A Good Dog

by Jon Katz

  On some level, Anthony surely knew the Dog Room would involve more than a new ceiling. I, however, had no clue.

  Anthony was, by now, a cross between a friend, a brother, and a son, our evolving relationship limited by our vastly different histories, but increasingly important to us both.

  We talked a half-dozen times a day, yelling mock insults, bemoaning some new outrage, sharing our small triumphs. We trekked into Saratoga once in a while for burgers and movies, walked in the woods with our dogs. On Sundays, he and his wife, Holly, and toddler daughter, Ida Jane, and I met for breakfast in Salem.

  In the time since I had first seen him patching the sliding door of my newly acquired barn, Anthony and his business had made big strides. He’d originally dubbed his company Hands-On Maintenance and spent his weeks replacing doorknobs and repairing leaky faucets. Now, after he’d tackled increasingly ambitious jobs at Bedlam Farm—from a hillside pole barn for the animals to Paula’s airy new quarters—I had some caps made for him that seemed to fit his mission better: Anthony Armstrong: Repairs and Restorations. He worked like a fiend, had great taste, and was becoming captain of a small crew of helpers.

  Anthony was obsessed with the Dog Room and what might be hidden there. Nobody who lived in or had visited the house had any idea what that fake brick was covering up or why; no one in recent memory had ever looked. There was a decaying chimney on the exterior of the house, and a cast-iron woodstove in front of the fake fireplace, so it seemed safe to assume there’d once been a real fireplace there, or perhaps an oven of some sort.

  The plan was for Anthony to tear down the acoustic tile, then insulate and Sheetrock the space above, a start on making the room larger, brighter, less forlorn, more suitable for humans. If we had any money left, we’d pull up that carpet. Insulation was also a priority: when the wind came up hard, the room creaked like an old frigate in a squall and cold air gusted across the floor. I argued, halfheartedly, that the fireplace could wait.

  But from the moment he dove in with his crowbar, we both kept looking at that “brick” fireplace. Why was it there? What lay underneath? Anthony couldn’t take it. He badgered me for days to let him pry off the wall-covering and take a peek. I’d already spent a hefty sum on the office, plus the winter’s usual vet bills and feed. Paula was arguing that Dog Room renovations were a quagmire waiting to happen and could wait.

  I’d developed theories about waiting, though. Things I waited to do, I’d learned, often never got done. Few people in life urge you to go for it, to take chances; almost everyone cautions you to be careful, go slow. The trick is to figure out when they’re right and when they’re wrong. My worst nightmare is a life filled with regrets as the clock winds down. I didn’t feel I had as much time to wait as I used to.

  So I was already inclined toward adventure, though trying to talk myself out of it, when one April morning Anthony walked past me into the Dog Room with a claw hammer.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Let’s poke a hole and take a peek.” He knew me well.

  He swung his hammer, and it took just three whacks before the “brick” sheared off enough to look behind it. What we saw, when the dust settled enough for a flashlight beam to penetrate, was a complete surprise.

  There was a rare old slate fireplace, dusty and crumbling from years of moisture, yet graceful, the sort of discovery renovators dream of. Nearby Granville and environs is a region renowned for its quarries; this rock must have come from there, my neighbors told me as word of the discovery spread. One elderly farmer even thought he remembered the mason who’d built the fireplace.

  We saw more sobering things back there, too, alas. Rain had been pouring down the chimney flashing into the walls and floors for years. Nothing much but history was holding the chimney together. There was very little insulation behind the walls, and what was there was water-soaked and smelly.

  The rest of the house stood on a stone or concrete foundation, but this room sat right on the ground. So when we proceeded to peel back the carpeting—what the hell—we saw beautiful pine floors that were worn and rotted.

  In a bit of a frenzy now, debris and dust beginning to pile up, Anthony ripped off the knotty-pine wall paneling and found more rot and mold.

  This was not a recent addition we were seeing but a part of the original house—probably, Anthony thought, a shed used to store firewood for the stoves. “Oh boy, this is going to cost you,” he whistled.

  When he pulled the ceiling down, the room’s history and its destiny became apparent. With its double-height ceiling, rough-hewn old beams, and a barn-wood wall that was once the rear of the house, and with its view of the valley and daylong light, this could be a beautiful space.

  “We have to save this room,” Anthony and I said, almost in unison. “We have to do it right.”

  But as I was already learning, the cardinal rule of renovation is that while nobody knows what’s behind walls and ceilings, fixing whatever’s there or replacing whatever isn’t will always take longer and cost far more than you think. Restoring a room, especially one that’s nearly two hundred years old, is an organic thing. Everything affects everything else, all the small gears pieces of a greater whole. Anthony immediately hired a helper and bought scaffolding and a bigger truck. I got bigger bills.

  Anthony and his sidekick, Chris, were soon going at it, ripping the roof, ceiling, walls, and waterlogged floor apart. Rotted wood, slabs of paneling, tiles and carpeting formed a mountain behind the house. The Dumpster was filled and emptied and filled again. “Oh my God,” I heard Anthony say half a dozen times a day as he pulled up another moldy board or poked his crowbar right through a wall.

  He hired Kathan, a temporarily out-of-work stonemason, to repoint and rebuild the chimney and restore the fireplace, a task that would take weeks. But Kathan did beautiful work, meticulously remortaring and replacing the crumbling bricks. He was outside on his scaffolding one raw day—I was watching his progress with some awe—when he asked about the gouged-out slope behind the house.

  This gaping excavation, an unsightly cutaway dug to make room for cars, trucks, and snowplows to circle the house, was an eyesore. I’d planned to put in a concrete retaining wall to hold back the dirt and prevent mud slides after rain, but hadn’t really thought much about the aesthetics. The other option, slightly less unsightly, was to build a wall of pressure-treated lumber.

  “You want a stone wall?” Kathan asked.

  Genius. Stone walls were beautiful, substantial, dignified. They were everywhere in Washington County, often crumbling in the weeds and woods of former farms, where farmers dug stones from their pastures to make room for crops.

  A stone wall would greatly improve Bedlam Farm, and would far outlast me. I loved building things that people might be talking about long after I was gone, like the lovely but slow-growing burr oak I had planted to someday provide shade and beauty in my back pasture. I had no chance of living long enough to see that tree grow tall and spread its branches, but my daughter, Emma, might, or whoever eventually lived here.

  So we decided to build the Bedlam Wall, of fieldstone trucked in from a Granville quarry. Had I grasped the expense, noise, and disruption—it took ten tons of stone and a half-dozen truck trips merely to deliver it—I might have hesitated. “On to Berlin,” I muttered to Anthony, echoing General Patton.

  “If we’re gonna go down,” he agreed, “let’s go down in flames.”

  Kathan and his helper, Julio, assisted by Anthony and Chris, worked like mules for weeks. The fieldstone—first quarried by workers who fled Ireland during the Potato Famine, we were told—lay piled in giant mounds all over the driveway. Kathan sorted each rock, eyeing it, measuring it, chipping or filing where needed, then fitting it into place. There was no mortar in this wall, just the mason’s ability to pile and slide rocks into an interlocking shape. It was extraordinarily complex and painstaking work.

  Neighbors and townspeople began stopping by to monitor progress and express admiratio
n. I was buying milk at the Bedlam Corners Variety Store one morning as another customer was gossiping with Marie, its new owner. “That guy is building a huge stone wall up at the old Keyes place. He must be crazy,” he said. Then, thinking about it, he added, “He must be loaded, too.”

  “You’re half right,” I said, winking at Marie and leaving.

  It was hard to believe how these guys worked. They showed up at six a.m., rain or shine, heat or cold, broke for a thirty-minute lunch around noon, then resumed hauling giant rocks around for hours. They manipulated tractors as if they were playing video games. Kathan chiseled and tapped, arranged and rearranged. In the age of The Home Depot, it wasn’t something you often got to see.

  But it was also a nightmare for Orson.

  The din and dust and noise were indescribable and continual. The house rattled with the vibrations of hammers, saws, planers; trucks pulled in and out, dropping bone-jarring loads of rock, followed by the thunk of sledgehammers and the whirs of drills. Neighbors came by in their pickups and muttered about how much money this must cost, how good it looked.

  In the midst of it all, I had a book to write. I retreated to my first-floor study while the dust rained down and tried to concentrate. I pulled the dogs in with me, and we all huddled together in my little room.

  Rose didn’t like the noise, but she found Anthony and his tools the most fascinating thing next to sheep, and would sit and study him for hours from the safe distance of her garden hideaway. Sometimes she would charge at an auger or drill, trying to herd it. Mostly, she decided to become an Anthony scholar, studying him as if he were an ancient text. Clementine also had her work: to enthusiastically greet and lick every human being within her range, and then to gobble every doughnut, sandwich, or cookie she could steal. It was during the Dog Room restoration that I dubbed her The Whore of Bedlam Farm for her willingness to go home with anybody holding a bag of Doritos.

  It was sad, in a way, to contrast these two dogs’ responses with Orson’s.

  I had unleashed an Orson hell, an invasion of noisy men with tools, coming in and out of the gate, in and out of the fence and the house, scores of times, day after day, week after week. He fought valiantly to keep them all out, to nip and charge at them, bar the door, grab their tools.

  He waited for his moment, took his shots. Anthony’s brother, Charlie, having joined the crew to paint, learned to carefully pat Orson and give him treats before entering the yard with sanders and paint cans. Orson seemed to accept him after a few weeks, and Charlie relaxed—until the day he turned away and Orson ran up and nipped him in the butt. Orson does not forget and he does not forgive. And he does not give up.

  It all may have taken a toll that I was too busy, self-absorbed, or dim to recognize at first. Orson, as his farm life centered more on me and less on sheep or the outdoors, had become increasingly preoccupied with protecting the boundaries of the house, its gates and doors. Now the coming and going by Anthony and his crew drove him crazy. From dawn to dusk, one large man or another, often carrying a drill, saw, or hammer, was coming through a gate or door to start thumping, banging, noisily intruding.

  I crated Orson when I knew people were coming, but I couldn’t lock him up all day, and everybody urged me not to.

  Anthony and his guys weren’t afraid of dogs, and didn’t really mind walking into the house holding their toolboxes in front of them, shouting at Orson to get back. They were willing to suffer the occasional ripped pair of jeans. What might have meant a lawsuit in New Jersey was just part of life in the country. Throughout the day, while I worked, I heard people yelling, “Hey, Orson, knock it off!”

  In a way, Orson became a bit unhinged. A dog who’d already known too much failure was failing all day, trying to keep out one intruder after another, unable to. In addition to Anthony and his crew, the steady parade of visitors—delivery people, gardeners and mowers, the exterminator, the feed man, neighbors and friends, curious readers—continued.

  Some days were worse, some better, but it seemed to me that Orson was being cranked up continuously and dangerously. I had to try to do something about it, short of sending him to New Jersey for a few months. I went to my vet and told her about my worries.

  I told her I wanted to get more serious about this arousal. Might there be a medical cause? We tested and tested. She did blood work, administered a thyroid test, took X-rays. We tested for fractures, for Lyme disease, for cancer. It cost more than a thousand dollars, and turned up nothing.

  “I can’t help you,” the vet finally concluded. “There’s nothing medically wrong with Orson that I can see. But I know somebody who perhaps can.” She handed me a business card from a holistic orthopedic vet who specialized in dogs with problems that conventional veterinary care couldn’t fix.

  “She might be a bit out there for you,” she cautioned me. “She’s a professional and well-trained vet, but she is innovative and open-minded. She does acupuncture and massage and uses herbal remedies. But I can’t tell you how many dogs she has helped when I couldn’t.

  “Orson is a great dog. And I think you’re right—something is wrong with him. But I can’t tell you what it might be. I think your instincts are good. He might be headed for some serious trouble. Valerie may be someone who can help.”

  I groaned. I didn’t want to go there. I liked conventional vets, and was wary of the many “alternative” cures and practices I had seen and heard about, especially online. Surely there had to be rational limits on the amount of time and money I spent worrying about this dog, who was a big part of my life but not all of it.

  But my vet was no fuzzy-headed animal wacko. Clear-eyed and businesslike, she’d won my respect and trust. And as a writer about dogs, I thought, I really couldn’t lose. It would be interesting either way.

  The important measure, I decided, wasn’t whether or not I believed in alternative veterinary care, but whether the dog got better. If he did, it was great. If he didn’t, wasn’t it part of our covenant that I do everything possible to help him, to show him how to live in the world?

  Orson, I’d come to fear, was headed for a new kind of trouble. His behavior seemed to be deteriorating in a way I didn’t believe ethical or responsible to ignore, not any longer.

  He was calmer and more obedient many days, yet on others getting more aroused, his efforts to defend the house more ferocious. We’d been working together for nearly four years. I had trained with him—positively and carefully—over hundreds and hundreds of hours.

  I’d run out of ideas, exhausted most conventional training methods, and hit the outer limits of traditional veterinary care.

  The number on the card was in Vermont—naturally. I called as soon as I got home. So Orson and I took the next step together and entered the woo-woo.

  Orson and Jon

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hell on Wheels

  Orson was never a well-grounded dog. Whatever happened to him back in Texas had left him damaged, without the resilience of dogs like Clem and Rose. He was unraveling, it seemed to me. Among those who knew him, a variety of theories had grown up over the years to try to explain his behavior.

  We knew he’d been trained as an obedience show dog at some point, so perhaps that was why gates (like those used in such competitions) had special significance, one breeder suggested.

  One vet thought it was perfectly natural for some dogs to defend their territory, but another felt that Orson, when excited, was actually suffering seizure-like symptoms that sometimes caused him to lose control, to fail to recognize even familiar faces and voices. Something like epileptic seizures, she said, that might need to be treated medically, even surgically.

  An “animal psychic” I met at a book signing (hers, and there were people lined up beyond the bookstore door waiting to meet her and get their books signed) thought he was picking up distressing vibes from the animals—pigs, chickens and turkeys, cows, a few sheep, too—slaughtered on the farm in years past.

  One trainer felt Orso
n had been poorly socialized as a pup and that I should have visitors bring hamburger and liver treats when they came. Another suggested using a shock collar when he charged the gate.

  The odd thing is that Orson, like Clementine, was innately social; he lived for attention. He greeted a steady stream of visitors to the farm warmly and appropriately. He loved the UPS and FedEx men in the driveway—just not when they approached the gate or door. I despaired of ever making sense of these contradictions.

  Yet I recognized the truth of what my vet, Mary, was telling me, even as it saddened me. There was no point in subjecting this poked and prodded creature to any more uncomfortable, expensive testing. We had to somehow reach a different kind of accommodation. It was time to move on, if there was anything to move on to.

  Holistic. It was an odd-sounding word. The number of dog owners drawn to holistic care kept growing, I knew from my research and from countless stories I’d heard. Yet the idea still discomfited me.

  I like and trust regular vets and count a number of them among my friends. I’ve always found them committed, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. I was doubtful that a holistic vet, whatever that meant, knew much more than regular ones.

  I’m also concerned about putting some limits on the care and time I spend on even a beloved dog’s well-being. For me, a healthy life with dogs means boundaries. I love my family; I value my work; I treasure my friends—and I love my three dogs dearly. That’s about the right order for me. I don’t want to spend hours online exchanging herbal cures and trading conspiracy theories about veterinarians and dog-food manufacturers. Holistic care is something I’ve always resisted as dubious, unnecessary.

  Still, Orson and I had kept faith with each other.