The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

by Jon Katz

  Abandoned by a couple that had divorced, they had originally numbered five, and had been living in the woods for several years. Now there were only two left. They fled from dogs, people, snowmobiles. Nobody could catch them, or had even gotten near them. Some neighbors occasionally threw down some hay, but mostly the sheep lived off brush and weeds. Now the wretched creatures were starving in this unusually bitter winter, ravaging people’s shrubs and “ornamentals.”

  A number of border collies had been worn out trying unsuccessfully to herd them out of their hiding place. In fact, one of Jane’s neighbors had called a nearby border collie owner a week earlier to ask for help. The sheep, growing increasingly desperate for food, had begun chewing the bark off trees. The owner had refused, saying it was too dangerous a mission. This ticked me off, as Jane knew it would. There are some appeals you just don’t turn down if you have border collies. How often does somebody ask you and your dogs to save some sheep? Isn’t that more or less the reason for a sheepdog’s existence?

  Still, the woman had a point. These sheep were not “dog-broke”; they’d never been around working dogs. They were likely to flee when a dog approached, just as if they were confronting a coyote or another predator. Trained dogs, in turn, get easily unhinged when sheep behave so unpredictably. Instead of herding, the exercise becomes an unruly, sometimes bloody chase. Nine-month-old Rose wasn’t large or experienced; she was used to moving fairly compliant sheep who’d been around border collies all their lives. I wasn’t sure she’d developed the presence to deal with these rampaging wild creatures.

  It would be a test of all our hard work together, more important to me than any trial ribbon.

  Besides, rounding up wild sheep was a pretext; this visit had many dimensions. How apt, though, that a dog was the spark.

  When Jane heard about the recalcitrant border collie owner, she told her neighbor, “My brother Jon won’t like that. I bet he’ll come up here with his dogs when he hears about this.” Jane knew me. Brothers and sisters don’t need to talk all the time to understand one another. And I loved the idea that perhaps for the first time in our lives, she was asking her brother for help.

  Of course she was right. I called Anthony and asked him to watch over the farm and its inhabitants for a day or two.

  Even though Orson was keen to join the posse, I decided to put him in a kennel. He thinks Newfoundlands are sheep and would probably go ballistic at the sight of them, and I didn’t even want to picture what runaway wild sheep would do to his arousable nature.

  This was no small step. I could never have left Orson in our first few years. But I’d worked hard to get us both to this point. I’ve always believed that quality kennels are among the safest places to leave dogs; you know they’ll be fed, safe, and right where you last saw them when you return.

  It was time, past time. Sometimes I wonder if I liked Orson’s dependence, seeing it as a sign of his devotion. It’s hard to teach a creature you love to move away from you. But in many ways, it’s the essence of love. What if something happened to me? Shouldn’t he know that other people could love him, too?

  The folks at the Borador Kennel in Salem knew his story well. Dog lovers all, they would adopt him, visiting him throughout the day, stroking and cooing and offering treats. For an attention junkie, this wasn’t half bad. I also enlisted Derrick, the twelve-year-old son of one of the technicians, to come visit Orson in the evening after the staff went home.

  So I dropped Orson off with little fuss, and Rose and I headed west, bound for a great adventure for us both.

  I HAD NOT SEEN JANE IN A GOOD TEN YEARS, MAYBE LONGER. Until a few months earlier, I’d resigned myself to the likelihood that I’d never see her again. I hadn’t seen or talked with my older brother in years, either. Jane—the person in my family to whom I was the closest and, in many ways, the one I’d loved most—seemed lost to me.

  Now, on a gray winter day in a far-off corner of New York State, closer to Canada than to the lives either of us had known before, we were like refugees reunited in a foreign land.

  A lot seemed to be riding on this, much more than the welfare of a couple of sheep, and I was afraid that we might both be disappointed. After all that had happened, I had no reason to believe my connection with Jane could survive as more than a phone friendship.

  We were nearly strangers now, however close we’d been in our early years. She’d been very ill for a long time. She had only seen my daughter once or twice, years ago. She’d virtually abandoned her own two children; one daughter had come to live with Paula and me for a while and the other had gone to live with her father. Neither talked to her much now. I knew how bad she felt about our family and hers, how hard she had struggled to recover. But so much damage had been done, to her and by her.

  It was hard to forget those awful years, or to believe they were truly over. It would be extraordinary even to talk with her face-to-face. Paula and I have been married for more than three decades, and I can’t imagine being closer to another human. Yet Jane knew me as no one else in the world could. The same crucible had shaped us; she understood, literally, where I came from. To lose my family was a catastrophe. To get even a piece of it back was a miracle.

  I’D ARRIVED THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON AFTER A LONG DRIVE, with Rose navigating. As we cruised along, I was surprised at how rural and remote a region my sister had chosen. She’d never lived outside an urban area. In our telephone conversations—increasingly frequent, now daily—I’d tried to warn her of the particular challenges of life upstate. Boston winters are rugged, but she had stores and services and movie theaters close by, dog-rescue friends to commiserate with. My sister still seemed fragile to me, and at my urging, she’d seen a doctor, just before moving, for some medication for her anxiety and depression. It had helped.

  But I knew what nasty winters in unfamiliar, rural areas could be like. This was a brave undertaking. It wouldn’t be an easy transition for her, and she had a lot less support than I did.

  She had little money to spare. After being laid off six months earlier from her programming job, she was living off savings and real estate proceeds until she found new work.

  She knew nobody upstate apart from an e-mail friend in the dog-rescue movement who lived nearby. One daughter was in California, the other back in Massachusetts. There was no community around to keep her company or help her out. She had eye and leg injuries from an accident—I was surprised to learn she’d had a related knee replacement a few years ago—and now felt considerable anxiety about driving.

  Plus she had about two thousand pounds of dog to take care of, some with heart, dietary, or orthopedic problems that required ramps, special food, vet visits. A fervent believer in raw natural diets for her dogs, she fed them only chopped-up turkey or chicken parts. I hated to think how much time she’d spend in her minivan (without four-wheel drive), making the rounds of vets and butchers.

  Yet Jane felt strongly, as I did, that change was necessary and that time was growing short. She needed to shed her past and move forward. Twelve-step recovery programs had saved her, but she wanted the next phase of her life to be different, more meaningful.

  It was surreal how similar we’d become. All those impulses, apart from the addictions, were issues and themes I had experienced, even written about. But it was also daunting how different we were. In some ways, she seemed much more damaged than I; in other ways, more peaceful, less angry. Neither of us needed a shrink to explain the powerful pull drawing us toward quieter, more peaceful surroundings with our canine companions.

  A mile or two from her house, I put the directions down and pulled over. I needed to catch my breath a bit, settle down, adjust my expectations. What if this visit didn’t go well? What if we just didn’t like each other after all this time? Rose, puzzled at the stop, moved in to lick my face. Perhaps she sensed my anxiety, or wanted to urge me to get moving. She was not good at being idle.

  I had great memories of times with my sister when we were yo
ung children—the long yaks at bedtime, the funny stories we exchanged, an aborted attempt to run away to our grandmother’s house. That happy period was short, though. Mostly, we huddled together against the storm that was my family.

  Would I be greeting a ghostly survivor with whom I could never reconnect in any of the old ways? Or a close-to-home version of a dog person like Laurie, somebody who had turned her physical space and emotional self over to dogs so completely that she shut out human beings?

  Cranking the truck, I continued down the road to Jane’s. It was time to know.

  The night before, she’d told me on the phone that she wasn’t going to make “a big deal” out of the visit. “I see you as another dog friend,” she said.

  “I’m not another dog friend,” I said. “I’m your brother. It’s different.”

  She apologized quickly. Even after all this time, we could still read each other. She was simply taking that view to keep from getting too wrought, putting too much weight on a quick visit. I understood.

  But I didn’t want another dog friend; I wanted my sister back. I wanted to be the kind of brother she deserved, and to have the sense of family that neither of us had had as kids. We didn’t have another decade or two to feel estranged.

  The sheep-chase gave the visit a wild, dog-related dimension. It was bizarre, but also safer; it took the pressure off.

  I saw the white mailbox she’d described and pulled in, down a long driveway. A white ranch house sat on the top of a rise, with woods on one side, an open field leading to a pond on the other. I had called Jane on my cell to tell her I was close—I’d gotten lost twice on the endless drive—and she told me she’d be outside the house, waiting.

  But at the end of this driveway, a strange woman was standing on a porch. She seemed elderly, perhaps in her late sixties or early seventies, with a worn, weary, almost ravaged face and dyed red hair. I had pulled down the wrong drive.

  “Do you know where Jane lives?” I asked, leaning out the truck window. “She just moved in last week. I’m her brother.”

  The woman looked puzzled, then smiled faintly. “It’s me,” she said. “It’s me, Jane.”

  I WAS SPEECHLESS, SUFFOCATING, ALMOST GASPING FOR AIR. I got out of the truck, Rose bounding out behind me. Jane came down the steps and we had a long hug. Then we pulled back, both anxious not to make “too big a deal” out of something that was a staggeringly big deal.

  In my head I’d carried a picture of my sister from another era. Time and afflictions had aged her. The hard years—she’d had precious few easy ones—were etched in her face. Did I look as old to her?

  Fortunately the shock and discomfort of the moment was quickly supplanted by the charge of enormous, friendly, slobbering Newfoundlands, barking, wagging, and encircling the normally assertive but now stunned Rose, who looked at me, then retreated under the truck.

  Rose is never stymied for long or by much, but this time she was rattled. These huge creatures bearing down on her—which might have looked like sheep but weren’t—were a new experience. She studied the situation, emerged from her hideout, and tried all her herding moves—nipping at noses and heels, circling around. The Newfies seemed amazed at this hyper little creature, their heads swiveling as she barked and charged. She got bewildered but genial responses until, finally, in the amazingly adaptable way of dogs, everybody started sniffing around the yard. Rose seemed to grasp that these were dogs, not livestock, and started stealing their toys. Jane and I watched for a while, amused by this clash of cultures, relieved not to have to say much.

  “How did we get from there to here?” she wondered. Even before I walked into her new house, we were joking about this odd location for the Family Circle. This was an organization of our extended family in Rhode Island and Massachusetts that had met regularly for years at different relatives’ homes, an organization she and I had carefully avoided. We walked into her backyard—it had a gorgeous, sweeping view of the Adirondacks. Suddenly, Rose froze, and in the dimming daylight I saw two sheep sitting on a hillside perhaps a quarter-mile away. Rose was already giving eye and creeping along the ground. “We’ll take care of them tomorrow,” I told her. She didn’t move from her crouch.

  “Was it the dogs that got us together?” I asked Jane.

  “I don’t know,” she said, truthfully. “Maybe. Probably.”

  That was a bittersweet reality. It was great that dogs were responsible for this, sad we hadn’t managed it ourselves.

  Surveying the scene, heading back for a tour of the house, I told Jane I didn’t think it likely that we could corral these sheep. They looked restless and emaciated despite thick wool that had surely gone unshorn for years. They were probably suffering from worms and parasites as well as malnutrition.

  Rose had never seen such creatures, even though she herded sheep every day. I thought she was too young, the sheep too fearful, the woods too deep to accomplish this task. Jane shrugged. Either way, she said, my arrival had already raised her stock in the neighborhood.

  We all filed inside. It was hard for even a border collie to get wrought up around these sofa-like Newfies; they simply aren’t excitable. They all sat down to stare at the visitors, which led Rose to settle down with a bone while Jane and I sat down to deal with each other. She was sweet, easy, a bit vulnerable, much as I’d remembered her.

  The house was spartan, the carpets cheap and worn, the walls bare. Almost all the furniture was shoved into two rooms, the living room and the basement. There were bowls and buckets—Newfies love water—everywhere, and the floors were littered with bones and toys.

  The place suited her. It was modern, with two propane stoves and a sunlit “California room,” and potentially comfortable. But it reminded me of a dog motel suite, temporary and impersonal, more than a home, partly because Jane had only been there a few days, partly because she didn’t seem to have much interest in or talent for domestic life. She told me she hadn’t had a visitor in years.

  As it got dark, we sat in the living room and she made me a cup of tea. This talk had been a long time coming, and there was so much water under the bridge to deal with that we both sensed we might drown if we tried. We took it slow and easy. She talked about each of her dogs, and got a huge kick out of Rose, who immediately set about organizing the Newfies, moving one here, the other there. They didn’t exactly comply, but they didn’t object to her efforts, either.

  We proceeded as if we got together all the time, as if this were normal. We didn’t stray far from dog talk. After a bit, the shock and dismay of not recognizing her began to wear off. I said I was excited about our looming encounter with the wild sheep.

  “I see why you like border collies,” Jane told me. “You and Rose are both obsessive about work.” This was true. Though I doubted we could round up those sheep, we were going to give it a hell of a try. I kept peering out the window at the landscape across the pond.

  After a while, I brought my bags in. Jane’s guest quarters consisted of a bare room with little heat or light and a threadbare carpet. The sofa bed was a nightmare, with a pronounced tilt and murderous springs. I knew there wouldn’t be much sleep that night. I also realized that this was the first night I’d ever spent in any place my sister lived. She would be getting dinner ready, she said—another first.

  Jane’s ranch house had been purchased and set up with her dogs very much in mind. Two of her Newfoundlands couldn’t walk up stairs—one had debilitating heart diseases, the other had serious hip problems—so they stayed in the basement, which was furnished with sofas, a carpet, and a propane stove. Just the day before, she told me, she had taken in still another Newfie, a puppy named Simon, who suffered from dwarfism, which left him with short, basset hound legs. He was, of course, the perfect dog for Jane—cute, sweet, in desperate need. Simon, strange-looking but playful, had attached himself to Rose, and the two of them were rolling around on the floor while the other dogs sat placidly watching.

  I’d offered to take my sister ou
t to dinner but she said, with some pride, that she’d already prepared a meal.

  I sat down at her small Formica table and she brought out some salad greens, rolls, and a pan of microwaved macaroni and cheese. I could see Jane wasn’t used to guests. She couldn’t quite coordinate the food and drinks in sequence. She had spoons, but no knives or forks, plates but no napkins. She hadn’t bought anything to drink, so we had tap water. Dessert was ice cream. It felt strange. Our own family dinners had been elaborate and delicious, but always difficult; this one was quiet and peaceful. Rose curled up against one of the enormous Newfies, and my sister smiled down at her dogs—those who could climb the stairs—all sitting quietly around her. We were surrounded by dogs, in fact, and had to thread our way through them to clear the dishes.

  For the first time, we talked about our parents a bit, and some shared childhood memories. Then she described her dogs again, one by one.

  “I came here for them,” she said. She had all kinds of plans for them: expanded fencing, ramps for the ailing ones, dog doors so they could go in and out independently, treks to nearby state parks. She was extraordinarily gentle with and attentive to them.

  After dinner—it was about eight P.M.—she announced that we had to go downstairs and visit the basement-bound Newfies. I made what I hoped was the appropriate fuss over them. Cold-weather dogs, they were delighted by the snow and bitter temperatures. She’d had to buy multiple air conditioners to keep them comfortable during Boston summers, Jane said; here, she might not need them.

  I went outside to walk Rose and to clear my head and calm down. When I returned, Jane was settling into what was clearly her evening routine. In a room off the family room, she unearthed some turkey carcasses from an enormous freezer, and chopped them apart with a small hatchet, putting the parts in a bucket on the floor.

  The dogs stared at the pungent bucket for fifteen minutes or so as Jane worked. Then each got a turkey leg or thigh, plopped down on the living room carpet and began crunching away.