Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (102 page)

Hawk had engaging habits. He had presence. He was devoted to me. To everyone, this was apparent. But I really knew nothing of his psychology. He was no Tulip or Keeper or Bashan who had been analysed by their writers. He knew sit, stay, down, go to your place. He was intelligent, he had a good memory. And surely, I believed, he had a soul.

The friends who had given us the house on Nantucket insisted that I see a doctor about my malady. They made an appointment for me with their doctor in New York. We would leave the Island, return to our own home for a few days, then put Hawk into the kennel and drive into the city, a little over two hours away.

I can’t remember our last evening together.

On the morning my husband and I were to drive into the city, I got up early and took Hawk for a long walk along accustomed trails. I was wearing a white sleeveless linen blouse and poplin pants. My head pounded, I could barely put one foot ahead of the other. How about Lupus? my mind said. How about Rheumatoid Arthritis? Well, we’ll know more soon…We drove then to the kennel. It was called Red Rock and Hawk had been there before, they liked him there, he’d always been a gentleman there. When we drove in, Hawk looked disconsolate yet resigned. I left him in the car while I went into the office. I was looking for Fred, big, loud, gruffly pleasant Fred, but he didn’t appear. One of his assistants did, a girl named Lynn. Lynn knew Hawk. He’s only going to be here for one night, right? Lynn said. I went out to get him. I put the leash on him, his blue, rather grimy leash, and he jumped out of the car and we walked into the office. Lynn had opened another door that led to a row of cement runs. We stood in that doorway, Hawk and I. All right then, I said. I was bent forward slightly. He turned and looked at me and rose and fell upon me, seizing my breast. Immediately, as they say, there was blood everywhere. He tore at my breast, snarling, I think, I can’t remember if he was snarling. I turned, calling his name, and he turned with me, my breast still in his jaws. He then shifted and seized my left hand, and after an instant or two, my right, which he ground down upon, shifting, getting a better grip, always getting a better grip with his jaws. I was trying to twist his collar with my bleeding left hand but I was trying not to move either. Hawk! I kept calling my darling’s name, Hawk! Then he stopped chewing on my hand and he looked at me coldly. Fred had been summoned by then and had a pole and a noose, the rig that’s used for dangerous dogs, and I heard him say, He’s stopped now. I fled to the car. My blouse was soaked with blood, it was dripping blood. I drove home sobbing. I’ve lost my dog, I’ve lost my Hawk. My mind didn’t say anything. It was all it could do to stay with me as I sobbed and drove, my hands bleeding on the wheel.

I thought he had bitten off my nipple. I thought that when I took off my blouse and bra, the nipple would fall out like a diseased hibiscus bud, like the eraser on a pencil. But he hadn’t bitten it off. My breast was bruised black and there were two deep punctures in it and a long raking scratch across it and that was all. My left hand was bleeding hard from three wounds. My right hand was mauled.

At home I stood in the shower, howling, making deep ugly sounds. I had lost my dog. The Band-Aids we put over my cuts had cartoon characters all over them. We didn’t take our medicine cabinet very seriously. For some reason I had papered it with newspaper pictures of Bob Dole’s hand clutching its pen. I put clean clothes on but the blood seeped around the Band-Aids and stained them too. I put more Goofy and Minnie Band-Aids on and changed my clothes again. I wrapped my hand in a dish towel. Hawk’s water dish was still in the kitchen, his toys were scattered around. I wanted to drive into the city and keep my appointment with the doctor, he could look at my hand. It seemed only logical. I just wanted to get in the car and drive away from home. I wouldn’t let my husband drive. We talked about what happened as being unbelievable. We hadn’t yet started talking about it as being a tragedy. I’ll never see him again, I’ve lost my dog, I said. Let’s not talk about that now, my husband said. As we approached the city I tried to compose myself for the doctor. Then I was standing on the street outside his office which was on East Eighty-fifth Street trying to compose myself. I looked dishevelled, my clothes were stained, I was wearing high-top sneakers. Some people turned as they were walking by and made a point of staring at me.

He was a cheerful doctor. He put my hand in a pan of inky red sterilizing solution. He wanted to talk about my malady, the symptoms of my malady, but he was in fact thinking about the hand. He went out of the office for a while and when he came back he said, I’ve made an appointment for you to see an orthopaedic surgeon. This doctor was on East Seventy-third Street. You really have to do something about this hand, the first doctor said.

The surgeon was of the type Thomas Mann was always writing about, a doctor out of
The Magic Mountain,
someone whom science had cooled and hardened. Still, he seemed to take a bit of pleasure in imagining the referring doctor’s discomfort at my messy wounds. People are usually pretty well cleaned up by the time Gary sees them, he said. He took X-rays and looked at them and said, I will be back in a moment to talk with you about your hand. I sat on the examining table and swung my feet back and forth. One of my sneakers was blue and the other one green. It was a little carefree gesture I had adopted for myself some time ago. I felt foolish and dirty. I felt that I must not appear to be very bright. The doctor returned and asked when the dog had bitten me and frowned when I told him it had been six hours ago. He said, This is very serious, you must have surgery on this hand today. I can’t do it here, it must be done under absolutely sterile conditions at the hospital. The bone could become infected and bone infections are very difficult to clear up. I’ve reserved a bed in the hospital for you and arranged for another surgeon to perform the operation. I said, Oh, but…He said, The surgery must be done today. He repeated this, with beats between the words. He was stern and forbidding and, I thought, pessimistic. Good luck, he said.

The surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital was a young good-looking Chinese man. He spoke elegantly and had a wonderful smile. He said, The bone is fractured badly in several places and the tendon is torn. Because it was caused by a dog’s bite, the situation is actually life-threatening. Oh, surely…I began. No, he said, it’s very serious, indeed, life-threatening, I assure you. He smiled.

I lay in a bed in the hospital for a few hours and at one in the morning the hand was operated on and apparently it went well enough. Long pins held everything together. You will have some loss of function in your hand but it won’t be too bad, the doctor said, presenting his wonderful smile. I used to kiss Hawk’s nose and put my hands in his jaws in play. People in the hospital wanted to talk about my dog biting me. That’s unusual, isn’t it, they said, or, That’s strange isn’t it, or, I thought that breed was exceptionally loyal. One nurse asked me if I had been cruel to him.

My hand would not be the same. It would never be strong and it would never again stroke Hawk’s black coat.

“The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard. First appeared
The New Yorker
, June 1996. Later published in
The Boys of My Youth
(Back Bay Books, 1999).

“Getting Along with Nature” from
Home Economics
by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1987 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

“The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss first appeared in the
Seneca Review
, vol. 35, no. 1 (spring 2005). A shorter version later appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
, vol. 310, no. 1861 (June 2005).

“The Unwanted Child” in
All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family
, by Mary Clearman Blew, pages 159–177.

“Torch Song,” copyright © 1999 by Charles Bowden. Originally published in
Harper’s Magazine
, August 1998, vol. 297, no. 1779, p. 43. Reproduced by permission of Anderson Literary Management.

“Embalming Mom” by Janet Burroway, originally published
Apolachee Quarterly
, 1985, no. 22, pp. 2–13.

“Physical Evidence” by Kelly Grey Carlisle. From
River Teeth
, vol. 7, no. 1 (fall 2005) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2005 by the University of Nebraska Press.

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson, from
Glass, Irony, and God,
copyright © 1995 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“Burl’s” by Bernard Cooper. Originally appeared in
Los Angeles Times Magazine
, Nov. 1994.

“Visitor” by Michael W. Cox. Originally published
New Letters
, 64.2, 1998, pp. 7–16.

“Living Like Weasels” from
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
by Annie Dillard. Copyright © 1982 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

“Return to Sender” by Mark Doty. First appeared in
The Writer’s Chronicle
, Oct.–Nov. 2005.

“Leap” copyright © 2001 by Brian Doyle.

“Somehow Form a Family” by Tony Earley. Reprinted by the permission of Regal Literary as agent for Tony Earley. Copyright © 1998 by Tony Earley.

“Kissing” by Anthony Farrington,
Gulf Coast
, vol. 13, no. 1 (winter 2001), pp. 103–115.

“The Beautiful City of Tirzah” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher. First appeared in
New Letters
, vol. 72, no. 2.

“Sun Dance” from
The Cold-and-Hunger Dance,
Diane Glancy, University of Nebraska Press, 1998, pp. 24–32.

“Mirrorings” by Lucy Grealy. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.

“Present Tense Africa” copyright © 2007 by William Harrison.

“Reading History to My Mother” by Robin Hemley. Originally appeared in
Fourth Genre
(Spring 1999).

“World on a Hilltop” by Adam Hochschild. Copyright © 1997 by Adam Hochschild. From
Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels
(Syracuse University Press). Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

“A Small Place” from
A Small Place
by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1988 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

“High Tide in Tucson” from
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 1995 by Barbara Kingsolver. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

“Small Rooms in Time” by Ted Kooser. Reprinted from
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative
, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 2004) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press.

“The Essayist Is Sorry for Your Loss” by Sara Levine. Originally published in
Puerto del Sol
34.2 (summer 1999), pp. 28–40.

“The Art of French Cooking” by E. J. Levy.
Salmagundi
, vol. 144–145 (fall 2004/ winter 2005), pp. 188–198.

“Portrait of My Body” by Phillip Lopate. From
Portrait of my Body
, Anchor Books, 1996, pp. 18–31.

“Flight” by Barry Lopez. Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Barry Lopez.

“The Undertaking” by Thomas Lynch. From
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
, W. W. Norton, 1997.

“Sorry” by Lee Martin. From
Turning Bones
by Lee Martin by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2003 by Lee Martin.

“Interstellar” copyright © 2007 by Rebecca McClanahan.

“Bad Eyes” by Erin McGraw. Originally published in
The Gettysburg Review
, vol. 11, no. 1 (1998), pp. 89–98.

“The Search for Marvin Gardens” from
Pieces of the Frame
by John McPhee. Copyright © 1975, renewed 2003 by John McPhee. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Brenda Miller, “The Date” from
Season of the Body: Essays
. Copyright © 2002 by Brenda Miller. Reprinted with the permission of Sarabande Books, www.sarabandebooks.org.

“Son of Mr. Green Jeans” by Dinty W. Moore.
Crazyhorse
, n. 63 (Spring 2003), pp. 49–53.

“Celibate Passion,” from
The Cloister Walk
by Kathleen Norris, copyright © 1996 by Kathleen Norris. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“This Is Not Who We Are” by Naomi Shihab Nye. First appeared in
O Magazine
(April 2002), p. 83–86.

“Autopsy Report” by Lia Purpura. First published in
The Iowa Review
, vol. 33, no. 3, (2003–2004). Later published in
On Looking
, 2006, Sarabande Books, pp. 1–8.

“Watching the Animals” by Richard Rhodes. Reprinted from
The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West
, © 1969, 1991 by Richard Rhodes.

“Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine” by Bill Roorbach.
Into Woods
, 2002. University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 49–76;
Creative Nonfiction
9 (1998), pp. 40–55.

“Repeat After Me” by David Sedaris. From
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
by David Sedaris. Copyright © 2004 by David Sedaris. By permission of Little Brown & Co.