My Dog Skip Read online

  A few days before one Christmas it snowed: this was for us a most rare and majestic event. I had seen snow once before, when I was very small, but most of the younger children never had, and they went wild with joy. Skip had never seen snow either, and I observed him as he pranced in it on our lawn, rolled about in it, and tried to catch the flakes in his mouth. I went a little berserk myself and started shooting baskets in the backyard in it, enjoying the sound of a successful shot made through the frozen basketball net. The next day Skip and I trudged to the top of Brickyard Hill with a sled. He sat in front of me and I held him tightly as we descended in an exuberant swoop all the way down to the cemetery. We did it again and again, returning home exhausted from the countless treks to the apex of the hill. That snow, if you can believe it, lasted on the ground for four days, and the older townspeople still remember it with reverence.

  Christmas mornings were warm with the familiar ritual. We would wake up shortly after dawn in our house—my father, my mother, Skip, and I. Skip would have aroused me out of sleep with his nose as always, then bitten my toes, then pulled the blankets off me with his teeth to make sure I would not tarry any longer. No worry about that on this day. We would open the presents, and Skip would have his own stocking: a new tennis ball in it, perhaps, and a package of bologna and fried chicken livers, and a new collar. My mother would play three or four carols on the baby grand; then we would have the sparsest of breakfasts to save room for the feast to come.

  Under the purple clouds we would drive the forty miles south to Jackson to be with my grandmother Mamie, my grandfather Percy, and my incorrigible great-aunts Maggie and Susie. The drive itself is etched in memory, the same we took the night Skip was ill—the tossing hills and the frost on the ground and the tiny hamlets on the plain with their wan, lost facades where children played outside with their acquisitions of the day, and finally the splendid glimpse of the Capitol dome and the ride down State Street to the little brick house on North Jefferson. When Skip saw the familiar house he would bound out the car door swift as a fox, and I was not far behind.

  They would be there on the gallery under the magnolia tree waiting for us, the four of them, and we would all go inside to exultant embracings to exchange our gifts, modest items for sure, and examine what we had given one another. Once Skip got a rubber mouse that squeaked, and proceeded to bite it in two. And the smells from the kitchen¡ The fat turkey and giblet gravy and cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows and the orange nectar and ambrosia and roasted pecans and mincemeat pies¡ Skip hovered around the oven while nibbling on a roasted pecan and my two great-aunts, who could not see very well, bumped into each other every now and again and wished each other Merry Christmas, while the rest of us sank into the chairs by the fire in the parlor and awaited what my grandmother was making for us. Christmas songs wafted from the chimes of the church down the way, and the crackle of firecrackers came from the neighboring lawns, and my grandmother would dart out of the kitchen with Skip at her heels and say, “Almost done now!”

  Then, at eleven in the morning, never later, we would sit at the ancient table, which had been my great-great-grandmother's: my grandfather Percy and my father at opposite ends, my mother and great-aunts on one side of it, my grandmother and I on the other, Old Skip poised next to my chair, expecting his favors. Occasionally I would slip him a turkey gizzard or liver or wing. We sat there for two hours, it seemed, prattling about many things. The clock on the mantel would sound every quarter-hour, and my great-aunts would ask for more servings and say, “My, ain't this good?” I would look around every year at each of them, and feel Skip's nose on my hand, and listen to the talk, as if all this was designed for the two of us alone. Then, after the rattling of dishes, and after Skip had dined on leftover dressing and pieces of turkey, we would settle in the parlor again, drowsy and fulfilled, Skip stretching out on the carpet in his Yule-tide torpor. Finally my grandmother, standing before us by the fire, would gaze about the room and always say, in her tone at once tender and bemused: “Oh, well, another Christmas come and gone.”

  ••••••• 9 •••••••

  The Changing Seasons

  “TIME, HE IS A TRICKY FELLOW,” Lewis Carroll said. Old Skip had come to us when I was nine years old; by the time I entered high school, I was fourteen and he was four. If, as the authorities often declare, a dog's life in relation to a human beings can be calculated by seven human years to his one, then Skip was twenty-eight when I was fourteen. This is all too confusing, however, and I intend not to place much stock in it: my memories of Skip move in and out and around in time anyway, from my grade school years through junior high and high school and beyond, which is likely as it should be, because if the existence of all creatures is a continuum, there is still plenty of room to weave and backtrack and drift and glide. Life is indeed a confluence, but seldom a steady one, and embraces forever the changing seasons.

  Autumn: Our region of America never had the great flamboyant, bursting beauty of northern autumns, but there was a languor to our Octobers and Novembers, especially in the dry falls when the foliage was so profound and varied, and the very landscape itself would be imbued with a golden, poignant sheen.

  One Saturday during the autumn I woke up quite early to take full advantage of the fresh, free Saturday ambiance, and in such a disposition I woke up Skip rather than the reverse, and we lounged around in bed for a few more minutes as I considered the days unique possibilities. My room was quite small but nonetheless contained an unusual number of interesting items: colorful pennants from a dozen colleges; the German helmet and belt hanging from nails on the wall; horns from a dead cow; a photograph of the 1946 St. Louis Cardinals; my father's old baseball glove; a bookcase with books by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Dickens, and Poe; the rattlers from the rattlesnake I had killed in the woods; four chunks of petrified mud picked up along ancient creekbeds; and various photographs of Skip with Rivers Applewhite, the other boys, the bulldog Buck with whom he had shared the first prize in the dog contest, and myself.

  Lying there in bed with Skip beside me, I gingerly recalled the major events of the day before. After school Friday he had been waiting for me at his appointed place on the boulevard. We immediately went home and got my bicycle and rushed out to the black high school football field to see the Black Panthers play a game and to imbibe the lavish flair of their players and fans. They played in the discarded uniforms of our high school, so that their school colors were the same as ours, and they even played the same towns up in the Delta that our high school did. Skip and I normally sat on the sidelines next to the cheering section, but one afternoon the referee asked me to carry one of the first-down markers, and Skip followed closely beside me during that entire game as I fulfilled these official responsibilities. Next I conjured the scenes from last night's white high school game, which Skip, Peewee, and I had watched from the end-zone bleachers, and the infectious undercurrent of excitement there, for on Fridays in the fall you could almost feel this tension in the atmosphere, the unreserved reverence for the game itself, the awesome thuds of big old boys running headlong into each other, the off-key marching bands, the cheerleaders making pyramids of flesh, while all through this pandemonium the spectators slapped at the manifold Delta bugs attracted from the nearby swamp-bottoms by the lights of the stadium.

  At about nine o'clock I got dressed in a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, a white T-shirt, and a green baseball cap with a Y on it. Skip and I ate some raisin bran in the kitchen; then I led him outside for a lengthy session of retrieving sticks. It was Indian summer and everything—the earth and the trees, touched by the airy sunshine—was the lazy golden-brown of that sad and lovely time; there was the faint presence of smoke everywhere, and the smell of leaves burning, and sounds and their echoes carried a long, long way. Wherever you looked there was a truckload of raw cotton coming in for ginning; along the country roads and even the paved avenues in town you could see the white cotton bol
ls that had fallen to the ground. The county fair was on, and every night that week we had taken in the 4-H exhibits—the vegetables, and the bottled preserves of all the shades of the rainbow, and the pumpkins, and the great slabs of meat. How Skip loved those county fairs¡ He strolled the grounds with the other boys and me in a spirit of fine titillation, ate the cotton candy Rivers Applewhite gave him, and waited impatiently while we took the carnival rides. I had tried to get the man who ran the Ferris wheel to let him go on it with us, but he was not sympathetic. “This contraption ain't no place for a dog”

  In our backyard on this Saturday morning Skip was by now a little tired out from his exertions, and it was time to consult with Henjie. I went into the house and told the telephone operator his number (it was 27; mine was 243; my father's office was 1). When Henjie answered the phone, I wanted to know if everyone was coming to the football field, and he said they would all be there at ten; we had stopped going to the Saturday Kiddie Matinee when the war ended and we felt we had outgrown it anyway. I fiddled around with the radio awhile, and read the Memphis Commercial Appeal for the football scores; then I got on my bicycle and headed up the street toward the football stadium, with Skip following, stopping every so often for him to examine a dead frog or some other lifeless object or to greet an old lady.

  When he and I reached the field, the same site at which he had earlier set the world record for fox terriers, we ran a few wind sprints, then examined the cleat marks that had been made in the turf the night before by our high school heroes. Three thousand people had been in these grandstands and the bleachers just a few hours ago¡ I did a pantomime of a forty-three-yard scoring play, dodging Skip and the imagined tacklers on last nights exact route to glory. Then the boys showed up, including Peewee with his official Southeastern Conference football with the dangling lace for Skip to carry in his mouth on his running plays, and we chose up sides and played a brisk brand of tackle until the twelve o'clock whistle blew at the sawmill. The only injuries on this day were to Peewee's big toe, which he claimed he sprained when tripping on a cleat mark, and to Henjie's head, which he said Big Boy had mistaken for the football. The final score was 86-69, my team over Muttonhead's.

  The afternoon held many possibilities, but this one began with fried chicken and biscuits and other delicacies at Bubba's house, for his mothers refrigerator contained a plethora of riches mournfully absent from the one at my house, and then an interlude listening to the Ole Miss or State football game on the radio, because there has always been a religiosity to college football in our region, and Saturday is the holy day After that we rode our bicycles to Main Street to see the latest Boston Blackie movie, then returned to my house to get our DeSoto and take a spin around town, from the telegraph shack at the end of Main Street to the Country Club at the rim of the Delta. Only a scant minority of its citizens had never seen Skip behind the steering wheel, but we managed to locate a little store on Brickyard Hill which was virgin territory, and the inevitable old man shouted: “Look at that ol'dog drivin'a car!” Then we proceeded to Henjie's house to listen to the college football results on the radio. We lounged on his front porch and watched the leaves drift from the oak trees and listened indolently to the scores—first those of the little schools in the East like Williams and Colby and Amherst and Niagara, or Allegheny and Susquehanna and King's Point and Lafayette; then the Ivy League scores, which were just exercises; on to the big midwestern and southern ones that really mattered—moving slowly across the country like a great roll call of America.

  After that Skip and I took off for home, walking down the hills toward the quiet flat streets, and making it just in time for hamburgers and french fries. After supper I turned on the lamp in the front yard and put the portable radio on the porch, tuning it to the LSU game from Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, and Skip and I played football again by ourselves, I making up the whole game to the accompanying din of the thousands from the radio, racing ninety-five yards for fictitious touchdowns before seventy-five thousand cheering fanatics, intercepting enemy passes in the dying seconds of the fourth quarter, kicking forty-six-yard field goals against thirty-mile-an-hour winds. By now it had been a long autumn Saturday Old Skip and I stretched out on the cool, wet grass. I used the football for a pillow and he lay down beside me and we gazed up at the stars until it was time to go in to bed.

  In remembering moments such as these, I retain the sad-sweet reflection of being an only child and having a loyal and loving dog, for in the struggles of life, of the dangers, toils, and snares of my childhood hymns, loyalty and love are the best things of all, and the most lasting, and that is what Old Skip taught me that I carry with me now.

  And the coming of the springtime for Skip and me in that old town¡ Even today it is an echo in my heart: the prolific chorus of the land, which sang like a living being; the overpowering fragrances of the vines, flowers, and grasses; the early jonquils and flowering quinces and then the blossoming pears and dogwoods and azaleas; the incessant cadence of the katydids in the nights; the broad lawns glistening with dew; the lightning bugs in late spring flickering and vanishing as far as the eye could see.

  Skip and the fellows and I took long rambling hikes up to Peak Tenereffe on the old valley road, which once had been an Indian trail, and stood high on the bluffs and looked out over the dark fecund Delta land being broken now for the cotton planting, and absorbed the rich odors everywhere of the honeysuckle and wisteria, coming back down only when the lights of town one by one twinkled on far below. Or we walked up the bayou, which had been dug deep into the earth to bring the waters down from Brickyard Hill past the cemetery, through the residential section, past the cotton gin, and on to the river. In these springtimes, with the water coming out of the hills, the bayou was crawling with hundreds of crawdads, and Skip sometimes went after them, circling around them as he had with the copperhead, until one afternoon one of their number pinched his nose with a claw, and that was it for him and crawdads. We walked under one bridge after another, following the source of the water until the bayou itself ran out. Then we played by ourselves or with the other boys in the empty cavernous cotton gin by the Illinois Central tracks, or strolled down Highway 49 to inspect the floodwaters from the river, the overflowing gullies and the shacks with stilts as uneasy protection against the cascading waters. On Thursday evenings in the spring Skip accompanied me to the Boy Scouts meetings in the church, and afterwards participated with us in the loud and strenuous games of capture the flag and kick the can on the school grounds, once taking the empty can in his mouth and running away with it, so that we had to go to a neighboring house and ask for another can.

  In the springtime there was nothing gentle about nature. It came at you violently or in a rush. When the muddy waters from the river invaded the town, and even the shacks on stilts in the bottoms were covered over, we saw the open trucks with the convicts crowded in the back on their way to bolster the levees with sandbags, their black-and-white stripes somber under the gray, forbidding sky. Sometimes a tornado twisted down and did strange things to whatever it hit, carrying someone fifty yards and leaving him barely hurt, or driving straws into car tires like needles, or sending our garage across the alley into a field of weeds.

  One afternoon a modest tornado descended while we were watching a movie in the Dixie. We heard hailstones on the roof, hitting in steady torrents. All the lights inside turned dim, and after a succession of emphatic thumps the movie on the screen broke down. We got out of there, onto the sidewalk under the front marquee. Skip, who had been waiting for us, as was his custom, was standing there barking. In the middle of Main Street bicycles were floating in midair up and down the whole thoroughfare, and Skip, like the spectators at tennis matches who turn their heads right and left while following the ball, was bobbing his head back and forth as the bicycles whizzed past. Then the wind began to subside, and a huge rat, caught in the waters of the gutter, was being carried by the strong current closer and closer to the sewer that would
transport him into the river. Skip went out and watched as the rat disappeared, and on the walk home, with trees strewn everywhere, he pushed at the egg-sized hailstones with his nose.

  Skip managed to get in everywhere. In school I was away from him for long hours, and he did not like it at all. A disastrous incident happened to me one April when I was in the fifth grade. We had a considerably mean-spirited teacher named Miss Abbott. One day when she was out of the classroom I made a spitball and threw it two rows over at Edith Stillwater. At that precise instant the wretched Miss Abbott came back into the room and shouted my name; the sound of her voice sent terror to my soul.

  Each afternoon for six weeks during that incomparable spring I had to “stay in” for two hours, working long division. Miss Abbott would sit at her desk, reading the Bible or Reader's Digest, while the shadows got longer and the sound of the boys’ voices at play wafted in through the open windows. On one of these afternoons, who should suddenly burst into the classroom but Skip himself, angry, I suppose, that I had been getting home so late in recent days; he approached me at my desk and licked my hand; then he spotted Miss Abbott and started growling contemptuously at her, prompting her to throw down her Readers Digest and retreat into a corner. In a querulous voice she ordered us both to leave, and the next morning she added another whole week to my incarceration.