skip trying to nurse the diminutive visitor back to life. As Rivers fed her, Skip hovered about like an accomplished pediatrie intern; that kitten could not have received better attention at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The kitten began to purr, and to move around with a little more spirit, and when she slept, it was in the crook of Skip's legs, not unlike the way he slept with me. Often the little kitten would gaze at Skip, and hug him with her paws. Rivers came every day for a week to check up on her. She named her Baby.

Suddenly one day, the kitten began to cough and retch, and then to tremble all over. As Skip gazed down at her lying on the grass, he nuzzled her with his nose, glancing up at me questioningly. Once more I telephoned Rivers. When she arrived, she held the kitten close to her. She died in Rivers's arms. Rivers started crying, the tears dropping down her cheeks in tiny rivulets, then put the kitten on the ground, and she, Skip, and I just stood there looking at her. I got a shovel from the Victory garden, and Rivers and I recited the Lord's Prayer before we buried her under the elm tree in the backyard. For weeks Skip acted sad and strange, and a very long while after that, in another city far away, Rivers Applewhite, whom I had not seen in twenty
years, confessed to me she had never gotten over that kitten, and wondered if Old Skip ever had either.

When my mother eventually found out about Skip's and my confrontation with the writing spider, she banished all chinaberry fights in our neighborhood for two years. Even worse, along about then she took on eight more piano students, to the dismay of Old Skip and me.

My mother was of an old, aristocratic family that had been dispossessed after the Civil War. She was the best piano player in the state. Although we never suffered hardship, we were by no means rich, and she supplemented the family income by teaching piano. There was a Steinway baby grand in our parlor that occupied more than half the room. On late afternoons when it began to grow dark, Skip and I would listen to the music from up front. It was not the music the pupils repeated over and over that we heard, but the songs my mother played when she told the children, “Now
I'll
play your piece all the way through like Mr. Mozart would want it played.” I can somehow hear her music now, after all the years, and remember the leaves falling on some smoky autumn afternoon with Skip there with me, the air crisp and the sounds of dogs barking and the train whistles far away.

It was the keyboard racket made by her students, however, that drove Skip and me to distraction. Rivers Applewhite was about the only one of them any good at the piano,
and when she came to take her lessons, Skip and I would sit out of sight in the adjoining room and listen as she sweetly played her etudes and sonatas. The others were the most noisy and off-key creatures I have ever heard, and as they played their cacophonous exercises over and over, Skip's ears would twitch almost as agonizingly as they had during Hitler's radio monologues, and he would beg me to take him outside or anywhere else, for which I needed only scant excuse. One of the pupils, a tattletale in our school class named Edith Stillwater who had a small off-color wart on her nose, was playing so fiendishly one day that I thought the baby grand might go up in smoke; I cannot begin to describe those profane chords. Skip himself had had quite enough. His ears were making circular movements like miniature windmills. He rose from where he had been lounging on the carpet, slipped into the parlor, climbed onto the top of the piano, and in one of his famous leaps nosedived onto the keyboard in front of which my mother and her tone-deaf protegee sat, accidentally making a chord with his paws and posterior that had more harmony to it than any ever contrived by Edith Stillwater. For this, supplementing the ban on chinaberry wars, he was made to sleep under the house at night for an entire week.

My mother also played the pipe organ in the First Methodist Church. Sometimes, early on Sunday mornings before anyone else arrived, Skip and I would walk down to the church and sit in a back pew in the empty sanctuary
while she practiced under a beautiful stained-glass window. She played “Abide with Me/’ ”Rock of Ages/’ “In the Garden.” The music drifted through the tranquil chamber and made Skip and me drowsy, and we would stretch out on the bench and fall fast asleep.

In ecclesiastical circles, Skip was best remembered for a singular occurrence that elderly Methodists
in
the town, I am told, still to this day discuss. It happened during the regular eleven A.M. Sunday church service—in the summertime, before air-conditioning, a broiling forenoon of August, with all the church doors open. On the organ my mother was accompanying Mrs. Stella Birdsong, who had the most inappropriate surname in all the annals of music—a heavy-set matron with an askew left eye, half-glass, half-real, it seemed to us, although that may not have been possible from the ophthalmological perspective—who was known in our area for her shrill, disharmonious high soprano notes, which caused chandeliers to rattle in her all-too-frequent performances. Henjie and I were seated on the aisle in a middle pew when he nudged me and pointed toward his ear as a signal for me to listen to something. Through the open door came the unmistakable sound from down the street of several dogs barking individually, and then in chorus, and getting closer by the minute. One of these barks, I perceived, belonged to Old Skip. Mrs. Birdsong had now begun her song, a sonorous religious composition with which I was vaguely familiar, which would be capped by a
shrill, metallic high C at its apex. As she was approaching this culmination, suddenly Skip and five or six other dogs of our acquaintance, of all colors, shapes, and sizes, burst through the open door, all bunched together and sniffing at each other as they proceeded down the aisle. At that precise instant, as the dogs had progressed halfway down the aisle, Mrs. Stella Birdsong hit her lengthy high C, the most ear-splitting quaver I ever heard in my entire existence. And as she held on to it with the tenacity of an iron riveter, Skip and the other dogs stopped in their tracks, caught there in evanescent frieze, each of them turning his head in the direction of the singer. Then Skip, with a ferocity I had seldom acknowledged in him, lifted his snout and began to howl, and then the others joined in with him, howls of such devilish volume, and amplified by Mrs. Birdsongs continuing high C warble, that Henjie and I and others in the congregation put our hands to our ears. Just as swiftly as Skip and the other dogs had begun their wails, they turned about in concert and dashed out the door, and I could hear them still howling half a block away. From the pew behind us an elderly character not particularly known for his piety nudged my shoulder and said, “Them dogs got the old-time religion”

T
HERE WERE
OTHER
hazards pertaining to Skip besides Stella Birdsong and skunks, some of them of a more risky nature. In the summer of his fifth year, for instance, he got hit by a car, the only time that ever happened, the bumper of it knocking him high in the air, and he somersaulted a couple of times but landed squarely on his feet and walked away chagrined but unscathed. Another time the Barbours’ big mean Doberman, who bore a striking resemblance to the photographs I had seen of Hitlers dog Biondi, bit him on the back of the neck and I had to take him to the same Dr. Jones who had granted me Dog Care for a dozen stitches.

Once we were hunting in the woods when he suddenly got mired in a small patch of quicksand. He frantically clawed with his paws to escape, but the more he fought the quicker he began to sink in that dark enveloping muck. It all happened in a matter of moments. I did not have time to
panic, or even to tell myself to be clearheaded in the face of the appalling jeopardy to Old Skip—I believe I just
acted.
I tossed away my gun and shouted to my father to hold my feet while I lay down on my stomach in Skip's direction and caught him by the paw and gradually pulled him free. Only when it was over and he was on safe ground feverishly shaking himself to get rid of the grimy sand all over him did I sit down under a tree and take a deep breath, then and only then feeling the stark emotions of pity and terror.

There was also the frightening business of his encounter one day with a copperhead snake. He and I were driving around in the hills. In a certain area near Highway 49 there was one tall hill after another for many miles. All these hills and dark little valleys in between them were overgrown with a beautiful green creeping vine right up to the highway itself. This vine, known as the kudzu, sometimes grew onto the trees and telephone poles, making strange and wonderful shapes. Rumor had it that if a cow tarried too long in a field without moving around very much the vine would grow out so quickly as to cover the cow. The green creeping vine protected the land and kept it from washing away during heavy rains, but when I was a little boy I thought the whole town would someday be covered by it, that it would grow as fast as Jack's beanstalk, and that every person on earth would have to live forever knee-deep in its leaves.

Skip and I drove off the highway to a road right in the middle of that phantasmagoric green vine. I stopped in a clearing to let him run. Everyone knew that the vines
were crawling with snakes, so I was not surprised to see a monstrous copperhead, one of the most poisonous of the indigenous species, slither out of the underbrush across the same clearing. I
was
surprised, however, to see Skip's reaction. Unlike what he did the day in the big woods when he sighted the rattlesnake and retreated a respectful distance to stare at it, he began to circle round and round this intruder, barking and growling. The snake did not like its privacy disturbed, and it snapped back at him, making ungodly hisses to match Skip's own commotion. He got closer and closer to the snake, ignoring my frantic shouts to get away. All of a sudden, in one prodigious leap, Skip came at the copperhead from the rear (just as, I had read in our library, Stonewall Jackson came at Hooker at Chancel-lorsville), caught it by the tail, and began dragging it all over the field. I could almost hear the fearful beating of my own heart, because every time the snake tried to bite back, his fangs extended in venomous rage, Skip would simply let go of it, and then move back in again to give the snake a couple of brisk additional shakes. While I was looking around for a rock to kill the copperhead, it headed out in a flash again, into the labyrinth of vines, wishing, no doubt, it had never left home. On the way back to town I gave Skip a stern lecture on snakes, but I knew it did not do much good.

I have mentioned that the town was half hills and half Delta. The name of the street that came swooping down out of the hills was Broadway, and it was the most unusual
street of all. Its angle of descent was so steep that every so often the driver of some doomed car or truck would discover that his brakes were not nearly sufficient to deal with this reckless terrain. His path to death would be an agonizing one, as he whipped eighty or ninety miles an hour out of those hills, usually smashing into another car or truck where the ground leveled off at the intersection with Main Street. Once, as we were told it later as children, a truck full of cotton pickers got out of control coming down that perilous thoroughfare and crashed into a big pecan tree at seventy miles an hour; the dead and the dying were thrown for yards around, even into the broad leaves of the pecan tree.

Sometime during Skip's fourth year we were walking down the sidewalk of Main Street with Henjie and Peewee near this intersection when we heard a dreadful collision. We rushed to the site. A Coca-Cola truck had lost its brakes and smashed into the high concrete steps to the post office. The driver had miraculously escaped with minor cuts and bruises, which the Methodist preacher the next Sunday would describe as “a merciful act of the all-knowing Almighty,” but the back door of the truck had been thrown open in the crash, and hundreds of Coca-Cola bottles were thrown out, most of them unbroken and rolling unencumbered along the middle of Main Street. At the sight of this grand bounty, Henjie and Peewee and I, Skip hot at our heels, raced into the Jitney Jungle nearby, where Big Boy worked sacking groceries, and got three of his largest sacks
from him. Out in the street people of all ages and colors were picking up the unbroken bottles and running away with them. Skip watched as Henjie and Peewee and I, gathering and gleaning like squirrels, filled our sacks full of the Coca-Colas and carried them home. It was better than any Easter egg hunt.

A couple of years after that, Skip and I ourselves had our most formidable brush with disaster. I was driving the old DeSoto out of the hills toward Broadway; Skip was sitting on the passenger seat next to me. We were just beginning the descent when I casually pressed my foot on the brakes. Nothing happened. I pressed again, and again nothing. The brakes were not working¡ I pumped the pedal in terror as the car gradually began to gather speed; Skip put his paws on the dashboard and gazed quizzically ahead at the whole precipitous stretch of that street, and I began praying beseechingly to the Methodist Lord. Suddenly I remembered what my father had once told me to do in such an emergency. I switched off the ignition and slowly began to pull the emergency brake upward; the vehicle jolted once, then twice, throwing Skip against the dashboard. Had I not in that instant done something else, the reader would not have this book about Old Skip before him now, for this memoirist would not have endured to write it, nor for that matter would Skip himself have survived to be written
about:
I gently turned the steering wheel to the right and jumped the curb into Miss Sarah Cooper Lear's enormous side yard abutting
the street, a treeless green expanse bereft of lawn furniture and even flowerbeds and bushes; I pulled up the emergency brake as high as it would go, and the DeSoto moaned and clanked and came to a reluctant halt halfway up a grassy incline. Skip and I just sat there for a moment, wilted wretches that we were, until Miss Lear came out and looked through the window and asked if we were all right. Neither I, Skip, nor the DeSoto had sustained a solitary scratch, and I sacked groceries at the Jitney Jungle all the next week to compensate Miss Lear for the tire ruts on her lawn, and attended church services the next eight Sundays in a row.