Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  I had fallen out of the magnolia, and had shot one of the mockingbirds—for which I suffered both physically and emotionally. I had gathered the pecans and fought the birds for the figs. The oak grove was still there by the side of the House, the gnarled old branches still hung with Spanish moss, and I had played baseball under its shade. Over the hill was The Cottage and Beaver Dam and Dutchman’s Creek, where I had safaried before I knew there was such a word as safari. From the front yard there was the water front with its Cedar Bench and the row of salt-silvered old houses, and I bet myself that I could still find the old wreck close to where the fish always bit well.

  The dog ran into the weed-grown yard and laid his black square muzzle flat on the ground and stuck his bobtailed behind into the air, waiting to play. There was still a mockingbird; it attempted a scherzo. In the oak grove there was a flash of blue, a scuff of wings, and the harsh calling of a jay. The wind came up freshly from the water with its burden of salt and tar and, faintly, fish.

  It was October, 1949, and the squirrel season was on. The hounds would be belling in the crisp October woods as they coursed the big buck deer, whose necks were swelling as the frost brought the rutting season and its disregard of consequence. On the beaches at Baldhead and Corncake the blues would-be running in the sloughs, and occasionally the big silver slabs of channel bass would be striking. There were still quail in these parts, and the season would be opening next month, and the dogs would be whining in the back yard. Possums would be curled in gray balls in the naked persimmon trees, and the woods would be full of blue-drifting wood smoke and the evening cries of the colored children driving the cows home. Hog-killin’ time was just around the corner....

  I was wearing a Countess Maria necktie and driving a blue Buick convertible. I was writing a syndicated newspaper column and selling stuff to magazines and going to the Stork Club and Twenty One for lunch. Toots Shor called me by my first name, and I was living in a penthouse and owed money to the bank.

  And I felt like a complete fraud. I felt like I was wearing somebody else’s clothes and driving somebody else’s car and going around under somebody else’s name, so long as the Old Man’s House stood there empty and sad, lonely and despoiled of firelight and laughter.

  So of course you know what I did. I had the mockingbird, and I had the magnolia, and all I needed was the mortgage.

  I went to see the man people called a skinflint, and told him that I was the Old Man’s boy grown considerably older. He said he remembered me; I don’t know if he actually did. But this old man—he was sere and crisp-frail as a leaf before it falls—that people called a skinflint said he would be glad to sell me the House back, and for exactly as much as the amount of the mortgage for which he had foreclosed it!

  Perhaps he was a skinflint, but he could have gotten three times as much as the mortgage warranted, for the country was fat with post-war prosperity and housing was acutely short. Skinflint or not, he had awaited death on the strength of his promise to keep the House in the family. I bought back the House, not because I could use it but because I needed it.

  The House sits proud and freshly painted today on its corner. Its flowers are cherished, its interior restored. A woman who was born in the House, my mother, is its chatelaine. My father watches television in the back living room, where the Old Man used to listen to the lugubrious whine of “The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven” on one of those long-horned gramophones. The little girl who swung on the back porch, a grandmother for many years now, lives “down the street.” There are lights and voices in the House again, and from time to time, dogs and children. Rich black laughter is heard in the kitchen, and the old-time smells still come tantalizingly into the dining room, where the old glass chandelier used to swing. Corn and butter beans and hot biscuits are still cooked in that kitchen, and the brandy is soaked into the Christmas fruitcake as in times past.

  It is amazing how the time passes. There was a letter the other day from the bank that holds the mortgage, saying that we don’t owe any money on the Old Man’s House any more. The Old Man’s House is free of strangers, and makes a happy harbor for cheerful ghosts. The magnolia and the mockingbird are safe again, and the flowers bloom, and I somehow thought that the Old Man might like to know it.

  30—Even His Runts Were Giants

  The death of an old dog is comparable in heartache to the death of any person, young or old, and in some respects produces more pain. The dog has been dependent, totally, and has become an extension of the man, closer in companionship than humans and certainly more blind to the master’s faults. The loss of a dog is felt more keenly because a portion of the human dies with the beast, or so it seems to me.

  You maybe remember that the Old Man said, “Old dogs and old men both smell bad and are better out of the house.” He also said, “Watching something die is not a very pleasant process, especially if it’s you.”

  He was referring at the time to a beast that was somewhat overdue. All we could do was make him comfortable. Then one day he died, and he died in the knowledge that he had not been abused in sharing the life of people whose lives he had richened in the sharing. When the Old Man died, he did it the same way.

  Ever since I can remember I have been enslaved by dogs, and not particularly in the sentimental lap-dog fashion. Dogs and people vary in intelligence and personality. My Mickey, a cocker bitch, was meaner than a Doberman. My Frank, the blue belton Llewellin, was such a wencher that he hanged himself on a fence trying to chase a new girl, and he was well past the age of such shenanigans. My Tom, a liver-and-white pointer was the best bird dog I’ve ever owned, and he was queer. His voice never changed from the treble, he shrieked at the idea of being bred, and the real he-dogs never even bothered to bite him. And then, of course, there was Sandy, a lemon-and-white English setter with as foul a disposition and as accurate a nose as ever I encountered. And there was Jet, a Gordon setter who spent most of his life asleep on the sports desk of the Washington Daily News; and the setter twins, Abercrombie and Bitch; plus a big, rangy Rhett Butler kind of pointer named Dude, who ran away from his happy home. And finally the current crop.

  The current crop is worthy of consideration. There is a spayed standard French poodle bitch named Miss Mam’selle Senorita Fraulein Memsahib, who is possibly the only stupid French poodle in the world. This one really hasn’t got sense enough to come in out of the rain. There was, until recently, Schnorkel, the Old Man of the bunch, who was possibly the only brilliant boxer I have ever met. I cannot say this for his son, Satchmo, or Satch’s sister, Mrs. Gwendolyn Wentworth-Brewster, otherwise known as Wendy, or some of his half-brothers and sisters, named variously Rufus and Ella and Lena.

  Schnorkel, who was pressing thirteen years of dignified age, was a Warlord of Mazelaine offshoot, and like that grand old man he always bred true. There are more half-bred boxers with white shoes and white chest blazes running around Spain than you can shake a muleta at. This is known as outside work. Actually my old gentleman has been married only four times, producing forty-two pups out of the brief honeymoons. The last time—we had the bride flown in from Madrid to Barcelona—he managed to sire eleven, which is pretty good going for an old boy with a hoary face and the Reaper just around the corner. And as somebody once said of Schnork, even his runts are bigger than most people’s giants.

  Except Satchmo, of course. Satchmo takes after his Spanish mother. But he makes up for his smallness by being perhaps the silliest beast I’ve ever met. He is a comic dog on the order of a young Mickey Rooney. He sleeps on a split level and sulks if I forget his morning kick. He helps the gardener at work by biting his ankles, and suffers horribly from sinus. I can tell when the weather’s changing, just by hearing Satch wheeze. I would give him away, as I gave his sister Wendy away, but nobody intelligent enough to feed him will have him. So I’m stuck with an idiot child.

  It is not so bad when they are run over or succumb to distemper when they’re too young to be part of the family, or even whe
n they garrote themselves like old Frank did. But we were just in the process of watching Schnorkel die, slowly, and it was a terrible thing.

  I bought this ten-week-old puppy as a gift for my wife. Paul Gallico, the writer; Bill Williams, the editor; a non-classifiable friend named Bernie Relin; and I went puppy hunting one day after an exuberant lunch involving Martinis. We wound up in Long Island and were introduced to the baby’s family. His old man, of whom the baby was the spittin’ image, was unleashed and he cuffed every puppy soundly. Only one pup bared his milk teeth and charged back at Papa.

  “I’ll have that one,” I said. “The scrapper. What’s his name?”

  “Chip,” the owner said. “He’s the dead image of his father and his grandpa. Chip off the Old Block is his square handle.”

  I had just made a week’s run as the first civilian to test a schnorkel submarine. “His name is Schnorkel,” I said. “He looks like a dog who would be named Schnorkel.”

  While he was kindly disposed to most people and all children this puppy was the worst dog-fighter I have ever seen. I had to pull him off a full-grown Doberman when he was just over six months old. His feet were hanging clear of the ground, but he had a tooth hold on the throat, and there was very little the Dobe could do about him until I got a stick and pried the puppy’s teeth out of his neck.

  This was on the same weekend that Schnork gained a lasting aversion to water. I. was out fishing in a boat on a lake in New Jersey, and the puppy was on the dock. I called him, and he thought what was in front of him was pale-blue sidewalk. He strolled off the dock and damn near drowned.

  From that point on all water was his enemy. You can’t tell me that this is a boxer trait, because his offspring, Satch, can barely be restrained from swimming daily to Africa with old Miss Mam’selle. The Spaniards where we live had a name for Schnork. They called him el Salvavida—the Lifesaver. That’s because he used to roam up and down the beach wringing his paws, frothing at the mouth, and beseeching people to come out of that wet old mess before they drowned.

  Schnorkel was a puppy when we lived in Greenwich Village, and he had a strange set of social values. There was a nice hoodlum around the Minetta Street area, a nondescript little man who liked dogs. He approached me one day in his quiet hoodlum manner and said tightly, out of the corner of his mouth, that he had heard we had been refused insurance on personal belongings because the neighborhood was so tough.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody lays a glove on your joint. Leave the door open. I run this end of the town. No bum lays a glove on your joint.” I waited for the kicker. “You wouldn’t mind sometime if I walked your dog? I’m a sucker for pooches and I love this dog.”

  I said, “Fine.” From time to time there would be a ring or a knock or even a lightly cast pebble against a window, and there would be Mr. Hoodlum in his form-fitting overcoat. I would shove the puppy down the stairs and the two mobsters would go for a walk.

  At the time I was working late at night, and occasionally Ginny Ruark would have to walk the dog. I didn’t worry about her safety in murky back alleys at 2 A.M. I had looked out the window one night. As she went into the street with the dog a shadow detached itself from a deeper, darker shadow. It flitted shadowwise down the tiny street, always melting into tiny corners.

  “You shouldn’t worry if your missus walks the dog late nights,” my tight-mouthed little man said one day. “My boys are always around.” He paused. “They got nothing better to do,” he said. “Can I walk the dog now?”

  Schnorkel became perceptive early. He was part of the mob, but he didn’t like outsiders. It is necessary to explain here that he once owned a tame duck, and baby-sat a cat named Shortchange. This did not mean that he liked either ducks or cats. He just liked one duck, and one cat named Shortchange. The same with our tame mobsters.

  Some penny-ante boys tried a heist in the neighborhood one night when Schnork was off leash, and he treed the interlopers on a fire escape. They say boxers can’t smell very good, but they can sure feel. When we became a little more affluent and moved uptown to Fifth Avenue he chased one set of thieves right up on top of an outbuilding. And he really distinguished himself one night as a house detective.

  This was a penthouse apartment, and the elevator opened directly into the foyer. We were having an intimate little gathering of a hundred and fifty-two people, a business-cocktail do, and Schnork leaped happily into everybody’s lap. Let’s just say he enjoyed meeting a hundred fifty-two people, including the cat lovers who wore blue suits and hated dogs.

  All of a sudden my wife came to me in a far corner. “Schnorkel won’t let two people off the elevator,” she said. “He’s got them bayed, like he treed the burglars. I suppose they’re some loaded friends of yours that you picked up somewhere, but you better come explain it to the dog.”

  They were smooth enough in appearance, certainly slick enough to fit in with the other guests. But Schnorkel, legs braced and teeth showing, was having none of them. I had never seen the bums before in my life.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Well,” one said, “we thought it was some kind of club. We saw the lights on late every night, and tonight all these people came, and we thought you were maybe running an after-hours club.”

  “You want to go back down in the elevator or will you have some dog?” I said. “I couldn’t care less.”

  They chose the elevator, and then Schnork went back to mingle with the party and rub his hairs off on the gentry’s blue suits.

  Schnorkel and Mam’selle had been Europeans for eight years when the old boy cashed. Schnorkel spoke French, Spanish, Catalan, Swahili, and English English; and Mam’selle still doesn’t know her name. The help called Schnorkel el Cocinero, the cook, because he was always in the kitchen. Mam’selle does not associate with the help. She also refused to drink water out of anything but a bidet, which is a Latin bathroom fixture.

  Both dogs were quite well traveled. They alternated between Palamós and Barcelona, and we spent one summer in Tangier in North Africa at an appalling cost in time, trouble, and money, because there was no housing readily available in Barcelona except the Hotel Ritz, and the dogs didn’t care much for the noise the tramcars made outside the Ritz. So we went to Tangier and shacked up in the Hotel el Minzah and I overdrew my account again, while being involved in cat fights and the beginning of the Moroccan rebellion.

  They have been well pleased with life in Spain, since they have slaves to do their bidding and a large yard in front of two houses. The yards are filled with flowers on which they make water. In front of one house there is a beach that is filled with tourists. Schnorkel, being a Kraut, was allowed to snarl at the French; while Mam’selle, being a Frog, barks at the Germans. Satchmo usually just bites me, being too lazy to heraus the Krauts.

  You will have noticed a forced light touch to this piece. I’ll tell you why. Schnorkel was gray, and he walked spraddled-legged, weak in the hindquarters, and his teeth were worn down so he couldn’t even fight his son any more, and noise bothered him, and his hide was abraded, and his eyesight was going, and he had forgotten his last girlfriend. My old puppy, my dog Schnorkel, was dying, in the midst of all the love he had mustered since he was ten weeks old.

  It seemed to do nobody any good to see the old boy as what he was, gray and feeble, finished and useless to himself and to the others, the dogs and the people. All the ham actor was gone out of him, all of the sense of humor, all of the bounce, and all of his considerable dignity. He had a stroke and he walked around with his head down, bumping into things, and toward the end he kept fumbling for corners to die in. The facilities for modern dog destruction are few, in the backwater section of Spain I live in. We dug him a grave under some pine trees and I borrowed a pistol from one of the Guardia Civil carabineros and took my old dog out tinder the trees and shot him. The cook and the Guardia Civil and I tossed some earth into the grave, and we buried a good portion of me, that sunny morning, with the big, cockad
ed yellow hoopoe birds looping from pine to pine and the Mediterranean lapping softly blue almost in the front yard. We were all glad to see the old dog go, because this way we got the puppy back.

  What we didn’t get back was the years since the puppy came into the little flat in Greenwich Village in New York and decided to stay. We didn’t get back the years which took me uptown and then Europe, to South America and Africa and India and Japan and Australia and China and New Guinea and all the other places I had hankered to see.

  In his lifetime Schnorkel lived a hundred years of man’s span. My grown-up friends were his grown-up friends, and so very many of Schnorkel’s friends got old and sick and tired and died of it too.

  I measure most of the importance of my adult life from the time I got Schnorkel until the day I buried him. I wasn’t much more than a boy when I got him, just a few years out of the war and still puppyish with all the cocky confidence of youth that had been momentarily interrupted by the war. Schnork and I started growing up together and the developing project continued until time, which expands the years of a dog, stopped the dog as a wise old man and left the graying humans to profit by his past presence.

  I was glad that Schnorkel had been with me the day I drove down to North Carolina and bought the Old Man’s House back, not because I could use it but because I needed it. Schnorkel was still alive when I finished paying off the mortgage, and so the Old Man had his House back, as I had a good deal of my boyhood back. In between there had been a lot of living and a great deal of work, a lot of departures and homecomings. Once I was gone for nine months on a swing around the world; the welcome was the same as if I’d just strolled down to the post office.