Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  Book Five: Whom Dog Hath Joined

  1 – Harvest Days

  Though my friend Rick often called my golden retriever a “death dog,” it wasn’t Rochester’s fault that he kept finding bodies. After all, his ancestors had been bred to find and retrieve dead game, right? And it’s not like we went out looking for trouble. It found us.

  “I’m still not sure it was a good idea to bring Rochester,” I said to my girlfriend Lili as we walked through downtown Stewart’s Crossing toward the Friends’ Meeting House on the edge of town. Victorian gingerbread baking in the harsh sunlight, Land Rovers and Escalades creeping in snarled traffic, the tracery of a kite high in the sky above us. Faint brassy notes of off-key jazz floating in the air, the smell of auto exhaust and melted gum on the sidewalk. “Even though he’s two years old, he’s still a big puppy sometimes, and I’m worried that Harvest Days will be too crowded.”

  The dog in question, shades of false and true gold streaking his flanks, tail erect as a mast of signal flags, strained forward as commuter fathers tried to practice workplace logic on misbehaving kids: good behavior now will result in rewards at a later date. Tattered flyers littered the street-- ten percent off any haircut, zero percent down and zero dollars at signing, make your floors look like new again.

  “He’ll be fine, Steve,” Lili said, reaching down to scratch the Golden Retriever behind his ears. “He’s a smart boy.”

  Rochester yawned and stretched his neck. He’d been mine for a year and a half by then; I had adopted him after the death of his owner, my next-door neighbor Caroline Kelly. Since then he had become my boon companion. At seventy-plus pounds he was a happy, shaggy force to be reckoned with.

  “From your mouth to the dog’s ears,” I said.

  It was late September, and Bucks County, in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, was enjoying the fading days of Indian summer. The leaves were beginning to turn yellow, red and gold, the air was crisp, and the storefronts on Main Street were dressed with Indian corn, pumpkins, and fake scarecrows stuffed in straw, wearing patchwork outfits.

  A few days before, Lili had read about Harvest Days, a fall festival on the grounds of the Quaker Meeting house in Stewart’s Crossing. “Can we go to this?” she’d asked, pointing to the article in the Boat-Gazette, our weekly newspaper. “It looks like a fun way for the three of us to spend some time together.”

  Lili was a transplant to Bucks County after a globe-trotting photojournalism career, and she had a convert’s dedication to all things rural. I had agreed, despite my reservations about Rochester’s behavior in crowds, because ten years of a previous marriage had taught me that when the woman in your life wants to “spend some time together” it’s a bad move to say no.

  We navigated the crowds past the mill pond, just beyond the sole traffic light in town. In winter the pond was a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, kids in bright red mufflers skating figure eights, parents warming hands around hot chocolate, a pick-up hockey game at the far end. In Indian summer, though, sunlight reflected on the glassy surface, with a trickle of falling leave and fat squirrels jumping from one overhanging branch to another, daring each other to stumble and drop into the water below.

  At five-eleven, Lili was a couple of inches shorter than I was, with a cascade of reddish brown curls, a bow-shaped mouth, and a petite nose that had undergone the surgeon’s knife when she was in high school. She wore a photographer’s vest over a bright green polo shirt and skinny jeans, and she had an SLR camera slung around her neck.

  Unlike Lili, who was born in Cuba and grew up in Mexico, in Kansas, and a number of other places, I was rooted in Stewart’s Crossing. “When I was a kid, we came to Harvest Days every year,” I said, as Rochester tugged me forward. “My dad would scavenge for hand tools, the weirder the better, and my mother collected romance paperbacks with the front covers ripped off.”

  “Why? Because she didn’t want anyone to know what she was reading?”

  “I thought so back then. But later I learned that bookstores would rip the covers off unsold books and send them back to the publishers for credit, then sell them. After she passed away, my dad donated nearly a thousand of them to the Friends of the Library for their book sale.”

  I looked ahead of us, but my mind was on the past. “He had a couple of yard sales, too, getting rid of the antique Lenox china plates and figurines she collected, and the sketches of boats and harbors she had hung in our bathrooms.”

  Lili reached over and took my hand and squeezed. “He even got rid of most of his tools before he died. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of my family’s stuff show up here.”

  As we got closer to the Meeting House, we had to navigate through a sea of haphazardly parked cars, moms with strollers and rambunctious boys chasing each other. Rochester was eager to play, and I had to keep reining in his leash.

  The broad half-moon lawn which faced onto Main Street was filled by neighbors who had cleaned out their attics, Avon ladies displaying their wares, and small businesses with free-standing displays. We passed free car wash coupons, crocheted samplers invoking prayers for home and hearth, wooden nativity characters made with basement jigsaws. I hoped Lili wouldn’t be disappointed at the kitschy suburban nature of the festival.

  “I’m going to take some pictures,” she said, lifting the camera from around her neck. “You start browsing if you want.”

  “We’ll hang,” I said. Rochester was busy sniffing the roots of an ancient sycamore and I was happy to stand there and look around. In front of us was the single-story Meeting House, dingier than I remembered it as a kid. Its construction was mortise-and-tenon wood-frame, covered in clapboard, though the central section had been faced with fieldstone. From previous visits, I knew that the left wing held a kitchen and dining area, while the center section was a large, low-ceilinged room filled with wooden pews for worship services. I wasn’t sure what the right-hand part held; there were no windows there and I’d never been back there.

  The Friends had begun a renovation campaign, and one of those huge thermometer-type signs stood beside the Meeting House, painted with growing red bars to show fund-raising progress. As of that day, they had made it to fifty percent of their goal.

  Lili snapped a couple of pictures and we continued forward. Most people were dressed as we were, in jeans and casual shirts, though I noted the proliferation of clothes that smacked of a 1950s-era safari—microfiber fishing shirts with epaulets, floppy-brimmed hats, and shorts with enough pockets to carry a week’s worth of rations. I also noticed the careless way people discarded trash near the bins, not caring if their aim was true, and the ratty condition of the lawns, which were sprinkled with crabgrass and dandelions.

  “It’s so quaint,” Lili said.

  This from a woman who had faced down guerrillas in Latin America and photographed dead children in Iraq. It’s amazing what your eye can trick you into seeing.

  The high school jazz band was playing off-key, and someone on the other side of the half-moon driveway was selling candy apples, guaranteed to rot the teeth of even the most careful eaters. The light breeze brought the sweet smell across to us, and I remembered going to Styer’s Farm Market in the country when I was a kid. My mom wouldn’t buy me one of the apples, covered in a shiny red lacquer, but my dad would.

  The Veterans of Foreign Wars, who gathered at a high-ceilinged hall on the edge of town (banquet rentals inquire within), had filled a yard-sale table with never-opened kitchen gadgets, gently-used toys, and cast off clothes from a multitude of generations. I recognized the elderly man in green service cap with military patches and a faded hunting jacket littered with marksmanship pins who stood behind the table. He was a part-time bagger at the Genuardi’s grocery outside town. He was talking to a twenty-something vet in camouflage ball cap, T-shirt and khaki shorts, artificial leg below the knee. He looked so young, like one of the students I might have taught, and I thought about the way that some of us have to carry the evidence of o
ur traumas on the outside, while others are able to pretend that nothing bad has happened.

  The Gulf War, the Afghan campaign and the invasion of Iraq had revitalized the dying VFW chapter in Stewart’s Crossing. The tide had turned in our view of returning soldiers, somewhere between the anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies and the renewed patriotism following 9/11. When I was a kid, only a few old men in faded uniforms marched in the Independence Day parade in Stewart’s Crossing. But many people in town worked in New York City, and we had lost a half-dozen neighbors in the attack on the World Trade Center.

  “There’s Gail,” Lili said, pointing at a table where our friend Gail Dukowski, who ran The Chocolate Ear café in downtown, was selling her cookies and pastries from a pair of flimsy card tables covered with green and white striped cloths that matched her store’s awnings.

  Gail looked frazzled. We got in line behind a sixty-something woman holding a small girl by the hand, a pair of teenagers, and a cluster of other eager customers. Gail’s blonde hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, her face was smudged with chocolate, and her eyes looked tired. She wore a big chef’s apron over her T-shirt and slacks.

  Rochester was excited to see Gail, tugging at his leash and nodding his shaggy head. When we went to The Chocolate Ear, she always had a special dog biscuit for him. A platter of them, wrapped in clear plastic and tied with a dog-paw patterned ribbon, sat at one end of the table.

  “You’re on your own here?” I asked as we reached her.

  She nodded. “Ginny ate something funny from the kitchen and had to go home.”

  “Can we help you?” Lili asked.

  The line behind us had continued to grow. “That would be such a blessing,” Gail said. “My mother’s coming at noon but I could sure use some help now.”

  “I’ll man the cash box,” I said.

  “You take the orders and I’ll box them up,” Lili said to Gail.

  “Thank you so much!” Gail stepped aside to let Lili and me scoot behind the table.

  I dropped a dollar in the cash box and unwrapped one of the big biscuits. Rochester settled on the ground underneath, chewing noisily. “Stay there and keep out of trouble,” I said, scratching him behind the ears.

  I sat in one of the café’s big wicker chairs with green and white striped cushions and began to accept people’s dimes and quarters and wrinkled dollar bills. I made change and told them about all the treats Gail hadn’t been able to bring to the fair, like her lemon bars, her flaky croissants and her special dark chocolate hazelnut tarts.

  Gail cut the walnut-studded chocolate bars and Lil boxed them up. I snacked on the crumbs and Lili slapped my hand. Every now and then I reached down to scratch behind Rochester’s ears as he rested his big square head on his front paws and stared out at the passing crowd.

  “These are delicious!” a heavy-set woman said, as brownie crumbs dribbled out of her mouth.

  “Fantastic,” a big man in a tank top agreed. His shirt read “If assholes could fly this place would be an airport,” which made me suspicious of his taste. Although his sheer size indicated he had a lot of experience with high-calorie foods.

  We handled the backlog of customers quickly and Gail slumped into the chair next to me. “I’ve been up since five this morning, baking chocolate bars, cutting them and stacking them on trays,” she said. “At seven, I met Ginny here and we set up the booth. She went home about an hour ago and it’s been a zoo ever since.”

  I leaned forward and discovered that if I pressed too hard on the table the chocolate bars went slip-sliding toward Mrs. Holt’s adjoining table of crocheted pink and lavender toilet paper covers topped by Barbie knock-offs. They were a shocking example of what happened when people with too much time on their hands possessed the deluded notion that they had some artistic talent, but she had bought two chocolate bars so I was willing to cut her a little slack.

  “We sure need some good food in Stewart’s Crossing,” said a young mom with twins in a double stroller.

  I took her money and told her the café sold terrific take-out sandwiches in kid-friendly flavors like meatballs and grilled cheese as well as desserts.

  Then I heard a scream.

  I reached down below the table to grab Rochester’s leash and keep him from tearing off toward the sound. But he was already gone.

  “Oh, crap,” I said, jumping up.

  “You both go,” Gail said. “I can handle things until my mother gets here.”

  “Where do you think he is?” Lili asked, taking off the apron she’d been wearing. The silver bangle bracelets on her arm jingled.

  “Wherever that scream came from,” I said.

  I darted around slow-moving elderly people, parents grabbing dilly-dallying little kids, and curious folks headed toward the Meeting House. The scatter of gold and orange leaves crunched beneath my feet, mixing with distant car horns and the sound of someone sobbing.

  The big white double doors at the center of the building stood open, and a walkway along the front of the building was lined with piles of osage oranges and green and white gourds. The three-part slate roof—peaked in the center, flat on the sides—was dusted with a covering of red and gold leaves.

  A crowd had already gathered outside the right side of the building, the part with no windows. A teenaged girl huddled against her mother, crying. “She was just trying to pet the dog,” the woman was saying to others in the crowd. “And then she saw what he was digging, and she screamed.”

  Others were watching my determined golden, who tugged at the something near the foundation. An elderly man was trying, without result, to talk Rochester away, but he looked too timid to touch the dog himself.

  Up close I could see the wood of the exterior wall was disintegrating, with long vertical cracks through the planks. I pushed forward, excusing myself and calling Rochester’s name. When I reached him, I grabbed his collar and lifted his head away from where he had been digging, and saw that he’d dragged a disintegrating tennis shoe through the gap.

  A single bone, like the one I filled with peanut butter for him, remained, sticking out of the shoe. Only this bone wasn’t the kind sold at pet stores.

  “Rochester, this has to stop!” I scolded. “No more digging up dead bodies.”

  2 – Death Dog

  Rochester had led me to three dead bodies in the short time we had been together, and I remembered each one. His original mom, Caroline, lying on a dirt road at the edge of River Bend, her blood spilled around her. My mentor when I was a student, Joe Dagorian, murdered during a fund-raising event on the campus of Eastern College, where I worked. And a couple of months before, Rochester had dug up a hand from a shallow grave on the grounds of Friar Lake, a college property I was in charge of developing into a conference center.

  In each case, I felt an immediate burst of horror, as I realized a life had been snuffed out. Pulse racing, stomach churning, scratchiness in my throat. Childhood funerals in the back of unfamiliar synagogues, women crying, my father placing the first shovel of dirt on my mother’s coffin.

  But dogs don’t have the same emotional connection to the dead, and I had learned my first responsibility was to keep Rochester from disturbing the site. I hooked up his leash and tugged him away from the wall.

  Lili joined me, holding her camera. She had seen so much death and destruction in the course of her journalism work that she had learned to use the lens to distance herself from it. I wished I could do the same.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called my high-school buddy Rick Stemper, a detective with the Stewart’s Crossing Police Department.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, when he answered.

  “I won’t.”

  I heard him sigh. “You’re at Harvest Days, aren’t you, Steve?”

  “Yup. Did you already get called?”

  “Yeah. Lucky me. Any chance the bone he dug up isn’t human?”

  “Not unless cows have started wearing Converse.”


  “I’m on my way. Keep the dog away from the remains, all right?”

  “Easier said than done,” I said, holding tightly to Rochester’s collar while keeping the phone between my shoulder and my head. My body stress mirrored my emotional tension, as I multi-tasked on behalf of the dead.

  “I’ll be there in ten,” he said, and hung up.

  A little boy scooted past and ran toward the sneaker. Lili quickly scooped him up and whispered into his ear. He stopped squawking and smiled, grabbing a handful of her curls. Though she had no children of her own, she had an instinct for kids, perhaps after all those years of comforting them in war zones.

  She handed the boy off to his mother and stepped in front of the Meeting House wall to address the crowd as people murmured. “The police have been called,” she announced. “Would everyone please stay back until they get here, and not touch anything?”

  With Lili taking charge, my mind was free to roam, and I remembered the first time I’d been in the Meeting House, when I was in the eighth grade. My social studies teacher, Mrs. Shea, was a Quaker, and she’d invited our class to join her at the Stewart’s Crossing Meeting one Sunday. She warned us in advance that it wouldn’t be very exciting, that most of the time people were silent and contemplative, and that convinced the hyperactive kids in my class to opt out.

  Not me, though. I was accustomed to dull services, because I grew up going to a Reform Jewish congregation in Trenton, across the Delaware from Stewart’s Crossing. Despite the beauty of the soaring Byzantine-style temple and the mystery of the curtained choir loft behind the bema, the elevated platform where the rabbi and cantor sat, I was frequently bored during services, especially when the cantor sung something in Hebrew that the rabbi had just read. The repetition seemed so inefficient to me, especially since I didn’t understand either rendition.

  I went to Sunday school from the time I was in kindergarten all the way through Confirmation in tenth grade. Joining Mrs. Shea and her congregation was a chance to skip a day’s class and experience something different, more American than our foreign-language prayers, white silk prayer shawls, rainbow of yarmulkes, hand-crocheted, bought in the Holy Land, or souvenirs of a distant cousin’s bat mitzvah.