My Dog Skip

by Willie Morris

  These woods were so much a part of our lives, my father's and Skips and mine, only a half hour's drive or so from town, that I grew up taking them for granted. Only later did I realize that they were the last and largest of the great Delta forests, that it was only at the bottom of that lower triangle of the Delta, where we were, that the remnants of the primordial wilderness had been left untouched by the incursions of man. It was to this spectral country, but closer to the Mississippi River, as I would read many years later in “Delta Autumn/’ that William Faulkner's character Uncle Ike McCaslin came on his last hunt, having to drive ”two hundred miles from Jefferson when once it had been thirty/’ Little wonder that as I grew older I always in my memory associated these woods with boyhood and Old Skip.

  My father and I were in one of these places on December 7, 1941, when I was seven, sometime before I got Skip; I can remember the day by the news that greeted us when we went home. And we had been there many times before then. At first I used a.22, though Daddy once let me shoot his 12-gauge, out of nothing but maliciousness, because after I squeezed the trigger that gun knocked me for a twisting nosedive into the mud. On my twelfth birthday I got a shiny new 16-gauge smelling richly of oil, and the next time we went into the woods I wasted a whole box of shells out of sheer exuberance, and Skip thought I had gone insane.

  One afternoon we were walking through a stretch of swamp-bottom with Owen McGinty, one of the town firemen. All of a sudden Owen shouted “Jump!” just as my foot hit something soft and wet, and I jumped with all the enthusiasm I could muster. “Look at that,” Owen said, rolling out the “that,” and my father went “Wheew.” There was a rattlesnake that must have been eight feet long, right in my path. Even Skip, intrepid in all things, but young at the time, was intimidated by the sight of this menacing serpent, and he backed off a few feet and merely stared at it. “Let the boy shoot him,” Owen said, and I aimed my new shotgun and killed him through the head. Owen pulled out his knife and cut off his rattlers and handed them to me. The next day I took the rattlers to school, and my classmates gathered around and said, “He was a big ‘un.” But Miss Abbott, my teacher, found out about it and made me take my trophy home. If the dust from the insides got in your eyes, she said, you would be blinded for life. My father said Miss Abbott got that from an old wives’ tale.

  Several times in the woods around Panther Creek we ran across a man my father knew—a hanger-on, he called him. The man lived right in the middle of the woods, in a little crooked shanty he had made for himself. He had a scraggly black beard and wore beat-up khakis and a slouch hat; in back of his shack was a vegetable garden. The game wardens ignored him, and he lived off the animals he could kill, and made money now and then guiding the deer hunters. My father later told me that the man would eat anything just so it wasn't alive, and even then he might eat it if the gravy was good. Skip took to this man right away, perhaps because the old fellow gave him fried squirrel and allowed him to tease his numerous squawking chickens. “Ill give you five dollars for that dog,” he said to me one day. I refused, replying that although Skip had a lot of the woods in him, he was mainly a town dog.

  Later, when I lived in England, I saw places that the English called woods, but compared with the Delta swamp-bottoms of that boyhood time they could have been grown in the shop of a florist. Similarly, the lakes where my father, Skip, and I went to fish, compared with the man-made lakes I would see later in Central Texas, were real lakes, of a piece with the stark heavy earth that enveloped them. Their waters were murky and oppressive, and the worst death I ever heard about took place at one of them, when a water-skier got tangled in a school of water moccasins.

  We did cane-pole fishing, both to save money and because it was lazier, for we seldom exerted ourselves on these trips to Wolf Lake or Blue Lake or Five-Mile. The most work came the night before, when we hired a couple of children at a quarter an hour and went back to the town dump to catch the roaches for our bait. Directly across the dirt road was a black juke joint, and the sorrowful sounds of blues music wafted across the way as we proceeded on our arcane odyssey We had a big wire basket with a lid on top, and we would spot the roaches with our flashlights, trap them in our gloves, and drop them into the basket. Need it be said, though this may shock some modern-day hygiene-conscious readers, that Skip was also an agile retriever of roaches? And likewise that he enjoyed going to the dump for its pungent smells and strange discarded paraphernalia and debris?

  The next morning, very early, we would drive out into the same Delta country, only not so far, rent a boat from a sharecropper, and spend the day drifting around the water. The fishing itself bored Old Skip, in marked contrast with his exuberant hunting in the forests. My father would sit at one end of the boat, I at the other, with Skip in the middle, and after a decent while he would stretch out on his back with his paws extended upward and doze in the indolent sunshine. I guess he really just wanted to be with us. In the quiet intervals I would ask him, “Want to take a swim, Skip?” and he would rouse himself from his slumbers, shake himself three or four times to get the kinks out, and jump overboard, paddling around with only his nose and the top part of his head above the water, and when he had had enough he would swim back to the boat and I would bend down and lift him in.

  When the biting was good we might bring home twenty or thirty white perch or bream or goggle-eye; when it was slow we would follow Skip's example and go to sleep in the boat. Whenever we caught a small fish my father would say, “Throw him back. Only the country folks take the little ‘uns, and they eat ‘em bones and all.” We would stop at some crossroads store on the way back to town to stretch and have a Nehi Strawberry or an Orange Crush, and talk about the fishing with the old men who sat out front whittling and chewing Brown Mule, spitting between the cracks of the porch floor and talking all the while. I would get Skip a bag of potato chips, and the three of us—a man, a boy, and a dog—would idly sit on the porch and absorb the lilting prattle of the old men and gaze out at the black people picking cotton in the fields beyond. When we got home my father and I would clean the fish on the back steps and eat them fried, with a crust as delicious as the fish itself. Skip himself might have some fried goggle-eye, but you would have to take the bones out for him first.

  I remember one of these afternoons—one of the last, because by that time I was sixteen (which meant Skip had just turned six) and had just about lost interest, and then my father and Skip would go out alone. But on this spring day the weather had taken turns between sunshine and a light rain, and we caught more fish than we had ever caught before. I barely had time to get the line into the water before I could feel the pulling and tugging, and out would come a fish big enough for a feast. The gars were jumping and making splashes all over the lake, and the turtles were diving off their logs, and the fish kept biting away; clearly something was going on under there. On a day such as this Skip would not be permitted his swim, but I could tell he too knew that something auspicious was going on. Then the wind rose and the rain came down in heavy drops, and we paddled to land as quickly as we could and made it to a deserted tenant shack just in time. The drops made little clouds in the dust until the dust itself was wet and muddy, and the rain blew in gusts and rattled hard on the rusty tin roof. We waited there for a long time, until the rain suddenly stopped. Then the sun came out again, and the whole world was wet and cool: the trees heavy and glistening in the sun, and the rich Delta land humming and making its grand noises, the soft fluttering of the leaves, the cries of the birds, the rush of the water. Why do I remember so well the sight of Old Skip in that moment long ago, sitting on his haunches at the edge of the doorway, gazing out, transfixed by the Lord's good earth? Then Daddy said, “We better be gettin’ back. If there're any fish left, well let ‘em alone to grow”

  ••••••• 4 •••••••

  War Days

  IN THE FIRST two and a half years of his life, Skip was a war dog, because I was a war boy. He was as much a
part of World War II for me as Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Hirohito.

  The war itself was a glorious and incomparable thing, a great panorama intended purely for the gratification of one's childhood imagination, and since Old Skip had an adventuresome heart, I believe he too sensed something momentous was touching our lives. My pals and I never missed a war film; Skip always waited patiently outside the theater until the movie was over and we joined him again. How my contemporaries and I hated the Japanese soldiers, who pried off fingernails, sawed off eyelashes with razors, and bayoneted babies¡ We loathed the Germans also, but slightly less so, because they looked like us. And the English (with whom we shared “a common tongue”) and the Free French and Russians, they were good fellows, and the Chinese were mysterious but friendly, and the Italians (pronounced “E)/£-talians”) were cowardly, but in captivity lovable, full of song, and more than willing to change sides. I promised myself that if the town was ever captured, I would retire to the deepest recesses around Peak Tenereffe with Skip and the other boys as a guerrilla fighter, and if I was ever caught and put before a firing squad, I would yell, “Long Live America!”

  We climbed Brickyard Hill and stood at its highest pinnacle with prewar Woolworth binoculars searching for any sign of Junkers or Zeroes, whose shapes we had memorized from twenty-five-cent books on enemy aircraft, and when Skip saw us looking up into the heavens he looked too, whether mimicking us or not, I was never quite sure. I kept a diary of all the crucial battles, which I followed every day in the pages of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Jackson Daily News, and I kept entries of more personal matters also. I came across this diary not long ago, all shriveled and yellowing, in the same box where I had found Old Skip's photograph. My handwriting on the first page said: “In the event of an emergency contact my dog Skip.” One of the entries in my boyish scrawl declared: “Skip is smart. Skip is very smart,” and went on to describe how only the week before he had supported us in trying to uncover a German spy network in town.

  The circumstances were these, the little diary reminded me: Because of the Southland Oil Refinery a few miles from town, and the active flow of commerce on the river, I had surmised that our town had been chosen by Berlin as a prime target, and hence we considered it our responsibility to keep our eyes keenly out for alien espionage agents. On that ominous forenoon the previous week, we had noticed a large blanket hanging on a clothesline behind a house near the town dump with a swastika emblazoned on the cloth¡ Immediately suspicious, I told my diary, Peewee, Mutton-head, Henjie, Skip, and I hid in a nearby grove of chinaberry trees and for long moments surveyed the house. Three or four enigmatic people kept going in and out. We forthwith hastened to police headquarters and reported our discovery to Sheriff Raines, who was drinking iced tea in a wicker chair on the sidewalk. “Oh, hell,” he said. “I know them people,” and proceeded to tell us the swastika was an Indian symbol on an old Indian blanket. “That don't matter,” he advised us. “You boys and the dog continue to keep your eyes out at all times.”

  Skip never cared much for the radio, but whenever we listened to Hitler giving a speech on our shortwave at home he had a most uncommon reaction. Cocking an ear to the Führern burning words and shouts, he would sit there for a moment imbibing this bombast, then with his ears twitching as in pain, begin strutting about the room emitting deranged little howls, his snout lifted mightily upward, much as he had done in the cemetery when we accosted the man making the shortcut. Often was the time we had to turn off the radio to get him to stop. Why did he never once do this when listening to Mussolini? Was this part of his ESP in reading my own moods about matters? Whatever it was, I never knew a dog so down on Hitler.

  The boy who had lived in the big white house next door had enlisted in the army when he was seventeen. Now he was fighting in Europe and we exchanged Victory mail, which we called V-mail, and I sent him reports of ballgames and sometimes oatmeal cookies (the good kind). One fabulous day a substantial package came to me from France, and I brought it into my room to open it. Always curious about novel and unexpected items, Skip began poking it with his nose. When I tore off the paper and opened the top of the box, he put his head inside to see what was there. It was a real German helmet, with the name of the soldier—Willy— carved inside it, and also a German belt with its engraving, GOTT MIT UNS, and an iron cross, and German money, and postcards of German storm troopers. Skip was intrigued by the helmet; when I placed it on the floor he sniffed it some more, then pushed it around with a paw. Tolbert, an old man who was doing some handiwork around the house, was fascinated with that helmet too. Sometimes I would let him wear it home, and he would walk off down the back alley, doing a goose step the way the Germans did, Skip following with sharp interest right behind him; then he would turn and wave at me, snapping his heels and giving me the “Heil Hitler” sign. Later I wore the helmet, the iron cross, and the belt down Main Street one Saturday afternoon, Skip at my heels. All the country boys standing on the corner came to look them over.

  “Gott mit uns,” one of them said. “Now what's that supposed to say?”

  “God with us,” I replied.

  “Yeah? Now ain't that something Them Germans think they got God on their side.”

  In addition to exploring the vicinity for spies, we pursued other constructive patriotic activities, and Skip was closely involved in these lofty schemes also. Dominating this good old time was the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt, our president—his voice on the radio, his face with the dark rings under his eyes on the newsreels. Because of him my father and I planted a big Victory garden in our backyard, raising food on our own because much of it was scarce and we had to have special ration stamps to buy it. We grew long rows of snap beans, tomatoes, beets, radishes, corn, squash, and rutabagas, and a unique breed of swamp turnip called zoo-boo, the seeds of which the hanger-on around Panther Creek had once given us. Since we lived in the flat part of town, this was rich loamy Delta land, and our vegetables came out of it bountifully and fast. Daddy and I worked every late afternoon of the war until dark, chopping and weeding; Old Skip relished that garden, its fresh full aromas, following us down the rows as we worked, dipping his nose in the soil so that he looked like a dirt-dauber, sometimes going to sleep under the tomato vines or next to our scarecrow, with whom he had established a makeshift truce.

  Every Saturday morning at ten o'clock there was the “Kiddie Matinee” at the Dixie Theater, and this, too, became a symbolic cosmos of the war effort. On the screen would be the latest chapter of the Spy Smasher serials involving grisly enemy agents, a newsreel of the fighting around the globe, and a full-length Western—Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or Lash LaRue or Don (Red) Barry. Many of the country people would bring their lunches in paper sacks and stay all day, right until sunset, watching Roy or Gene or Lash or Red all over again, joining the town children in cheering the inevitable scene in which the hero dashes across the range on his horse to rescue his friends from dismemberment or other catastrophe. If we collected enough coat hangers and tinfoil, which would be used to make bullets for our soldiers, and brought them to the Dixie Theater, the manager would let us into the Kiddie Matinee free of charge. Hence Skip and I would wander the alleyways of town twice a week or more, searching for discarded empty cigarette packages because of the tinfoil inside them; Camel cigarette packages were the most desirable of all because their tinfoil, it was said, made better bullets. I taught Skip to help locate these empty cigarette packages, and given his pervasive intelligence and diligence, which by now should be apparent to even the most jaundiced of readers, in little time at all he had mastered the search, bringing to me many empty packages in his teeth from the ditches, gullies, pastures, and undergrowth abutting our profligate alleys, as proud when he found one as the most princely young knight in quest of the Grail.

  It was also integral to the Kiddie Matinee that if you agreed to perform in the talent show preceding the action on the screen, either you were permitted in without having to p
ay or, as was usually the case with my friends and me, who were already allowed in free because of our tinfoil, the manager would reward you with a dime, the price of the normal ticket. Often was the Saturday the others and I appeared in the talent show. This led to two salutary things: one, I could save my dimes and buy chocolate bars and bubblegum on the black market; and, two, the manager, finally convinced that Old Skip had himself contributed substantial quantities of the tinfoil, allowed him to come to the matinee with us. On four straight Saturdays Skip stood on the stage with Henjie, Big Boy, Muttonhead, and me as we sang a quartet rendition of “The Marines’ Hymn,” which we dedicated to all the marines in San Diego; “The Caisson Song” for the army in North Africa and England; “Anchors Aweigh” for the sailors in the Pacific; and “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder” for all our pilots, navigators, bombardiers, tail gunners, and engine mechanics everywhere. Later, when the films came on, Skip would sit in the seat next to me, observing the transactions on the screen for a while before resting his face on my arm and going to sleep.