My Dog Skip

by Willie Morris

  ••••••• 6 •••••••

  Hazards, Dangers, and a Very Close Call

  THERE WERE OTHER hazards pertaining to Skip besides Stella Birdsong and skunks, some of them of a more risky nature. In the summer of his fifth year, for instance, he got hit by a car, the only time that ever happened, the bumper of it knocking him high in the air, and he somersaulted a couple of times but landed squarely on his feet and walked away chagrined but unscathed. Another time the Barbours’ big mean Doberman, who bore a striking resemblance to the photographs I had seen of Hitlers dog Biondi, bit him on the back of the neck and I had to take him to the same Dr. Jones who had granted me Dog Care for a dozen stitches.

  Once we were hunting in the woods when he suddenly got mired in a small patch of quicksand. He frantically clawed with his paws to escape, but the more he fought the quicker he began to sink in that dark enveloping muck. It all happened in a matter of moments. I did not have time to panic, or even to tell myself to be clearheaded in the face of the appalling jeopardy to Old Skip—I believe I just acted. I tossed away my gun and shouted to my father to hold my feet while I lay down on my stomach in Skip's direction and caught him by the paw and gradually pulled him free. Only when it was over and he was on safe ground feverishly shaking himself to get rid of the grimy sand all over him did I sit down under a tree and take a deep breath, then and only then feeling the stark emotions of pity and terror.

  There was also the frightening business of his encounter one day with a copperhead snake. He and I were driving around in the hills. In a certain area near Highway 49 there was one tall hill after another for many miles. All these hills and dark little valleys in between them were overgrown with a beautiful green creeping vine right up to the highway itself. This vine, known as the kudzu, sometimes grew onto the trees and telephone poles, making strange and wonderful shapes. Rumor had it that if a cow tarried too long in a field without moving around very much the vine would grow out so quickly as to cover the cow. The green creeping vine protected the land and kept it from washing away during heavy rains, but when I was a little boy I thought the whole town would someday be covered by it, that it would grow as fast as Jack's beanstalk, and that every person on earth would have to live forever knee-deep in its leaves.

  Skip and I drove off the highway to a road right in the middle of that phantasmagoric green vine. I stopped in a clearing to let him run. Everyone knew that the vines were crawling with snakes, so I was not surprised to see a monstrous copperhead, one of the most poisonous of the indigenous species, slither out of the underbrush across the same clearing. I was surprised, however, to see Skip's reaction. Unlike what he did the day in the big woods when he sighted the rattlesnake and retreated a respectful distance to stare at it, he began to circle round and round this intruder, barking and growling. The snake did not like its privacy disturbed, and it snapped back at him, making ungodly hisses to match Skip's own commotion. He got closer and closer to the snake, ignoring my frantic shouts to get away. All of a sudden, in one prodigious leap, Skip came at the copperhead from the rear (just as, I had read in our library, Stonewall Jackson came at Hooker at Chancel-lorsville), caught it by the tail, and began dragging it all over the field. I could almost hear the fearful beating of my own heart, because every time the snake tried to bite back, his fangs extended in venomous rage, Skip would simply let go of it, and then move back in again to give the snake a couple of brisk additional shakes. While I was looking around for a rock to kill the copperhead, it headed out in a flash again, into the labyrinth of vines, wishing, no doubt, it had never left home. On the way back to town I gave Skip a stern lecture on snakes, but I knew it did not do much good.

  I have mentioned that the town was half hills and half Delta. The name of the street that came swooping down out of the hills was Broadway, and it was the most unusual street of all. Its angle of descent was so steep that every so often the driver of some doomed car or truck would discover that his brakes were not nearly sufficient to deal with this reckless terrain. His path to death would be an agonizing one, as he whipped eighty or ninety miles an hour out of those hills, usually smashing into another car or truck where the ground leveled off at the intersection with Main Street. Once, as we were told it later as children, a truck full of cotton pickers got out of control coming down that perilous thoroughfare and crashed into a big pecan tree at seventy miles an hour; the dead and the dying were thrown for yards around, even into the broad leaves of the pecan tree.

  Sometime during Skip's fourth year we were walking down the sidewalk of Main Street with Henjie and Peewee near this intersection when we heard a dreadful collision. We rushed to the site. A Coca-Cola truck had lost its brakes and smashed into the high concrete steps to the post office. The driver had miraculously escaped with minor cuts and bruises, which the Methodist preacher the next Sunday would describe as “a merciful act of the all-knowing Almighty,” but the back door of the truck had been thrown open in the crash, and hundreds of Coca-Cola bottles were thrown out, most of them unbroken and rolling unencumbered along the middle of Main Street. At the sight of this grand bounty, Henjie and Peewee and I, Skip hot at our heels, raced into the Jitney Jungle nearby, where Big Boy worked sacking groceries, and got three of his largest sacks from him. Out in the street people of all ages and colors were picking up the unbroken bottles and running away with them. Skip watched as Henjie and Peewee and I, gathering and gleaning like squirrels, filled our sacks full of the Coca-Colas and carried them home. It was better than any Easter egg hunt.

  A couple of years after that, Skip and I ourselves had our most formidable brush with disaster. I was driving the old DeSoto out of the hills toward Broadway; Skip was sitting on the passenger seat next to me. We were just beginning the descent when I casually pressed my foot on the brakes. Nothing happened. I pressed again, and again nothing. The brakes were not working¡ I pumped the pedal in terror as the car gradually began to gather speed; Skip put his paws on the dashboard and gazed quizzically ahead at the whole precipitous stretch of that street, and I began praying beseechingly to the Methodist Lord. Suddenly I remembered what my father had once told me to do in such an emergency. I switched off the ignition and slowly began to pull the emergency brake upward; the vehicle jolted once, then twice, throwing Skip against the dashboard. Had I not in that instant done something else, the reader would not have this book about Old Skip before him now, for this memoirist would not have endured to write it, nor for that matter would Skip himself have survived to be written about: I gently turned the steering wheel to the right and jumped the curb into Miss Sarah Cooper Lear's enormous side yard abutting the street, a treeless green expanse bereft of lawn furniture and even flowerbeds and bushes; I pulled up the emergency brake as high as it would go, and the DeSoto moaned and clanked and came to a reluctant halt halfway up a grassy incline. Skip and I just sat there for a moment, wilted wretches that we were, until Miss Lear came out and looked through the window and asked if we were all right. Neither I, Skip, nor the DeSoto had sustained a solitary scratch, and I sacked groceries at the Jitney Jungle all the next week to compensate Miss Lear for the tire ruts on her lawn, and attended church services the next eight Sundays in a row.

  About the spookiest moment Skip and I ever lived through took place one appalling June night in the cemetery, scene of our previous pranks and hoaxes. Our cemetery, as I have earlier suggested, was one of the scariest in the South. Henjie, Peewee, and Muttonhead had gathered together all their financial capital and wagered me $8.50 that Skip and I would not spend an entire night in my army-surplus pup tent in the darkest and most fearsome section of the cemetery. I took that bet, because there were some items of furniture I wanted to buy for Skip's and my tree house, but only after my sadistic colleagues put me on the honor system, having me swear an oath on a Bible that I would not lie to them that Skip and I had fulfilled the obligation even if we had not, the reason for this chaste and upright declaration being, of course, that Henjie, P
eewee, and Muttonhead were not about to visit the cemetery after dark to ascertain our veracity.

  Part of the arrangement was that the three of them would accompany Skip and me just before the sun went down to select the most ominous spot. I carried with me the pup tent and a sack of provisions: a can of pork and beans, two Moonpies, some bologna for Skip, a can opener, and a canteen of water, plus two blankets and a pillow. To my dismay my antagonists gleefully chose the most forbidding place in the whole graveyard for me to pitch the tent: a gloomy glade not far from the witch's grave, with moldy nineteenth-century crypts and tombstones all around, and tall, ghostly trees, and dank, sinister shrubs and bushes. All this was part of one's worst nightmares. As I set up the tent in this somber and disturbing terrain Henjie said: “I’ll tell you this, they ain't never gonna spend all night here. My share is two dollars and eighty-three cents.” Then the three of them laughed, a chorus of righteous mirth. It was that unfortunate juncture between dusk and dark, close on to Midsummer Night, with still a little light at nine o'clock, and what was left of that light was fading fast, and formidable shadows were accumulating, and I was beginning to have second thoughts myself. I steeled myself to see it through. As the three of them turned to depart, Peewee chuckled and said, “Pleasant dreams!” As I watched them go, I noticed that only a few yards down the road they began to trot, and then to run because it was pitch-dark by now.

  “Well, boy …” I said to Skip. I sat down by the tent and opened the pork and beans and gave Skip some of his bologna. A half-moon shone out over Brickyard Hill up the way, casting over the whole graveyard a dread, shimmering aura. Lightning bugs were around us everywhere, lending grotesque incandescence to the surroundings. Not far away a mockingbird began her nocturnal song. I had always loved mockingbirds, and so had Skip, sitting under our elm tree in the backyard in the summer dusks, absorbing her sweet, adoring call. Who would ever want to kill a mockingbird? But on this encompassing night in the graveyard her lovely voice suffused me with trepidation, as if she were only mocking Skip and me in our vigil at the pup tent.

  Skip seemed to be having the time of his life, and this angered me: he strolled audaciously among the tombstones and even jumped on top of the gray, lugubrious Darrington crypt to survey the scene. The least anxious thing to do, I concluded, was to climb into the tent and force myself to go to sleep. As I lay down on the blanket I was aware of dancing shadows and the swirling rustle of leaves. Shortly Skip climbed into the tent and snuggled next to me, and I was glad to have him there, I can tell you.

  I must have fallen into a long but fitful slumber, filled with odd, shapeless wisps of nightmares, suffused with the sound of shovels digging into earth, when I was suddenly awakened by Skip's rising from my side, and as I anxiously peered through the darkness I saw him standing at the entrance to the tent silently looking out, taut and pointing the way he did with the squirrels in the big woods. I glanced at my Woolworth's wristwatch; it said quarter to two. I crawled toward him and looked out too. What I saw in that moment in that cemetery chilled me in the blood as nothing in my whole life ever would.

  About fifty yards away I made out the form of a battered pickup truck parked at the side of the road. Then, off to the left of it, I sighted four strange men in work clothes bending down before something. In that instant a cloud drifted away from the moon. I tried to rub the heavy sleep from my eyes. Were they actually digging up a grave?

  In my impenetrable fright I tried to ponder what to do. Skip was still standing next to me. I recalled the words in a movie I had once seen at the Dixie about the United States Military Academy at West Point: Duty. Honor. Country. I remembered, too, my Boy Scout oath as it related to conscience and obligation: ‘On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country/’ These words resonated now in my brain. Perhaps I could identify these insufferable grave robbers. “Let's get closer,” I whispered to Skip. “Don't make a noise.”

  Stealthily the two of us crawled in the direction of the villains. We were only twenty-five yards or so from them and hiding behind a tombstone: Robert Stacy Yarbrough, 1831-/899. From the farthest distance down in town I could hear the courthouse clock chiming two A.M. I glanced out again over the top of the tombstone. The silhouettes of the four figures were clear to me now. One of them had a gruesome pockmarked face, another a red mustache, but I had never once seen any of them, and from the place-name on the license plate of their pickup truck, they were from a county many miles away

  Then, to my horror, Skip began to bark. He growled, then barked some more. I tried to put my hand around his mouth, but in the act of doing so I stumbled and fell out from behind the tombstone, then looked desperately up and realized that the men had seen us. The one with the pockmarked face began walking swiftly in our direction. In seconds he was standing over me.

  “Well, look at this!” he said. “Come join the party!” He gazed down the way. “You been sleepin’ in a pup tent? This is some crazy town.” He dragged me by the hand and staggered toward the pickup truck. His three companions amiably greeted me there. They were drunk as could be. My deceived eyes in the cemetery's gloom had convinced me they were robbing a grave, but what they were really doing was drinking beer out of long bottles and getting drunker all the while; I dared not ask them why they had chosen a graveyard in the middle of the night for these revels, and on quick reflection acknowledged I myself would find it difficult to explain my own presence, not to mention my dogs, in these circumstances. One of the men was feeding Skip some peanuts and potato chips and making him feel at home; and then he handed me an opened bottle of beer and told me to take a swig, which I obediently did, and then another. It tasted awful. After the deranged hallucinations of that night, one thing I did not need was beer.

  It also must have put me into a long and leaden sleep. I awakened at the first glimmer of light to the sound of roosters up on Brickyard Hill. Somehow my back was propped against a tombstone, and Skip was sound asleep with his head on my lap. I glanced around. The pickup truck was gone and there were empty beer bottles all over the place, and a quart jug with a little corn whiskey left in it.

  I will tell you what else was gone too: my pup tent, blankets, pillow, water canteen, can opener, moonpies, and the rest of my pork and beans and Skip's bologna. Henjie, Pee-wee, and Muttonhead dutifully gave me the $8.50, but with all my losses that night I calculated I was down by three dollars at the least, and it eventually took me two years to finally confess to them about the grave robbers.

  In this recitation of perils and misadventures and hallucinations, I have postponed the most disturbing until last because even with the passage of the years I find it difficult to write about.

  About nine o'clock one evening I went out in the backyard to find Skip lying limp under our elm tree. He looked awful. Perhaps he had grown tired in our interminable jour-neyings around town, and he also must have consumed something bad, some stricken water somewhere, some rotten food maybe. His nose was dry as dust, and so were his paws. I lay on the grass with him and felt his stomach. It was hot and feverish. Also, little strands of warm saliva were dripping down his mouth, bubbling as they flowed. “Wait, boy.” I went inside and brought back a bottle of aspirin and a wet towel. He was shaking all over now. I put two aspirin under his tongue and made him swallow them, then applied the wet towel to his face.

  My father had been working late at his office, and when he arrived home he came outside and looked him over. “I think he's got hold of some poison,” he said. He telephoned Dr. Jones, but he was attending a veterinarians’ convention in Memphis. Then he called the all-night animal clinic in Jackson and described the symptoms. They said to’ rush him there right away.