Penny (6 page)

Penny made her own way, however, as she did with everyone. In five minutes Bobbie was down on the floor talking to her. Meanwhile Willis had to hear the whole story, of her arrival, her personality and finally of the phone call. At last he said, “I think we'll stay awhile, if you don't mind. I'd like to see this confrontation. Of the dog, I mean, with these people who think she is theirs. A dog's emotions aren't very obscure. Granting, of course, that a dog has emotions, and I am sure most dogs do. Daisy did. And old Pat did.”

Bobbie looked up and laughed. “Penny is just one little
bundle
of emotions. Don't you think so?” she asked me.

“Well, she hasn't much sense, if that's what you mean. Intelligence, yes, but sense, no.… Yes, to answer your question, she is an emotional creature. Like so many of you women.”

“And,” Bobbie said, ignoring the jab, “she probably ran away because of an emotional problem. Daisy wasn't jealous, but if someone came to the house with a child and everybody made a fuss over it, Daisy would go off in a corner and sulk. She never ran away, but there were times when I'm sure she wanted to.”

“Well,” Barbara said, “you know as well as I do that we don't want another dog. But she adopted us, and she's been here years and years, two weeks at least. It's not so easy just to say good-bye and good riddance.”

Penny left Bobbie and went over to her as she was talking. She stood, tail wagging, eyes wide and adoring, waiting for an affectionate word or a friendly pat. Barbara stared at her, frowning. “No, I won't! Go on away. Go lie down.”

Penny watched her, baffled.

“Penny!” she said severely. And Penny's ears drooped, her tail sagged and she turned away, the personification of friendless dejection.

“Penny!” Barbara said again, and this time it was a heart cry. She was on her knees, hugging the little dog, hiding her tears.

Five

Penny looked up when she heard the car pull into our driveway and stop. She barked once but stayed where she was, under the bench. I went to the door. A tall, slim, dark-haired young man and a very thin girl with a small baby in her arms came up the front walk. I stepped out onto the porch, greeted them. His name was Tom. We came into the living room and I introduced them. The girl sat down but Tom remained standing. Barbara asked how old the baby was and the young mother said two months. Tom reached into his coat pocket and handed me a sheaf of papers. I leafed through them—a pedigree and registration, two bills from a strange veterinarian, three color snapshots of Penny.

I glanced at Penny, still there under the bench but head up, looking from one person to another. Willis was watching Penny, and later he said, “She had the most baffled look I ever saw on a dog's face. I could almost hear her saying to herself, ‘What do I do now, with
two
sets of people?'” She glanced at me, seemed almost to plead for an answer. But I didn't have the answer.

Tom was saying, “I guess there's no question about who she is, is there?”

“No,” I said. “She's your dog.”

He shook his head. “She
was
mine, but—well, look. If she won't stay home, if she wants to live here, then she's yours.” Then he asked, “What do you call her? We called her Pokey.”

Barbara had been listening. Now she said, “Go ahead and call her. See if she comes.”

Tom hesitated just a moment, then said, “Pokey, come here.”

She got to her feet and wagged, almost embarrassed, and she went to him. He didn't touch her. He just said her name again, “Pokey,” with deep warmth and affection. And the dog almost smiled, then went to Tom's wife and stood up, her paws on the girl's knee, and licked the baby's face.

That broke Tom down. He squatted on his heels and patted her and talked to her, and she talked back very softly. Tom began to talk about her. She had all the shots and, yes, she was spayed. A kind of an accident, that was. One of the shots went wrong, he said, and she got an infection in her ovaries, so the vet had to do what amounted to a hysterectomy. The gash on her flank? As near as he could figure, she got that on barbed wire. She really belonged to Tom's wife, Carol. He gave the dog to her as an anniversary gift. But he had done most of the training.

“In training her,” I asked, “how did you punish her?”

“Punish her?” He was aghast. “Oh, I didn't ever punish her. I just talked to her till she knew what I wanted, and she did it.… Here, Pokey. Here. Right here.” And she went to him, lay down where he was pointing his forefinger. He rubbed her ears, fondly. He had proved his point.

“We both worked till a few months ago,” he said. “Pokey was at home alone all day. We've got a playroom in the basement and she stayed there. Then Carol got too pregnant to work and she quit, and Pokey was with her all day. But after the baby was born she began wandering. Some days she would come all the way down to the plant where I work, two miles from home, and wait for me at my car. And sometimes she went down to the horse barn—you know, the training track about half a mile from where we live—I guess because something was going on down there, horses and men, activity. She would stay there all day, sometimes. Now and then she even stayed overnight.” He shook his head. “And then about two weeks ago she just left and didn't come back. That's when she came over here, I guess.”

Carol was talking to Barbara, who had asked what they fed Penny. “We tried just about everything,” Carol said. “But she kept getting sick and throwing up. It seemed she couldn't keep anything on her stomach but bread and milk. Sometimes she would eat half a loaf of bread.”

And Barbara said that she had eaten almost everything here.

“And didn't throw up?” Carol asked.

“Not once.… We've got quite a lot of dog food that you'd just as well take. Canned food, mostly. Oh, she didn't care for kibbled food, the dry stuff, unless we tried it on the birds first!” And Barbara told them about Penny and the bird feeders and the secondhand kibbled bits that she thought were wonderful after the birds had kicked them out of the feeders.

And finally I said to Tom, “Well, she's yours. No doubt about that. I licensed her here in Salisbury, for her own protection. And I put a new collar on her. Keep the collar, but take the tag off and get her licensed in your own town.”

Tom hesitated. But for only a long moment. Then he said, “All right, Pokey, you're going home with us.” Then to me, “We'll be glad to have her back. But if she doesn't stay, if she runs off again, she's yours.”

Barbara had gone to the kitchen with Carol, to get half a dozen cans of dog food. I told Tom which brand we had been using, which she seemed to prefer, and he said they'd never tried that one.

And then they were out on the front porch, all of them, and going down the front walk, Pokey-Penny in the lead, just as though she was leading an Easter parade. She went down the walk and turned up the road, as though she were going for a walk. She had got past the garage when Tom called to her. “Pokey! Come on, Pokey. Get in the car. We're going home.” And she turned back, hesitated an instant, then hurried to the car and climbed in while Tom held the door open. Carol got in, with the baby, and Tom started the motor. He backed out and turned down the road, and a moment later they were gone.

We came back in, and Willis and Bobbie said they wouldn't have missed it for anything. “The look on that dog's face,” Willis said, “when they came in, was unbelievable. It was almost as though she was seeing ghosts. And then she was torn between you.”

We discussed the meeting and the departure a few minutes, and they left. And Barbara said, “Well, she is gone. It was a happy experience. I'm glad we had her. And I'm glad she is gone, since she really did belong to them. There wasn't any doubt about that, was there?”

“None in the world.”

We got lunch and ate. I showed Barbara the clipping from the Waterbury paper that was headed, “Another Dog Who Came to Stay at the Borlands?” It told about the basset hound that had adopted us, and it told the bare outline of the Pat story.

Barbara laughed. “So that's why Lila wanted all the details.”

“It's a good story, and she handled it just right.”

After lunch we went for a ride in the car, down to our lake place fifteen minutes from the farm. But there still was too much snow in the driveway to get beyond the entrance. We went on foot to the brow of the hill and looked down and saw that the lake was still iced in. It would be the end of May or early June before Barbara could swim. We came home, telling ourselves that we were lucky, at that. No dog to tie us down, to worry about if we went away for the day.

We came home and I got a carton and we put all the rest of the dog food in it, and the dog dish, the dog brush and the leash. I took them down cellar. Barbara handed me the old Navy blanket. “Hang it on the line. Let it air a few days before we even send it to the cleaner.”

All right, so she might be back on our doorstep tomorrow morning. Well, not tomorrow, because they would certainly keep close watch the first few days. But within a week she might be back. We weren't betting either way, but we were saying we were glad we had known that particular dog, and now we were saying good-bye, farewell and that's that. It was a pleasant story, and now it had a happy ending.

The next day I got up and automatically started to the porch door to say good morning to Penny. Opened the door, looked, shook my head and went back to the library with my first cup of coffee. Habit is hard to break. But that day I did succeed in breaking the logjam in a book I was writing. The chapter that had been stubbornly impossible to write fell into line at last, and I had that one licked. And Barbara was at her desk, at work. At lunch we agreed that we missed Penny—“No use lying about it”—but it was better this way. And when we went for a long walk that afternoon we saw that the ice on the river was almost all broken up. At long last. We saw two mergansers, the first of the season.

Then it was the day of the vernal equinox. It should have at least looked a bit like spring. But there was still a foot of snow on the ground and before the day was out it snowed again, another six inches. It seemed ridiculous to have to plow snow on the twenty-first of March. Some years we had been out plowing ground on the day of the equinox, though I admit there was frost in the ground and Albert didn't plow more than a couple of acres that day.

Another week and I phoned Tom, asked him to take the license tag off the dog and mail it to me. I told him I had canceled it at the clerk's office and that he had better license her in his own name. He said he would get to it. He had been busy. But Pokey, he said, was staying at home “pretty good. She was gone all one night, and we thought she had gone back to your place. But she was home next morning and has been home ever since.” I asked if she was eating, and he said yes, she ate a good deal.

“Does she still get sick and throw up?”

No, he said. “She hasn't been sick once since we brought her home. I guess it was all that bread she was getting.”

But he didn't mail me the tag. It didn't come, and I didn't press him.

Slowly the season progressed. The snow melted in the pastures. By the end of the month the migrant robins were back and the willows were on the verge of bursting bud. And then, the last day of the month, a phone call came and Barbara took it, and a voice strange to her said, “Mrs. Borland, your dog is here.” I heard her exclaim, “What!” and then she asked me to take the phone. It was a man I had known several years before when he was a butcher, and now he was working for the lime company about five miles from here. “Your dog is here,” he said to me. “The basset hound. She's got a tag, and I traced the number at the town clerk's office.”

I said, “Keep her there, Bob. Tie her up or something. We'll be right over.”

We got in the car and started to the lime company's plant, debating what to do, to bring the dog home or take her back to Carol and Tom. We still hadn't decided when we got to the office. I parked in the white-dusted driveway and went into the white-dusty little office building with windows covered with fine white limedust. My friend Bob was at a desk, and the moment I walked in here came Penny, herself looking pale and grizzled with the all-pervading lime. But it was Penny, all right. Penny-Pokey. I thanked Bob, who said she simply wandered in a couple of hours before, made herself at home and got acquainted with everybody. He saw the tag on her collar, made the phone call to Lila and then called our house. I thanked him again and opened the door. Penny went out ahead of me, jaunty and self-confident, went right to the car, waited to be let in. Barbara greeted her coldly, made her ride in the back seat and wouldn't even pat her once. But she said to me, “Let's take her home first. She looks starved.”

So we went home, and the moment Penny was let out of the car she went up the front walk and waited at the door for us. Inside, she went through the living room and to the kitchen, stopped at the refrigerator and plainly indicated that she was ready to eat. I went downstairs and brought back a handful of puppy biscuits. She would have nothing to do with regular dog biscuits, but those half-size puppy biscuits were like candy to her. We fed her half a dozen of them, and Barbara said, “We'd better take her back. Anyway, I want to see where they keep her.”

So I called and Carol answered. She didn't even know that Pokey-Penny was gone. She had been there the last time Carol looked. Which must have been around noon, since she had been at the lime plant a couple of hours and it was three o'clock when we got her. Yes, Carol said, of course they would like to have her back. Should she come and get her? No, I said, we would bring her. If Carol would give me directions to find the house.

It was a neat, relatively new house with a big lot, at least half an acre, on a gentle hillside in a cluster of maybe a dozen houses on similar lots. Six or eight children, none of them as much as ten years old, were playing nearby. There were two dogs in sight, both small tan mongrels. Children and dogs both watched as we pulled into the driveway. Inside the two-car garage was a conventional doghouse, and a long chain with a snap on the end was fastened to the corner of the garage.