Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  Í like to remember her exactly as she was in those few minutes on that sultry night, a first-place ribbon in one hand, her dog’s lead in the other, listening with the enthusiasm of an ardent! newcomer as Leah went on and on about things that Rose must have heard a thousand times. She’d heard them all before, but she never heard them again. The next evening, as I learned later,; she took Caprice to the abandoned tennis court at Eliot Park-As they were training, the heat and humidity that had been building over the past few days finally broke in another of the violent electric storms and downpours we’d been having all summer. Rose was prepared for the rain, I heard. She had on a set of those waterproof pants and jackets you usually see on runners about a third her age. Jack gave her the outfit for Christmas, he told me later. He picked out the color to match her eyes: electric blue. Maybe he’d had a premonition. Lightning strikes farmers. It hits people who are swimming or fishing or playing golf. I’d never heard of it killing anyone who was out training a dog, but ordinary handlers quit when rain starts. Top handlers train for all weather conditions and all distractions. If the Flood itself had let loose and God had boomed out a Commandment, Caprice would have been prepared. Maybe Caprice was. It was Rose who reached out and touched the metal door of the all-metal chain link fence.

  Chapter 6

  THE human denizens of dogdom are America’s last true villagers. Every kennel club is a tiny town with strong home-group loyalties and a complex network of bonds with its neighbors: ties of history, rivalry, and divided allegiance. Like villagers flooding a market town, we gather en masse at dog shows, not only to transact our practical business but to renew our sense of oneness with our fellow citizens of the great and noble Republic of the American Kennel Club.

  Bess Stein, Leah’s Novice instructor at the AKC-member Nonantum Dog Training Club, had been judging lately at States Kennel Club and Continental Dog Association trials as well as teaching at two clubs on the south shore. During World War II, she worked with my own Cambridge Dog Training Club in the Dogs for Defense program that recruited and trained canine soldiers, and more than a decade afterward, she bought a golden retriever from my mother. All this is to say that it was Bess who called me on Saturday afternoon with the news of Rose Engle-man’s death by lightning.

  I heard the phone ring only because I’d come inside to refill my glass with real lemonade and Leah’s with fake. In the arid ninety degrees, Leah and I were playing Tom Sawyer with the section of fence that encloses the Appleton Street and driveway corner of my yard. We wore old T-shirts and jeans of mine— big on me, small on her—that had descended even below my relaxed standards for kennel clothes. Daubs of white Benjamin Moore augmented the bright freckles on Leah’s arms and nose and the paler ones on mine.

  I’m awkwardly blunt at breaking bad news, and especially because Leah had seemed so self-confident and almost nerveless, like a human malamute, I was unprepared for her sobbing. When I’d jammed the lid on the paint can and dropped the brushes in a bucket of water, I put my arm around her shoulders, and I could feel her shaking. We sat in the shade on the paint-spattered grass.

  “I shouldn’t have told you so...,” I started to say. “Bess just called.”

  “Did it hurt her a lot?” Leah was crying so hard that I had trouble making out the words. I found her suddenly a child and myself suddenly the grown-up.

  “I don’t think so. It must’ve been almost instant. I don’t know if it hurt. But if it did, it was only for a second. She was in the tennis court, at the park, where we had class the other night. This was last night, just before dark, when we had all the thunder. Remember?”

  She nodded.

  “It must’ve happened just when she was leaving. The lightning must have hit just when she was opening the door.” The door, of course, was metal. So was the entire high chain link fence surrounding the tennis court. Did the metal bum? Did it hurt? I wanted a real grown-up to assure me that it hadn’t. “Jack found her.”

  “What about Caprice?”

  “She came home alone. That’s how Jack knew something was wrong, because Caprice came home without Rose. He heard her scratching at the door. He went to look and he found Rose.”

  “Holly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we not paint anymore now?”

  A few minutes earlier, we’d both been Tom Sawyer. Now I was Aunt Polly, a character, I might add, I’d never liked: the enemy, the ultimate adult. Death means that someone has to be the grown-up, the person who gets stuck pretending to know what the hell is going on. When it comes to dogs, of course, I do know what the hell is going on, at least most of the time, and I don’t mind explaining it to them and telling them what we’re going to do about it and why. But when it comes to people? If Leah hadn’t been crying and asking questions, if she hadn’t been there at all, I’d probably have thrown a clean pair of jeans, a toothbrush, and my dogs into the car and driven to Owls Head, Maine, where Rose’s death would have been far away and where no one—certainly not my father—would have expected me to pay attention to the needs of human beings. I’d have written Jack a letter, sent a donation to a good cause, and, when some time had passed, I’d have talked with people about what a great handler Rose was.

  One of the advantages of living alone—not that anyone with two malamutes is really alone—is never having to explain why you have to leave town. You put the dogs in the car and go. There is no one—a cousin, for instance—who might assume that you’re running away. My mother disapproved of running away. Every time one of our dogs died—and with a lot of dogs, you have a lot of deaths—she made me watch everything, including the burials, especially the burials, because I was supposed to say good-bye and understand it was for keeps. The last one I watched was her own. I haven’t been to a funeral since then. They all feel like hers.

  We did not, of course, have to paint anymore. We washed the paint off our hands and sat glumly in the kitchen drinking tea, patting the dogs, and talking about Rose. To mourn Rose, we still wore our ragged old jeans and shirts, as if we’d torn our clothes in grief.

  “I want to send flowers,” Leah said. “Would roses be stupid?”

  “No, of course not, only you don’t usually send flowers. It’s not a Jewish custom. You send a basket of fruit or something. Or you take food. Or...”

  “So we can’t...”

  “Actually, I don’t know. Rose wasn’t Jewish, but Jack is. I know because one time Rose and I both took a handling seminar sometime around Christmas, and Vera—that was her last poodle, before Caprice—had on one of those Christmas collars. With lights? It’s a regular collar, but it has little green and red lights. They’re powered by a little battery in the collar, and they twinkle off and on.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “No. It’s only a nine-volt battery or something. Anyhow, when Rose walked in, Vera had on this collar, which wasn’t exactly like putting up a Christmas tree, but... Anyway, they did both, Christmas and Hanukkah, or maybe he didn’t do Christmas, but she did both. Besides, her name was Rose Marie.”

  “So?”

  “So Marie is not a very common Jewish name.”

  “Maybe she was half Jewish.”

  “I don’t think so, because his family wouldn’t have minded so much then, or at least I don’t think they would’ve, and they did. When he married Rose, his family sat shiva for him. You know what that means? For them, it was as if he’d died. Shiva is mourning. The family stays home for a week, to mourn. People bring food for them, and they visit, and, you know, pay their respects. It’s instead of a wake or visiting hours or whatever.”

  “With the body right there? Yuck.”

  I shook my head. “For Orthodox Jews, the funeral has to be right away, within twenty-four hours. This is after.”

  “Is Jack doing that?”

  “I don’t know.” I expected her to ask how we could avoid going, but she looked brighter-eyed than she had since I’d told her about Rose’s death.

  “I
f he is,” she asked, “can we go?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m sure he’d appreciate it. And I’ll ask around and make sure it’s okay, but if you want to take roses, or send them, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We can do the traditional thing, too. We’ll take food.”

  “There’s a slight problem with that, isn’t there?” She managed a quirky little smile. “You know.”

  “I know what?”

  “That you don’t cook, exactly.”

  “Relax,” I said. “I know not to show up with homemade dog biscuits.” Actually, why not? In her own way, Caprice was presumably sitting shiva, too. “Anyway, it’s not such a bad idea.”

  “No!”

  “We can buy something.”

  “Don’t you even have a cookbook?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said smugly, “I do.” I retrieved it from a kitchen drawer and handed it to her. It was one of those spiral-bound compilations of everybody’s favorite recipes, the kind of cookbook that PTAs sell to raise money, but this one hadn’t come from a PTA. It was folded open, and I handed it to Leah that way.

  She read incredulously: “ ‘Preparation H works wonders on those little cuts and scrapes your horse is always getting.’ ”

  “You’re in the wrong section,” I said. “It’s from a humane society. There’s stuff for people somewhere.”

  She flipped pages. “Chicken salad, maybe? Unless it’s for chickens.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “Make a list.”

  But the sadness hit us again, and that time, we both cried and hugged the dogs. Later, we shopped and cooked together, and for once, I didn’t mind and wasn’t bored because, Leah and I decided, we weren’t just cooking, but performing a ritual, one of the traditional rites of women. I also spent some time on the phone calling a few people who might not have heard and taking calls from others who wanted to make sure I had.

  The ritual distracted Leah, but didn’t, of course, answer her original questions. When Steve showed up at six and I told him what had happened, the first thing she asked him was how much it had hurt.

  Steve is always gentle. “People say that first, they feel nothing,” he told her. “That’s what this uncle of mine says. He was out on his tractor and got hit by lightning. First he didn’t feel a thing, and then it was like he got hit with a giant hammer. Sometimes there’s total amnesia.”

  “Is he all right?” Leah asked.

  “Reborn. His breathing stopped, heart stopped. Lightning death, it’s called. But one of the guys revived him, right away. What can happen is that the heart starts again, but respiration doesn’t, and then there’s brain damage. But some people just recover. Anyway, he decided since he’d died and come back to life, it was a sign. So he swore off alcohol and tobacco. You could say it basically improved his health.”

  “So why did Rose...?”

  “If it was a direct strike, maybe. Not a shock, but a direct strike. What tends to happen is that people are either killed outright or they’re stunned, like my uncle, and they make a full recovery, maybe because what they got was a shock, not the full force.”

  “But,” I interrupted, “if it was because she was touching the metal fence...?”

  “So how much did it hurt her?” Leah persisted.

  “If she’d lived, she might not have remembered it,” Steve said. “Chances are real good that everything just stopped. Her heart stopped beating. She stopped breathing. Just like that.” His eyes were green and serious and fixed hard on Leah. “She did not lie there in pain. She did not struggle.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, but the tension left her face, and when Jeff Cohen called to invite her to a party in Newton, I could tell that she’d had enough of adult grief and adult explanation.

  “It doesn’t seem very, um, respectful,” she said.

  “Leah, Rose would not have minded,” I assured her. “She’d be glad to hear that you cried for her and that you’ll miss her, but you don’t need to stay home. Do you want the car?”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Fine.” One of the reasons I’d agreed to have her stay in the first place was that she did drive and wouldn’t have to depend on me to ferry her around. “But take Kimi with you. Not to the party. Just leave her in the car, with the windows open enough so she gets air but nobody can get a hand in to reach the locks. If you get a flat or something, and you have to walk somewhere, you won’t be alone.” (At night, with the windows open, fine, but never, ever on a hot day—dogs are horribly vulnerable to heatstroke.)

  After Leah left, I told Steve some things I hadn’t wanted her to hear. “I keep worrying that she was burned, that when she reached out to the gate and touched it, what happened was like a horrible burn. I kept trying to tell Leah that she didn’t feel anything, but it keeps eating at me. And not only that it hurt, but that it hurt in some really intense, gruesome way, like those scenes in movies, electrocutions. It seems like the worst way to die. You downplayed it to her. I know you did.”

  “In animals, it can shatter bones,” he said reluctantly. “Teeth. Most of the time, you don’t see burns or marks, but you can. It can be like I told her. But how do we know? We hear what people say if they survive. We don’t hear the others. It is fast. That’s true. And there can be amnesia, but not always. The truth is I think it can be excruciating. I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 7

  WITH the rigid formality of adolescence, Leah dressed herself in only one layer of nonathletic black and wound the indomitable radiance of her hair into a subdued knot for our visit to Jack Engleman. In lieu of attending the Sunday morning funeral (do I need to make excuses? I could not go), I’d had a fancy basket of fruit delivered to the house. It was a poor substitute, I know, but Jack wanted the funeral small and the burial private, Bess had told me, and she’d suggested that we visit sometime in the late afternoon.

  “Are you nervous about it?” I asked Leah as she artfully mounded the chicken salad on a platter of lettuce.

  “No. Why would I be nervous?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be afraid everybody would be crying. Or you wouldn’t know what to expect.”

  “I don’t exactly know what to expect, but it won’t be anything I can’t handle,” said Leah, a human malamute, after all.

  (“Projection,” my friend and tenant Rita commented later. “You project a lot onto that kid. Just who was anxious?” Obviously, Rita is a therapist, and not the physical kind.)

  On my way out to the car, I saw Kevin Dennehy attacking the scrubby row of barberry between his mother’s yard and mine with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers. I once tried to talk Kevin into replacing the ugly, prickly stuff with something classy like hemlock or juniper, and I even offered to split the cost. He rejected the proposal, and although he never said so outright, I had the impression that I’d made a serious gaffe, like offering to pay for half of a new Audi to avoid the humiliation °f having his Chevy visible from my kitchen window.

  When he saw us, he quit stabbing the barberry and lumbered over, holding the pruners with one hand and wiping the sweat off his face with the other.

  He rumbled in my ear in what was, I think, supposed to be a whisper: “Can I have a word with you?” When Kevin lowers his voice, he adjusts the pitch, not the volume. When I sent Leah back inside to put out extra water for the dogs and make sure the answering machine was on, he said, “The wake?”

  We’d seen him on our way back from shopping, and I’d told him about Rose.

  “Sort of. Visiting the house.”

  “Pacemaker,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Gadget implanted in her chest.”

  “I know what a pacemaker is. Rose had one? So that’s why... What’s this secrecy business? A pacemaker isn’t a treatment for VD or something.”

  “Eliot Park,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You still going to dog school there?”

  “I know what you’re worried about. Th
e graffiti, right? You think there’s some sinister connection with dog training at the park, between dog training and the graffiti and what happened to Rose. Well, the only connection is that Rose lived near the park and trained her dog there, so she’s the one who arranged to have the club use it. If we’d never been there, she’d have been training in the tennis courts. The club had nothing to do with anything. But obviously her death was less of a freak accident than we thought. I mean, a pacemaker? With water and electricity?”

  He shrugged.

  “Hey, how did you know that Rose had a pacemaker?”

  But Leah came down the back stairs, and Kevin wagged his big head back and forth. He apparently didn’t want to discuss an autopsy in front of her. He managed to lower the volume of his voice for the duration of two syllables: “Inquest.”

  The woman who opened Jack Engleman’s front door had coarse salt-and-pepper hair swept away from the thick, moist skin of her face, and short, stubby fingers with blunt nails. She introduced herself as Charlotte Zager, told us she was Jack’s sister, and then grabbed my hand and twisted it as ferociously as if it were a decayed molar with stubborn roots that was resisting extraction. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was a dentist.

  The smallest of the three or four baskets of fruit on the tables in the hallway may have been ours, or maybe some of the apples and pears piled in a great silver bowl on the living room coffee table had come from the one I’d sent. Protestant death smells like gladioli, Jewish death like fruit. The oddest thing about all of those pineapples, all of the dozens of bunches of grapes and bananas, and the hundreds of pears, grapefruit, oranges, and apples was that no one seemed to be eating any fruit at all. In the dining room, people were helping themselves to bagels, lox, cream cheese, and tomatoes, and some of the people in the hall and living room were eating brownies and pastry, but everyone was treating the fruit as if it were made of wax.

  Rose’s death had dimmed the glow of Jack’s skin, and when you looked in his eyes, it was easy to tell that he wasn’t there. Even so, he welcomed us. Had anyone spoken to him the word Kevin had whispered to me? I felt shy and took his hand, but Leah threw her arms around him and held him, then sat with him on the long flower-print couch opposite the empty fireplace. It seemed to me that he was comforted by her youth and that with no sense of age at all, she offered him a timeless, immediate grace that I’d have been glad to give if I’d known where to find it—if I had it in me at all.