Sheep
Page 2
But one last try.
That night when the father came home from work, I tried my best to show him what I was all about. I dodged and feinted, ran full speed around the yard herding imaginary sheep, then stopped on a dime and switched directions. I even tried herding him, but he just didn’t get it. He let me play for a while in the yard with Penelope—she couldn’t throw a ball worth a darn, though my mom said lots of girls can. Then it was time for dinner. Penelope and Dad went inside. Me? I was supposed to entertain myself.
Doing what? Chasing butterflies?
It was a bad matchup, that’s all, me with them. They needed a sit-around dog, a lie-in-your-lap dog, not a sheepherder like me.
It was easy getting out of there once I’d decided to go; the pointy sticks were no higher than the father’s knee. One day when I was taken off my chain, instead of playing with Penelope I just hopped over the sticks and took off. Didn’t dare look back. I hate to see a kid cry.
I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Wasn’t thinking, I guess. All I knew was that I’d had a purpose once, a reason for being alive. I’d found it running with the fellas, and if it took the rest of my life, I was going to find it again.
3
I RAN, forever it seemed, past houses like the one I’d escaped. Dogs chained or fenced barked in greeting, or in warning. A porch light came on, and there was my shadow, racing just ahead of me. A man on the porch yelled, “Hey!” I kept on running, away from those big houses and clean streets into the darker end of that town, where my blackness would blend in. There was so much to sniff there that I had to slow down. Cat, rat, paper that smelled like food, dog everywhere. I’d never been so excited, or so scared.
At last I found a corner of a vacant lot to lie down in, my belly knotted with hunger. There I spent a fitful night, no dreams of home to ease my slumber. I’d drop off, then wake up with a start, thinking I’d heard something. A big black truck with a rackety engine, Penelope calling “Blackie! Blackie!,” the click of a glass door shutting me in.
Morning came and I hit the streets again, trying my best to look as if I had something to do, a place to go. I guess I thought if I went far enough, looked hard enough, after a little while, a day or two maybe, I’d find Bob. He’d recognize me by the white spot on the tip of my tail, and he’d see right away that I didn’t have a home. What could he do but take me back?
The town was starting to wake itself up, shopkeepers sweeping their sidewalks, bread trucks and milk trucks and meat trucks passing like empty promises. To get my mind off food, I ran alongside a boy delivering newspapers. Until the boy got nosy. “Hey, you’re a stray, aren’t you?” He stopped his bike, but by the time he’d set that bike down, I was gone.
It was a bacon morning. Out of every window, the delicious odor of pig meat frying. I could hardly stand it. By the time I found breakfast—half a hamburger in a tipped over garbage can—I was so hungry I almost ate the paper it came in. (I didn’t tip the can, by the way. I could still imagine the scolding I’d get from Mom if she caught me. I didn’t dare think how life would be if I never saw my mom again.)
At every house people were up and going places, getting into cars and going off with big, important things to do. Kids jumped on their bikes or climbed onto school buses, leaving the houses empty and quiet. Or a dog would stay behind to mind things. The cats didn’t help. Cats have very little use for people, no matter how they might pretend otherwise. But the dogs always watched the people’s every move, afraid they’d never come back.
I made a few friends among the mixed breeds. One let me drink from her personal water bowl. I think she wanted me to stick around, but no way was I going to end up chained to a house again, not in this life.
I sniffed my way across town, then through a big, empty park, and at last ran smack into a highway, cars flying back and forth faster than Old Dex on his best day. I was trying to decide which way to go when I caught the distinct scent of something rank and woolly. I lifted my nose, sniffed again. Sheep? Sheep! The smell, terrible but wonderful for what it promised, drifted toward me. My heart lifted, and I raced in the direction of the smell. Bob! It had to be Bob!
They appeared like a funny kind of dream, a white blur, jingling and jangling like Christmas. The closer they came, the slower I went. These weren’t sheep. They looked sort of like sheep. They smelled sort of like sheep, but they sure weren’t sheep. The look in their weird yellow eyes, for one thing. They were harnessed all together in a long line, pulling a wagon with a little red house that sat sort of sideways on top.
“Ho!” said the man walking beside the wagon. “Ho, you mangy varmints!” The goats came to a jangling stop, snorting and fussing. “Hey, fella,” said the man, his hand laid flat so that I could sniff its trustworthiness. I was less careful in those days than I’ve learned to be, and a lot more lonely. One sniff and I was all over him, telling him my many troubles. “Well, yes,” the Goat Man said. “Sure. Danged if it isn’t so.” Things like that, to let me know he understood.
The Goat Man had the longest beard. Gray and curly, it hung halfway down a ratty old jacket that might have been yellow once. On his head was a floppy brown hat stained with sweat and tied under his chin with string. Between the hat and the beard were eyes the color of the sky above Bob and Ellen’s ranch, just as clear and bright blue.
The goats were a whole lot less friendly. They shuffled around impatiently while the Goat Man and I got to know each other. Then while they grazed on the grass alongside the highway, the Goat Man poured me a bowl of goat’s milk, thick and tangy. I lapped it up like it came from my mother. “That should hold you for a while,” the Goat Man said. “A growing pup needs sustenance.”
I figured sustenance was another name for the milk, but he meant more than that. He meant love and hope and that sort of thing. He knew what I needed all right. I needed a home. Watching the Goat Man put away the bowl and the jug of milk, I knew I wanted to stay with him. There were things he could teach me. And I could help with the goats. But would he take me with him? Would he want another hungry belly to feed?
The Goat Man got up from the rock he was resting on. He never rested long.
“On, you huskies!” he cried, and those goats, with only a little bit of grumbling, started moving, pulling that funny red wagon house on its creaky wooden wheels. I followed along, like I’d followed Old Dex, as if I’d always been a part of the team.
“You’re a good pup, Shep,” the Goat Man said after a while. “I don’t know where your folks are or I’d take you there. I guess you’ll have to hitch up with us. We’ve come all the way up from Mexico, and we’re headed for Canada. That okay, boy?”
You can bet I told him in every way I could, mostly with my tail, that it was. Mexico? Canada? What did I know?
We traveled right alongside the highway as the cars whizzed by. The Goat Man waved at the people in the cars, and when the children waved back, the Goat Man’s eyes would sparkle. I guessed that his mouth was smiling under all that beard. We walked in sunlight as long as it lasted, and then by moonlight when the sun was gone. I got used to the jingling bells after a while, but the goats wouldn’t let me anywhere near them. They’d kick or butt me if I tried to get close. This just made the Goat Man laugh.
That night, my first night on the team, we went a little off the highway to camp. The goats plopped down in the weeds right where they were. Then the Goat Man cooked us some goat’s meat—I’ll spare you the particulars—over an open fire, turning it on a stick. Did that ever smell good! When the meat was cooked, he shared it between us. It was as if he’d known all along I was coming for dinner.
You were wondering where I slept, right? You were hoping it would be down there by his feet, and you’d be right. For the first time since leaving home, I slept a genuine all-out puppy sleep.
The bells awoke me. The goats were restless, ready to hit the road. It was all they knew. Life was one long, straight run of grass or no grass. Something to be said for the simp
licity of that. I found a piece of the Goat Man’s face to lick him awake.
“Whoa, Shep! You must be hungry, huh, fella?” He pushed the door of the wagon house open. I hopped out and did my business. We had our breakfast, milk for me, cheese and milk for him. Then we began moving again. Early, it wasn’t so bad, a few cars, the air still smelling like it was meant to. After a while, I didn’t know which was worse, the goats or the cars. If I hadn’t loved the Goat Man so much, I don’t think I could have hung on as long as I did. A long time in people years, even longer in dog years.
Why we stuck to the highway was a mystery to me. All that exhaust and the smell of burned rubber when he could have gone into the hills. After I got to know the Goat Man better, I began to figure it out. The highway was just part of the bigger thing he believed in, his place on the earth. Never asked for a thing, the Goat Man. I never once saw him reach his hand out for someone else’s money. It would never have occurred to him to beg. He had all he needed. Goat’s milk and the cheese he made from it, some goat’s meat now and then, and his wisdom. Cropping the grass wherever it grew was the Goat Man’s purpose, his payment for the little space on the earth he and the goats took up. The circle of life, he called it.
Most nights, after we’d stopped and had our dinner, while the goats grazed, the Goat Man would get to work on what he called his Words of Wisdom cards. “Now that’s a good one!” he’d say, scratching his chin somewhere under all that beard. “Listen to this one, Shep!” I’d cock my head, and he’d read me what he wrote. I guessed it was wisdom, though I really didn’t know. Most cards he decorated with pictures. Well, sort of pictures. He was better with the words. When he was finished, he put a rubber band around the cards. “Wisdom,” he said, with that little wink he always gave me. “That’s what people need right now, and I’m just the person to give them some. Well, me and President Eisenhower.”
Then he’d curl up under his pile of quilts, and in no time at all he’d be snoring.
It wasn’t an exciting life. I had a higher calling, and I knew it. But I loved the Goat Man. He taught me all I knew. Not about the sheep—Dad and Old Dex taught me that. But about philosophy, which is just a big word for big ideas. Like what things mean, and how to live the best life.
Trouble was, sometimes the philosophy would happen at the very worst times, when I was tired and hungry and had to whine a little to get the Goat Man’s attention. Like once after a real long day, when we were camped for the night and the Goat Man was fixing our dinner. He’d put some goat’s meat on to cook, and my nose was as close to that meat as it could be without setting my fur on fire. “Shep,” the Goat Man said, and I knew by the sound of his voice that the philosophy was coming. “You will journey far and wide if you make your sails of patience.”
See what I mean? Sails of patience? It took some doing to understand the Goat Man’s meaning sometimes, and by then the meat was ready.
Worse was when the Goat Man came up with something so good he’d have to write it on a card right then. Our meat would shrink to nothing and turn black as coal.
The Goat Man would always be sorry he’d ruined our dinner, but not for long. “Don’t cry over spilled goat’s milk,” he’d say, chuckling to himself.
I never did get it.
4
WINTERS WERE HARD, especially for the goats, who needed their grass, but we never stopped traveling. The Goat Man would wear holes right through his boots, repairing them as best he could with cardboard or tying them on with string. It was funny how a new pair would always turn up just in the nick of time, and they’d always fit. People loved the Goat Man. He was doing what they would have liked to do, living in the open air, going where his mood took him.
If it snowed, we’d shelter in a barn or under a canopy of trees. On warmer days, we’d find a stream and nap in the middle of the day. In the evening, when we’d settled ourselves at a campsite and had our dinner, the Goat Man would read us poetry by the light of the fire, or play some tunes. I liked the sound of the poetry all right, but that accordion hurt my ears. “If music be the food of love, play on!” the Goat Man said. “That’s Shakespeare, Shep. He was pretty handy with words of wisdom, too.”
Nights were always the best. Even if it rained, I was right there next to my best friend, all snuggled up inside the little wagon house as the rain danced on our roof.
A good many dog years passed that way. I had been growing into a “right handsome beast” is how the Goat Man put it.
It was sometime during our last year together, though neither of us knew it. We were in a place called Oregon, the Goat Man said, and the air had begun to cool. He was selling his Words of Wisdom cards the way he always did in the winter. He’d sell them wherever he could, hoarding the few coins he got to buy hay for the goats. And every now and then, a meaty bone for me, even though I didn’t earn my keep. Oh, I ran alongside the goats, keeping them in line. But they didn’t need much herding. They’d gotten along fine without me. Still, I had to practice my skills.
The Goat Man was older than I knew, people years were a mystery to me then. Toward the end of that long, cold winter, the Goat Man took sick. For some time we didn’t travel, lying low behind an abandoned barn while the Goat Man slept. One night, as I lay warming his feet, he woke up and, as if he were still in a dream, began talking about Trudy. She must have been a real special person the way the Goat Man went on and on about her. But her father didn’t like the Goat Man (who wasn’t the Goat Man yet, just an ordinary farm boy). He wanted his pretty daughter to marry the son of a wealthy farmer. No amount of begging and crying was going to turn the father’s cold heart away from that plan. The wealthy farmer’s money was going to save their poor farm, and that was that.
They were so in love, the Goat Man said, that there was no help for it: they had to be together. One night, with only a slice of the moon to see by, the Goat Man came with a ladder and set it up under Trudy’s bedroom window. The two took off to the next county and married.
How the Goat Man chuckled telling the story of the big escape. But then he began to cough and cough. After a while, he slept. Toward morning, when the goats were starting to rustle and snort, he picked up the story again.
This part was so sad, I wished I’d slept through it.
They made a good life for themselves, young as they were. Trudy took in washing, the Goat Man worked a neighboring farm. In the spring, when Trudy said they’d be adding a child to their family, he was happier than he’d ever been in his life. “True love is a banquet for the soul,” the Goat Man said. But the birth was a hard one, not your usual thing, and when Trudy and their newborn son passed away shortly afterward, the Goat Man, who was not yet a goat man, became one. He left that little place with all the goats they had and never looked back.
“Love and grief grow in the same garden,” the Goat Man said.
Later that morning we went back to the highway, but the Goat Man had slowed down some. We had to keep stopping so that he could catch his breath. After a while, he climbed up into his little house and left things to me. Well, the goats and I, we had our routine. Nobody to wave to the kids in the cars, nobody selling Words of Wisdom, but we kept on moving.
And then one morning my tongue didn’t work the way it always had: I licked the Goat Man’s face, the part I could get to, but his eyes wouldn’t open. I yipped a couple of times—you know the yip, kind of sharp and high in the throat. But the Goat Man didn’t move. I nosed open the door and went out to reassure the goats, acting all businesslike, running up and down the line. The goats looked me over with their little yellow eyes as if to say, “Who do you think you are anyway? You’re not the boss of us.”
They were right. But I didn’t know what else to do. We had to go on. It was all we knew.
With some badgering, the goats got themselves up and into a line more or less. They were skittish, kept waiting for the Goat Man’s “On, you huskies!” I nipped a few heels out of desperation, and at last we began to move.
It was dark by the time the goats wore out. They had some way of talking, I never could figure out how. But suddenly they stopped. Like they were all one animal. They stopped on the side of the road and plopped down.
Well.
I went running back to the wagon. I knew the Goat Man would be real hungry by then. I sure was. He’d be unwrapping the cheese, pouring us our milk. I yipped at the door to the wagon house, but the Goat Man didn’t answer. It was harder to open the door from the outside, but at last it fell open. I hopped inside and onto his bed.
Nothing had changed. The Goat Man was going to sleep forever. I lay down beside him then, not at his feet, where I belonged, but right up next to his dear old face. If he opened his eyes, I was going to be right there to say hello.
Well, of course, by now you know he never did.
We went on like that for another long day. Didn’t know what else to do, neither the goats nor me, a caravan of lost souls. I knew something had to be done, but the goats surely weren’t going to do it. Things were working pretty much the way they always had for them. Grass, no grass. I was the one having the hard time of it. I’d lost my best friend. No way did I need a bunch of nasty goats.
Toward the end of that second day, I spotted a small barn with a house beside it. A farmer was driving a tractor through a big empty field, the earth turning in dark waves behind him. There was wash on the line, a tire swing hanging from a tree. Here were people who could use some goats, said I. Running and feinting and dodging and sweeping, I herded those goats straight into the field. They were so surprised they didn’t have time to complain. They went like sheep.