Following Atticus

by Tom Ryan

  “I don’t know, never asked him.”

  “But didn’t you teach him that?”

  “No. I didn’t teach him anything.”

  I never saw the point in teaching Atticus tricks. What I wanted from him was for him to be his own dog as much as I was my own man. The things I wanted him to learn were basic things that made going through life safe and easy. I know many who tell me that by teaching their dog tricks they worked on their relationship together. The dogs, I was told, liked the task and then the reward. I can’t argue against any of that, but it wasn’t for us.

  All I wanted was for Atticus to fit in as much as he needed to so he wouldn’t be a bother or get into trouble, but I also didn’t think it was up to me to decide what he would become. That was up to him. As long as he could walk with me off leash, feel comfortable in public settings, and understand that he should never feel self-conscious anywhere, I was fine with it.

  My carrying the little puppy in the length of my arm from wrist to elbow for two months, like a running back with a football, went a long way toward forging our relationship and deciding how things would be for years to come.

  I first encountered Paige Foster through the Internet. I was looking for a new puppy to replace Maxwell G. Gillis, and I entered information into an online database. I was so impressed by Max that I wanted another miniature schnauzer.

  Breeders from around the country responded to the information I supplied by sending e-mail photo after e-mail photo of miniature miniature schnauzers, five to eight weeks old, and the dates of their availability. None of them looked quite right to me. The truth is, they all looked too right and too stately in their perfect poses. They reminded me first of puppies a Stepford Wife might own and then of those poor overly processed little girls who are entered into beauty pageants by their parents. What they didn’t resemble were puppies. Most important, they didn’t remind me a bit of my dearly departed Maxwell G. Gillis, who was anything but perfect. He was rough around the edges, much like me, but he was real and I loved him.

  For whatever the reason, of all the breeders who responded, it was Paige I started exchanging e-mails with. She’d send photos of puppies and I’d tell her, “No, they’re not quite right.” Then she’d send more and I’d tell her the same thing.

  Finally she asked, “Just what are you looking for?”

  I wrote to her about Max, going into depth about his personality and what we shared. I cannot remember exactly what I wrote, but I remember telling her I wanted a dog who would be cool to just hang out with. I wanted a dog who would sit with me, whether on the beach, on a bench in the center of town, or at a sidewalk café, and watch the world go by. I was looking for a thoughtful dog, more of a philosopher than an athlete. I wanted a dog who was independent, but not so independent as to be stubborn or troublesome. I wanted a friend.

  Paige e-mailed back with a disclaimer. She had one last dog, but he was “different,” so different that he was going to be the only dog she raised that she was going to keep for herself. When she sent along some photos, I saw a puppy unlike any of the perfect puppies I’d seen. He wasn’t sitting up with a straight spine, preening for the camera. He was lying down, his head weighing heavily on top of one paw, eyes looking askance at the photographer, with a sigh that said, Get this over with, will you? He was unimpressed by the attention.

  Max had been silver. This puppy looked nothing like him. He was black, except for his paws, nose, chest, and butt—they were white—and what mostly caught my eye were two bushy, snow-white eyebrows that looked like they belonged on an old fisherman.

  The deal was done. I chose the puppy that didn’t look like the others. In my mind I suppose I went with the one that didn’t fit in because I felt like I didn’t fit in either. I was also intrigued by the fact that he was the only pup in his litter. He was all alone in the world, and that’s exactly how I felt.

  Paige’s initial advice, to carry Atticus wherever we went, worked well on several different levels. Yes, it helped us bond, and I earned his trust, but it did something more for me, something I did not anticipate. I felt somewhat guilty about moving forward so quickly to get another dog. It was something I thought I would never do, but there I was holding this little breathing creature in my arms just weeks after Max’s death. He was tiny and vulnerable, and he needed me. It didn’t take me long to realize I needed him, too.

  Paige’s advice was perfect for an only puppy and a solitary man with a broken heart. Man and dog grew together starting that very first day. But I would take time to remember Max. Our first stop after picking up Atticus at the airport was Plum Island. I carried Atticus onto the beach and took a small plastic bag from my pocket and cast some of Max’s ashes out into a breaking wave.

  Our first weeks together went very well. Everything was going just as Paige had said it would. There were no complaints. That is, until a cool spring morning when I left Atticus in my car while I met with my regular Saturday breakfast group. I backed my hatchback up to the window we’d be sitting near so I could keep my eye on Atticus. He climbed over some boxes to the top of the backseat, on the flat panel just inside the glass of the rear window. It was the first time in the two weeks I’d had him that we’d been apart from each other, and from this vantage point he could keep his eye on me as well.

  Breakfast went as all our weekly breakfasts went; we poked fun at one another, caught up on personal news, and shared political gossip about the tempests in the teapot of our little city. There was always good grist at breakfast for the next issue of the Undertoad. My companions were deeply rooted townies tapped into the community grapevine. When they told me something, I would spend the week verifying the facts of their stories, and they always checked out. Those breakfasts were, for this outsider, an insider’s view of Newburyport.

  It was in the middle of this jovial gabbing that one of the townies, a hard, red-faced fellow who worked for the city’s water department by day and drank by night, nudged me and pointed out the window. Atticus was still on top of the panel above the backseat just inside the rear window, but he had turned away from us. He squatted and peered at me over his shoulder.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s taking a shit,” another fellow said.

  And he was looking me right in the eye as he did so.

  Atticus received a roar of approval from the townies. He fit right in with this group of men who believed that the best way to have a ball was by busting each other’s balls. From that point on, he was forever deemed a valuable member of our group and a worthy dog to follow Max, whom they had all grown fond of and had visited at his “going-away party” the night before he was put to sleep.

  Atticus wasn’t finished. He stood up, turned to face us, and then used his paws to smear the feces around in the car. Within seconds I was outside, unlocking the door, but it was too late. The backseat and the windows looked as if a class of kindergartners had been finger-painting with mud.

  There’s nothing quite as toxic at the smell of puppy poop. I drove home with the windows wide open, but it didn’t help much. Meanwhile, the little six-pound monster sitting in the front passenger seat looked quite pleased with himself, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, gazing serenely out the window.

  A couple of days later, we had a similar episode. I left him in my apartment when I met friends for lunch. I returned an hour later. Before I even opened the door, I was greeted by that same horrid stench. My little Picasso puppy had spread his artwork all over the white walls of the hallway just inside the door.

  I called Paige in a panic.

  Her southern twang was laced with laughter as her drawl split every syllable into two. “He’s letting you know you broke the contract. From day one you two have spent every minute together, and now you’re leaving him behind and he doesn’t like it.”

  I was pissed. Paige was amused.

  “What do I do? H
ow do I get him to stop?”

  She told me to get a small crate, one he couldn’t move around in much, and leave him in that while I went out.

  “He won’t mess that up. Dogs refuse to mess up their space,” she told me.

  The next day I put him in the newly purchased tiny crate and went out to lunch. When I returned, the familiar stench filled my nostrils. All I could see were two serious eyes staring out at me from the crate from what looked like the body of a Tootsie Roll. Not only had he messed in the small space, he then rolled in it!

  I brought him to the tub and held him in one hand. With my other hand, I held my nose. Shit swirled down the drain while I sloshed him gently in the warm water until the little tar baby was gone and Atticus had returned.

  Another call to Paige. “The crate didn’t work! He crapped, and then he rolled in it!”

  During those first few weeks, Paige laughed a lot. She enjoyed my torment but was secretly pleased at how earnest I was in my puppy-rearing ways. Each time I called, no matter how panicked or frustrated or aggravated I sounded, she responded with mirthful laughter. I think this northern boy had become her favorite source of entertainment.

  “He’s showing you his will. Do the same thing again tomorrow. Let him know he can’t do this when you go out. Let him know you are in charge. And don’t worry, y’all will work it out.”

  The next day I put him in his crate, resolved to win the war of the wills. An hour later I came back to the same results. The little Tootsie Roll with eyes was awaiting me when I opened the crate. He was not happy, not unhappy, more matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

  Another trip to the tub to decrap him. This time I didn’t phone Paige. I was a man who called out dirty cops and politicians in print. I endured threats, both anonymous and not so anonymous. I was as tough as nails. But here I was being bullied by a six-pound puppy. It was embarrassing.

  I decided on a different technique.

  Imagine this scene if you will: At the time I was literally about fifty times Atticus’s weight. I sat on the side of the tub and held his sopping-wet body up under his legs while his paws dangled over the water. I looked him in the eyes and told him that he was going to have to get over it and that we would be together nearly all the time, but there were days he was going to have to stay back in the apartment or in the car. He didn’t look away out of shame or defiance. Instead he seemed to appraise me while I talked.

  “Here’s the deal. We’ll compromise—I won’t put you in the crate when I go out if you agree not to make a mess of things. I won’t be gone long, and I’m always coming back.”

  The next day I went out. I left him sitting by the door with a dog biscuit. When I locked the door, I fought off the sound of his squeals and cries and kept on walking. I returned to see him sitting in the same spot where I’d left him, the biscuit still there. He lunged at me, rearing up on his hind legs, his front paws landing around my knee, his face beaming with excitement that I really had come back. There was no stink in the apartment. And it would stay that way. Whenever I left him behind, I left him with a cookie and he behaved, and when I returned, he was happy to see me. Only after we had greeted each other again would he pounce on his cookie as if it were prey he’d been stalking.

  We had reached détente. Paige was right—we worked it out.

  I waited a little while before calling her again so I could casually tell her that I’d broken Atticus of his protest pooping. But as soon as I heard her voice, I confessed to the entire process. She laughed and laughed and said, “That little boy . . . he sure got some spirit!”

  Paige may have been off when it came to the crate, but she was right about nearly everything else, and nothing worked as well as did my carrying him.

  If you’ve ever known a miniature schnauzer, you know they can be stubborn. We got beyond that tendency. Perhaps it was due to the trust we built up when I carried him around town. Or maybe it had something to do with my not forcing him to do much of anything.

  There were few rules, but they were important ones. They were basic. Atticus was allowed to do whatever he wanted so long as he was not endangering himself, he showed respect for my possessions, and he didn’t bother other people.

  If I asked him to sit, he had to sit, but it didn’t matter to me where he sat. If I asked him to lie down, he would lie down where he wanted to, and that was okay, too. I didn’t want to control him; I simply wanted to set up boundaries that would protect him.

  For all she was right about, there was one other thing Paige was wrong about. She suggested even in that first month when I carried him that whenever we went out, I put on his harness and leash so he would associate them with going out and think of them in a positive way. But from the beginning he hated them both. Whenever I went to put on the harness, or a collar when his neck grew strong enough to have one, he cringed. When outside, I’d attach the leash to the harness and put him on the ground. The first thing he did was take three steps away from me, asserting his independence and his dislike for the leash.

  This led us to another compromise. On the rare occasion I wasn’t carrying him, I put the leash on him but then dropped it and let him walk beside me. He was still tiny, and it was a funny sight seeing him drag his leash over the redbrick sidewalks of the downtown, but there was no willful fighting. I picked up the leash, or him, only if need be.

  It didn’t take long for him to feel at home in Newburyport. People got to know him just as they grew to know Max, first in my “Letter Home” column to my father and then by seeing him around town. In the issue following Max’s death, I announced that Atticus was coming to town, and when he arrived, people were ready for him. During his first few days, wherever we were, folks drove by beeping their horns and yelling out their windows, “Welcome to town, Atticus!” Shop owners who only a few weeks prior to that were bidding good-bye to Maxwell with tears in their eyes and signs in their storefront windows joyously welcomed Atticus.

  The celebration was overwhelming, from the endless puppy gifts left at my door to the constant greetings directed at Newburyport’s newest resident. Atticus grew up thinking that everyone knew his name. Those first days in his new city were charmed. Everywhere we went, people wanted to meet him. To some extent this would happen with any cute puppy, but with Atticus it was different—people were making trips especially to see him, driving into town or going out of their way by crossing the street or running out of a building, and each time, they greeted him by his name. Through the columns in my paper, they’d seen how Max had changed my life and felt as if they’d known him. Now they wanted to meet the dog who was chosen to follow him.

  The hardest part was telling people they couldn’t hold Atticus, but after I explained what Paige had said, they understood my reasons even if they didn’t like them. Instead they’d reach into my arms and pet him, many with soft innocence in their eyes (even the roughest, toughest men), as if he were a newborn human baby, some saying things to him like, “You would have loved Maxwell G. Gillis.”

  There wasn’t a place Atticus didn’t feel comfortable. When he grew a little bigger, he’d make his way in and out of stores getting his cookies while I waited outside—just as I had with Max. I loved his independence.

  A curious reader of my newspaper wanted to know why he was Atticus M. Finch and not Atticus M. Ryan. I told her I wanted him to have his own identity. We were a team, but it was important to me that he was allowed to be himself and not simply my dog. I did not want an accessory so much as a living, breathing, feeling entity to accompany me through life. Allowing him to have his own last name was part of that, no matter how small or silly it may have seemed. When I shared this with Paige, she sighed happily in approval and thanked me. “It’s important for a dog to be himself,” she said.

  From his earliest days, Atticus made his way into city hall with me, first to cover a troubled and befuddled mayor who shouldn’t have lasted too long
—and didn’t. (It had something to do with cronyism and being caught threatening a police officer, as well as the fact that he just wasn’t a very good mayor.) The mayor would see me sitting in one chair and Atticus sitting in another awaiting our weekly meeting in his outer office and wouldn’t know what to say. Meanwhile, his secretary and aide both did. They greeted Atticus as everyone else did, by name, and they’d say, “Mr. Ryan and Mr. Finch are here to see you, Mr. Mayor.”

  When the next election came and a new mayor took office, she was better suited for the job than the last fellow, but she didn’t last long either. (It had a lot to do with the sexual e-mails she was caught exchanging with a teacher.) During our first meeting in her office, she arched an eyebrow as I sat in one chair facing her desk while Atticus, now a bit older, sat up in another listening to her every word.

  “You allow him on the furniture?” she asked, clearly disapproving.

  “Why not? You allow politicians to sit here, don’t you?”

  Eventually that mayor grew to welcome him, even on the furniture.

  And so it came to be that Atticus was a fixture in the mayor’s office and in the rest of city hall at various board and committee meetings, where he would sit beside me on the hard wooden benches, my fleece jacket underneath him. No matter the length of the meeting, he would sit and behave, paying attention and doing better at not falling asleep than most in the audience and even some of the city officials. Depending on what I had written in the latest issue of my paper, I was either celebrated or reviled. Atticus, on the other hand, was usually greeted warmly in the hallways, either as Atticus or Mr. Finch.

  Even through those growing years, as he matured both physically and socially, I continued to carry him on occasion. We’d become accustomed to it and both found comfort in it. From time to time, I would find myself in a street-corner conversation from which he felt left out, so he would nudge my leg with his nose to pick him up, and I’d hold him while I continued chatting. It was clear he wanted to be part of it, to be on our level.