Ivy Takes Care

by Rosemary Wells

  On the way home, Ivy got to hold the pup in the backseat of the car. She held his front quarters on her lap and whispered in his outsized ears. She stroked him under the chin. The pup curled up and went right to sleep with the rhythms of the stroking and the car swaying.

  Mr. Burgess explained that overshot and undershot meant teeth not properly aligned. Straight stifles were hind legs with no bend at the knee, and fiddle fronts were front feet that turned out. “All these things keep a dog from working to the maximum,” said Mr. Burgess, “and he won’t be in a show ring for long if he’s got any one of ’em.”

  “What about slaggy, draggy hindquarters?” asked Billy Joe.

  “Lots of shepherds are slanted down in the back,” said Mr. Burgess. “As if they were half sitting. It’s a poor trait to breed into a dog. I don’t like it.”

  Mr. Burgess peered into the rearview mirror and smiled at Ivy, who held his pup in her lap. “All my dogs are named after German operas, but this one is different. He has a royal nose. I think he looks like the emperor Montezuma. I am going to call him Inca.”

  They stopped to buy a wire-sided dog crate at the feed store in Carson. Then home they went, with a car full of dog food and toys and a brand-new collar and woven leather leash for Inca. Ivy did not mention to Mr. Burgess that Montezuma was an Aztec, according to her history book.

  “How come you put him in that box?” asked Billy Joe. “Seems like you’re jailing him up, to me!”

  “You’ll see,” said Mr. Burgess, stuffing a pillow and a towel into the crate. The next moment, Inca started chewing the pillow.

  “No, Inca!” said Ivy, but Mr. Burgess said, “Put your hand in the crate with him, Ivy. Take the pillow out of his mouth. Say, ‘Leave it!’ and tap him on the nose sharply with one finger.”

  Ivy took the pillow from Inca’s mouth and said, “Leave it!” over and over, tapping his nose and making her voice stern. “It’s not working, Mr. Burgess,” she said.

  “It will,” said Mr. Burgess.

  After ten more times, Inca stopped bothering his pillow. He put his head between his paws and mooned his eyes Ivy-ward.

  “Now praise him,” said Mr. Burgess. “The treat is a message. It doesn’t need to be bigger than a good-size pebble.”

  “Good dog!” Ivy said, giving Inca half a biscuit.

  “He’s learned two things,” Mr. Burgess said. “Not to chew his pillow and the words leave it. Very important!”

  “I want to do some stuff with him, too,” said Billy Joe.

  “Good!” said Mr. Burgess. “See that hill on the other side of the paddock? First give him some water, then take him for a run all the way up there. When you come back, look for ticks and burrs. Let him empty himself out, and then give him more water.”

  As Inca took off with Billy Joe, Hoover and Coover watched with cool eyes, barely thumping their tails in their sunny spots on the porch. Billy Joe sprinted up into the hills with Inca beside him. The puppy raced just as hard and fast as Billy Joe could go.

  Cora Butterworth came out of the house. She stood and watched, hands on hips with a wet dish towel crammed in her apron. She grinned. “Mr. Burgess,” she said, “you’re good for that boy. He should run up there fourteen times a day, far as I’m concerned. Run the bejiggers out of him! Only time that boy isn’t in trouble is when he’s asleep or on the move.”

  Inca was happy to drink his water after his big run. Contented, Inca curled up in his cage with his pillow without once putting his teeth into it.

  “That’s enough for today,” said Mr. Burgess. “We’ll leave him here in my room and let him howl while we go to the big house and eat. He’ll learn that yowling gets him exactly nowhere.”

  In the morning, Ivy played tug-of-rope with Inca, so he knew to play with the right toys and not chew up anything belonging to people.

  Ivy could hear Mr. Burgess’s screen door squeak open at six a.m., much earlier than any of the other ranch guests. He fed Inca outdoors and kept him out until he relieved himself so he didn’t mess the house.

  “The dog’s master or mistress is in charge of what goes in and what comes out and when,” Mr. Burgess explained to Ivy. Every time Inca was about to relieve himself, Mr. Burgess said the word go very loud. Then he praised Inca when he got it right. The first day was a Monday. By Wednesday, after hearing go! so many times, Inca got the picture. Go! was a clear command. He did not once mess up the house.

  “All this eating and drinking and going to the bathroom outdoors!” said Ivy.

  “That’s the way,” said Mr. Burgess. “It’s a day’s work training a dog, and you have to be as fair as a nun on a hockey field.”

  It was Billy Joe who took Inca for his big run every afternoon. It was Ivy who did the obedience training. She learned to loop a choke-chain collar the right way so it didn’t hurt Inca’s throat and taught Inca the command heel so he’d walk nicely at her side and not pull.

  Ivy pushed down Inca’s backside and taught him to sit, each time giving him a tiny bit of dried liver, which in Inca’s mind seemed to be the snack food of the gods. When Inca got it right, she smoothed his soft red ears between her fingers and told him what a good boy he was.

  “Oh, I wish you were mine!” Ivy whispered to him, but she knew there would be no expensive German shepherd show dogs in her future.

  Ivy didn’t give Inca too much to remember at once. Heel was easy. Sit took a few days, because Inca’s tail was so waggy and he sat on top of it while it was going like a windmill, and then he’d fall over and bite his own tail to get it to stop.

  Everyone in the guest lounge at the Red Star Ranch laughed at this, but Mr. Burgess held up his hand.

  “No, please,” he said, “dogs hate to be laughed at, so you’ll just have to chuckle into your root beer so he can’t hear you.”

  Mr. Burgess showed Ivy how to make Inca lie down by putting the treat between his sitting front feet and giving it to him only when he lay down. Down! was hard. Inca was a big, squirmy puppy, and when Ivy pushed him down, he rolled over and kissed her.

  “Don’t let him do that!” said Mr. Burgess. “Training is work. Shepherds love work, and they understand when you take it seriously.”

  Come and stay followed on from down. “German shepherds live to serve,” said Mr. Burgess. “They love to follow commands. So, when we’re finished with the basics, we’ll have Inca jumping hurdles and picking out the toy I want him to fetch from a whole pile of toys.”

  Mr. Burgess taught Ivy to teach Inca one new skill at a time, and they went over and over the commands until the puppy knew these were the most important words in his life. Ivy never used the word no because Mr. Burgess said everybody used no a thousand times a day, and the dog could not understand it after a while. Leave it! was a much clearer command.

  “He’s the best dog who ever lived!” Ivy said to Mr. Burgess.

  “No,” said Mr. Burgess. “He’s just a good shepherd. They’re all that way.”

  On the last night of Mr. Burgess’s stay, everyone sat down to a So-Long-It’s-Been-Good-to-Know-You supper, which was a Red Star Ranch tradition. Ivy’s mother made leg of lamb and served it up to the guests with mint sauce. Inca sat by the sofa. He was not allowed to beg at the table and knew he would be banished from the room if he did. His gimlet eyes didn’t miss a piece of the lamb as it went from guest fork to guest mouth. Ivy kept a little piece of gristle aside for Inca to have in the kitchen later, when he followed his down and stay commands.

  Suddenly the telephone rang. It was for Mr. Burgess. When he returned to the supper table, his face was pale with worry. Sweat gleamed and beaded on his forehead. Ivy thought it might have been Mrs. Burgess making a nasty call. That would not have been the first time an unpleasant phone call had happened during supper at the Red Star. Maybe one of his shepherds at home was hurt or sick.

  “Mr. Burgess?” said one of the new women guests, Mrs. Blanc. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

/>   Mrs. Blanc was a peppy little lady whose husband had made her give up the piano, her one joy in life. Mr. Blanc had cut a hole in the side of their apartment house in Pittsburgh and pushed the piano out through the hole, crashing it into the cement backyard, five stories down. This was according to Billy Joe, who happened, completely by accident, to run across one of Mrs. Blanc’s letters after she’d thrown it in the trash.

  Mr. Burgess leaned back in his chair and looked down the table at Ivy, who was serving vegetables to the guests.

  “That was American Airlines,” he said, his voice unsteady. “They have the vet’s certificate that I sent them so that Inca can travel with me on the plane tomorrow. Trouble is, they won’t take a pup this young. What am I going to do? I have to get home on tomorrow’s flight. My brother can only stay with my shepherds at home in Teaneck till tomorrow night. Oh, holy moly mackerel, what am I going to do?”

  Ivy knew the answer to the problem before she served the next spoonful of peas.

  “Well,” she said, “as you know, I have an animal-care service, Mr. Burgess. I can take care of Inca until he’s old enough to go. Then we’ll put him on a plane and fly him to New Jersey, if you make the arrangements.” She caught her mother’s eye, and her mother nodded. More money in the envelope marked U. was a good step along the way.

  “I’ll help, too!” said Billy Joe.

  All the color returned to Mr. Burgess’s face. “You will?” he asked shakily. “It would be for almost three weeks.”

  “Sure,” said Ivy. “I’ll keep up his training, too.”

  “I’ll run him up into the hills every day of the week,” put in Billy Joe.

  Mr. Burgess was so happy that he offered Ivy a ten-dollar bill and five to Billy Joe, right there on the spot.

  “You don’t have to do that, Mr. Burgess,” said Ivy. “I never charge but twenty-five cents a day. Three weeks is just five dollars, twenty-five cents.”

  Billy Joe’s eyes said, Shut up, Ivy, from across the room, but Ivy never shut up just because that silly boy wanted her to. She was saving her money for vet school. Billy Joe claimed he was saving his money for a beat-up motorcycle, except he never really saved it. He usually lost it in the laundry and his mother kept it, because she said all money found in the wash was hers to claim and give to the church, and if he didn’t lose it, Billy Joe liked to spend every dime that came his way on bubble gum and fireworks.

  Mr. Burgess made Ivy and Billy Joe keep the money. “Cheap at the price!” he said. “Besides, you’ll need some of it for dog food. Now, I say root beer all around!” he announced happily.

  When supper was finished, Mrs. Blanc went to the old, carved-up piano in the lounge. She banged out “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which was one of ten songs, all of them Christmas carols, that she said she knew how to play. Never mind it was only the middle of August.

  Although she would never have cut a hole in the wall of a house herself, Ivy was not sure Mrs. Blanc’s husband was completely in the wrong, back there in Pittsburgh.

  Next to the training, the best thing about Inca was nights. Inca’s crate was set up right next to Ivy’s bed. Ivy stretched out an arm and went to sleep each night with one or the other of Inca’s ears in her fingers. She talked the puppy down from the day’s excitement, always ending with, “Oh, Inca, I wish you were mine.” Ivy would never have a dog of her own. Her mother could tell her to the nickel just how much a dog would cost the family per year and would conclude by saying that they could not afford a dog like Inca in this lifetime.

  Billy Joe Butterworth was a can’t-sit-still boy if ever there was one, so he was not much for the repetitive work of dog training. Ivy recalled that he’d been the same way in third grade about his times tables. He couldn’t and wouldn’t and didn’t remember them, until his dad made him recite them in the kitchen for one hour every night by the clock, so that he mightn’t wind up as the village idiot. Somehow, those multiplication tables got etched into Billy Joe’s brain like the Pepsi-Cola song on the radio, but it wasn’t easy.

  But Billy Joe faithfully helped every evening after chores with the big Inca run. Probably, Ivy figured, Billy Joe was afraid if he didn’t work hard, she’d make him give Mr. Burgess’s five-dollar bill to her, and he’d probably already lost that five-dollar bill. It was probably laundry-clean from being in Billy’s Joe’s dirty jeans pocket and was probably at that very minute in the church collection plate.

  Mr. Burgess had shown Ivy how to make good use of a collection of old horse hurdles in the back of the barn. She set them up in a winter paddock. Using the command word hup!, she got Inca to go over a good four-footer with no trouble.

  Ivy dreamed that one day Inca might be a Utility Dog Excellent, the highest rank in the dog training world, according to Mr. Burgess. She would have contributed to this. Maybe Mr. Burgess would find a big dog show out West and invite her to the ringside.

  Ivy was just picturing this dream when Billy Joe’s voice rang out, “Ivy! Mail for you!”

  On top of the pile of bills and flyers was a postcard. The picture side had a photo of Silver Lake in New Hampshire. In the lake was a squad of dark-green canoes, paddled by smiling girls, with Allegro in yellow script on the bows.

  The message side simply read, Hi! I’m having a great summer — wish you were here! Annie.

  That was it? Ivy turned the postcard over and over. What did it mean? It was like a message from a stranger. Did Annie really wish Ivy were there? There was no way to know. Summer was practically over! Still, it was better than no postcard at all. But the ring had not been mentioned. Had the camp taken it from its wrapping and held it aside? Had the United States Post Office failed to deliver it?

  That night, Ivy’s letter to Annie took up three pages, the maximum allowed for a three-cent stamp. She only hoped that Annie was not so caught up with canoes and campfires that she had lost interest in things from home. And she hoped the letter would make it to New Hampshire before Annie was turned around and already headed home.

  In the morning, Ivy put the letter in their mailbox and turned up the flag. She was glad to be home, not in New Hampshire. She had seen the Allegro yearbook. Those eastern girls with their middy shirts and English saddles didn’t compare to beautiful Inca. She called Inca to her side. Ivy had collected a mess of old toys from the Butterworths’ attic and made Billy Joe put them in a bag, so the smell of her fingers would not be on any of them. It was all in a training book given to Ivy by Mr. Burgess, which Billy Joe had no patience to read.

  Billy Joe was leaning both arms on the fence behind her, chewing a piece of timothy grass. “What do you want those old toys for?” he wanted to know.

  “You’ll see,” said Ivy. She rubbed a six-inch shank of rope with her hands for a minute. Then Ivy made Inca fetch the rope over and over and over again. When she was ready, she got Billy Joe to throw one of her dad’s holey old leather gloves down next to the bit of rope and told Inca to fetch. Inca sniffed both glove and rope and chose the rope. He brought it back over the jump, sat, and dropped it at Ivy’s feet.

  “Bet he won’t do it with all these old toys and socks,” said Billy Joe.

  “Bet he will,” said Ivy. She knew it didn’t matter how many pieces of junk were on the ground. Inca would only pick up the one with her smell. Dogs’ noses were so good they could detect their person’s particular smell from a great distance.

  In an instant Inca picked up the rope again. This made Billy Joe go and cut up a whole length of clothesline into identical pieces. He spread them on the ground and mixed in the Ivy one near the middle.

  “Try that!” he said.

  Ivy smiled. She sent Inca over his hurdle. In one second he grabbed the right rope and brought it back.

  Billy Joe didn’t have a chance to say anything to that, because his mother’s voice rang out like a dinner bell from the kitchen.

  “Billy Joe!” she called. “You get my oven scrubbed out yet?”

  A couple of days later, when Inc
a was a full three months old, a manila envelope came in the mail for Ivy from Mr. Burgess in New Jersey. It contained a dog ticket for American Airlines to fly Inca to Newark, New Jersey, on the last Monday in August — just three days away! In a small silver wrapper was a tranquilizer pill, so Inca would sleep the whole journey. Also enclosed was another ten-dollar bill for Ivy’s dad, to pay for his trouble.

  “Ain’t trouble,” said Ivy’s father. “Put it in the envelope, honey. You got college to pay for. Don’t let that boy know a thing about it, either.”

  Inca was not a perfect dog. He liked to crawl on his belly, an inch at a time, toward the supper table when the guests were eating. No amount of leave its or down stays stopped him from begging ever so gently at the table and staring with false starving expressions at the guests. Ivy’s mom made the decision to keep Inca in a horse stall at supper time so he would not bother anyone. Inca howled from the stable because he could smell supper cooking in the kitchen across the way.

  It was over a last bite of a chicken wing that Ivy noticed an unusual silence. She excused herself from the table and ran out to the stable to see if Inca was doing all right in his stall. Her heart fell exactly as fast as a roller-coaster car when she saw the stall door open and no Inca inside.

  She ran to the Butterworths’ front door. “Where’s Inca?” she shouted at Billy Joe.

  “He’ll come back,” said Billy Joe. “I just hated seeing him all confined like a jailbird.”

  Ivy drew breath, narrowed her eyes, and swore at Billy Joe so no one but he could hear. “He’s my dog. He’s my responsibility, and you let him out into the night, you birdbrain!” she said.

  Jim Butterworth came to the door and stood behind Billy Joe.

  “He let Inca out,” explained Ivy. “He’s out there with coyotes and bears and I don’t know what-all.”

  “Son, why’d you do that?” asked his father.