by Mark Doty
The black puppy was too big for the little cage in which he was housed, and when the attendant at the shelter first let him out so we could meet him, he promptly fell over, then scrambled up and hurried back in. The long-haired boy, a student at the local alternative college with astonishing eyelashes as black as the dog’s lustrous coat, reached in and lifted him back out. “That’s the only security,” he said, “that little guy has ever known.”
This is the point where love, the very beginning of love, shades right out of language’s grasp. Could I ever say what made him immediately endearing? Some constellation of image and gesture, some quality of soul, something charmed and promised. Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can’t go where the heart can, not completely. It’s freeing, to think there’s always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so—and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.
Ah, but now I remember I’ve left something out: there’s a dog missing from my chronology. I’m maybe four, and we live in a different big house in Tennessee, one on a hill, with a steep gulch beside it where my father’s pickup truck is parked, down by the chopping block—a wide old stump—where on some Saturdays he kills a hen for my grandmother to pluck and roast for Sunday dinner. Still completely clear to me, the pale body of the hen, resting in an oval enameled metal roasting pan, black and flecked with little stars, as if the hen lay in the midnight sky.
My sister’s boyfriend, of whom my parents do not approve, gives her a gift, a feisty and handsome boxer whose name is—could it be Bo? (Long ago, and never talked about again.) Bo likes to climb up on the porch swing and sit in our laps when we swing back and forth in the cool evening air and sing hymns. One night he’s jumping up and gets his paw caught in the space between the slats on the porch swing, and my mother tries to free him, but he misunderstands her intent and sinks his teeth into her arm: purplish bite like a half-moon.
Is it the next day when we’re in the car, our old green Studebaker, driving into the country? My sister and I in the back seat, my parents up front, I can’t remember where Bo is, sitting with us, on my fourteen-year-old sister’s lap? And then we pull over someplace, on the edge of some grassy field, and my father opens his door and then lifts the dog out, and sets him in the grass by the shoulder of the road. Then we’re quietly driving away. The memory’s the barest sketch: does anyone speak, do we look back?
The sign my father has written in the atmosphere of our family says, This way away from the mountain.
How do you tell a puppy’s life? Peeing inside, when we get busy and forget to take him out on time, and the yellow pee running in a quick line down the old house’s sloping floor. Receiving lavish praise for peeing outside. Beginning of a sense of routine. First bark. In the middle of the night, unexpectedly, a single, wolfish howl, never to be repeated; we decide it’s a sign of a UFO passing over. First friendship with another dog, in this case, a pit bull called Shadow, who lives between our house and the railroad tracks and river. Shadow’s a tawny, big-headed girl who dwells outside, pretty much unsupervised. As far as I know, she’s never been on a leash in her life. She likes nothing better than to wrestle with Arden endlessly. She tempers her own strength; she lies beside him on the grass, and they flash their teeth at one another, and then they lock their jaws together and make growly noises and wrestle with their heads. She wins, very gently, until she lets loose and lets him pin her head down for a moment, just to keep things interesting.
Every day we wander along the railroad tracks by the river: slender birches chewed by beaver, who sometimes slap a tail on the water, great blue herons perched on a rock in the fog, a big, collapsing red barn full of—what? Strange little handcarts that come and go on the tracks, and every once in a while an actual train, a chain of rust-red freight cars, a wave from the engineer. We make a new friend, Beth, who wears a suede jacket with long fringe in all kinds of weather and walks two fat Labs, Bear and Snowflake, their names signaling their colors. When Beth goes into rehab, we walk her dogs, fetching them from her crowded apartment and walking down to the riverbank. It’s February, and there’s a two-week spell when it’s thirty below zero every night, but Bear and Snowflake are used to going out before bed, so we put on a serious number of layers of clothing and trundle down the dark sidewalk to her place. Then Wally and I and the three dogs march down to the railroad path, the five of us walking in a straight line, under a dome of stars glistening like ice chips overhead, and ice below us, too, the snow packed down to a hard, gleaming surface. It’s so cold that when the town clock rings out—eleven o’clock—it seems as if the air itself might crack, or the bones in our cheeks. Beth’s left a stock of little cups of Hood vanilla ice cream in the freezer, and that’s the thing she most wants us to do while she’s away, no matter how cold it gets: make sure the dogs have their late-night treat.
As Arden grows, he and I take to walking to town via the back way, following the railroad path, then padding along the busy-for-Vermont sidewalks to the video store, the bank, the bookstore. One day, Shadow’s out in the more or less junkyard she inhabits, and ready to play. She tags along on our walk, loping with Arden or with me, enjoying herself, and when we get to the intersection where our path joins Main Street, right beside the two-lane bridge, I tell her to go home, but she ignores me. I point, gesture, try to sound firm. She sits and looks as if she might consider obeying me.
Arden and I walk toward town, and it isn’t till we reach the stationery shop whose windows Wally has decorated with constellations of notepads and pens and office supplies, probably the most boring display job conceivable, that I turn around and realize Shadow is at my heels. Why I don’t just turn around at this point and go home I can’t recall, but I’ve spent half an hour walking to town and there must be something I am bound and determined to purchase. I loop Arden’s leash around a parking meter and duck into the health food store—I’ll only be a minute—but while I’m standing in line to pay for my fair-trade coffee beans or echinacea drops or whatever it is, I see a streaming blur race past my feet, and then that same wild force goes streaking up and down the aisles, racing between people’s legs, probably knocking over a barrel of unsulphured raisins or unprocessed oats along the way.
Since I’m teaching at the ridiculously time-consuming alternative college, Wally and Arden spend lots of time together on their own. He’s often home, making display-window props for the stores he dresses in Burlington and Glenns Falls, trying out ideas. So, the two are always together, and Arden receives such a steady light of attention that his already incipient character blooms.
A dog seems to come with a temperament attached, the way children do. The swirling forces of environment impress themselves upon the fresh page of a new personality, but anyone who’s been a parent or a preschool teacher, or has adopted a puppy knows what I mean: there is a stamp of thisness, of idiosyncrasy that’s plainly evident from the get-go. Arden came with a meditative, observant disposition, a way of looking off thoughtfully which communicated a reflective demeanor, and an absolute desire to please and indicate that of course he knew the right way to behave.
I too dislike the anthropomorphizing of animals; there is something diminishing about a dog in sunglasses, something shameful about a rabbit in a straw hat. Such gestures bleach out otherness; they presume knowledge where no such thing is entirely possible, or at least not easily won.
But we’d be equally reductive if we refused to grant animal consciousness its complexities. Who hasn’t observed a dog being sneaky, or turning on the charm, or licking her lips in anxiety, or dissolving into complete happiness? And what vocabulary do we have for the life of feeling but our own? I am willing to grant that the emotions of dogs are not like ours, but I’m absolutely convinced that what they experience is emotion—and that some of the terms we’
d use to describe a human character (observant, thoughtful, desiring) are the best we can do to name their not quite knowable inner lives. (Tolstoy, the master of omniscience, seems to have agreed: there’s a wonderful moment in Anna Karenina, when Levin’s hunting dog, Laska, grows exasperated as her master wastes time in conversation with another hunter, Prince Oblonsky, while a woodcock appears: “…Laska, her ears pricked up, kept glancing at the sky and then reproachfully at them. ‘Found a fine time to talk!’ she thought. ‘And there’s one coming…There it is all right. They’ll miss it…’”)
When Arden was six months old, we took him for a hike back through the woods to a swimming hole on a little river behind the school where I taught. As usual, there wasn’t a soul around, and we were blissfully skinny-dipping in the waist-high water and wondering if Arden would ever try swimming. So far, he’d merely stood on the edge of any stream, looking in with an equal degree of curiosity and doubt. I decided to float on my back, the brief Vermont summer sun delicious, the cool water swirling around my ears, when—crash and flounder, suddenly there’s a puppy in the water, and said puppy has his jaw quite gently clenched around my shoulder, and I am being rescued and pulled the four feet to shore! How to understand that act: instinct triumphing over fear, the ancestors’ tradition of marine rescue written in the genes? A felt sense of responsibility?
There’s something refreshing about such virtues sitting beside what might be taken as their contraries: a stubborn streak of independence, a firm notion of boundary. When Arden gets a nasty pad cut, inflicted by jumping into a bog in the woods at the bottom of which lies—a piece of broken glass, rusty tin can?—we hurry to the vet, since a pad cut bleeds all over the place, and he’s promptly examined, with us by his side. But we’re not allowed to be in the room while the actual stitching up takes place, and when the vet emerges to tell us Arden’s fine, we ask, How did he do?
“Well,” she says, “he did snap at me while I was working on the stitches.”
It seems so out of character that I’m full of disbelief. “He tried to bite you?”
She pauses a beat. “Well,” she says, “he’s not above it.”
Arden has to wear one of those plastic lampshades around his neck, to keep him from yanking out the stitches with his teeth. Either he knows he looks ridiculous or he loathes the limitation the collar creates. He suffers a deep indignity. He stands with his head turned toward the floor, so that the lampshade rests on the painted pine floorboards, the picture of canine dejection. We relent, we remove the lampshade and move his head away from his back paw when we see it tending in that direction. Then, deciding to trust him, we run out for fifteen minutes, for coffee or a quick turn through the video store, only to return and find him on the couch, the black stitches yanked out, the paw cut bleeding away.
Back to the vet, who this time thoroughly sedates him before she goes anywhere near that paw.
Thus begins a lifelong history of Arden and veterinarians, who never seem allowed to see his charming side; in the doctor’s office, he’s nervous, exasperated, and self-protective. Vets like to offer him a little treat, some liver-flavored vitamin or diminutive biscuit; Arden accepts them, eyes the vet and me, and then delicately spits them out.
One kennel we visit seems like a jail for pets, with concrete floors and brilliant fluorescent lights and awful metal doors that bang and reverberate through the metal walls. The search for an acceptable kennel isn’t an easy thing, but there’s a week we have to be away. A friend from school recommends Arlene’s, a place perched way back on a dirt road on a hill above the college, in a zone of trailers and odd little “manufactured homes.” My colleague says, “It might not be quite what you’re used to.” We call, then go for a visit. Arlene is a wide woman in a flowered dress, who seems to have a bit of difficulty standing; she says, “My leg’s been bugging me, but Junior can take you out to the kennel.”
Junior is a thick fellow, arms and legs of the same size, and his head seems made of identical material, as if he were built of tubes of clay all extruded from the same pipe. We walk across the muddy patches and the thin grass out back, to a row of pens made of wire fencing, roofless, each one with a little wooden house inside. One pen has several of the ramshackle structures, for the more social. It looks like the canine version of a town in a John Waters movie, but we try to remind ourselves that what we seek in a kennel might well not be the things that would please a dog, and Junior does seem affectionate with the animals, and the creatures wiggling their butts in the pens are completely fine.
When Arden arrives, he appears to find the place delightful. He runs up to the edge of the cages, greeting the inhabitants: much tail-wagging, sniffing, friendly little barks. We’re wretchedly nervous about leaving him—I suddenly feel very gay and very middle-class—but he shows no signs of being the least bit bothered, and we’re disciplining ourselves not to look back too much as we walk away, letting him be absorbed in his new social life in the big damp pen.
Of course, we call Arlene from San Francisco, a couple of days into the trip. She’s as laconic as an old Vermonter could ever be. She says, “He’s just fine.”
What I want, naturally, are some details, but I don’t quite know how to ask for them. “So he’s okay?”
“He’s doing just fine.”
I try again. “He’s adjusting okay?”
Pause. Arlene calls out, “Junior?” Another pause, shuffley noise, phone bumped or dropped, muffled words, then, “How’s that new black dog?”
Muffled word. She gets back on the receiver. “Junior says he’s just fine.”
I have no choice but to believe, though I also can’t help but imagine Arlene rolling her eyes.
At last we’re back, and make the drive from the airport straight up Arlene’s dusty, gravelly road. The noise of our car pulling into the driveway rouses Junior, who emerges and leads us out back; Arden’s in the big pen by himself, as all the other dogs seem to have gone home. He comes bounding out of his doghouse, and when Junior opens the door to the pen, he jumps straight up in the air, arcing his body like a leaping fish, the picture of joy. Junior retrieves the blanket we’ve left with him, which feels very damp, as, indeed, does Arden. I look back and see that the doghouse has a gaping black hole in the roof. Arden’s been sleeping in the rain all week!
But, in fact, he seems none the worse for wear, perhaps even refreshed by the experience, as happy and eager as he’s ever been, though we don’t ever go back to Arlene’s.
It’s fifteen years later when Paul and I drive Arden, on fall weekends, down to a little house Paul’s parents own on the Jersey Shore. When we pull off the Garden State Parkway at the exit, Arden sits up in the back of the station wagon, excited, head to the glass, nostrils pulsing at the salt air.
At the house, he’s in heaven; there’s a small grassy yard that fronts onto a lagoon, a world of things to watch. Arden’s happiness is to lie on the grass, watching, alert to seagulls and egrets, to passing boats, to rippling water. Across the canal, they’re building condos smack out into the wetlands, so there’s an occasional truck, a bulldozer flattening reeds. He hardly has to walk at all if he doesn’t choose to—it’s hard for him, these days—and a whole world seems to offer itself for his inspection. Eventually he falls asleep, out in the grass, and in a while wakes up and watches again.
He’s so pleased with his situation that he doesn’t want to come in that evening, so we let him stay there, sleeping in the twilight. We don’t have the heart to wake him up to bring him indoors, but at three in the morning, we’re roused by a crashing lightning and then a wild downpour, like gravel poured onto the roof of the house. Suddenly I’m awake enough to think, My God, he must be miserable! I pull on some shorts and run out into the storm—only to find him so deeply, completely asleep he seems he might be sinking into the earth. He’s soaked to the bone. I say his name—nothing. I stroke him, no response. Now I’m soaked in the cold rain, too. I put my hand on his ribs to make sure he’s breathi
ng, which he is—but he has gone so far into the bliss of sleeping in the grass beside the dark lagoon that I can’t wake him at all. And this is a dog who didn’t even like to go for a walk in the rain!
I don’t know that in a few minutes, after I’ve given up and run back into the house to wrap myself in a towel and shiver and shake off the water as if I were myself a large, soaking dog, he’ll stumble back into awareness, wake up enough to hobble to the door so that he can have a towel-drying, too. Just now, as I am bending over the absolutely still black body gleaming in the flashes of lightning, he suddenly seems to me the image of King Lear—the mad old man on the moor, fallen, intensely vulnerable, the very image of all our aging, helpless in the storm. And I’m the worried Fool, trying to rouse the tragic, failing King.
But perhaps I dramatize, as I have been known to do. (Mark shouldn’t have a dog….) I could also have read his deep, dreamless sleep in the rain as a memory of Arlene’s, of lovely nights of youth in a fragrant field, in good company, where the rain must have brought to the sleeping animals new fragrances of its own.
Entr’acte
Smell of Rain in the Field
Rain on the old wood of the doghouses, rain on the spots where dozens of visiting dogs have slept or peed, rain picking out the flowers of the field, each with their definite scent, intensifying the odiferous leaves. It makes one dizzy, to imagine that universe of particular smells, and all those fragrances rising together—how encompassing it must have been, how dense with information!