During one of these summers before the tenth grade Skip accompanied me to Camp Kickapoo, the Boy Scout camp situated in deep sequestered piney woods thirty miles south of us, for our annual organized outing. The scoutmasters knew him from our weekly meetings and our brisk intervals of kick-the-can afterward and said it would be fine to bring him along. He really admired that scout camp—the nightly sessions around a roaring fire when the scoutmasters told ghost stories and recited “Casey at the Bat” and “The Barefoot Boy,” the raucous play, the swimming pond where the others and I practiced our strokes for the coveted merit badges. I had been appointed the camp bugler responsible for reveille and taps, and Skip faithfully climbed the hill with me before every dawn when I sounded my notes on my silver trumpet to rouse the slumbering boys, and again at night to induce them into reluctant sleep. On the evening before we left for home, as we sat around the fire, the members of the troop unanimously voted Skip an honorary Boy Scout. There was a heartless price to be paid, however, when we got back into town, for Camp Kickapoo richly deserved the nickname it had been given through the decades: Tickapoo. My father discovered about two dozen ticks on Skip's back and stomach, several of them severely bloated, and even found several on me, one behind the lobe of my ear. “Ticks are a bad business and deserve to be respected,” he said, and forthwith drove us down to Dr. Jones, the vet, who one by one removed them from us by modern hygienic methods.
The intrepid Henjie and I had taken canoeing lessons from the scoutmasters at Tickapoo, and just before the start of school that year we borrowed his older brother's canoe for an excursion down our river. We would spend the night camping out. We accumulated our provisions, including the usual sliced bologna for Skip, and put into the river just below Main Street. Skip sat between us, as well-behaved as he had ever been—reflective, almost, it seemed, much as he had been that day long ago on the steps of the deserted tenant shack after the storm—as we slowly paddled out from town into the encompassing countryside. This was another of those memories that would last, a memory of the spirit, really, and not so much of the brain; I guess it had to do with the very earth itself. Amid the surrounding swamplands and thickets the grassy banks of the bayous were lined with the familiar willows, and the duckwood was thick and emerald green in the melancholy brakes of cypress, and the cattails danced in the whispery breeze. Turtles lay in the sun on logs in the water, and when two or three of them concluded to get up and jump in the river, Skip observed them with his quizzical lift of the face.
It was early September, and there was the most subtle touch of autumn all round. You could not see it in the leaves, but you could sense it: a vagrant coolness, evanescent light and shadow. Henjie and I pretended that I was Tom, Skip was Huck, and he was Jim, even though he was not the proper color. In the distance were old Indian mounds where we had come as children in search of arrowheads and earthen fragments of pottery; in the eternal flatness they resembled miniature grassy hills. On both sides of us in the great fields the cotton blossoms were beginning to turn white. Dozens of black people were chopping with their hoes, and Skip's ears twitched as their muffled song drifted out to us:
I ain't got too long now, I ain't got too long …
I ain't got too long now, I ain't got too long …
The man be comin’ for me soon.
Farther on down, in the dwindling afternoon, Skip dipped his snout into the brownish muddy river for a drink of water, then unceremoniously spit it out: “too thick to drink, too thin to plow,” I had read in Mrs. Parkers class on what Mr. Twain said of the bigger river to the west, so I poured some water from one of our canteens into a container for him. With the arriving darkness we tied the canoe to a cypress and camped near some willows, and after supper Skip drowsily settled in the crook of my legs and we went to sleep to the sound of Henjies snores and a million cicadas.
One evening of high summer when I was in the eleventh grade Skip did not come home. I had not seen him since morning. In all our years together this had never happened. I asked my father if he had seen him.
“He's probably off chasing squirrels,” he said. “Hell be back.”
I telephoned Rivers, Henjie, Peewee, Muttonhead, Bubba, and Big Boy, but he was not with them. After supper I went out looking for him on my bicycle. I rode all over town, calling and whistling for him everywhere. I could hear my own sad echo off the facades of the accustomed old houses and buildings: “Skip, where are you?”
I rode everywhere that he usually went when he made his rounds. There was a boxer puppy on Main Street that he liked to visit. And a Scottish terrier on Calhoun Avenue. And a big, shaggy dog, part Lab, part Saint Bernard, that he admired on Jefferson Street. And a hybrid old hound on Brickyard Hill. All over town people were outside watering their lawns, and I asked if they had seen him. I half-expected to see him coming out of someone's yard, bounding through the bushes when he heard me whistling. But he did not come. I rode until dark before I gave up. I put my bike in the garage and sat on the front steps until bedtime waiting for him. I telephoned Sheriff Raines, telling him of my missing dog. It felt strange to go to sleep without him in bed with me. I was used to pushing him out of the way so I could turn over. That night the bed seemed too big for me. I tossed and turned all night, sitting up every time I heard a noise, hoping it was him scratching at the door to be let in. I remembered the night he had been poisoned, and the time we had saved him from the quicksand in the woods.
At first light the next morning I began riding around again, retracing my earlier routes, then going on to the football field and the cemetery and the bayou and the dump and the waterhole and the river and the park and every alley in town. I made more telephone calls. I went to the backyard and sat under the elm tree, alert for any sound of him. Had he been run over on some country road? Drowned in the river? Bitten by a copperhead? Kidnapped?
I had to give it another try. Once again I got on the bicycle and began riding in a neighborhood of dingy shacks not far from the dump. I had already been there the day before, but I repeated the search, calling out for him all the while.
In a desolate stretch of this vicinity something suddenly caught the corner of my eye: an old, rusty abandoned refrigerator at the edge of a vacant field. I had noticed this derelict refrigerator three or four times in our recent jour-neyings around the locality, but the sagging door to it, I recalled, had always been ajar. I was drawn toward it compulsively now, as to a magnet. I got off the bicycle and approached it. I was not sure, but I thought I heard something inside, some strange rustling movement—or was it my imagination? I could hear the pounding of my own desperate heart. I reached out and yanked open the door.
Who should leap out of that refrigerator but Old Skip¡ He was a little limp and weak, and when he saw it was me he crawled slowly toward me and lay at my feet. I got on my knees and rubbed him around the lungs, the way we had been instructed in first aid in the Scouts. He gulped in the fresh air and began wagging his tail. He was all right¡ We remained there a long time, until the whistle from the sawmill across town blew I shivered at the thought of what had happened. In his normal investigative spirit he must have crawled into the refrigerator, his movements causing the door to close behind him. He had been trapped all the time in that awful refrigerator—he could have been dead in a few hours. What must he have been thinking in his insidious entrapment? Was he just waiting there for me to come?
“Skip,” I said to him, “please never leave me again!”
••••••• 11 •••••••
Going Away
WHY, IN CHILDHOOD and youth, do we wish time to pass quickly? We want to grow up—and yet again we do not. This is the way people are, and have always been, even before the telephone, television, electricity, jet airplanes, and fax machines. You want to grow older, and yet you don't. Can anyone explain it?
As my high school years began to close, Skip remained constant in his companionship. Rivers Applewhite and I, too, were a steady pair. When we d
ouble-dated with Big Boy and Daisye, or Muttonhead and Janie Sue, riding around town on Saturday nights along the streets of our childhood, Skip rode around with us, until we let him off at my house and went on to the midnight movie at the Dixie. Our baseball team won the state championship that year, and in the parade down Main Street, with the crepe paper decorating the lampposts and the marching band playing our fight song, he rode in the back of a flatbed truck with my teammates and me. They gave the team shiny red-and-white jackets with State Champs, 1952 on the back, and he loved that jacket so much that when I spread it out for him on the floor or the bed he would go to sleep on it, and on chilly nights I would wrap it around him with only the top of his head above it. At the graduation ceremonies in the school gymnasium that June, when my friends and I marched down the aisle in our mortarboards and gowns to the strains of Tannhäuser, he tried to go inside but was mindlessly turned away. Afterwards, however, he attended the midnight-to-dawn dance, a tradition at graduation among all the boys and girls in all the Delta towns of that day, with its black jazz bands and matronly chaperones and exhilarating air of ceremony and frolic, and Skip stayed up all night with the rest of us.
I went to college in another state far away For our first paper in English composition the professor assigned us a two-thousand-word autobiography; I began with a description of the fading lonely sunlight outside my dormitory window, went back through the years with Skip, and concluded with much rhetoric in the same dormitory six hours later. One sentence read: “My dog and I wandered the woods and swamplands of our home shooting squirrels.” To which the teacher appended the comment: “Who was the better shot, you or the dog?” When I telephoned my parents from college, they got Skip to bark at me from the other end. When I came home in the summers we did the same old things, but it was different—not that I was not as close to him as I had been, but that I was not a boy anymore, and that the whole outside world was beckoning to me.
And that Skip himself had somehow grown old. He was eleven when I graduated from college, and feeble, with arthritis in his legs. Sometimes he still had the devilish look of eye, but he did not retrieve sticks anymore, and preferred lying in the shade of the trees, or under the steps to the back door, and he did not want to ride in the car, and he never woke me up in the mornings; it was I who had to wake him up.
In a wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by
Dreaming as the summers die.
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
I won a scholarship to England to complete my studies; I would be away three years. The day came when my parents had to drive me to meet the train East, where I would take an oceanliner. I knew I would never see Skip again.
My parents were waiting in front of the house when I went to the backyard to say good-bye to him. He was lying under our elm tree, the one in which he had trapped Bubba and me years before, with the same old tree house up there, a little forlorn and neglected now. I sat beside him not far from the grave of the little kitten we had buried those years ago and rubbed the back of his neck, in the spot he had always wanted to be rubbed. He lifted his head and looked at me, then put his head in my lap, nuzzling me with his nose as he had done the first time I had seen him as a puppy. I told him I had to go and that I would miss him. He looked at me again, and licked my cheek. “Thank you, boy” I whispered. Then I left without looking back.
But as the car pulled away from the house, I looked back. Skip was walking along the front lawn, and then sat down and gazed at me. I watched him until he was just a tiny speck.
A month later there was a transatlantic call for me at Oxford University. I went to the front lodge of my college to take it. “Skip died,” Daddy said. He and my mother had wrapped him in my baseball jacket and put him in the ground, close to the grave of the little kitten.
I wandered alone among the landmarks of the gray medieval town. A dozen chimes were ringing among the ancient spires and cupolas and quadrangles, all this so far in miles and in spirit from the small place he and I had once dwelled. Walking alone in the teasing rain, I remembered our days together on this earth. The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, and love, and death: Old Skip was my brother.
They had buried him under our elm tree, they said—yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.
Morris, Willie.
My dog Skip / by Willie Morris. — ist ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-55816-9
v3.0
My Dog Skip Page 9
