The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  I could smell it before I was halfway down the stairs, but the acrid stink of diarrhea did not prepare me for what I saw when I turned the corner into Willie’s room. “Shit!” I said, with no conscious attempt at irony. It was everywhere, stinky brown frosting covering the inside of Willie’s crate, Willie himself, and even several books on the bookshelf behind.

  Little did I know that the pup who had stolen my heart had come with as much baggage as a starved, beaten dog from a puppy mill. Along with his terror of unfamiliar dogs, he had projectile diarrhea and spewed feces horizontally through the mesh of his crate or his exercise pen. No one knew why, even though I took him to my regular vet, to gastrointestinal specialists, to Chinese medicine vets and homeopathic vets. I read up on everything I could find about diet and healthy intestines. I cooked his meals myself, desperately trying to find a food that didn’t cause an intestinal tsunami. Nothing seemed to help. I began almost every morning of my new life with Willie on my hands and knees, cleaning up liquid shit. As the days progressed, I got in the habit of hauling his crate into the bathtub to rinse it off. In spite of newspapers, protective plastic, and blankets, I spent hours on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor to clean the cracks between the wooden planks.

  And yet, once he was scrubbed up and clean again, he’d slide against me like a young kangaroo nuzzling into a pouch. He’d press his head against my neck and moan with happiness. I’d lie beside him, stroke his velvet belly, close my eyes, and forget about the poop and the vet visits and the medical bills stacking up on the counter.

  • • • • •

  After a few weeks at the farm, Willie had learned a remarkable amount for his age. He could sit and lie down to the quietest cue and was learning to stay. Ridiculously responsive, he came every time I called, even if he was distracted—a behavior no one has a right to expect from a dog without months and months of training. He played tug games with Lassie every night; when she got tired, he’d play by himself if Jim and I were busy, flinging his bright red toy upward and catching it on its way down.

  Now that he was settled into his new home, it was time to socialize Willie, to familiarize him with the scents, sights, and sounds of life off the farm. The country may hold its mysteries and adventures—chipmunks disappearing under bushes, crows scolding in the pines—but Willie needed to get into town, hear traffic, meet neighborhood children, and get accustomed to other dogs. I drove him to a neighborhood I knew well, a relatively quiet area with little traffic, a gaggle of young children playing a half block away, and no off-leash dogs to frighten him. Willie hopped out of the car happily enough but then stabbed his head down into the grass, sniffing the signposts of unfamiliar dogs as obsessively as he had at the vet clinic. Then a Buick appeared out of nowhere, woofers pounding out rap like Thor on a bender, and Willie’s obsessive sniffing flipped into unmitigated terror.

  He ran wild-eyed away from the noise, fighting the constraint of the leash and bucking like a lassoed mustang until I could get to him. I backed him away from the street and sat beside him, cooing to calm him. After he settled, we tried again to walk down the sidewalk. But our progress was not normal. Willie alternated between inhaling dog smells as if his life depended on it to all-out panic when he heard new noises, like a car or even the voices of children playing in the distance.

  Within days, it became clear that Willie was as sensitive to sounds as any dog I had encountered in all my years of working with behavioral problems. When he was away from the country, even quiet noises terrified him. He was so afraid that I couldn’t socialize him as I would a normal puppy; I would have to expose him to unfamiliar noises much more slowly than usual.

  Even at the farm, there were plenty of noises for him to get used to. The peace of the country is an urban myth. Oh, it’s blissfully quiet sometimes, but even if you can’t see your closest neighbor, nearby tractors and four-wheelers often play backup to the song of a raucous flock of starlings. Living with nature isn’t always a Bach sonata; sometimes it’s a Rolling Stones concert.

  Not long after our excursion into the city, someone started up a chain saw over the hill. One moment all we could hear were a few crows complaining in the woods; the next moment, full throttle, the entire farm seemed to be growling. Willie had been sleeping soundly on the rug but leaped to his feet, barks exploding out of his mouth like invisible bomb blasts. I dropped the glass I’d been holding and began to shake.

  • • • • •

  I have never been brave. As a child, I spent my first day in kindergarten huddled in a corner, refusing to come out. My mother was asked not to bring me back. One of my earliest memories is not being able to sleep for weeks after being taken to a movie theater that had inadvertently switched a children’s movie with an adult horror show. It featured massive robots that snatched people out of their homes and consumed them like monkeys eating grubs. My beleaguered mother pulled me and my sobbing five-year-old friends out of the theater as soon as she could, but I lay in bed for weeks afterward, staring at the window in my bedroom, listening to my sister Liza’s metered breath as she slept, sure that at any moment the glass would shatter and I would be seized by a hand the size of a pickup truck, pulled through the window, and eaten alive.

  Later, at the age of nineteen, I dreaded the days when my first husband, Doug, left town on business. I would pull the shades long before nightfall, terrified that I’d turn and see a face staring at me through the dark window glass. I’d sit on the couch with a book until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I didn’t turn on the old black-and-white television because I didn’t want to miss the sound of the doorknob turning if someone tried to break in. I couldn’t shower, too vulnerable to be naked and helpless in the bathroom, so I’d wash my hair in the sink. After a while I couldn’t avoid the image of someone creeping into the apartment while I was bent over the sink, so I let my hair get dirty until Doug came home.

  I didn’t think much about why I was so fearful. At the time it just seemed like another character flaw, like letting myself get too skinny or too fat, or being too shy to speak up when Doug’s articulate, politically active friends came over for dinner. I had good reason to be frightened, but I got better at controlling—or at least hiding—my fears in my late twenties and early thirties. I still pulled the shades long before it got dark, but I was able to sleep in the bedroom instead of on the living room couch. I showered when alone, although I often kept the shower curtain partly open so I could see the bathroom door.

  I told no one that several times a day I’d sense a man walking behind me with a baseball bat raised high behind him, like a major league star about to hit a home run. I knew that his next move was to smash the bat into my head, making it explode like a melon. Every time I sensed his presence, I sucked in my breath and jerked my head to look back. No one was ever there.

  I hated going into dark rooms by myself. Sometimes I kept the lights on during the day. Other times I’d pace in front of a door leading into darkness and then work up the nerve to dash inside, like a mare running too fast at a jump that scares her. Once I was able to flip the light switch, I’d look fearfully at the shower curtain or the closet door, afraid that someone was hiding behind it.

  Things were easier for me years later when I had Luke, Willie’s uncle. I don’t know if he initiated going into dark places on his own or if I asked him to in the beginning, but I began to count on him to scout ahead of me, especially when I had to enter the barn at night. A classic red dairy barn, it was full of dark corners even with the lights on. Old implements and fencing materials were piled high in the corners, the perfect place for someone lying in wait, the natural habitat of serial killers. The kind with knives. When returning home after dark on bad days, I’d skip doing the sheep chores, too afraid to enter the building even with a flashlight, deeply ashamed of abandoning the flock until daylight.

  Once I got Luke, everything changed. I’d open the old wooden door and back up a step, away from the darkness. Luke would run in, and
after a few moments of silence, I’d know that nothing was there. No monsters under the bed or dangerous men hiding behind lumber and rolled-up wire fencing. I still didn’t like being in the barn at night, and got out as soon as I could, but at least I could go inside and do what I needed to do.

  But Willie wasn’t Luke. He had his own monsters. Rather than helping me feel secure, he made my fear worse. Willie could scramble out of a dead sleep faster than your brain could process the word “startle.” He’d be asleep one moment, perhaps cuddled against my shoulder in the evening, and the next instant he’d leap up into a stand, barking BARRR-RARR-BARR, his nails clawing my cheek.

  Every time Willie leaped up to bark, often to a sound I couldn’t even hear, I’d jerk up, too, and look around in a panic. Heart pounding, sometimes nauseated with fear, I’d force myself to stop and take a breath. “Settle down, Willie,” I’d say. Calm down, Trisha, I’d think. Forcing my body to go loose, taking slow breaths like I did with my clients’ dogs, I did all I could to help both of us relax. But Willie would burst from silence into full-bore barking five or ten times in an evening. Even though I was soothed when we cuddled on the living room floor, his unpredictable explosions began to take a toll on me. I began to feel like I was living in a war zone, with IEDs scattered among the furniture in the living room. Dealing with my fears had always been a challenge, but now I was living with someone who was making them worse.

  But then Willie would come over and lick my face. He’d drop a toy in my lap, his face radiating joy and love like a Hallmark commercial, and we’d play together like two kids in the backyard as the daylight faded and the moon rose behind the hill.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I was five, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I am told that I said, “I’m going to marry a rancher.” One might argue that this foreshadowed my eventual attraction to strong, outdoorsy men, but more likely, it reflected my love for animals and my belief—reasonable at the time—that the only way to ensure being surrounded by animals was to marry someone who owned a lot of them. In Arizona in the early fifties, women had babies and made beds and tuna casseroles. Men had careers and made mortgage deals and shopping centers.

  My father, a deeply conservative banker, believed for most of his life that women had no business interfering in a man’s world. One night as I sat with my parents and my two older sisters at dinner, he carefully explained to us that women could never be promoted into an administration position at a bank because they couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions.

  “It’s because of their monthlies,” he stated while we sat around the new teak table paid for by his promotion at the bank. “Woman can be secretaries and teachers. Those are perfect jobs for them. Women are nurturing and supportive, and those positions don’t require them to be assertive or to make difficult decisions.”

  Perhaps that is one of the reasons I arranged my collection of fifty-two stuffed animals—the big panda bear, the floppy, long-eared dog—in classroom-style seating every afternoon and stood before them with a miniature blackboard, teaching them to spell “cat” and “dog.”

  There is no doubt that my father loved his family and worried daily about providing for us. Often inaccessible to me when he was home and inside the house, my dad spent hours with me in his garden. He taught me to water his cherished roses ever so slowly, so the roots could absorb the moisture. I nodded in sympathy when he bemoaned that growing daffodils was impossible in the desert climate. He loved good books and good writing and took my sisters and me to the bookshelves in his den and selected just the right book for us at the right time. He told me once, reverentially, that books were like jewels in a treasure chest because you could open the cover and go anywhere in the world while sitting in a chair at home.

  However, he encouraged us to read the thoughts of others, not to express our own. When my oldest sister, Wendy, was in her teens, she told him that she wanted to be a writer. He snorted: “What could you possibly have to say?” When my mother began leaving the house in the evenings to take a painting class, he would pace the driveway, a glass of Scotch and soda in his hand, his brow wrinkled, while she was gone. They usually fought after she returned, and eventually, even though she loved art and had real talent, she quit the class. My sisters and I were taught to stay quiet when Father came home from work. No talking to him, no loud laughter in another room, no running down the hallway. “Don’t bother your father. He’s had a hard day.” Silence was important in my family.

  I was shy and introverted. My best friend was a stuffed animal named Beauregard, an amorphous creamy-orange creature as big as I was. Beauregard went everywhere with me, slept with me, and listened to my deepest secrets. One day my father tossed Beauregard out of the car as we drove down a Colorado highway on a rare summer road trip, because I had thrown a fit at a rest stop: I wanted to drink out of a public drinking fountain that my mother deemed unsanitary. I cried, shrieked, and screamed, and continued to sob as we drove away. Normally a kind man, my father grabbed Beauregard in a fit of frustration and threw him out the window. My mother convinced him to turn around and retrieve Beauregard from where he was lying in the roadside grass.

  By first grade, I had shifted my allegiance to real animals. Our terrier mix, Fudge, became my closest confidant, but my grand passion was horses. Just the sight of a horse made me happy. I begged my parents to let me ride the ponies at the fair when my legs were so short they stuck out straight from the saddle. My best friend and I played our own version of “horse,” pointing our sneakers into hooves, tossing our cropped hair like manes, and prancing our way through recess, two awkward girls channeling powerful stallions. I drew horses constantly, specializing in the dished faces of Arabians and the muscled haunches of quarter horses. I collected equine figurines and spent a year teaching myself to make tiny leather bridles and saddles for them.

  I was fascinated by other animals as well. I spent hours squatting in the dirt, watching ants as they traveled along tiny highways in the backyard. I taught Fudge to jump over a pole and to sit up and beg. I adopted a tarantula from science class and called her Lady Schick, an ironic title referring to her hairy legs and the new razor that had just come out for women only.

  My mother, an avid animal lover, supported my efforts even when it came to bringing home spiders. She saw that I loved animals as much as she did. She understood why I sat and watched ants, and she never criticized me for coming back inside covered in dirt. She appealed to my father’s brother to pay for my riding camp in Montana after my father refused. Before I got my driver’s license, she drove me back and forth to the stable every Saturday and Sunday, never complaining about getting up in the dark to do so.

  But it was dogs she loved most; my sisters and I would tease her that she had more pictures of dogs on her wall than she did of us. Our family always had dogs, from Fudge the terrier mix to the Irish setters that Mother eventually bred and showed in conformation competitions around the country. Like many children with dogs, I’d lie on the floor and tell Fudge my childhood secrets, secure in the belief that she would understand me like no one else ever had.

  Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that for twenty-five years I’ve used science, art, and empathy to help “problem dogs” have a voice; to listen to what they are trying to tell us and help them and their families be happy together. Willie was another one of those dogs, but this time he was mine. It seemed he had a lot to say.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On a brisk midwestern day, puffy white clouds behind the woods, blaze-orange leaves polka-dotting the fading green, I was walking to the barn. Pip and Lassie led the way, furry dominoes loping gracefully through the grass. Three-month-old Willie stopped to sniff the greasy carcass of an earthworm. I was thinking about how much hay to give the sheep when a rabbit bolted out of the brush, streaking just a few feet in front of Willie. He took off in hot pursuit, his back legs overtaking his front ones like a cartoon character’s as he tried to keep up.

&n
bsp; My house and barn are too close to the road. I envy friends who measure their driveways in fractions of miles rather than yards. I’ve always lived in fear that I would lose a dog to the road, envisioning the pavement as a long, thin predator waiting to snatch up a member of my family and gobble it down. Although there’s little traffic, the cars and trucks barrel past like freight trains, gravity pulling them down a steep hill on one side, a blind curve on the other. Much of the farm is fenced, but the front yard and the path to the barn are not. Rather than keep every dog on a leash until we get to a fenced area, I methodically teach our dogs never to go near the road; we never walk them anywhere near it, and they are taught to stop instantly and come when called. This wouldn’t work, no matter how good the training, if I had a pack of bloodhounds bred to work independently, with their handler’s job to follow as well as she can. But border collies are bred to listen even when running full tilt five hundred yards away. Although teaching them a “flying stop” takes time and effort, it is easily achievable if you make it a priority. City dwellers are appalled at the idea of a dog off leash; most country people can’t imagine life any other way.

  Once, when Lassie was younger, one of my ewes ran away from home. After a panicked search, I found her in a forest a few miles from the farm, with no way to capture her. I dashed home, terrified she’d disappear again, aware that only the magnetlike draw of other sheep would save her. Lassie helped me rush some of the flock up a ramp into my truck, all finesse thrown out the window, me yelling, “Get up, Lassie! Get ’em up!” With Lassie in the cab and the shocked sheep in the back, we drove up a steep, bumpy hill and let the group jump out of the truck beside the woods where the escapee stood trembling and ready to flee. As I had hoped, she left the woods and joined the safety of the flock. However, now I had six sheep standing in an open field several miles from home and no way to get them back—they could jump down out of the truck but not up into it. The only option was to have Lassie herd them down the hill a half mile to a neighbor’s nearby barn, where they could stay overnight until I came up with a plan.