by Sonny Brewer
“An interruption?” Diana asked, her voice tight. “You could call it a break. You could call it family time.” She left me alone in my study. By the time I’d stopped sulking and was ready to apologize, to ask what movies were playing, all the voices in the house had become silent behind the shutting of the front door. I sat for a moment longer, and then noticed Cormac was not in the room with me. I went out front and called him.
It was dusk, and I waited for him to stroll into the faint light spreading onto the porch and into the yard. I didn’t see him, didn’t hear the jingle of tags on his collar. I called him again, louder. Still no Cormac. I felt a nudge of panic. Three days ago, I’d left him outside in the afternoon, and he’d run across the wire to go exploring. I was buried in the book, and hadn’t even thought of him until I got a call from a neighbor that Cormac was at their house. Now I’d let him run off again. I yelled his name and headed down the steps. He came running full tilt around the corner.
“You scared me,” I said. His look said he had wondered when I’d miss him. Priorities was a word spoken in my head. Cormac sat, his tail still, and stared up at me. I made a mental note to call the people who sold me the underground fence again. I’d phoned once to complain Cormac was charging out of the yard.
“There’s a better transmitter and receiver,” Ken had said. We agreed on another two hundred and fifty bucks for a system upgrade. “I guarantee no dog, and only a few elephants will cross this baby,” he had said, his attempt at comedy. But I had not yet heard back from Ken.
Cormac and I were both oblivious just now to transmitters and receivers. We were headed for a walk. I had his leash in my hand and he was jumping like a mullet on a run. Every time I got his leash and for one reason or another delayed snapping it to his collar, he’d do a kind of bouncing levitation act. I swear I can’t see how he’s bending his legs and bunching his muscles when he does this. He gets happy for a walk and springs into the air, his body still mostly horizontal, grinning, his big tongue flopping out of his mouth. On the fourth or fifth airborne maneuver you want to say, “Jeez! It’s just a walk, just like the last one we took, just like the next one we’ll take.” But what you really want is to find a way in your complicated human mind to let go and get some of his simple, saturated joy for yourself.
I had to wait for him to come in for a landing to clip on his leash.
“Come on, Mick, let’s go put a bow on this package,” I said. I wanted to work on the book’s last pages at the round house of Henry Stuart. I first saw it twenty-five years ago, a strange-looking circular hut with a domed roof made of hand-poured concrete blocks. It sat in the middle of a paved parking lot situated between two rows of office buildings. Shaded by a single huge live oak with thick branches that dangled with Spanish moss, the hermit hut, as some know it, looked transported from a movie set, or a Hobbit shire.
In 1982 I became divorced and I was free to make some changes in my life. I went looking for a job that gave me more free time to write during the day. First, to help clear my head of emotional baggage, I spent six months of muscle-wringing work, barebacked under a hot sun tending the decks of barges shoved by a tugboat up and down the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway.
Then I thought about moving to New York or Los Angeles, but my daughter, Emily, was living near Fairhope, and I wouldn’t miss my weekend visits with her. So, if not a writerly loft in Manhattan, then a garage apartment in Fairhope and real estate sales seemed a good next option. Opening a bookstore, at this point, was not even a twinkle in my eye.
When I’d shown up for my first real estate class at an office complex just north of Fairhope, I was surprised to find the odd little round house squarely in the middle of the parking lot. It looked dropped there from some ancient time, seeming all the more out of place with asphalt crowding it on three sides. When I asked, a woman told me I was looking at “some kind of a house” built in the 1920s by an eccentric old man. The life story of that man, Henry James Stuart, would come to inform a book I’d write twenty-some years later.
When Cormac and I took our little hikes, I could hear Henry’s voice better, his story became more accessible. Strolling with Cormac I was more receptive to Henry Stuart’s ghost floating above the land. So a regular part of our schedule was long walks with Cormac to keep my mind open to the character. Two-thirds of The Poet of Tolstoy Park was stirred loose in my imagination by those walks. The best advice for writer’s block, for me: “Go walk the dog.” I knew I’d write imperfect fiction. But God didn’t stop with a few fine examples of pine trees, and I had decided to raise up my own tree in the forest.
We went outside on the porch to greet the April morning’s warmth, and struck out for the round house. I led Cormac to the Jeep to load him up for his short ride down the driveway, across the shock zone. “You know,” I said to him. “This is a pain in the neck. I wonder if—hmmm?” It suddenly seemed to me that a vehicle is a vehicle and a child’s red wagon qualifies as a vehicle for transporting a dog down a driveway. “Let’s try this,” I said. Cormac seemed game.
I went to the garage and got the boys’ wagon. The wooden side rails seemed perfect, would give the doggins a more secure ride. I pulled the wagon by its handle onto the driveway, and called for Cormac to get aboard. I bent over at the front, snapped my fingers inside the wagon. He started to get excited, picked up a piece of pine straw and vocalized his enthusiasm and curiosity and confusion. His tail swung back and forth with such energy that it would have raised a welt if it had struck a leg. Then it dawned on me. When loading him in the Jeep, I always said the same thing to him: “Get in the Jeep.”
So I snapped my fingers over the wagon and said, “Cormac, get in the Jeep.” He jumped right in, and took a seat, his tail hanging off the back of the wagon like a rudder moving side to side. We must have looked perfectly ridiculous. The drivers in both cars that passed as we rolled down the driveway broke into wide grins when they saw us, a man tugging a wagon load of reddish-brown dog. I didn’t care. And we crossed the fence that way each morning that we walked until we moved to another house years later.
Once at the street, I called Cormac from the wagon and we continued our hike to the round house. We dawdled, stopping two or three times for Cormac to sniff out some mysterious passage written on a bush or in the grass, which he occasionally snacked on after a brief reading.
“There have been some passages by McCarthy or Marquez that have made me feel the same way, Mickins,” I said at one such stop. I could have added other names of other writers who wrote stuff good enough to chow down on, but I don’t think Cormac would have recognized them. Ah, so much good writing, so little time. The great writers I love to read were an influence on my writing, but they also kept me from trying my own hand at fiction. Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy. I stood in stunned awe of their work. What was the point? If I couldn’t write that well, why spend the ink?
When we got to the round house, Cormac yipped and wiggled. He looked at the door, then back at me, then back at the door. I thought there might be some animal inside, a mouse, a stray cat. I thought of a snake, like the one I’d written into a scene in the book. I opened the narrow double-doors slowly, Cormac nudging at my calves. There were no visitors inside. At least that I could see. As my dog pushed past me into the circular room I wondered, for the twenty-third time, if Henry might be on the premises, and Cormac knew it. He looked around, sniffed the chair I always chose at the table, then struck his lizard-on-a-rock pose, stretching out flat as a rug on the floor. Before I could get my laptop out of the bag and powered-up, the novel file opened, Cormac’s eyes were closed. He’d made himself at home in Henry’s place.
Somehow in that mysterious place Henry seemed nearer. He’d called his land Tolstoy Park, and I talked myself into believing I could also feel Tolstoy there in the background.
I sat down at a table near a window. I slipped off my shoes and stretched my toes over to scratch Cormac’s back. He immediately rolled onto
his side and kicked his legs up. He wanted a belly rub. Somebody once told me that a dog turns over onto its back to indicate submission. And if they’re signaling a human, they will either curl their tail to cover their privates, or, if they trust you they won’t bother to cover up. Cormac’s tail was relaxed. He hadn’t given up on me.
I opened my notes file, scrolled down to find the list of people whose names I’d put into the acknowledgements section at the front of the book. I enjoyed constructing a brief narrative that told of each person’s help to me as I wrote The Poet of Tolstoy Park. When I finished, I’d added a page and a half to my manuscript. I was about to save and close the file, when Cormac gave a big sigh and turned over on his side, so completely at rest that I thought about joining him on the cool, shiny concrete floor of the round house. I watched his chest and belly rise and fall, watched his eyebrows twitch following the dream show in his head, and put my fingers back on the keyboard and wrote:
“And good old Cormac, my dog, lay so patiently near me as I wrote the book reminding me, like Kerouac’s cat, there is, finally, nothing so great about human endeavor or failings that should disturb our rest.”
It is interesting to me, this touch of irony: that Cormac himself inspired the counter maxim to his paragraph in my book’s acknowledgements. For when I lost my good dog Cormac, oh, how that failing disturbed my rest, and, curiously enough while walking in the bookwriter’s shoes.
ELEVEN
FIRST, THE LOUD whump startled me. Second, it surprised me to discover its source.
The house was empty except for me. Diana had gone to work, and the boys were off to school. I hadn’t noticed the gathering dark in the clouds to the west. There was a low sonorous roll of distant thunder. I went to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The wind rose, whipping the tall pines in my front yard.
There was the sound again. A thud, like something striking a wall. It was coming from inside. I went back into the house. The big thump came again. I went down the hall, into the kitchen. Then I saw Cormac, outside on the back porch, heaving himself against the French door. He stood on his hind legs to reach as high as he possibly could. I let him inside and, whining, he went around and around my legs. I sat down at the dining room table and patted my knees. Cormac came to lie on the floor, looking at me with his face between his paws. When the thunder boomed again, he jumped up and looked over his shoulder, then sat on his haunches between my knees. I looked at him, then sat on the floor and petted him, rubbing his head and down his back, until his breathing slowed to a normal rhythm.
I could not imagine what had changed for the doggins. Last week he had paid no mind to rumbling in the heavens; today the sound of thunder terrified him. It would come to pass that even the sound of rain would give him the jitters—Pavlov’s bell and all that. Cormac had, on some esoteric cue, reached back into his canine ancestry, back to a cave and the sound of a giant boulder rolling down a hill, to one of his forefathers smushed by the big rock, broken like the skull of a saber-tooth under the maul of one of the two-leggeds. The imprint on the gene coding was indelible.
Cormac, when he looks for a place to hide because thunder shakes the sky, would crawl into my lap if he’d still fit there. I wondered what that great trembling sound in the heavens represented to him and his kin. If an animal’s fear response is triggered by an adversary, what kind of Thing from the Mind of Stephen King could be romping around up there, hidden in those roiling black clouds? And, with this first experience, I just couldn’t fathom what had flipped the switch in his head.
Of course, when I told Drew about Cormac’s reaction to thunder, he said he doubted it was something new, that I’d only just noticed it.
“Are you suggesting I’m not paying attention to my dog?” I asked.
“No,” Drew said. “Anyway, it’s kind of a moot point to ponder,” he said.
And he was right. There was only the question of what to do about it. I phoned Belle, and asked her what could be done for Cormac. “Can he be trained to get over his fear of thunder?” I asked. She said no, and we talked about the condition, not uncommon among dogs. “I’m sorry, Sonny,” she said, “I’m afraid it’s Cormac’s cross to bear, and something of a thorn in your side.”
“Is it that biblical?” I had to smile. “Is there no salvation here?”
“Well, if there’s such a thing as situational salvation,” she replied, “then the answer is yes. There is relief for Cormac and for you.” I stood on tiptoes, waiting for her to bring down the tablet from the mount. I almost laughed when Belle offered to write a prescription for “doggy downers.” She told me that many pet owners keep a supply on hand.
I was stunned, and told her so. I told her there was no way I was going to turn Cormac into some kind of junkie. She laughed and said such would not become the case. I told her about my doctor asking me to get on medicine to bring my cholesterol down from the stratosphere, how I’d told him I’d get it down my own way, how I ate like a monk and walked two miles a day for six months, how I lost twenty pounds. I told her I wasn’t sure that I was trying to bring down my cholesterol, as much as I was trying to stave off being on some pharmaceutical for the rest of my life.
“Did your plan work?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “My LDL numbers actually went up after all that.”
“So you’re on the drugs?”
“I am.”
“But you don’t want to use drugs on Cormac?”
“No. There are a million thunder boomers that roll across Mobile Bay like Patton’s army come to Lower Alabama,” I said, and she agreed that living on the Eastern Shore means frequent invasions. “It seems to me,” I went on, “when the twentieth, or thirty-seventh, storm occurs without harm, there should come an end to the fear.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” the vet said. “The fear is primal and anti-intelligent.”
When I watched the movie Because of Winn-Dixie, adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s novel, I thought little Opal’s preacher dad was surely going to give Winn-Dixie, her newfound dog, his walking papers when he freaked out and transformed into a wild beast during a thunder storm and almost wrecked their mobile home.
But they were committed to the big, rambunctious dog.
They would take care of him no matter what.
Not all dogs, of course, have the phobia. Our neighbor’s Golden is completely oblivious to thunder. Bailey sits licking his paws and yawning while his friend from our side of the fence is freaking out.
I thanked Belle for her advice. I told her Cormac and I would work this out drug-free. Somehow. For one thing, I took my electric saw and cut a hole in the garage door and put a kennel crate in there in case I wasn’t home when thunder came calling. I put a piece of carpet on the floor and sides of the kennel so it would be quieter and more comfortable. I thought again that we really needed that stronger electronic fence signal. But Ken had said the transmitter was on back order.
Three days later another thunderstorm occurred while Cormac was outside minding the ranch. I waited to see if he’d make his fuss at the back door, and when he did not I went downstairs to check on him. I opened the door to the garage a crack and peeked through. Cormac had used his private door and crate as I’d hoped. I found myself thinking back to the hunting dogs and even the pets I’d known as a child and how all those dogs lived outside. Always. And how maybe I was being too uptight.
TWELVE
I TRY TO IMAGINE what it is like for Cormac when a storm rolls in. Here on the Gulf Coast that telling dark often brings a western sky down on our heads, making Cormac want to crawl inside the pocket of my jeans.
From his point of view, then, let’s try this:
My eyes blink open and my body flinches. The reverberation is not audible, it is something I feel in the marrow of my bones, and a shiver runs from my shoulders down my spine and pulls my belly taut. Every hair in my coat seems alive. I leap to my feet and stand on the porch, straining to detect a second pulse from th
e unseen one dragging its sopping muzzle along the floor that keeps the birds from flying to the moon. There. The thing is now awake and the growl in its chest moves to its voice and the great sound stirs the air like the thrum of a hovering dragon. The hair on my back bristles. My breathing goes faster and faster and my body trembles. My eyes strain in their sockets. I have seen in others of my kind their eyes white-circled with fear of the invisible one. Behind me the door is quiet. No sounds come from inside. Still, I spring against it. My body and legs crash hard against the door, and it rattles and shutters and refuses my plea. I stare at the door. My eyes water but I will not blink. I watch the yellow metal of the round knob and still the door does not open to receive me to safety. The hand that can open the door has been missing for two days. None who live inside are there. All have been missing for two days. Another one with good hands and a good voice has taken their place, but he does not answer my charge on the door. My ear and my neck burn from the impact. I stand on the door, my forepaws extended, and I rake down. My claws tear the wood. Again. And again. The rumble from the animal draws nearer and swings lower, thudding across the hills and tumbling low into the ravines. My breathing burns. It has moved to the tops of my lungs. My mouth is open and my tongue is dry where my hot breath burns across it. My heart is knocking inside my chest. The sky flashes and I know it angers the terrible beast that lives there and the beast will now curse the ones whose paws and hooves and claws hold them to the earth. Perhaps this time he will come to rip open my neck, or tear at my belly. My vision is blurred except at the center of where I look. I drop from the door and spin and look toward the trees. And it comes, the curse flung down on the ground so that it shakes, and the birds must be falling like the water brought by the clouds. When I cry out, my voice breaks inside my throat and a small sound falls from my tongue, but inside my head a red howl is raised and my legs gather beneath me and they release and I run. So that my blood will not soak into the wet soil I run. I run. I run.
