My Dog Skip

by Willie Morris

  Soon we heard the faint sound of footsteps on the gravel, and there was John Abner, a frightened little boy walking stealthily through the trees, looking all around and flashing his light in every direction. When he got within a few steps of the witch's grave, Strawberry all of a sudden held the stick out from the bushes and waved the pillowcase. Then I blew a solemn high note on my trumpet, and descended to the same moan I had used on the man taking the shortcut. With that, I pushed Skip out from under the trees. Since he knew the poor victim and recognized him, he rushed impetuously toward him. When we looked out, all we could see was a wisp of dust on the road, and we heard the sound of small feet moving fast, Skip with his skeleton in torrid pursuit.

  Old Skip was with us the Halloween night several of us went out to one of Peewee's fathers pastures not far from our school building to fetch a cow. We knew our schoolteachers would be rehearsing their faculty play shortly after dark on that evening, and we surreptitiously led the cow down one of the town s alleyways onto the school grounds, then through the back door of the auditorium. We tied the rope from the cow's neck to a seat on the aisle, leaving it a good amount of slack to roam around. As we were accomplishing this, I noticed Skip sitting on his haunches staring inquisitively at the cow, and the cow staring right back at him. Skip glanced at me: What manner of creature is this? he seemed to be saying. I believe he perceived we were involved in something of immense consequence.

  We retired to some hedges near the auditorium windows as darkness fell. From the street we saw the football coach emerge from his pickup truck and walk toward the auditorium, entering it through the front door; we knew it was the football coach's responsibility to turn on the lights before the other teachers arrived. We snuck up to one of the windows and looked inside, barely able to make out the silhouette of the coach groping his way down the aisle in the darkness. When he bumped into the cow's horns, he emitted a terrorized shriek of such acoustical dimensions that even Skip began to bark, and we got out of there fast.

  When my comrades and I were thirteen years old (and Skip three) we ascertained the house where some of the women held their Wednesday-afternoon prayer meetings. One morning, following the cookbook, we baked two dozen oatmeal cookies in our kitchen, using every ingredient just as the book said, and then for good measure we added a mixture of castor oil, dill pickle juice, and milk of magnesia. “What else?” Henjie asked. I looked down at Skip, who had been following our activities with his usual intense attachment. Then I glanced across to the bottom shelf of the kitchen cabinet and saw his worm medicine for dogs, flea-and-tick powder, and ear ointment. Using an eggbeater, we put these also into our mixture. When the cookies were cool we gift-wrapped them and pasted on a card that read, “To the ladies from all the people in town.” Then we crept through the bushes to Sister Craigs house and placed the gift inside the screen door. Later we peered through the window as Sister Craig served the cookies; I propped Skip's head near the ledge so he could watch too. The first guest who bit into an oatmeal cookie chewed on it for a moment, her jaws working politely but with purpose, then spit with such energy that the crumbs landed at a point six feet away, spraying three other guests with the awful stuff. Skip followed this with interest, and then we all slipped happily away. I never knew a dog who cared so passionately for nonsense, especially when he felt he was part of it.

  At night when I lay in bed reading, Old Skip would crawl up to me and look at the book, sometimes touching it with his paw. He always wanted to know what I was doing. “You want to read some Dickens?’ I might ask. When I turned out the light he would go to sleep curled up in the bend of my legs; when it was cold he would root around and scratch at me to get under the covers. First thing in the morning, after he had gone outside for a solitary run, he would bound back into my bed and try to roust me out with his cold nose. If this did not work, he would lightly bite my toes beneath the blanket.

  After we both had a breakfast of raisin bran and milk, he would walk with me toward school. The school building was only six blocks down the boulevard from our house, and along the way Henjie would join us, then Bubba, then Rivers Applewhite. Every morning at the same spot, a few yards or so from Riversa front porch at the street corner near the bayou, he would stop and sit, watching us from afar as we crossed the bridge to the school grounds; then he would turn around and go home. Every afternoon after school he would be at that precise place waiting for me. We would retrace our journey home again, where I would make us both a mayonnaise-and-ketchup sandwich before we commenced our late-afternoon rituals.

  Of these many exercises, one involved my throwing sticks for him. He was the best retriever I ever had. I would throw a stick as far as I could, far across the alley behind our house perhaps, or into the deepest recesses of the neighbors’ backyards, and then hide in the shrubs or under the house or in the green DeSoto parked in the driveway. Skip would come tearing around with the stick in his mouth and, not finding me where I had been when I threw the stick, would drop it and look everywhere. If he found me under the house, he would crawl in there and lick my nose, as if to suggest I was not as smart as I thought I was. Or he would jump onto the hood of the car or even go into the house to see if I was there.

  This game backfired one day; I am not saying Skip was all perfect, for who wants a perfect dog? Bubba and I threw a stick for him far into Mrs. Graeber's yard and then climbed the elm tree in the back of my house, hiding far up the branches among the leaves. It took him half an hour to find us. We watched with superior smirks and stifled laughter as he dropped the stick and roamed everywhere in his search for us, looking on top of the garage and inside the toolshed and in the gullies abutting the alley, even going onto Mrs. Graebers back porch and into her wisteria vines in his quest. When he finally located us in the tree he became extremely angry. He refused to let us out of that tree. Every time one of us descended, he snapped at our feet with his long white teeth. We sought to soothe him with assuaging talk—“You're a good old boy, Skip” or “How about some raisin bran?”—but we might just as well have been courting Hitler or Tojo or Mussolini. Since no one was around to come to our rescue, we were trapped up there for over two hours until Skip got tired and dozed asleep, and we missed the biggest Cub Scout baseball game of the season.

  I have mentioned his high regard for raisin bran. I have never seen a dog with such a haughty distaste for dog food— dog food of all kinds—which he never once touched after his days as a puppy. Put a can of Red Heart on his platter and he would treat it with the disdain of a potentate from the most sublime of palatinates. His preferences were otherwise highly eclectic and included the mayonnaise-and-ketchup sandwiches we ate after school, fried chicken livers, squirrel dumplings, parched peanuts, potato chips, Moonpies, ham hocks, chicken gizzards, cotton candy, and rice and gravy. His favorite food of all, however, was sliced bologna.

  After a time we devised an established procedure with my black friend Bozo, who worked behind the meat counter at Goodloe's Grocery Store down the street. I made a small leather pouch and attached it to Skip's collar. I would say, “Skip, go on down to Bozo and get yourself a pound of bologna.” Then I would put a quarter in the leather pouch, and Skip would take off down the sidewalk for the store and bring the package back in his mouth, with Bozos change in the pouch. Bozo enjoyed entertaining his friends with this exercise. They would be standing around, talking baseball or football or some such, and when Bozo heard Skip scratch on the front screen door, he would open the door with a sweeping deferential flourish and tell his companions, “Here s Old Skip shoppin’ for a pound of his favorite foodstuff” and with another great gesture would negotiate the transaction.

  There was a parallel to this. When Bozo opened the leather pouch and found only a nickel, he knew Skip had been dispatched by my father to get the Jackson newspaper. Bozo would roll up the newspaper with a rubber band and Skip would return home with it in his mouth. One day, however, he came back with the Memphis newspaper. Daddy subscribed regularly t
o the Memphis paper, and he was exceedingly upset. He severely admonished Skip, then ordered him to take the paper back and to return with the right one. Skip appeared a few minutes later with the Memphis paper again. In the pouch, I found a note from Bozo: “It ain't the dogs fault. We run out of Jackson papers.” My father felt so guilty he gave Skip four fried chicken livers.

  In one of those early summers I entered Skip in the local dog contest, a highly regarded event sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. About five hundred people were in the audience, and since the prize was to be based on good looks and on the tricks the dogs could perform, I felt certain Skip would win. Fifty-two dogs were to participate in the competition. Skip was the thirty-fifth on the program, and when he was announced, I led him onto the stage of the auditorium. Because he was a well-known presence in town, everyone generously applauded. Then a polite silence fell as I got him to walk around the stage two or three times so the judges could examine his posture and the way he carried himself. Now it was time for the tricks.

  “Sit down!” I commanded. But Skip had an ornery look in his eyes and would not sit down. Instead he jumped up and barked. “Lie down and roll over!” This time he sat down and shook hands. “Play dead!” To this he leapt off the stage, ran up the aisle, turned around, and leapt onto the stage again. The spectators began to laugh, and I was growing more and more embarrassed by the minute. “Sit down!” I repeated. He rolled over twice and then stretched out contrarily on his back with all four feet sticking up in the air. When he finally got up, I reached for the tennis ball in my pocket and said, “Make a catch!” I tossed the ball in the air toward him. Ordinarily he could have caught such a mundane throw in his mouth with no effort at all, but he let the ball go right by him, conjuring for me in that unsettling instant my readings about the Chicago Black Sox, who threw the 1919 World Series. I had never seen him so difficult. I led him backstage and told him he had made a fool of me. Only later did I comprehend that he did not care about winning trophies and considered the performance of public tricks beneath his dignity. But when the prizes were announced, he tied for first place with Sheriff Raines's big bulldog, a handsome dog named Buck with an impressive brown-and-white forehead, although he slobbered a lot. Super-Doop, the Hendrixes’ black Labrador, finished a few points behind Skip and Buck. The judges said they were not impressed with Skip's discipline, but they gave him the prize because he was such a fine-looking dog. In appropriate time I forgave him his irascibility before the judges, and for many years the blue ribbon with the shiny medal attached to it hung proudly on the wall of my bedroom.

  Not long after this, when I turned twelve and joined Troop 72 of the Boy Scouts and began working on merit badges, I discovered that not a single member of the town troop had Dog Care. This was hard to fathom, yet true. Numerous of the local boys had earned such unusual merit badges as Sheep Farming, Pigeon Raising, Poultry Study, Reptile Study, Bird Study, and Pulp and Paper, and the smartest older boy in the troop, named J.C., offspring of our dentist, Doc Shirley, not only had acquired all these but also possessed the most arduous merit badge of all, called Signaling, which embraced Morse code, ship codes, and flags, despite the fact that we lived five hundred miles at the very least from the nearest ocean, but even this most diligent of boys did not have Dog Care. With such a distinctive companion as Old Skip, I determined to set a historical precedent, but I needed to have my certificate of authority approved by a practicing veterinarian. I telephoned the town vet, named Dr. Cornelius Jones, to make an appointment, explaining to him my mission. I asked if I should bring my dog with me, and he said he did not deem that necessary.

  His offices were in a dark old stone building on Washington Street covered with lush green ivy, and the smells inside of medicines and antiseptics and animals were pungent but not disagreeable. “Since IVe never been asked to do this before,” he said, TU just ask you some questions about your own dog. What's his name?”

  “Skip.”

  He queried me about age, weight, breed, habitudes, and training, and then asked: “What about fleas?”

  “What about ‘em, sir?” I replied.

  “Does your dog have fleas?”

  “He's got plenty, yessir.”

  “How do you rid him of fleas?”

  “Well, I pick ‘em off him one by one and throw ‘em on top of the heater.”

  This apparently discouraged the doctor. He started in on another line of questioning.

  “Do you consider your dog intelligent?”

  “Yessir. He may be the smartest dog who ever lived.”

  “Really? What can he do?”

  I told him he could drive a car with a little help and picked up his own bologna at Goodloe's Grocery. Also that he played football.

  Once more he gave me a disbelieving glance. “Do you feed him a good diet?”

  “Yessir, I sure do.”

  “How many times a day do you feed him?”

  “Oh, I guess about seven or eight.”

  “Seven or eight!” the doctor said. “Don't you know you're only supposed to feed a dog once a day?” Then, shaking his head, he signed my certificate, making me the first in the county to get Dog Care.

  ••••••• 3 •••••••

  The Woods, Fishing, and a Skunk

  ONE AUTUMN AFTERNOON my father had Old Skip out for squirrels at the Delta end of the county. There was a slight rustling in the underbrush. Skip suddenly froze, sniffed the air, looked intently around, then with a neat bounding leap crashed in after the sound.

  Almost as suddenly he emerged, the most woebegone dog in the world. A skunk, his dignity intact, strutted royally out into the opening and down the trail. Skip had the foul yellow liquid all over him and smelled so putrid we had to put handkerchiefs to our noses. Even his eyes looked sick; I can still smell that malevolent odor, which had the wretched texture of spoiled molasses and a thousand burnt wires. We walked back to the clearing and wrapped him in an old blanket, and took him to our backyard as far away from the house as we could get, and bathed him, not once but twice, in tomato juice, the oldest remedy in the town for skunk smells. We did not want to lay our eyes on him for days, and until the odor began to wear off he was the most listless and unenthusiastic creature I ever saw About four or five days later we were sitting in the front room listening to President Roosevelt on the radio. Skip had not been allowed in the house since the assault of the skunk, but now he opened the screen door with his nose and entered. He still smelled bad; my mother was furious. He knocked down an armchair and ran through my fathers legs. When we finally caught him, we gave him another tomato juice bath.

  Our first dogs were the big ones—Tony, Sam, Jimbo— and since they were bird dogs, they had a fine and natural inclination to hunt. Yet Skip was the best of all, for he trampled the woods with an inborn sense of possibility and adventure.

  The Delta woods, when I was a boy, were a living thing for me, and Skip since his earliest days in them loved their commanding excitement and mystery. There were stretches, in the dank swamp-bottoms, that stayed almost wholly dark, even on the brightest of days. The tall thick trees were covered with vines and creeping plants, and on a gray December afternoon the silence was so cold and impenetrable that as a very small boy I would become frightened, and stay close to my father. He taught me how to note landmarks the deeper we went into the woods: one hickory had a gnarled limb, like a broken arm, or the ash next to it was split in two, probably by lightning. Sometimes he would make his own marks, with powder or empty shotgun shells, and he always kept an eye close to his compass. Three or four times in my memory, men had gotten hopelessly lost in these hidden places, and someone would have to organize search parties, or get the sheriff and his deputies to circle round and round in the woods looking for footprints or empty shells or the sign of fires. As we walked along the thin trail, fighting the mosquitoes that swarmed at us despite the ointment we slathered on our skin, the sun would suddenly open up some half-cleari
ng, and giant spiderwebs would shimmer and toss in the light. Daddy would stand dead in his tracks, gesturing to me to be absolutely still, and he would point to a deer farther down the path, looking at us a brief instant before scampering away into the trees. We never hunted deer; my father was against it, and mainly we came to the woods to shoot the wild squirrels, gray and red and sometimes black. The squirrel dumplings my mother would make, in her new pressure cooker, even if we had to spit out the buckshot while eating them, were always worth the hardest days walk. We had squirrel cookouts in our backyard and invited all my friends. One night Henjie ate four fried squirrels by himself, and Skip could eat two with the blink of an eye and invariably ask for more.

  Many was the time we would rise before dawn, and Skip would be waiting for us at the car, such was his agitation to get started toward the woods. We would drive out the flat roads past the dead cotton stalks in the fields, making it to the woods just as the sun was beginning to show. Then we would catch the chatter and rustling of all the birds and beasts, and when we got out of the car Skip would be ready to tear a muscle to get in and see what was there, and once in there would almost immediately start pointing squirrels. In the bottoms the ground was so soggy that our boots would make faint oozing sounds, and our footmarks would slowly fill up with water as we walked; Skip's pawprints would make the same funny sounds, and until he got used to them he would sometimes scratch at them to see if there might be something sinister underneath. And there were days when the air would be so thick with mosquitoes in that raw wilderness, setting upon us in vast and palpable waves, that we had to try to find someplace else or give up and go home. I envied Skip his furry coat when the mosquitoes were troublesome, for to him mosquitoes were neither here nor there, and we would have to beg him to depart with us, such was his affinity for those woods.