Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  OLD DOGS

  AND

  CHILDREN

  ROBERT INMAN

  Copyright © 1991 by Robert Inman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Originally published by Little, Brown and Company, 1991

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Excerpt from “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine,” by Tom T. Hall,

  © Hallnote Music Co., P.O. Box 40209, Nashville, TN 37204. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Inman, Robert.

  Old dogs and children / by Robert Inman.—electronic edition

  ISBN 978-1-62050-960-9

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Inman is the author of five novels: Captain Saturday, Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, and The Governor’s Lady, as well as a collection essays, Coming Home: Life, Love and All Things Southern, and a family holiday book, The Christmas Bus.

  Inman has written screenplays for six motion pictures for television, two of which have been “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentations. His script for The Summer of Ben Tyler, a Hallmark production, won the Writers’ Guild of America Award as the best original television screenplay of 1997. His other Hallmark feature was Home Fires Burning, an adaptation of his novel, winner of a Houston Film Festival Silver Medal.

  His playwriting credits include Crossroads, The Christmas Bus, Dairy Queen Days, Welcome to Mitford, A High Country Christmas Carol, The Christmas Bus: The Musical,and The Drama Club. He wrote the book, music and lyrics for Crossroads and The Christmas Bus: The Musical. Inman’s plays are published by Dramatic Publishing Company.

  Inman holds two degrees from the University of Alabama, including a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He left a 30-year career in television journalism in 1996 to become a full-time writer. He and his wife Paulette live in Conover and Boone, North Carolina. They have two daughters, Mrs. Larkin Ferris and Mrs. Lee Farabaugh.

  Visit the author’s website at www.robert-inman.com.

  PRAISE FOR ROBERT INMAN’S

  OLD DOGS AND CHILDREN

  “The richest, fullest, most satisfying novel I’ve read in a long time… . It is a narrative so compelling that, for a few charmed hours, a reader will know Bright Birdsong, will live in her town, and will be enriched by the experience.”

  —Linda Brinson, Winston-Salem Journal

  “A vivid portrait of growing up Southern, white, and female during the first seventy years of this century… . Mr. Inman’s style is gentle and discerning. He deftly combines the religious with the ridiculous, pathos with politics … . Southern pride and resistance to change provoke much of the novel’s heartache and humor.”

  —Jodi White, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A most readable and memorable book…. Each section of the novel moves from drama to drama with suspense, excitement, poignancy, and surprise.”

  —Eloise Sanderford, Morganton (N.C.) News Herald

  “A page-turner whose subtleties make it well worth savoring at leisure.”

  —Dorothy Golden, Library Journal

  “Old Dogs and Children will draw readers in with the first page and keep them enthralled to the last. It is a brilliant portrayal of a wonderful life full of love, disappointment, and regret. It is filled with memorable characters.”

  —Elizabeth D. Dickie, Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “A rich, complex novel… . A memorable work, one that will linger deep in the pores of all who marvel at the river life.”

  —Dannye Romine, Charlotte Observer

  “It is not just a good story; it is a captivating story. It shimmers.”

  —Nancy Dughi, San Antonio Express-News

  “A fresh, original work filled with humor, poignancy, a rich evocation of life in a small Southern town, and a memorable array of exquisitely drawn characters.”

  —John L. Pape, McAllen (Tex.) Monitor

  “Robert Inman, who grew up in rural Alabama, understands the way small towns work and how people in them live. That allows him to take the many threads of his story and weave them into a narrative so vivid one wants to hop in the car and visit.”

  —Wes Hasden, Chattanooga Times

  “A triumph… . Every sentence, every phrase, provides another crisp, clear image of Bright Birdsong and the people and events surrounding her.”

  —Rickey R. Mallory, Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

  “Bright Birdsong is one of Robert Inman’s most endearing characters, gracing his splendid novel Old Dogs and Children like a breath of cool, fragrant air after a hot Southern day, and bringing to life another of his vivid, small-town worlds.”

  —Barbara Hodge Hall, Anniston (Ala.) Star

  “Mr. Inman tells a gentle story, full of warm people the reader is prepared to like on first acquaintance.”

  —Bob Trimble, Dallas Morning News

  “A rich, slow-moving story … . Mr. Inman knows small-town Southern life. He writes about it beautifully. Better yet, he knows solid human relationships that are built on trust and honesty. His story is poetic. It is real. I think it will last and become more popular with the years…. It’s the kind of writing I love to read over and over again.”

  —Wayne Greenhaw, Alabama Journal

  “Reading Old Dogs and Children is a little like sitting on the porch, savoring the cool breeze, with a glass of iced tea in one hand, just as all hell breaks loose. It’s both charming and unpredictable. It also confirms my suspicion that Inman is more than a gifted Southern writer. He is, I think, a uniquely American author with promise written all over the road ahead.”

  —Dennis Beck, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  To the women who raised me:

  Nell Bancroft Cooper

  Emma Margaret Cooper Inman

  Ain’t but three things in this world

  That’s worth a solitary dime:

  Old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

  —Tom T. Hall

  Also by Robert Inman

  Home Fires Burning

  Dairy Queen Days

  Captain Saturday

  Coming Home: Life, Love and All Things Southern

  The Christmas Bus

  The Governor’s Lady

  Contents

  BOOK 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  BOOK 2

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  BOOK 3

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  BOOK 4

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  BOOK 5

  23

  24

  25

  26

  BOOK 1

  1

  When you top the rise over the River Bridge, the first thing you see is the Birdsong house down at the end of Claxton Avenue, three blocks away, where the street makes a right angle with Birdsong Boulevard. The house is wide and white with a banistered porch running across the front, nestled behind a grove of pecan trees that shades the front lawn. The house sits up rather high off the ground, and it has brickwork all around the bottom with gaps left in the bricks for ventilation, a patchwork
skirt. There is a second story, but not much of one—a few dormered windows peeking out from the roofline—as if it had been added as an afterthought. Which is exactly what happened after the Great Flood of 1939.

  This early June morning, gray and purple in the half-light just before dawn, Bright Birdsong stands on her front porch looking up Claxton Avenue toward the River Bridge and waiting for the sun. Claxton is quiet and deserted, not a single sign of life in the pools of amber light from the street lamps, not even a dog sniffing about the side loading dock of the Dixie Vittles Supermarket across the street, looking for a stray morsel. There is a car parked in front of the store, but there is no one in it, at least not anyone she can see. Is there someone stretched out in the back seat asleep? Some eager shopper waiting for the store to open to take advantage of the special on rutabagas or drumsticks? She considers a number of possibilities, turning them over idly in her mind. As she does, a car approaches from her left on Birdsong Boulevard and turns left on Claxton, moving away from her toward the River Bridge. Its red taillights wink off as the treetops on the low bluff across the river glow orange with the anticipation of the sun.

  New sun. The first shards of light splinter the treetops now, and Bright raises her arms slowly, reaching for the new sun. She feels its warmth flooding her body, stirring something in her that stretches in a single unbroken strand to her childhood some sixty years before, one of the few constants in her life. The new sun blinks at her and then pops, full of itself, into the morning. She embraces it, arms wide, the thin fabric of her flowered print housedress spread like a fan.

  The new sun brings memory. Hosanna, the old black woman who helped raise her, has a deep-seated belief in the mysterious, curative effect of new sun. And the small white child knows wisdom when she hears it. So she wakes very early and goes to stand in her long white nightgown on the front porch, watching the sun wink and smile just over the top of the house across the street. She pulls the gown over her head and lets it fall to the floor of the porch, feels the new sun fill her naked body with a strange, light warmth.

  The memory of it echoes through the spreading sunlight of this present June morning. What if I should do that now? she thinks, and she giggles, pictures the imagined man sleeping in the back seat of the car in front of the Dixie Vittles waking suddenly, peering out the window and seeing a naked old woman on the banistered front porch of the house across the street. What to do? Wave or ignore him? It is a delicious thought, one that may well entertain her all morning. Until Roseann gets here.

  Roseann. The spell is broken. Bright lowers her arms with a sigh and gives herself up to the morning.

  Birds chatter in the pecan trees on the lawn, fussing at her because the birdbath in the backyard is nearly empty. It is Monday and the birds are anxious to get about their business. Monday, and that means Roseann will be here within hours—she and her new husband, Rupert, and Bright’s grandson, Jimbo, in their Winnebago, stopping by on their way to the beach. Roseann. Perhaps the visit will be quick, like a summer storm.

  But that is not all. Monday means it is only three days until Fitz Birdsong Day, in honor of her son the governor, who is running for reelection and wishes to end the campaign triumphantly here among the home folks. A parade, a rousing speech, a barbecue luncheon. Another summer storm, but gentler. Fitz tries to please; Roseann does not. By sundown Thursday it will all be behind her and she can be quiet again, blend in again with the deepening summer.

  She stands a moment longer, then gives up the porch reluctantly. She stops briefly in the parlor, surveys the comfortable clutter: a pile of magazines on the table next to the wing-back chair where she likes to read—Time, Esquire, National Geographic, Southern Lumberman; a stack of books on the floor next to the chair—an Agatha Christie, a Louis L’Amour paperback, a new book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; piles of sheet music on top of the Story and Clark upright piano and more of it spread open above the keyboard—Liszt, Chopin, a Scott Joplin rag. There is no rhyme or reason to the room or its contents, she thinks, taking brief inventory. Her tastes run amok, but she maintains a lively interest in things in general if not things in particular. She will have to tidy things a bit before Roseann gets here. Mama, don’t you ever pick anything up? Roseann is painfully tidy. Roseann is a pickle.

  She pads on, her slippered feet slap-slapping on the hardwood floor of the small breakfast room and the linoleum of the kitchen, stopping to put the coffeepot on to boil and a pan of milk to warm. The kitchen is narrow and cozy. Cabinets, counter, and sink on one side, stove and refrigerator on the other. And comfortably old-fashioned, like the refrigerator that is its centerpiece—an ancient Kelvinator with the motor in a round housing on top. It has been with her since the Great Flood of 1939, when it replaced the icebox that a deliveryman filled once a day with a five-pound block of ice. The refrigerator had looked enormous in 1939, with space enough inside for all manner of foodstuffs on its stainless steel shelves and a small freezer compartment that made its own trays of ice. Bright had felt very elegant, very modern, with her own electric refrigerator. But it is tiny by modern standards. She opened the door to a brand-new refrigerator in Thompson’s Furniture last week—gleaming white without even a latch on the front—and it seemed as if she were peering into the entrance to Mammoth Cave.

  “About time for a new one, Miz Bright?” Lester Thompson asked. “This model’s got a built-in icemaker.”

  “Why no, I’ve got a perfectly good Kelvinator at home,” she replied, “and it makes perfectly good ice.” But there is more to it than that. This refrigerator was the one that Fitzhugh gave her in 1939. Fitzhugh didn’t leave very much.

  This morning, the Kelvinator is purring at her, the only sound in the kitchen. She opens the door and takes out the sugar bowl, which she keeps in the refrigerator because it attracts ants if left on the counter. Bright has given up trying to rid the world of ants. She simply accommodates, in this as in most things. The last time the Orkin Man came was twenty years ago, in 1959.

  Bright steps onto the screened-in back porch and stands there for a moment, waiting for the coffee to boil, listening to the bumping noises that her dog, Gladys, makes under the house. Gladys is an Irish setter, feeble with age, one eye glazed over and sightless from some dog disease. Gladys has been living under the house since Little Fitz brought her home from school.

  It had been about this time, early June, the end of Fitz’s second year in law school. Bright had expected Fitz to come home from the University on the bus, so she was surprised to see him climb down from the cab of a truck that pulled up to the curb in front of the house. He went around to the back of the truck, opened the tailgate, lifted out his suitcase and trunk. And then the dog. He picked up the suitcase with one hand and dragged the trunk with the other, across the lawn to where Bright waited on the front porch. The dog just sat by the curb on her haunches and watched him.

  “Hi, Mama,” he called.

  “Hi yourself. Why didn’t you come on the bus?”

  “They wouldn’t let the dog on the bus. So I hitched.”

  Fitz deposited the suitcase and trunk beside the front steps and went back for the dog. He tried to coax her to follow him, but she simply sat there and stared at him. Then he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and tried to hoist her to all fours, but she collapsed in a heap by the curb. So Fitz reached down and gathered her up in his arms and marched across the lawn with her. He set the dog down by the steps and she sprawled there on the grass, head resting across her front paws.

  “What’s wrong with that dog?” Bright asked.

  “She has a drinking problem.”

  “You mean alcohol?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Where did she acquire a drinking problem, Fitz?”

  “In the fraternity house. Her name is Gladys, Mama. She’s our mascot. She started out on light bread soaked in beer and then gradually moved on to the hard stuff.”

  “Who did this?”

  “Well, I
guess we’re all a little responsible.”

  “You ought to be ashamed,” Bright said.

  “I am. That’s why I brought her home to you.”

  “Why me?”

  “I figured you could rehabilitate her. Get her all fixed up.”

  “Oh, no,” Bright said, crossing her arms across her chest.

  “Just for the summer, Mama,” he pleaded. “I’ll take her back to school with me in the fall.”

  “And get her drunk again.”

  “Well …”

  So Gladys stayed. She never had another drink of liquor, as far as Bright knew, but her bladder and stomach were already pretty much gone. Long ago, a veterinarian examined her and pronounced her terminal. But she lives on now, defying nature, incontinent and dyspeptic. She pees constantly, in little dribbles. She eats nothing but canned dog food softened with warm milk and spends most of her time in a warm, dry place under the house, just underneath Bright’s bedroom. She comes and goes through an open space in the brickwork by the back steps. Lately, she has taken to bumping around in the middle of the night, getting herself tangled in the web of pipes and wires, moaning and clanging until she extricates herself.

  Now, in the early morning, she is making her way out … rattle … clang … bump … moan … and Bright follows her halting, half-blind progress. By the time Gladys clears the maze, Bright has fetched and opened the can of food from the kitchen, mixed it with warm milk from the pan on the stove, and placed the bowl by the back steps. She sits on the steps, wrapping her housedress around her knees, and waits for Gladys to poke her head through the opening in the brickwork. The dog pauses, giving the morning a one-eyed once-over, and stares for a moment at Bright, tilting her head this way and that. She gives forth a soft moan. Bright has never heard Gladys bark, not in the many years she has been here. Perhaps her bark fell victim to alcoholism, back there in her profligate days at Little Fitz’s fraternity house. Or perhaps she never found anything worth barking at. Gladys steps gingerly into the morning as if expecting to collide with another pipe. She shakes herself, the most vigorous thing she does these days, and dust flies. She looks up at Bright again, expecting a greeting.