My Dog Skip

by Willie Morris

  A few years after that, during my first year in high school, our English teacher, Mrs. Parker, asked our class to stay after school an entire hour for a special spelling bee. It was a glorious late afternoon of mid-May, and we were not even halfway finished when Skip leapt through one of the open ground-floor windows and landed on his feet near Rivers Applewhite's desk, knocking off all her schoolbooks before walking to me. Happily this teacher, unlike the brutish Miss Abbott, was a kindly personage and lover of dogs, and she said: “Welcome, Skip¡ Can you spell?” The intrusion was a fortunate one for me, because just before his histrionic entrance I had been called upon to spell purification. Skip s interruption gave me time to decide that there was only one r, rather than two, in purification.

  ••••••• 10 •••••••

  As Summers Die

  FOR A BOY AND HIS DOG—need it even be said?—the summertimes were the best of all. They came and went for Skip and me in splendid random, touching our mutual boyhood and our getting older with the patina of the passing days.

  Three or four times every summer he and I went to Jackson to stay with my grandparents and great-aunts. We always took the Greyhound bus to Jackson. Being a friend of my father's, the driver allowed Skip to make the journey on the bus—the price was a quarter for me and a dime for him—and the loudspeaker in the station just before we boarded would always say: “Central Local Bus now loading on Platform One—for Little Yazoo, Bentonia, Flora, Poca-hontas, and Jackson- town !” and off we would go.

  Though quintessentially a small-town dog, as the reader by now may have discerned, Old Skip was adequately sophisticated for the capital city, thank you, and reveled in its own distinctive summer adventures. Our Christmases there had already suggested to him, I can't help thinking, that if grandparents are noteworthy for spoiling a grandson, they can be equally solicitous of the grandson s dog. My grandmother catered to his every whim and foible, which included giving him canned shrimp, potted meat, and even collard greens on occasion, so that by the conclusion of our summer sojourns he had assumed a spirit so magnified and grand that I knew I would have to get him back to more earthly reality on our return home.

  To me, my grandfather Percy was old, older than almost anyone I had ever known, but he never let on that Skip's and my pace was more than he had bargained for. He would do everything I wanted, from climbing the fig trees in the backyard to marching down the street beating a dime-store drum. He worked in the place on Griffith Street that made potato chips. Every afternoon at four he would come home smelling of potatoes, and would fetch from his old leather satchel two big bags of chips for Skip and me, crisp and hot. Sometimes he would take the two of us to work with him, and we would watch while he put on his white apron, carry the great sacks of peeled potatoes to a machine that cut them into thin slices, and then transfer them to the prodigious black oven that heated up the finished product. We munched on potato chips all day, from nine to four, and came home so full of salt and potato grease that we had to drink half a gallon of ice water at supper.

  Maggie and Susie, my grandmother's eccentric old-maid sisters, were challenges, I could tell, to Skip, and he always observed them quizzically in their ceaseless and directionless peregrinations. They had been born long ago during the Civil War, and neither of them could hear or see very well, getting me confused with a brother of theirs who died in 1908 and Skip with a dog named Beauregard they had owned as girls in 1879; once they even confused Skip with a cousin of theirs who had passed on during World War I. They perambulated inside the house and around the yard all day long in their fantastic flowing dresses, running into doors and trees, knocking things off tables; sometimes they bumped into each other in these interminable explorations, and said “Excuse me,” and then pushed off again in opposite directions. Several times a day they tripped over Skip, and once when I saw Maggie trying to strike up a conversation with the garbage can in the backyard, Skip was sitting there moving his head back and forth, and when he saw me he seemed to be asking, “What's going on here?”

  We took long walks, my grandparents and great-aunts and Skip and I, down streets shaded by crepe myrtles, where old ladies on decaying verandas would sometimes ask us in for iced tea; and on to the State Capitol with its fine air of permanence, to search for envelopes with foreign stamps on them in the big refuse bin; and on to the cemetery down the way in the hot, glowing dusks; and then the long walks home, Skip leading the procession because the varied topography of the big town had long since been amply planted in his brain.

  If the years of World War II, in Skip's and my childhood, were glorious beyond measure in our own town, they were equally stimulating in the capital city Jackson was crowded with soldiers of all ranks and origins, and one could hear the clipped Yankee accents all along East Capitol Street, and on several occasions my grandfather and Skip and I walked out to the German prisoner-of-war camp to gaze at the captured soldiers behind the high fences; on one of these afternoons a sergeant of the Afrika Korps bent down and tried to pet Skip through the barbed wire, insisting in his halting English that he reminded him of his own dog in Germany

  In addition to the northern accents that filled the downtown, you heard the Dutch tongue all around you, because hundreds of pilots from Holland were training at the air base, and exiled Dutch leaders were living here also. One morning my grandmother took Skip and me to the Jitney Jungle across the street, which she used for all practical purposes as her personal pantry, visiting it several times a day to buy a tomato, or a head of lettuce, or a cucumber, but mainly to gossip with the other ladies of the neighborhood, and at the vegetable counter with two other perfectly dressed women, she pointed out to me, was the Queen of the Netherlands: I told Skip this, but I doubt that it registered, and if it did, that he believed it.

  At night, as Percy and Skip and I lay half-awake in our beds, I could hear their voices—Mamie's and my great-aunts”—from the parlor. My great-aunts’ world was unexpectedly clearer at this hour, and I loved to lie in the next room, in that lulled awareness just before sleep, and hear the tick-tock of the old clock and the quiet, eclectic talk: about Momma and Poppa, or the other brothers and sisters long dead, or the one brother who went to New York at the turn of the century and was never heard from again, or the family house in Raymond, sold those many years ago. Percy would groan in his half-sleep, and recite “Oh, to be a child again just for tonight.” It was like shifting gears, from boyhood's concerns and the war with the Germans to a different world filled with Yankees, poverty, and death. Later, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I heard snores of such a variety and intensity as were never heard before—tenor and contralto from the back room where Mag and Sue slept, playing to Percy's staccato bass—and moans and sleeptalk-ing into the early hours, and Skip would nuzzle close to me as we listened some more. I knew that Skip and I would never grow old.

  And then back home again on the Greyhound.

  I can still see the town now on some hot, still weekday afternoon of midsummer: ten thousand souls and nothing doing. Even the red water-truck was a diversion, coming up the boulevard with its sprinklers on full force, the water making sizzling steam-clouds on the pavement while half-naked little children followed the truck up the street and played in the torrent till they got soaking wet, Skip sometimes joining them in this mindless charade. Over on Broadway where the old men sat drowsily in straw-bottomed chairs, whittling to make the time pass, you could laze around on the sidewalks—barefoot, if your feet were tough enough to stand the scorching concrete—watching the big cars with out-of-state plates whip by, the drivers hardly knowing and certainly not caring what place this was. Way up that fantastic hill where Skip and I had once lost the brakes, Broadway seemed to end in a seething mist—tiny heat mirages that shimmered off the asphalt. On Main Street itself only a handful of cars were parked here and there, and the merchants and the lawyers sat in the shade under their broad awnings, talking slowly, aimlessly, in the cryptic summer way. The one o'cl
ock whistle at the sawmill would send out its loud bellow, reverberating up the street to the bend in the river, hardly making a ripple in the heavy somnolence.

  Summer for us was considerably more solitary than the fall, since so many people were out of town on vacation— but what was wrong with that? By nine o'clock we were out of bed and on the move. First I made Kool-Aid in a large glass pitcher, gathered some old comic books, and put my mother's folding card table under the tree in the front yard. On the table I taped a sign that said: Funny books, 3 cents, Kool-Aid, 2 cents a glass. While Skip, so hot that his tongue dripped with sweat, drowsed under the table, I might get three or four sales by noon, but rarely did commerce thrive in that stifling heat. In the early wartime years, to pass the time between sales I killed flies with a flyswatter, pretending that the flies were Japanese fighter planes, bagging twenty-three in ten minutes one morning near a watermelon rind, or turned over a flat stone and killed ants with a hammer, pretending they were German footsoldiers trying to establish a beachhead. After a while the two of us just sat in the shade of the tree and watched the morning pass by: the red water-truck, horse-drawn wagons heading to town, a group of dogs all bunched together going to the dump. Skip, if of the mood, would socialize with them for a little while. Soon we heard the ice-cream man coming around the corner with the bell on his cart ringing, and if I had cleared a nickel's profit on our mornings sales I would purchase a Fudgsicle and share it with Skip. At noon it was time for a glass of Kool-Aid and a ham sandwich, and some chicken livers for him, and then to amble into town to see what was going on, with me walking along the sidewalks and supersti-tiously avoiding all the cracks, and finally taking a shortcut down the bayou to Main Street.

  One day we were standing on Broadway and Main when I spotted a quarter at the bottom of a sewer. I went to the alley behind the Dixie and found a long stick, stuck the wad of gum I was chewing on the end, and returned to the sewer, where, after considerable maneuvering, and with Skip hunched down and gazing at this operation with his usual curiosity, I speared the quarter with the gum and with a vigorous yank brought it out. With these unexpected earnings I hailed the ice-cream man again, who by now had made it all the way across town from our house, and this time bought two Fudg-sicles, one for me, one for Skip. Then, for a nickel, because the driver let Skip ride free, we boarded the new city bus on Jefferson Street and rode in much excitement and pride, since the town had never had a bus line before, up Main and Canal and Brickyard Hill and the boulevard and down Canal to Main again: the limits of our world.

  Now we went to my fathers office, where I experimented for a while with his typewriter; then on to the radio station to read the news coming in from all the worlds capitals on the teletype and to hear the announcers promote the virtues of various insecticides and fertilizers and a spectacular locally made patent medicine that cured everything from gallstones to summer itch; then to the offices of the newspaper to observe that weeks issue coming off the flatbed press; and next to the ice house, where on especially scalding days the boy who worked there allowed us to spend a few minutes in the room where they made ice, a dark, frigid, timeless chamber a universe removed from the blazing summer world outside. There was a cotton auction taking place at the auction center, the first of the year, and we watched that for a few minutes: the staccato warble of the auctioneer, the men in khakis milling around in clusters, discussing the quality of that summers product. Then to the Armenians to watch him make bread, and to the Italians to watch him make coffee, and to Gregorys Funeral Home to watch a funeral procession get started, and to the courthouse to watch part of a trial from an empty balcony, and to the Catholic church to look into the windows and get scared. Once Father Hunter himself caught us at one of the windows and gave us a tour inside: the unfamiliar statuary, the alien baptistery the faint incense odor. Then to a big open field right in the middle of town to play among the rows of cotton bales waiting to be hauled up to Memphis on the train. Then on to the Ricks Memorial Library, where the ancient ladies permitted Skip to go to sleep under the long oaken table in the reading room while I read the latest serials in Open Road for Boys. Then up to the firehouse to visit the firemen, playing dominoes while listening to a ballgame, who in their gregarious indomitability had put aside their embarrassment over the fact that the fire-house itself had partially burned because of faulty electrical wiring the previous summer, and who more often than not gave me a Nehi Strawberry and Skip a nibble of ham or hard-boiled egg. Finally, on the way home, we might stop at Bubba's, who would by now be back from weighing cotton at his fathers plantation, and we might bake some more oatmeal cookies using our standard recipe of castor oil, milk of magnesia, and Skip's dog-worming medicine, then gift wrap them and put them on some mean old mans front porch.

  On the Fourth of July there was always a political rally in some large and dusty clearing in the middle of the woods.

  The barbecue and potato salad and sliced homegrown tomatoes and corn on the cob and biscuits were stacked on long tables and served up by country people, and I sat on the grass with this steaming feast in my lap, splitting some of it with Skip, lethargically eating and listening to the preachers and politicians.

  But mostly we liked the little creeks and streams that trickled out of the hills into the flatland, and most of all the river itself in the summertimes, the river of the vanished Indians, the Yazoo, which flowed slow as could be past the giant cypresses and elms and weeping willows, southward toward the Mississippi. We basked in the sun along these banks and watched the boats drift by. Why did the gnarled, bending cypresses always seem to be trying to tell something to me? It was a river not to be tampered with, but it had a grace to it nonetheless: the way it opened up and wound around, the moss hanging over it from the cypress trees, the decaying old houses along it that Skip and I explored. One of these houses stood only a few yards from the river, with a ruined sagging veranda and high ceilings and an oak tree that had grown tall through a collapsed place in the roof and these words carved on a wall in what must have been the kitchen: Your cause is a hard one and I pity you. Lt. Thompson. Illinois 36th Inf. We were in this house one day when a heavy thunderstorm came, and the trees all around and even the old house itself swayed and moaned and the river beyond made rippling murmurs.

  One summer after I had reached high school I served as “public relations director” for the town's recreation park, where I was chief assistant to the high school football coach, and supervisor of a radio program each afternoon. The park was only three or four blocks from our house, and Skip and I strolled over there every morning that summer. He became a fixture among the children as he observed with interest their softball games and Ping-Pong matches and shuffle-board and horseshoe throws; some of them called him Uncle Skip. The football coach and I, accompanied by Skip, collected a carload of children every day at four and went to the radio station for our daily broadcast. We interviewed them about their participation in that days various activities and announced the winners and their scores.

  The program was a hardship, however, on those days when no children at all turned up at the park; then the football coach and I would have to talk to each other on the air for half an hour, about anything we could think of that would fill up that time. During these broadcasts Skip sat on the floor under the microphone. After a long silence one day when we were depleted of things to discuss, the coach asked, “Skip, what did you do at the park today? Skip¡ “ and with that loud declarative Skip began to bark at some length, and the disgruntled radio station manager was later heard to comment, “Now they're interviewing dogs.” Once the coach and I talked for five minutes about a Ping-Pong table we had just nailed back together, and then about a bark blight a certain elm tree near the shuffleboard had caught, and another time we discussed at some length why the Nicholas children, who lived just across the street from the park, failed to show up on that day. The football coach surmised that they had probably gone out of town for a while; no, I speculated, I had seen them
that morning eating Popsicles in front of a grocery store. On one particular day when it had rained for several hours and no children whatsoever came to the park, the football coach and I, with Skip in the backseat, cruised all over town in his car looking for a child to interview. We had run out of talk ourselves, and anybody would do.

  Ten minutes before our program was to go on the air, we spotted a little boy walking up Main Street in the rain. It was Donnie Fulton, who spoke with a stutter. The coach drove the car up to the curb and shouted, “Donnie, come get in with us.” The little boy dutifully got in the car, and the coach whispered to me, “Don't let him go now we Ve got him.” The boy made a motion that might have suggested escape, but Skip, sensing something a little untoward perhaps, growled the boy into tentative submission. We trundled him down to the station and interviewed him for twenty minutes.

  One night that same summer Skip and I were sitting on the front porch when suddenly we saw a large Delta Airlines passenger plane as it began curiously circling low over our neighborhood, then started an odd descent toward our dirt airstrip two miles away What on earth was this meant to be? I ran to the DeSoto in the driveway, Skip following closely behind, and we sped out to the airport just as the passenger plane came to a skidding halt in the muddy runway Everyone, like us, who had heard its motors had also reached the airport as the lost plane landed—we later learned the pilots had mistaken the lights of town for the Jackson airport forty miles south. A sizeable crowd had gathered near the airliner. Henjie's father, who was president of the chamber of commerce, was carrying a steplad-der, and when Skip recognized him he followed him toward the plane. Henjie's father put up the ladder and said to each frightened passenger as he climbed down it into the mud, “Welcome to our little town.” The next week there was a photograph in the newspaper, on the top of page one, of Henjie's father and Skip greeting the passengers.