My Dog Skip Page 6

  My father got in the driver's seat of the DeSoto; I sat in the back and held Skip in my lap. Jackson was forty miles away, much of it over the same steep hills with the creeping vine where Skip had attacked the copperhead snake. The vines were sere and gray now in the winter's cold, and the night hushed and desolate under ponderous clouds, and we raced through the bare little villages as fast as we dared. “Don't die, Skip,” I said, and he looked up at me with glazed eyes. After an eternity, it seemed to me, we reached the outskirts of Jackson; far in the distance was the state capitol, brightly lit and imposing, like a picture postcard against the frigid sky. When we arrived at the animal clinic we took him inside. A young veterinarian asked us to wait and took him in back. He returned several minutes later.

  “It's poison, all right.”

  “Who would want to poison a dog?” my father asked.

  “Only bad folks,” the doctor replied.

  “Can you cure him?” I asked.

  The doctor said he was not sure. Skip was very sick. He would give him the best medicines he had. If he survived the night he would live. He advised us to drive on home and come back the next afternoon. My father and I made the journey home in a grim silence. Alone in my room I missed Skip asleep in the crook of my legs. As on the day the brakes had given out on the DeSoto, I prayed to the Lord. I promised Him I would behave myself forever if He would save Skip. I hardly slept that night, and the next morning I did not go to school. That afternoon we drove again to Jackson. At the clinic I held my breath as the doctor greeted us.

  “I've never seen a dog come back like that from poison,” he said. “That dog wants to live.” He needed to be nursed a few days, he said, and he gave us two big bottles of pills. All during the following week I made him rest on the sheets in my bed. I brought him water and bologna cut into small pieces and a bedpan to relieve himself, and Rivers and the boys brought him wildflowers. Then, bright and early one morning, I felt him licking my nose as he always did to wake me up. When I opened my eyes he was sitting there next to me wagging his tail. The impish expression in his eyes had returned, and he bit my toes to roust me out faster. “Let's go chase some squirrels, Skip!” I said, and he leapt off the bed and waited for me to take him outside—from the valley of the shadow of death he had returned to me once more.

  ••••••• 7 •••••••

  Old Skip and Baseball

  HE WAS A DOG for all sports seasons. Ralph, the photographer in our group, once captured this quintessence in him, having him pose under the oak in my front yard with a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap on his head, the lace of our football grasped between his teeth, his paw in a baseball glove, and in front of him on the grass a basketball, a baseball bat, four baseballs, my baseball spikes, a tennis racket, a volleyball, a football helmet, half a dozen or so sports magazines and game programs, and numerous baseball bub-blegum cards.

  I had even created a mythical dog football team of my own devising, consisting of various dogs I was familiar with in the town, and often when walking somewhere alone or riding on my bicycle I would entertain myself by reciting play-by-play accounts of games involving this team, which I called Kennel U. Using my mother's old Kodak camera, I went around taking snapshots of the dogs on the team, pasting them into the crude replica of an official game program, with thumbnail sketches of each dog, such as Sheriff Raines's Buck and the Hendrixes’ Super-Doop. We operated out of the single-wing offense made famous by the Tennessee Volunteers. Skip was the tailback and, naturally, also the captain.

  His dramatic touchdowns in our real football games in my front yard were fabled in the town, of course, but he also enjoyed watching the boys and me shooting baskets around the wooden basketball goal in back, and whenever someone made an errant shot that missed the entire backboard and bounced over the hedges toward the front, he would enthusiastically retrieve it and push it back to us with his nose. His swiftness and agility were likewise legend, and when of the spirit he could move so fast that I desired some specific authentication of his actual speed.

  I borrowed Henjie's father's stopwatch one Saturday morning and persuaded some of the fellows to accompany us to the high school football field, where I intended to time Skip formally in the hundred-yard dash. The difficulty was that I knew I must improvise some method that would get him to race from one goal line to the other, exactly one hundred yards, at top velocity and in as straight a path as possible. How to do this? At first I had Henjie, Big Boy, and Peewee station themselves at the far goal line with the stopwatch while I positioned Skip at our goal line, in as close an approximation of the classic sprinter's stance before the starting gun as I could persuade him to assume. Then, on a signal from me, our three companions began shouting, “Skip, come here!” at which I would give him a vigorous shove to get him on the way. This did not prove efficacious, producing a series of false starts in which he might sprint fifteen yards in the right direction, or twenty, or twenty-five, then circle around and return to me. After a reflective conference the others and I arrived at the proper solution. Pee-wee would hold Skip at the starting line, with Big Boy and Henjie at the opposite line with the stopwatch. I would station myself at midfield and shout for Skip to follow me, then start running toward Big Boy and Henjie, and at that precise moment Peewee would release Skip, who would likely run after me in a straight line and at full acceleration for the entire distance.

  This indeed worked perfectly the very first time we tried it. I yelled at him from the fifty-yard line and then began running in the opposite direction. The instant Peewee released him Henjie started the stopwatch. I ran as fast as I could, but in little time at all I could hear him approaching me from behind. I crossed the finish a mere three or four strides before he did. Then, with Peewee dashing alone down the field toward us in his keen curiosity, Big Boy and I approached Henjie, who had the stopwatch extended in his hand and was grinning with such wild felicity that I thought he might commence jumping up and down at any moment.

  We looked at the stopwatch: y.8 seconds¡ Take into consideration if you will that the human world record in the hundred at that point in history was 9.4 seconds, held by a fellow named Mel Patton. I immediately surmised that the all-time world record for fox terriers was achieved on that day in this small-town high school football stadium of the American Southland. Who would have the audacity to question it? We did, after all, have four witnesses.

  You will have to take me at my word, however, that his favorite among all the sports was baseball. How did I know this? Because I knew my dog very well, and it had to do with the look in his eye when he was around baseball, and also with that particular time and place.

  Like Mark Twain and his comrades growing up a century before in another village on the other side of the Mississippi, my friends and I had but one sustaining ambition in the 1940s. Theirs in Hannibal was to be steamboat men; ours in our place was to be major-league baseball players. In the summers, we thought and talked of little else. We memorized batting averages, fielding averages, slugging averages; we knew the roster of the Cardinals and the Red Sox better than their own managers must have known them; and to hear the broadcasts from all the big-city ballparks with their memorable names—the Polo Grounds, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium—was to set our imagination churning for the glory and riches those faraway places would one day bring us. Soon after the war was over Peewee went to St. Louis on his vacation to see the Cards, and when he returned with the autographs of Stan Musial, Red Schoen-dienst, Country Slaughter, Marty Marion, Joe Garagiola, and a dozen others, we could hardly keep down our envy. I hated Peewee for a month and secretly wished him dead, not only because he took on new airs but because I wanted those scraps of paper with their magic characters.

  I had bought a baseball cap in Jackson, a real one from the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a Jackie Robinson Louisville Slugger, and one day when I could not locate any of the others for catch or for baseball talk, I sat on a curb with the most dreadful feelings of bei
ng caught forever by time— trapped there always in my scrawny and helpless condition. I'm ready, I'm ready, I kept thinking to myself, but that remote future when I would wear a cap like that and be a hero for a grandstand full of people seemed so far away I knew it would never come. I must have been the most dejected-looking boy you ever saw, sitting hunched up on the curb and dreaming of glory in the mythical cities of the North. And Skip, of course, would be right there on the street curb with me, dreaming his own dreams. Sometimes he would sit in my lap when I listened on the radio at home to the Cardinal games out of KMOX in St. Louis. When the boys and I played catch in my front yard, he would sit on the porch, watching us with interest, and often as not he would go inside and bring back his tennis ball and have us toss him his own grounders and high flies. Ever since he was two years old he could catch a tennis ball in his mouth as well as any center fielder. I had started him off on this gradually. He was about a year old when I began throwing the ball on a bounce from short distances, then moving a little farther back every day At first he muffed most of them, but soon he became all but unerring. After that I started gently tossing the ball to him in the air. Then we progressed to short pop flies, and finally to tall, arching throws way up beyond the topmost branch of the oak tree, which Skip dexterously circled under, his eyes following the lengthy descent, snaring the ball when it reached him, then dropping it in front of me before I again threw it to the tallest heavens for another acrobatic catch.

  Almost every afternoon when the heat was not unbearable my father and I would go out to the old baseball field behind the armory to hit flies. I would stand far out in center field, and he would station himself with a fungo bat at home plate, hitting me one high fly or Texas Leaguer or line drive after another, sometimes for an hour or more without stopping. Old Skip would get out there in the outfield with me and retrieve the inconsequential dribblers or the ones that went too far. Once my father hit one so long that it bounced on the pavement of the street beyond the outfield and rolled three blocks away, and I watched as Skip had to run a quarter of a mile at least to retrieve it, eventually bringing it back to me and dropping it at my feet.

  The smell of that new-cut grass was the finest of all smells, and Skip and I could run forever and never get tired. It was a dreamy, suspended state, those late afternoons, thinking of nothing but outfield flies as the world drifted lazily by on Jackson Avenue. Then, after all that exertion, Daddy would shout, “I'm whuffed, and the dog is whupped, too!” and we would quit for the day.

  On Sunday afternoons my father, Skip, and I sometimes drove out of town and along the hot dusty roads to baseball fields that were little more than parched red clearings, the outfield sloping out of the woods and ending in some gully full of yellowed paper, old socks, empty bottles, and bugs. One of the backwoods teams had a fastball pitcher named Eckert who did not have any teeth, and a fifty-year-old left-handed catcher named Smith. Since there were no catcher's mitts for left-handers, Smith had to wear a mitt on his throwing hand. He would catch the ball and toss it lightly into the air and then whip off his mitt and catch the ball again in his bare left hand before throwing it back.

  In his gregariousness Skip developed a fondness for the toothless pitcher and the southpaw catcher, often coming down out of the forlorn unpainted little bleachers to watch them warm up before a game, and to sit between them on the bench when their team was at bat, where they shared with him their parched peanuts. It was a fine way to spend those Sabbath afternoons—my father and Skip and I sitting behind the chicken-wire backstop with a few farmers and their families, watching the wrong-handed catcher go through his odd gyrations and listening at the same time to our portable radio, which brought us the days action from Yankee Stadium or Sportsman's Park. The sounds of the two games, ours and the ones being broadcast from far away, merged and rolled across the bumpy outfield and the gully into the woods. It was a combination that seemed perfectly natural to everyone there.

  Because back home, even among the adults, baseball was all-meaning; it was the link with the outside. A place known around town simply as The Store, down near the train depot, was the principal center of this ferment. The Store had sawdust on the floor and long shreds of flypaper hanging from the ceiling. Its most familiar staples were Rex-all supplies, oysters on the half shell, legal beer, and illegal whiskey, the latter served up, Mississippi bootlegger-style, by the bottle from a hidden shelf, and costing not merely the price of the whiskey but the investment in gas required to go to Louisiana to fetch it. There was a long counter in the back. On one side of it, the white workingmen congregated after hours every afternoon to compare the day's scores and talk batting averages, and on the other side, also talking baseball, were the blacks, juxtaposed in a face-to-face arrangement with the whites. The scores were chalked up on a blackboard hanging on a red-and-purple wall, and the conversations were carried on in fast, galloping shouts from one end of the room to the other.

  An intelligent white boy of twelve was even permitted, in that atmosphere of heady freedom before anyone knew the name of Mr. Justice Warren or had heard much of the United States Supreme Court, a quasi-public position favoring the Dodgers, who had Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe—not to mention, so it was rumored, God knows how many Chinese and mulattoes being groomed in the minor leagues.

  We often went there to get the scores and absorb the animated repartee, and this unlikely establishment was one of Old Skip's favorite spots in town, ranking right up there with the dump, the fire station, Bozo's grocery, and the Victory garden and tree house in our backyard. Intrigued by its variegated activities, he would accept the raucous affections of the town drunks and petty gamblers as if they belonged to him alone, but when one of them offered him some raw oysters one day, he took a couple of sniffs, made a face, and imperiously went outside to wait for me.

  As I got older and into high school, I was the center fielder for our team. Our coach was nicknamed Gentleman Joe. He always had us pray before a game, and sometimes between innings when the going got rough. His pep talks, back behind the shabby old grandstand of our playing field, drew on such pent-up emotions, being so full of Scripture and things of the holy earth, that I sometimes suspected we were being enlisted not to play baseball but to fight in the Army of the Lord.

  Given this spiritual emphasis, Skip acutely distressed me on this very baseball field one afternoon, in a historic scene more rampant by any measure than the morning he and the other dogs came down the church aisle during Mrs. Stella Birdsongs ill-fated soprano solo. We were playing host to the juggernaut team from the metropolis, Jackson, and there must have been four or five hundred people in attendance, including the big-city partisans, who condescendingly viewed us as small-town unsophisticates. We were about halfway into the game, and leading it by a score of i-o, when the progress of it was precipitately disrupted.

  The Jackson boys were at bat and I was at my post in center field when out of the corner of my eye I saw Skip himself burst out from under the left-field bleachers and run madly in my direction. The playing field was at least two miles from our house, and how he even knew about the game I will never comprehend, except for his almost psychic propensity, previously cited, for fathoming where in the various venues of town I might approximately be at any particular moment. As he raced onto the field, the base umpire called time and began running angrily after him. Skip came right up to me to offer his salutations. I tried to chase him away. “Go home!” I shouted, and when the umpire finally accosted him, he started circling the outfield in widening arcs, then rushed to the infield to pay his respects to Mut-tonhead at shortstop.

  Muttonhead tried to catch him too, but Skip eluded his grasp and ran up to Big Boy on the pitchers mound. By now the whole playing field was in pandemonium, the other umpires joining the chase, and Peewee from second base, and Henjie threw off his catchers mask and went after him, and Gentleman Joe, and Sheriff Raines, and even Rivers Applewhite, who later said she thought she alone could ta
me the miscreant, and after a while numerous of the enemy players took to the pursuit, losing their caps as they did so. Only my friends and I on that field appreciated how elusive Skip could be when he chose to, but they persisted in the hunt. Four or five of this posse would momentarily surround him, but he would squirm through their legs, or dash away with his world-record speed, while in the grandstand the spectators cheered and applauded, and the waggish public-address announcer put on the music “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I was so chagrined I cowardly watched the spectacle from deepest center field, not once moving to assist, until he galloped out in my direction once more, and stood there just looking at me. I was exasperated. I reached down and smacked him on his rear, the first and last time I ever did so, and as he glanced at me, as if I were the rankest of turncoats, I grabbed him firmly in my arms, whispering “Go home!” all the while, and ran to the nearby outfield fence and tossed him over it. Then, standing on my utmost tiptoes, I peered across the top of the fence as he walked slowly through the cotton field beyond, halted once and looked back at me with a betrayed and wounded countenance, and haughtily began ambling in the direction of home. We subsequently lost that game io-i, and for long days my friends and I held Old Skip accountable, Big Boy complaining that after the tumultuous interruption he misplaced both his curveball and his control, but since we lost most of the other games too, Skip was after a decent time forgiven.

  ••••••• 8 •••••••

  Christmases

  WE LOVED THE TOWN at Christmas, in the clear, cool air, the lights aglitter in front of the established houses on the hills and down in the flat places, the sudden containment and luster. Skip would accompany our church group as we went caroling, and as we observed the heavenly path of the star, it must have been the star, as it moved across the skies from around Belzoni out in the Delta, up over Brickyard Hill and Peak Tenereffe; sung on such a night, the Christmas carols were the most peaceful blessings in all the world. Our friends and I and Skip would take Christmas baskets to poor people living in shabby little cabins in the hills and feel glad that our families were not in such bad straits. Rivers Applewhite, Skip, and I had a custom on Christmas Eve of walking down Main Street to look at the bustling crowds and the decorations, then out into the residential sections to see the Christmas trees in the windows. The town seemed expectant, all laid out and still under the pristine December night.