The Poet's Dog (2 page)

W
e found cans of food: Sylvan's favorite, baked beans with molasses, and chicken soup, and crackers. No milk.

“I don't like milk, anyway,” said Flora.

The wind picked up suddenly, and the cracking and falling of tree limbs shook
the cabin. The lights flickered, and we found an oil lamp in case the power went out.

“You can sleep in Sylvan's bed,” I said.

“I want to sleep with you in front of the fire,” said Nickel.

“Me, too,” said Flora.

We gathered pillows and blankets and Sylvan's old green sleeping bag.

The wind grew stronger. A large thump of a big tree limb fell outside.

The lights went off, then on, then off again.

I lay on the red rug.

Flora slept right away.

After a while Nickel turned and put his
arm around me.

The way it used to be.

In the night I got up once to push up the door lever with my nose and go outside into the wind.

Nickel raised his head.

“Where are you going?”

His voice sounded frightened.

“I'm going to pee,” I said.

I heard Flora's sleepy, comforting voice in the dark.

“He's a dog,” Flora said softly.

“Oh right,” said Nickel. “I keep forgetting that.”

I came back to my red rug next to Nickel.

His arm went around me again.

“Sometimes I forget, too,” I said to Nickel.

I
n the morning the wind still howled. The snow was halfway up the windows on either side of the door, and still falling hard.

When I opened the door to go outside, the snow was over my head. I couldn't get through.

Nickel had leaned the snow shovel inside the night before, and he shoveled a path through the drifts for me. I leaped through the snow.

Back inside I shook the snow off on the rug by the door.

“Thank you, Nickel,” I said.

His hair was plastered to his head. He looked the same way he had when I'd first found him.

Flora still slept by the fire.

“I found the weather box and listened,” he said. “The storm will last for days. No one is allowed on the roads. No phone service. No cell phone service working either.”

“The power went on and off all night,”
I said. “We only lost power for hours once that I remember, though.”

It is a windy afternoon storm. Sylvan's class of poets sit in a group. There is a fire in the fireplace. I lie on the red rug, listening. The students who want to be poets are eager and fresh, like washed apples. Sylvan and I are the only ones with gray, grizzled hair.

“They know so little about life,” Sylvan whispers to me as he puts out plates of cookies and seltzer bottles.

“Maybe they just don't know what they know,” I say, making Sylvan smile.

They all pat me. Students are always kind to their teachers' pets Sylvan has told me.

One young man reads a poem about a farmer walking his animal to town.

I sit up. It sounds like
Ox-Cart Man
. Sylvan nods when he's done reading.

“What do you think, Teddy?” he asks.

The students laugh.

“Shallow and derivative,” I say before I realize that I'm talking.

No one but Sylvan hears me, of course.

“It has been written a different way, Dan,” says Sylvan. “Go read
Ox-Cart Man
.”

A thin, nervous girl, Ellie, reads a poem about her lost love.

Sylvan taps his foot nervously. I know he hates it.

“Ellie, have you lost a love?” Sylvan asks her
when she's finished reading.

She shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes.

I get up from the red rug and go stand next to Ellie.

Her lips tremble.

“What have you lost?” asks Sylvan. “What are you really talking about in this poem?”

I lean against Ellie, and she puts her arm around me.

“My cat,” she whispers.

She is crying full-out now, and I glare at Sylvan. I curl my lip at him.

He looks at me, and his face softens.

“Ellie,” says Sylvan softly, “write about your cat, dear girl.”

And the lights go out, Ellie's tears making the ruff of my neck wet in the dark room.

“You were not kind to her,” I tell Sylvan later.

He sighs.

“I know. Sometimes writers are not thoughtful of other writers. We want to be inspired. Cranky when we're not. But trust me, she will write a wonderful poem about her cat.”

And she does.

It's called “Gray Cat Gone Away.” It ends:

I
N MOONLIGHT

N
O

SOFT SWEET PAW ON MY CHEEK

N
O

FUR CURLED UNDER MY CHIN

J
UST

A SAD SPACE LEFT BEHIND—

G
RAY CAT GONE AWAY.

T
here was no silence in the cabin, even at night. The wind was like a wild song that pushed away the quiet.

The power had gone off and on, off and on many times.

We cooked up many things from the freezer to be heated in the fireplace later.
We stored the cooked food in coolers outside in the snow.

Today Flora cooked soup on the stove, stirring as she read a book.

“This is you, Teddy,” she called to me.

When I walked over to the stove, I saw she was reading a book on Irish wolfhound dogs. A tall dog like me was on the cover.

“You're much better looking, I must say,” said Flora.

If I could smile I would have.

“Did you know that your ancestors were warriors?” she said, peering over the book at me.

“So Sylvan told me,” I said.

“Your great-grandfather or grand
mother may have pulled soldiers off horses with their teeth,” said Flora.

“I myself have never done that,” I said, making Nickel laugh.

“It says here you have a kindly disposition,” said Flora.

“Does it say he's a best friend?” asked Nickel, tossing more wood on the fire.

Flora lowered the book and stirred the soup, tossing in some herbs from a small jar.

“Yes,” she announced. “It does. And often the Irish wolfhound loves children and cats.”

“I have met a cat or two that I liked,” I said.

“We have a cat at home,” said Flora.

“Is it a spitter?” I asked.

Flora gave me an insulted look.

“She is not a spitter.”

A sudden sweep of wind sent snow against the cabin. Outside a limb fell. We all looked up.

“This is lasting a long time,” said Nickel. “The batteries for the weather box are getting low, and I don't know how to charge them. But the storm is expected to last for a few more days.”

“Good,” said Flora. “I like it here.”

“I like it here, too,” said Nickel. “As long as there's wood to burn and food to eat.”

He paused.

“And as long as Mom and Dad aren't worried.”

“Remember, I wrote a note,” said Flora.

“There's wood in the shed,” I said.

“If we can get there,” said Nickel.

“And food in the pantry,” said Flora.

“I like it here, too,” I said suddenly. “I do.”

Sylvan types on his computer, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning and muttering to himself.

I sit up on the red rug and yawn my yawn that ends with a squeak.

He looks over at me.

“Being a writer is not easy, you know. It is, now that I think of it, either full of sorrow or full of joy.”

“Like being a dog,” I say.

Sylvan turns in his chair and peers at me.

“I should take my own advice to Ellie and write about what I love.”

Sylvan pauses.

“I will write about you.”

“The way Ellie wrote about her cat?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Sylvan.

He turns back to his computer and writes furiously.

“Ellie is a poet, you know,” he says. “At long last. The next time she sees you, she'll hear you speak.”

“I know,” I say, yawning.

The peal of laughter from Sylvan fills the room. After a moment he laughs more at what he's writing. He coughs a bit at the same time. He has a bottle of medicine and a spoon on his desk. He pours some into the spoon. His cheeks are a little flushed.

After a few minutes he gets up, closes the cover on his computer, and lies down on the couch.

The cough stays with him through the night.

It is the beginning of Sylvan getting sick.

“‘D
ay three in the cabin during a horrific storm,'” Nickel read dramatically from his notebook. “‘Flora is rummaging through the refrigerator like a hungry weasel, searching for something mysterious, and possibly poisonous.'”

Nickel wrote silently in his notebook
every day, and had just begun reading his views of our life in the cabin.

His writing is funny, sly, and sometimes poignant. Sylvan had taught me the word
poignant
.

“It may be the most important thing in poetry,” Sylvan tells me. “Poignancy.”

Sylvan would have said that Nickel had style.

Not once had Nickel asked to use Sylvan's computer. The silver computer sat silently on his desk, cover closed. There was something final about that.

Sylvan closes his laptop computer with a snap.

“The end. Done-o!”

The loud word
done-o
causes me to leap up from a sound sleep.

Sylvan grins at me and brings a pillow over to my red rug. He lies next to me, one arm around me.

Because I am a dog with a good nose and fine ears, I can hear that he is not breathing easily. He doesn't have the same Sylvan smell that I know.

“You should go to the vet,” I tell him.

“The doctor,” he corrects me.

“Yes.”

“Ellie is driving me to the doctor tomorrow. You can have a nice talk with her.”

His grin is huge.

Flora had become the cook, inventing meals that looked terrible but surprised us by tasting good.

I lap up her soups noisily, the liquid first, then eating whatever she has added at the end.

“That's a much better way to eat soup than with a spoon,” said Nickel.

“Peanut butter is very hard,” I told him, trying to get it off the roof of my mouth.

“It's not because I'm a girl that I cook,” Flora explained. “I like it. It's in the herbs. Like science. When I grow up and have twenty-seven cats and dogs and become a horse trainer, I will have a large collection of herbs.”

Nickel laughed, the cheerful sound cutting through the constant noise of the wind outside.

It reminded me of Sylvan's laugh.

“I will find a horse; you just watch,” said Flora, turning on the oven
.

“And she will,” said Nickel.

Nickel and I went outside to the shed while Flora cooked whatever invention she cooked.

It was still hard to get through the wind and drifts. We both ran with our heads down. When we reached the shed, we opened the door and shut it behind us.

The shed smelled the sweet smell of cut wood. It was strangely warm and quiet.

Nickel leaned against the woodpile for a moment.

“This is where you slept after Sylvan left,” he said, nodding at the pile of gray blankets behind the woodpile.

“Yes.”

“You didn't want to sleep in the house alone.”

“No.”

“Were you warm enough?”

“Most nights.”

Nickel sighed.

“But what will happen to you after Flora and I go home?”

I didn't answer.

After a moment Nickel started loading wood into the log carrier.

Just before we opened the door to fight our way back to the cabin, Nickel turned.

“Something good will happen. I know. After all, you once had Sylvan,” he said.

He said it with a poignant tone. That word again.

Poignant.

When we were out in the snow and wind again, walking quickly, Nickel suddenly touched my head.

“Look.”

In the clearing close to the woods stood a deer, the color of dawn, watching us.

“A sign of something good,” said Nickel.

We hurried on, and when we both looked back, the deer was gone.

I
told them in the morning. I didn't want to tell them at night. Night could bring dreams.

We were eating pancakes that Flora had made without milk, strange and grainy and wonderful, with lots of maple syrup. I licked the syrup off first, then ate the
pancake in small bits.

Nickel watched me and ate his pancake the same way. It made Flora laugh.

Nickel had found the cord to charge the weather box.

“More days of bad weather. Ice is possible before the storm ends. The roads will be cleared after two days. Things will open again. Electricity will be back on in most places.”

“So,” I said suddenly, “Sylvan got very sick.”

I hadn't meant to say it right out like that.

Nickel put down his fork.

Flora opened her mouth, but for the
first time since I'd known her, no words came out.

“You didn't think he'd just gone away and left me, did you?” I asked. “After all I've told you about him?”

Flora shook her head, still silent.

I could see tears at the edges of Nickel's eyes.

“That's the story,” I said. “He got sick.”

Ellie comes to drive Sylvan to the doctor. The day is sunny, and she walks into the house without knocking.

“Hello, Teddy,” she says.

She puts her head down next to mine and hugs me.

“Hello, Ellie,” I say.

She grins.

“I can hear you,” she says happily.

“You're a poet,” I say.

Sylvan comes into the living room dressed in a tweed jacket over a blue shirt.

His eyes are as blue as the shirt.

“Did I hear you two talking?” he asks slyly.

“Yes,” says Ellie. “I'm wondering if my dog, Billy, will talk to me when I get home.”

“No,” says Sylvan, “but don't worry. You'll have many hours to read to him.”

Ellie sighs.

“No, Billy is more of a sleeper,” she says.

“I'll drive,” says Sylvan, who since I've known him has only ridden a bike.

Ellie is no fool.

“Do you have a driver's license?” she asks.

“No, he's a poet,” I say, making Ellie laugh.

“I'm driving,” says Ellie. “You can sit next to me and roll out your lovely words.”

Ellie strokes my head.

“Do you want to ride in the car with us?” she asks me.

“I'll wait here,” I say.

I don't want to leave the house. I'm afraid that if I leave, somehow everything may change.

I walk outside and watch them drive off in Ellie's small red car.

Going away.