Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  No, there’s little cause for real happiness among the animal people and scant opportunity for self-congratulation. (Peter Singer says about Animal Liberation, “When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald’s to see how successful I’ve been.”)

  Public awareness and revulsion are often raised only to fade or be circumvented. Commercial whaling has never been outlawed; the clubbing of seals has resumed; trade in exotic species is brisk; bills pending in the House and Senate would allow tuna fishermen to again use netting methods that would kill thousands of dolphins and still be able to label their product as “dolphin safe” (sort of a joke on the little kids). The USAir Arena itself, so vast and impersonal, so disconcertingly inert, only emphasized the gargantuan task the animal people had taken on, and the gaunt specter of hopeless helplessness appeared more than once. Between speeches, people would wander out to the encircling satellite area and line up for the beyond-veggie vegan food that the arena’s concessionaires were serving up with a certain amount of puzzlement. The Franks-a-Lot stand was sensibly shuttered. (The animal people are vegetarians. They’d better be if they don’t want to be accused of being hypocritical. Of course, by being unhypocritical, they can be accused of being self-righteous.)

  On the fourth day of the World Congress there was a March for Animals, from the Ellipse up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol. Any parade watcher who had expected to see animals (as though animal rights activists were all Episcopalians going to some fun-filled blessing of the beasts at church and taking their rats and snakes and dogs and burros and pigs with them) would have been disappointed. And anyone who had expected to see eccentricity incarnate in the marching crowd would have been disappointed as well. They appeared to be ordinary, caring, middle-class Americans marching for justice. Yet has any group in this country ever had such an extremist agenda, based utterly on non-self-fulfillment and non-self-interest? The animal people are calling for a moral attitude toward a great and mysterious and mute nation. Their quest is quixotic; their reasoning, assailable; their intentions, almost inarticulateable. The implementation of their vision would seem madness. But the future world is not this one. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but to humankind’s intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn’t it?

  Electric Chair

  THE PRACTICALITY OF DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION WAS PROVEN in Thomas Edison’s odd Menlo Park Laboratory in 1888. Edison allowed an engineer named Harold Brown to fiddle around in the dynamo room, pushing cats and dogs onto a metal plate electrified with alternating current. Edison did not care for alternating current. He didn’t understand it. He liked direct current. But a competitor, George Westinghouse, was proving to be successful combining high-voltage AC with a transformer, transmitting farther and cheaper than Edison could with his DC methods. Westinghouse had had some unfortunate accidents, however, and Edison never tired of adding up the competition’s volts (“HOLY MOSES!” he wrote) and emphasizing their dangers in letters and memorandums.

  In order to demonstrate how awful and potentially deadly AC was, Edison allowed Brown to experiment, and after sizzling some fifty animals, Brown declared AC a perfect electrical medium for efficient extermination and inaugurated a campaign against Westinghouse as a “merchant of death.” Brown also devised an “electrical cap and shoes” and sold them, along with three AC dynamos, to the state of New York for $8,000. The state, which had been seeking a more modern alternative to hanging, was enthralled. State officials added a chair and some straps and wanted to call it something like electromort or dynamort. Edison slyly suggested that they call it Westinghousing and continued to lead more animals to their death—dogs, calves, a horse, and an elephant—to prove AC’s dangers on one hand, and awesome effectiveness on the other. “I have not failed to seek practical demonstration,” Edison wrote. “I have taken life—not human life—in the belief that the end justified the means.”

  Hawk

  GLENN GOULD BATHED HIS HANDS IN WAX AND THEN THEY felt new. He didn’t like to eat in public. He was personally gracious. He was knowledgeable about drugs. He loved animals. In his will, he directed that half his money be given to the Toronto Humane Society. He hated daylight and bright colors. His piano chair was fourteen inches high. His music was used to score Slaughterhouse-Five, a book he did not like. After he suffered his fatal stroke, his father waited a day to turn off the respirator because he didn’t want him to die on his stepmother’s birthday. When Glenn Gould wrote checks, he signed them Glen Gould because he was afraid that by writing the second n he would make too many squiggles. He took prodigious amounts of Valium and used makeup. He was once arrested in Sarasota, Florida, for sitting on a park bench in an overcoat, gloves, and muffler, attire the police deemed suspiciously unsuitable for the climate. He was a prodigy, a genius. He had dirty hair. He had boring dreams. He probably believed in God.

  My mind said, You read about Glenn Gould and listen to Glenn Gould constantly, but you don’t know anything about music. If he were alive, you wouldn’t have anything you could say to him. . . .

  A composer acquaintance of mine dismissed Glenn as a performer.

  Glenn Gould loved the idea of the Arctic, but he had a great fear of the cold. He was a virtuoso. To be a virtuoso you must have an absolutely fearless attitude toward everything, but Glenn was, in fact, worried, frightened, and phobic. The dogs of his youth were named Nick and Banquo. As a baby, he never cried but hummed. He thought that the key of F minor expressed his personality.

  You have no idea what that means, my mind said. You don’t really know what it is he’s doing. You don’t know why he’s brilliant.

  He could instantly play any piece of music from memory. On the whole he did not like works that progressed to a climax and then to a reconciliation. The Goldberg Variations, which Glenn is most widely known for, were written by Bach for harpsichord. The story goes that Bach was visiting one of his students, Johann Goldberg, who was employed by a Count von Keyserling, the Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony. The count had insomnia and wanted some music that would help him through the dark hours. The first notes of the Goldberg Variations are inscribed on Glenn’s tombstone.

  My dog rose from his bed and walked beneath the table, which he barely cleared. He put his chin on my knee. He stood there for a few moments, not moving. I could see nothing but his nose. I loved kissing his nose. It was my hobby. He was a big black German shepherd with accents of silver and brown. He had a beautiful face. He looked soulful and dear and alert. He was born on October 17, 1988, and had been with us since Christmas Day of that year. He was now almost nine years old. He weighed one hundred pounds. His name was Hawk. He seemed to fear nothing. He was always looking at me, waiting for me. He just wanted to go where I was going. He could be amusing, he had a sense of humor, but mostly he seemed stoic and watchful and patient. If I was in a room, he was in that room, no other. Of course we took long walks together and many cross-country trips. He was adept at ferry crossings and checking into motels. When he could not accompany me, I would put him in a kennel, once for as long as two weeks. I felt that it was good for him to endure the kennel occasionally. Life was not all good, I told him. Though mostly life was good. He had a series of collars over the years. His most recent one was lavender. He had tags with his various addresses and phone numbers on them and a St. Francis medal with the words “protect us.” He had a collection of toys. A softball, and squeaky toys in the shapes of a burglar, a cat, a shark, a snowman, and a hedgehog that once made a snuffling noise like a hedgehog but not for long. They were collected in a picnic basket on the floor, and when he was happy, he would root through the basket and select one. He preferred the snowman. His least favorite was a large green and red toy—its shape was similar to a large bone, but it was an abstraction, it lacked charm. Hawk was in a hundred photographs.
He was my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy, my love. On the following day he would attack me as though he wanted to kill me.

  Regarding life, it is much the best to think that the experiences we have are necessary for us. It is by means of experience that we develop and not through our imagination. Imagination is nothing. Explanation is nothing. One can only experience and somehow describe—with, in Camus’s phrase, lucid indifference. At the same time, experience is fundamentally illusory. When one is experiencing emotional pain or grief, one feels that everything that happens in life is unreal. And this is a right understanding of life.

  I loved Hawk and Hawk loved me. It was the usual arrangement. Just a few days before, I had said to him, This is the life, isn’t it, honey? We were picnicking on Nantucket. We were on the beach with a little fire. There was a beautiful sunset. Friends had given my husband and me their house on the island, an old farmhouse off the Polpis Road. Somehow, on the first night at the house, Hawk had been left outside. When he was on the wrong side of a door, he would never whine or claw at it; he would stare at it fixedly. I had fallen into a heavy sleep.

  I was exhausted. I was always exhausted, but I didn’t go to a doctor. I had no doctor, no insurance. If I was going to be very sick, I would just die, I thought. Hawk would mourn me. Dogs are the best mourners in the world, as everyone knows. In my sleep, in the strange bed in the old farmhouse, I saw a figure at the door. It was waiting there clothed in a black garbage bag and bandages. I woke and without hesitation got up and went to the door and opened it, and Hawk came in. Oh I’m so sorry, I said to him. He settled down at the foot of the bed with a great comfortable sigh. His coat was cool from the night. I felt that he had tried to project himself through to me, that he had been separated from me through some error, some misunderstanding, and this, clearly, was something neither of us wanted. It had been a bad transmission, but it had done the job and done it without frightening me. What a resourceful boy! I said to him. Oh there are ghosts in that house, our friends said later. Someone else said, You know, ghosts frequently appear in bandages.

  Before Hawk, I had had a number of dogs who died before their time, from grim accident or misfortune, taken from me unprepared in the twinkling of an eye. Shadrach, Nichodemus, Angel . . . Nichodemus wasn’t even old enough to have learned to lift his leg. They were all good dogs, faithful. They were innocents. Hawk was the only one I didn’t name from the Bible. I named him from Nature, wild Nature. My parents always had dogs too, German shepherds, and my mother would always say, You have to talk to a dog, Joy, you’ve got to talk to them. It ended badly for my mother and father’s dogs over the years and then for my mother and father. My father was a Congregational minister. I am a Christian. Kierkegaard said that for the Christian, the closer you keep to God and the more involved you get with him, the worse for you. It’s as though God was saying . . . You might as well go to the fair and have a good time with the rest. Don’t get involved with me—it will only bring you misery. After all, I abandoned my own child. I allowed him to be killed. Christianity, Kierkegaard said, is related only to the consciousness of sin.

  We were in Nantucket during dies caniculares, the dog days of summer, but it was a splendid time. Yet there was something wrong with me. My body had turned against me and was full of browsing, shifting pain. The pain went anywhere it wanted to. My head ached, my arms and legs and eyes, my ribs hurt when I took a deep breath. Still, I walked with Hawk, we kept to our habits. I didn’t want to think about it, but my mind said, You have to, you have to do something, you can’t just do nothing, you know. . . . Some days were worse than others. On those days, I felt crippled. I was so tired. I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate. Even so, I spent long hours reading and listening to music. Bach, Mahler, Strauss. Glenn thought that the “Metamorphosen” of Strauss was the ultimate. I listened to Thomas de Hartmann play the music of Gurdjieff. I listened to Kathleen Ferrier sing Mahler and Bach and Handel and Gluck. She sang the famous aria from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice—“What Is Life.” We listened to the music over and over again.

  Hawk had engaging habits. He had presence. He was devoted to me. To everyone, this was apparent. But I really knew nothing of his psychology. He was no Tulip or Keeper or Bashan who had been analyzed by their writers. He knew sit, stay, down, go to your place. He was intelligent, he had a good memory. And surely, I believed, he had a soul.

  The friends who had given us the house on Nantucket insisted that I see a doctor about my malady. They made an appointment for me with their doctor in New York. We would leave the Island, return to our own home in Connecticut for a few days, then put Hawk into the kennel and drive into the city, a little over two hours away.

  I can’t remember our last evening together.

  On the morning my husband and I were to drive into the city, I got up early and took Hawk for a long walk along accustomed trails. I was wearing a white sleeveless linen blouse and poplin pants. My head pounded, I could barely put one foot ahead of the other. How about lupus? my mind said. How about rheumatoid arthritis? Well, we’ll know more soon. . . . We drove, then, to the kennel. It’s called Red Rock, and Hawk had been there before; they liked him there, he’d always been a gentleman there. When we drove in, Hawk looked disconsolate yet resigned. I left him in the car while I went into the office. I was looking for Fred, big, loud, gruffly pleasant Fred, but he didn’t appear. One of his assistants did, a girl named Lynn. Lynn knew Hawk. He’s only going to be here for one night, right? Lynn said. I went out to get him. I put the leash on him, his blue, rather grimy leash, and he jumped out of the car and we walked into the office. Lynn had opened another door that led to a row of cement runs. We stood in that doorway, Hawk and I. All right then, I said. I was bent forward slightly. He turned and looked at me and rose and fell upon me, seizing my breast. Immediately, as they say, there was blood everywhere. He tore at my breast, snarling, I think, I can’t remember if he was snarling. I turned, calling his name, and he turned with me, my breast still in his jaws. He then shifted and seized my left hand, and after an instant or two, my right, which he ground down upon, shifting, getting a better grip, always getting a better grip with his jaws. I was trying to twist his collar with my bleeding left hand but I was trying not to move either. Hawk! I kept calling my darling’s name, Hawk! Then he stopped chewing on my hand, and he looked at me coldly. Fred had been summoned by then and had a pole and a noose, the rig that’s used for dangerous dogs, and I heard him say, He’s stopped now. I fled to the car. My blouse was soaked with blood, it was dripping blood. I drove home sobbing. I’ve lost my dog, I’ve lost my Hawk. My mind didn’t say anything. It was all it could do to stay with me as I sobbed and drove, my hands bleeding on the wheel.

  I thought he had bitten off my nipple. I thought that when I took off my blouse and bra, the nipple would fall out like a diseased hibiscus bud, like the eraser on a pencil. But he hadn’t bitten it off. My breast was bruised black, and there were two deep punctures in it and a long raking scratch across it and that was all. My left hand was bleeding hard from three wounds. My right hand was mauled.

  At home I stood in the shower, howling, making deep ugly sounds. I had lost my dog. The Band-Aids we put over my cuts had cartoon characters all over them. We didn’t take our medicine cabinet very seriously. For some reason I had papered it with newspaper pictures of Bob Dole’s hand clutching its pen. I put clean clothes on, but the blood seeped around the Band-Aids and stained them too. I put more Goofy and Minnie Band-Aids on and changed my clothes again. I wrapped my hand in a dish towel. Hawk’s water dish was still in the kitchen, his toys were scattered around. I wanted to drive into the city and keep my appointment with the doctor; he could look at my hand. It seemed only logical. I just wanted to get in the car and drive away from home. I wouldn’t let my husband drive. We talked about what had happened as being unbelievable. We hadn’t yet started talking about it as being a tragedy. I’ll never see him again, I’ve lost my dog, I said. Let’s not ta
lk about that now, my husband said. As we approached the city, I tried to compose myself for the doctor. Then I was standing on the street outside his office, which was on East Eighty-fifth Street, trying to compose myself. I looked disheveled, my clothes were stained, I was wearing high-top sneakers. Some people turned as they were walking by and made a point of staring at me.

  He was a cheerful doctor. He put my hand in a pan of inky red sterilizing solution. He wanted to talk about my malady, the symptoms of my malady, but he was in fact thinking about the hand. He went out of the examining room for a while, and when he came back, he said, I’ve made an appointment for you to see an orthopedic surgeon. This doctor was on East Seventy-third Street. You really have to do something about this hand, the first doctor said.