At night I dream about Boots, crazed and desperate, clawing and biting to escape the bag as her tiny lungs fill with water.
* * *
—
I find solace in our neighborhood dogs. Sensing no danger from a kid, they emerge stiff-legged from their doghouses and under-porch hollows to greet me. The meaner ones growl until I squat down small and extend my hand, palm up. “Good boy!” I say, and their tails move cautiously back and forth. Like a Pied Piper of dogs, I lead the pack down the road, parceling out head pats to each mutt as they sniff my shoes and check my pockets for treats.
Mother falls for none of the strays I bring back for audition, not even a pitiful three-legged dog who has no home. “That dog’s nasty,” she says. “Wash your hands—it could have a disease.”
I plead for a dog of my own. We’ll be eating dinner, talking about Marshall’s schoolwork, and I butt in, “Another good thing about dogs…”
Miracle of miracles, a kind couple from church gives us a squirmy, squirrel-colored puppy, which they say is a short-haired cocker spaniel. We name him Buster Brown after a line of shoes that has a dog in its ads, and I nickname him Buggy Brown. The first few nights, he sleeps in a box with a towel, a hot-water bottle, and a ticking clock to remind him of his mother’s heartbeat. At his first whimper I lift him into bed with me. He starts out under the covers down by my feet and wiggles his way up until he’s sleeping directly against my face. In the morning I smell his puppy breath as he yawns, sticking out his long pink tongue and smacking his lips.
We are inseparable. If I sit on the couch, Buggy Brown sits on my lap with his head resting on my arm. I let my arm fall asleep rather than move it, so I won’t disturb him. If I go into the bathroom, he sits outside, scratching at the door. Outdoors, he flops down the steps, trips over his own feet, sniffs the vegetables in the garden. Every night I comb him like a monkey, picking burrs from his fur and ticks from his ears. Sometimes the tick comes off with a bit of Buggy’s pink flesh caught in its jaw, but my trusting dog never complains.
Buggy Brown’s life revolves around me. He sleeps on my socks or discarded clothes, anything that has my scent, and he trots behind me as my constant companion. If I go somewhere without him, he sits by the window motionless until I return, at which point he leaps in the air and makes high-pitched yaps. He treats me like I’m the adult with all the answers, not a kid too young for school.
In turn, I rediscover the world through my dog. I switch on the radio and he jumps backward, startled. I shine a flashlight and Buggy cocks his head, then charges, flinching and licking his nose when it touches the hot glass. Together we explore the woods and creek, and he stops to smell (and eat) mushrooms and bugs I’ve not even noticed. At night he howls at the moon as if it doesn’t belong up there.
Much like humans, puppies have moods. Buggy Brown races around the house with ear-flapping joy, his toenails clicking on the linoleum, then suddenly skids to a halt in front of his bed and hops in for a nap, sighing with contentment. If Mother hits him with a rolled-up newspaper or sticks his nose in a mess he made indoors, he mopes for hours. If I scold him—a rare event—he snuggles up to me, propping his chin on my wrist, pawing me, trying to worm his way back into my good graces.
I check his loyalty one day by taking away a bone he’s chewing on. He passes the test, looking at me with a puzzled expression but not growling. “You’re the best dog in the world,” I say again and again, and his entire body wriggles in gratitude. Buggy Brown is the most dependable goodness in my life.
One fateful day Buggy Brown falls into the open pit in our backyard dug by a septic-tank repairman. After calling for him, I hear a whimper coming from the bottom of what seems like a huge cavern. Poor Buggy Brown—his coat is covered in the grossest sludge I can imagine, and he has never looked so sad. No one knows what to do until a neighbor man steps forward for the bravest deed I have ever seen. He walks carefully down a board angled into that pit, picks up my foul, bedraggled dog, and, holding Buggy to his chest, climbs back out. Normally Buggy Brown hates baths, but on this day he stands stone-still as we spray, lather, and rinse him over and over.
Several months later, Buggy Brown gets sick. Our loyal guardian lies in the shade instead of running out to greet neighbors’ dogs or kids on bikes. He coughs constantly. I hold his feverish body, and dab Vaseline on his hardening nose and thickened foot pads. “Distemper,” says the veterinarian. “We could have prevented this with a vaccine, you know.” No, we didn’t know, and we likely wouldn’t have spent the money anyway.
In the vet’s office, Buggy Brown has some kind of fit. His lips curl back and his teeth chatter like scissors. Liquid the color of curdled milk dribbles out of his mouth, staining my clothes. Mother has to pry him from my arms. The vet agrees to keep him for a few days, and I never see Buggy Brown again. I wonder if the vet really kept him or put him right to sleep—or drowned him in a creek, like Boots.
* * *
—
After a period of mourning, again I bring up the subject of dogs. I promise I’ll do all the feeding, clean up the messes and garbage, and protect the furniture. “Yes,” Mother says, “but they break your heart, Philip. You know what it’s like around here. A car slams on the brakes, we hear a yelp, and somebody’s dog just got run over.”
One Sunday afternoon I’m walking along the railroad tracks, and God answers my prayer. I find a bone-thin puppy curled up asleep. Breathless with hope, cupping the puppy in my hands, I hurry home. I pray mightily for him while Aunt Kay feeds him milk from a dropper. Over the next few nights, she sets an alarm clock for feedings, crumbles aspirin into the milk, and somehow nurses the mongrel puppy back to health. He is soot-colored except for a white spot over one eye, so what else can I call him but Blackie?
Blackie has more energy than Buster Brown, and much less desire to behave. He scatters garbage across the yard outside and chews the furniture inside—and, as she often reminds me, Mother ends up doing most of the feeding and yard pickup. Blackie is banished to the outdoors. He runs away for hours at a time. I tie him to the clothesline, which he promptly pulls down. I attach a chain to a tree, and he winds the chain around it until he can hardly move, then howls until I free him.
I try to think like a dog. If I approached things with my mouth, not hands-first, I’d want to chew everything, too. I always find a way to take the dog’s side, and Blackie knows that. Whenever he sees me, his tail spins in circles. If I let him off the leash, he dances around as if it’s the best day of his life.
My children’s books tell stories about animals who can talk and understand words. Could this be true? I wonder. In my most soothing tone of voice, I say, “Blackie, you are the stupidest, ugliest dog I have ever seen. You’re an idiot, and I can’t stand you. You’re nothing but trouble.” He wags his tail and looks at me with bright, eager eyes. A few minutes later I say as harshly as I can, “Blackie, now you listen to me—you are one great dog and I love you!” His head lowers and he looks up at me with a What have I done wrong now? look. It is my very first scientific experiment.
Blackie lets me hold his muzzle in both my hands as I tell him about my day. He may not understand English, but he understands my sorrows and listens to my complaints. I let him lick my sores because everybody knows dog spit helps them heal. I always ask about his day, too. “Were you a good dog? Did you stay in the yard? Did you dig under the garden fence?” He gently takes my hand in his mouth and makes happy whining sounds as if to answer me.
Blackie never does manage to win Mother over. He raids the neighbors’ garbage cans as well as our own. He makes piles in the most traveled paths so that Marshall and I have to pry moist dog dirt from the crevices of our shoes. He tears up grass wherever we chain him so that soon our yard looks like an extension of the dirt road. Mother keeps track of all these offenses, and sometimes beats Blackie with a stick.
The final straw comes
when a neighbor spies Blackie chasing his chickens and ducks. A man in dungarees and a straw hat shows up at our door. “Ma’am,” he says to my mother, “I reckon that’s y’all’s dog over there, the black one?” She nods yes. “Well, I hate to tell you this, but that dog done killed three of my chickens. Y’all gonna hafta find some way to control that dog.” Mother thanks him, and he tips his cap and walks home. I try to deny the crime—maybe it was a dog who looked just like him—but Blackie’s dead-chicken breath is a sure giveaway.
The next Sunday afternoon we load Blackie in our car and go for a ride. Knowing what is about to happen, my heart is bursting. Blackie suspects nothing. I hold him in my lap as he sticks his nose out the window, speed-reading the air on the way to an adventure. Every so often he turns and licks my face in sheer joy.
“Tell him goodbye,” Mother says as the car pulls to a stop on a dirt road in the woods, miles from home. She remains in the car while Blackie and I get out. I hold him close, tell him he’ll be OK, and I’m sure somebody else will make a great home for him. He tolerates such talk for a minute or two, and then breaks loose to explore the new territory. He runs down the road to mark a tree and barks at a squirrel rustling in the leaves above.
I return to the car and kneel on the back seat, looking out the rear window. Blackie sits down, panting, his tail moving back and forth behind his body, smoothing the dirt. He stares at the car with a quizzical look. Then he jumps to his feet and lopes in our direction.
Blackie proves no match for a car. My last view of him is a moving dark shadow I can barely make out in a cloud of dust. Finally, even the shadow disappears.
The writer attempts to bridge the wound of childhood with words, knowing all the while that, should the wound heal, he would no longer be a writer.
—Richard Selzer, Down from Troy
CHAPTER 6
HAZARDS
At the age of five, I encounter the dentist.
I have already lost some of my baby teeth. The first time I felt a tooth beginning to move, I rocked it back and forth with my fingers until it loosened enough that even my tongue could wiggle it. “You’d better tie that thing to a doorknob and slam it shut,” Marshall said. “Or else it’ll come out at night and you’ll choke to death in your sleep.”
Not eager to die, I tied one end of a thick string to my tooth and another to the doorknob—and chickened out. It took two or three attempts before I mustered the courage to slam the door. I felt instant relief, like the sensation you get when a piece of food stuck in your throat finally goes down. Over the next few days I wore sores into my tongue, feeling the soft, tender space between the missing tooth’s sharp-edged neighbors.
But now two pointy teeth have shown up in the wrong places, forming a new row in front of my lower teeth. This calls for a visit to the dentist. “So this is your son Philip,” he says to Mother and shakes my hand as if I’m a grown-up. He’s an overweight, grandfatherly man with a big nose, whom Mother has chosen because of his low fees.
The dentist leads me to a padded chair that goes higher as he pumps a pedal like a bicycle’s. “Let’s see what you’ve got here, my boy,” he says. I lean my head back against the crinkly paper on the headrest and open my mouth. A light strapped to his head makes me squint, and I listen to his “Uh, huh…hmm” grunts as he pokes around. I can see the hairs in his nose and smell his lunch. At last he says, “Yep, looks like those two got to come out.” My heart skips a few beats.
“No shots!” I say. “Please. I hate needles.”
The dentist looks over at Mother, who shrugs.
“Well, normally we’d use some Novocain,” he says. “I dunno. If that’s what you want…” He reaches into what looks like a small refrigerator, though when the door opens, steam comes out. From it he removes a pair of funny-angled pliers. With his meaty hands he jiggles the first tooth back and forth a bit, then stands up and braces himself. I hear a loud crack, like when a baseball bat breaks—and everything goes black.
He has just ripped out an adult canine tooth with its long root. I shake from the terrific searing pain and lean over the porcelain sink beside the chair to spit out a gush of warm, salty blood. I can’t get enough air into my lungs.
“Well, I’ll be. That’s no baby tooth at all.” He holds the tooth closer to examine it. “Still, it was in the wrong place. You’re a brave boy. And as long as you’re here, we might as well get the other one.”
He gives me a few minutes to recover, and I sip water out of a paper cone and keep spitting until it comes out mostly clear. He packs the still-bleeding hole with a wad of cotton, grabs his pliers, and the nightmare repeats. When he’s finished, I notice flecks of my blood on his white coat.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” Mother says, as I’m still gulping mouthfuls of air. She stops for ice cream on the way home, and the shock of cold when it hits my gums blurs my vision.
* * *
—
The world is a dangerous place, I am learning, even at home. Twice I fall on the central heat register that warms our house, and for weeks afterward I wear a grid of burn marks on my hands and legs. Black widow and brown recluse spiders hide in corners of the crawl space, and whenever I feel my skin twitch at night, I leap from bed with a start.
Outdoors presents more hazards. We run barefoot across thorns and rusty cans, and scrape our backs ducking through barbed-wire fences. Bees, hornets, wasps, and yellow jackets zoom around looking for young boys to attack. A hornet sting is a badge of honor: I probe with a needle to make sure the stinger is out, then watch the little crater with a blood spot swell and turn red.
Adults like to scare us kids. Cross your eyes and they’ll stay stuck that way forever. Swallow a peach pit and you’ll choke to death. Masturbate—what’s that?—and you’ll go blind. Play too hard on a summer day and you may get sunstroke and end up in a hospital or a coffin. Wary of rabies, Mother warns me to avoid dogs that slobber or stagger around in circles. I ignore her and befriend every dog I meet.
My aunt Doris has told me scary stories about people who die from something called “blood poisoning.” Whenever I step on a nail or pick up a splinter, I inspect the site every few hours, watching for that red streak that could rise up my leg like mercury in a thermometer and race to my heart.
In this era before vaccinations, I catch the normal childhood diseases: chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, scarlet fever, strep throat, measles. Aunt Kay, a nurse, takes charge then. Most of these ailments cause a fever, which I almost enjoy. Fever makes everything clear and misty at once, like dreaming while awake. I’m in my own private world. Time stops, and I no longer know what normal feels like. And then one morning, when I wake to a pillow soaked in sweat, Aunt Kay announces happily, “The fever broke!”
The scariest disease, polio, we don’t worry about. Dr. Salk and Dr. Sabin have been competing to find a vaccine, and Dr. Salk wins the race with a treatment that requires three shots. His vaccines get off to a bad start, paralyzing several hundred kids and alarming parents all across the country. “Your daddy had it, so you’re OK,” Mother assures us, and I breathe easier. Then Dr. Sabin produces a vaccine you can take by mouth, on sugar cubes. Marshall makes the most of it. Fond of sugar and convinced he’s immune, he looks for hesitant classmates at school and offers to eat their Sabin doses.
Eventually the scientists get the procedure down and polio in the United States almost disappears. It occurs to me that maybe my father just lived too soon.
* * *
—
Despite the discomfort, being sick has some advantages. I can eat all the ice cream I want, served in Dixie Cups with wooden paddle-spoons. The rule against soft drinks gets suspended, too, and I sip cold, bubbly ginger ale that tickles my throat.
Not only that, sickness brings out the best in Mother. For a while I become the center of her attention. In the daytime she fixes me a makeshift bed
on the living-room couch and reads books to me. Every hour or so she asks how I’m feeling, and I hear her giving reports on the phone to her friends. “He’s doing better today. A little trouper, doesn’t complain at all.” I like hearing her talk about me, as if I matter.
Her cool hands touch my forehead—and press a damp washrag to my face when I vomit. She tells me of the nights she sat up with me in a steam tent in Blair Village when I had pneumonia, my breathing so heavy that neighbors could hear it through the walls. “With your asthma, you’re always on the verge of it developing into pneumonia,” she explains.
One day she takes me to a chiropractor. I’m surprised she still trusts them. He tells her my asthma was caused at birth when forceps crimped a nerve behind my ear. He does something to my back that makes cracking sounds but doesn’t hurt much. After just one treatment he pronounces me cured, and writes about it in a journal. Later, after I fall down and hit my head, the asthma flares up again and the chiropractor has to repeat his miracle cure.
A few months later, when I keep saying “No!” my mother reaches out to slap me, and I fall over and hit my head on the floor. “That’s what finally cured you,” she insists. “Your asthma stopped, and I never had to take you to the chiropractor again.”
Illnesses play into the family myth. After the visit to the cemetery, when Mother told us the story of Hannah and Samuel, she said, “God saved you for a purpose. I’ll do everything I can to preserve you boys because I gave you to Him. Your lives are sacred now, and God has great plans for you.” With each illness, each hospital visit, each close scrape, the myth grows.
Where the Light Fell Page 5