Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  At four-thirty, Violet Wish returned my call. As I’d guessed, she’d been at the show in Fitchburg. One of her papillons had finished his championship. After offering congratulations, I asked Violet whether she remembered a guy named Jack Andrews. “Eighteen years ago, maybe more. He had a golden named Chip. Chipper. You did a portrait of the dog.” Violet’s name stamped on the back of Chipper’s photograph was the reason I’d called her. I’d been surprised. Violet had always specialized in show dogs. I’d wondered how a pet owner like Jack Andrews had known of her existence.

  “Oh, yeah. I sort of remember him. You used to see him at shows with that tall girl. What was her name?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t remember him at all. I didn’t even know he showed.” Showed dogs, naturally. What else?

  “He was a nice guy, but he kind of stayed in the background. I only knew him, really, because I did those portraits. That was a long time ago. The girl was the one who handled. She finished Chip for him.” (Translation: handled the dog to his championship.) “That’s when he had the portrait done. What was her name? Tall girl with short brown hair. If you want to know about Jack, she’s the one you ought to ask.”

  “Do you know how I’d get hold of her?”

  “I haven’t seen her for ages. Geez, Holly, it might even be eighteen years. Maybe more.”

  When we hung up, I made myself a cup of coffee and took it, together with Violet’s portrait of Chip and Jack’s graduation picture, out to the fenced side yard, where the dogs had been safely confined while I split wood. My goldens would’ve kept me company as I worked. When Vinnie was on a down-stay, nothing but the sound of my voice would persuade her to budge. Rowdy and Kimi might have held their stays, too. They might also have torn off after a squirrel, rounded the corner of Appleton, and ended up in the traffic on Concord Avenue. As obedience dogs, malamutes have many strengths: They’re highly motivated, especially by food. They learn quickly. They have a long attention span. They work hard. They’re lively and fun. In fact, the only thing wrong with them as obedience dogs is that they’re, well . . . disobedient. They are, however, incredibly intelligent. I was hoping to absorb some of Rowdy’s and Kimi’s brain power by osmosis. But if they had any brilliant insights about Jack Andrews and Chip, they kept their thoughts to themselves. When I went back inside, the dogs followed me.

  “Not quite yet,” I said, meaning dinnertime. Then, armed with the knowledge that Chip had been a show dog, I started to tap my extensive network for information about Jack Winter Andrews. To my annoyance, an infuriating number of people, including my father, had only vague memories of Jack. He’d owned two or three dogs, they thought. Yes, all goldens. The person I should be talking to, I was told over and over, was that tall girl. She dropped out of dogs a long time ago. What was her name? Tracy something, I finally learned. No one came up with a last name. Jack’s family hadn’t known about his dogs, a few people told me. No one—no one in dogs—was supposed to call him. His family had thought Chip was just a pet.

  The handwritten note found on Jack’s desk? It takes more than the absence of faults to make a winner. I hadn’t read an idiosyncratic meaning into that sentence after all; Jack Andrews hadn’t been writing about himself—he’d really been writing about a dog.

  Jack Andrews, I concluded, had led a double life. His family had known nothing about his existence in the world of dog shows and show dogs, which is to say, in my own world. John Winter Andrews had had golden retrievers. The life he had kept secret felt weirdly like my own.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Sunday afiternoon, Steve and I and our fifour dogs piled into his van for what proved to be a dismal trip to the island in the Merrimack where Hannah Duston had been held captive three centuries ago. Saturday’s blue sky had turned ashen, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. The heavy rain that slicked the highway seeped into the interior of the van to reawaken the odor of every dog Steve had ever transported in it. By the time we reached Concord, New Hampshire, we’d had to stop twice to clean up after Lady, Steve’s pointer, who sometimes gets carsick.

  As the miles and minutes passed, my relationship with Steve smelled more and more like a sick, wet dog. Neither of us said anything about my father, his mother, Thanksgiving, or his impending post-Thanksgiving trip home to Minneapolis.

  “If you’d fed her gingersnaps the way I told you,” I said, “she wouldn’t have thrown up.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “You should’ve given her Bonine. We should’ve stopped in Nashua or Manchester and found a drugstore.”

  “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant.” He peered at the highway and leaned forward to wipe the fogged-up windshield. “With a degree in veterinary medicine.”

  “As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about car sickness, and obviously, I know more about it than you do. My dogs aren’t throwing up.” Neither was India, Steve’s other dog. Furthermore, I hadn’t fed Rowdy and Kimi gingersnaps, dosed them with Bonine, or done anything else to prevent a malady from which neither had ever suffered. Steve nobly refrained from saying so.

  “Which exit is it?” he asked.

  “Next one. Seventeen. When we get off, we follow the sign for Penacook, but we go only a half mile or so. The island’s actually in a town called Boscawen. The parking area’s supposed to be on the left.”

  And it was. When we turned in, the rain was pouring down, and I wanted Steve to stop so that I could take a picture of the green historic marker from inside the van, but he kept going. “You can get one on the way back,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “I didn’t make you come! You volunteered. I could have driven here by myself. In case you’ve forgotten, we decided it would be a chance for us to spend some time together.”

  Steve parked next to a path that led down a hill toward the river. Rowdy, who hates to get wet, balked at leaving his crate. Once we were all out of the van, Kimi directed an unprovoked growl at India, who looked to Steve for guidance.

  “You ought to get that under control,” he said to me. “There’s no need for it.”

  “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant,” I snapped. “Preferably an expert in animal behavior, by which I don’t mean a vet.” Veterinarians don’t necessarily know anything about dog behavior, but Steve is as good a dog trainer as I am. In some ways he’s better because he’s more patient than I am. India had her U.D.—Utility Dog title—and was working on her U.D.X. The X is for excellent, and excellent is just what she is. The title Perfect Bitch obviously belonged to someone other than India. In the eyes of Steve and all four dogs, I read the message that we should have stayed home.

  Fortunately, as we started down the path, the rain stopped, the sky brightened, and our foul moods began to evaporate. When I’d called the New Hampshire Historical Society for directions, I’d envisioned the scene of Hannah’s massacre as a small and perhaps inaccessible island in the middle of the Merrimack, which I imagined as wide, rocky, and turbulent, bubbling with the confluent waters of the Contoocook River. To my surprise, I’d been told that there was a footbridge. I pictured a narrow, rustic suspension bridge with footing that might prove treacherous to the dogs. By now, the entire episode of Hannah’s captivity had acquired such significance in my mind that it never occurred to me that anyone would have marred the site by running railroad tracks straight through the island. In all my reading, I might mention, I’d come across only one other person, a man, Leslie Fiedler, who found Hannah as consequential as I did. According to Fiedler, Hannah’s story represented the characteristically American and feminist recasting of the European myth of the damsel in distress. What weakened a lot of the points he made, however, was his failure to get the facts right. According to Fiedler, the Haverhill Hannah was a stone monument of a woman in a sunbonnet who held a tomahawk in a “delicate” hand. Bronze, no hat, a hatchet, not a tomahawk, and a hand toughened by rough work. A hand, in fact, like mine. Furthermore, central to Fiedler’s argumen
t was the image of offended motherhood’s defense of a male child. The murdered child, however, was a baby girl.

  But back to the island, which was barely that: a few acres separated from the riverbank by marshy water and nowhere near the center of the confluence. The Merrimack and the Contoocook were dark, flat, and not half the width I’d imagined. The old iron railroad bridge didn’t even have to stretch hard to link land to island. As we followed the tracks across, Steve said, “The river would’ve been higher in March.”

  “Yes, but not all that much. In a pinch, you could swim across.”

  “Maybe not at that time of year. And they probably didn’t know how to swim.”

  “True. The river was in flood, I think. And if they’d gotten wet, they might’ve frozen to death.”

  I hadn’t known or maybe had forgotten that there was a monument on the island. I suppose I’d harbored some crazy expectation of crawling around in the moldy remains of a skin-covered tent or unearthing the skeleton of one of the birch-bark canoes that Hannah had scuttled before she fled. After three hundred years, needless to say, no trace remained. The abandoned tracks and a dirt path took us through a wooded area of bare-limbed maples and low evergreens to a big clearing.

  In the center of the clearing, near the river, rose a monument much taller than the one in Haverhill and far more funereal in appearance, a massive pillar of gray granite topped with a gray granite Hannah. She leaned forward in a way that reminded me of a figurehead on a ship. The bodice of her dress dipped low, and her arms were bare. Her left hand didn’t point in accusation, but rested at her hip. In it she clutched what could have been an upside-down bouquet of wilted flowers with round, flat blossoms.

  Scalps.

  Her right arm hung at her side. The hand had once held a hatchet. The blade remained. The handle was broken. Most of Hannah’s nose was missing.

  On the four sides of the pillar beneath this Hannah were rectangular slabs with rounded tops. The panels looked like tombstones. There were no pictures on them, just words. The one on the front started out in Latin and switched to English:

  HEROUM GESTA

  FIDES JUSTITIA

  HANNAH DUSTON

  MARY NEFF

  SAMUEL LEONARDSON

  MARCH 30, 1697

  MIDNIGHT

  “Something about fidelity and justice?” I said to Steve. “Heroism?”

  He shrugged.

  On the tombstone under Hannah’s right side was carved DONORS. Beneath was a list of names. Under Hannah’s left arm and the scalps was what was evidently intended as poetry. It was all in capital letters and had no punctuation.

  STATUA

  KNOW YE THAT WE WITH MANY PLANT IT

  IN TRUST TO THE STATE WE GIVE & GRANT IT

  THAT THE TIDE OF TIME MAY NEVER CANT IT

  NOR MAR NOR SEVER

  THAT PILGRIM HERE MAY HEED THE MOTHERS

  THAT TRUTH & FAITH & ALL THE OTHERS

  WITH BANNERS HIGH IN GLORIOUS COLORS

  MAY STAND FOREVER

  At the bottom were five more names.

  “‘Glorious colors’?” I said. “It’s totally gray.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing to me,” Steve said.

  But the really weird inscription appeared on the back of the pillar, and before I present it, let me comment that there’s nothing like real weirdness to heal a troubled relationship, so if you, too, ever find that the harmony between you and your lover has been marred, severed, or otherwise disrupted by mothers, fathers, national holidays, car sickness, or anything else, take a visit to Boscawen, New Hampshire, make your way around to the back of Hannah’s statue, and read, just as we did:

  MARCH

  15 1697 30

  THE WAR WHOOP TOMAHAWK

  FAGGOT & INFANTICIDES

  WERE AT HAVERHILL

  THE ASHES OF

  WIGWAM-CAMP-FIRES AT NIGHT

  & OF TEN OF THE TRIBE

  ARE HERE

  I subsequently learned that on June 17, 1874, the day this monument was unveiled, between three thousand and six thousand people attended the ceremony, which was cut short by heavy rain. The reporter for the Concord Monitor who described the aborted festivities complained in print that the monument was “disfigured with some doggerel and other evidence of bad taste.”

  Steve and I gaped. I read the inscription aloud.

  “It isn’t English,” he said.

  “But ‘faggot’?”

  “Bunches of sticks. Firewood. Death by fire. They burned people alive.” “Not here. But I can’t think what else it could mean. ‘Infanticides’ means her baby, I guess. Martha, her name was. But the rest? It’s amazing that she isn’t missing more than her nose and the handle of her hatchet. You’d think someone would’ve dynamited the whole thing by now.”

  “‘Are here,’” Steve read. “Are they?”

  “An Indian woman and child escaped. The woman survived. There’s a record of it. Maybe she sent people back.” I wondered aloud about the burial practices of Hannah’s captors, the converts to Roman Catholicism who had prayed three times a day. In the soggy ground beneath us, perhaps, were the bones of murdered children.

  Infanticides, indeed.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monday morning was rainy and dreary. Armed with the title of the book that had a chapter about Jack’s murder and, thanks to Kevin Dennehy, with the date of Shaun McGrath’s death, I went to the Brookline Public Library. As I approached, I noticed near the front of the building a Civil War memorial that I’d taken for granted in the happy days of yore when my professional interests had centered exclusively on dogs. Like most other public monuments in the United States, this one depicted a male Caucasian. He wore a uniform and rode a horse. The only public statue of a dog I’d ever seen was the one of Balto in Central Park. And Balto was a male. Men of color? On a frieze in Boston, a Civil War memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. Women? One. Hannah Duston. Twice. In Haverhill. In Boscawen. I was in a good mood to read obituaries.

  Shaun McGrath’s was short. He’d grown up in Arlington, which is just north of Cambridge, and his funeral mass had been celebrated at a church there. The survivors were listed as his parents, James and Shirley McGrath, six brothers and sisters, and a variety of nieces and nephews. After graduating from a local business college, McGrath worked for a computer firm and then joined Damned Yankee Press. Interestingly enough, from his high school days on, Shaun McGrath had been an avid chess player. At the time of his death, he’d been the president of a local chess club. And this was a man who’d supposedly made no backup plan in case Jack’s murder failed to pass as suicide! I also located the account of McGrath’s fatal accident on Memorial Drive. It was a paragraph long and said only that he’d run his car into a tree. It didn’t mention Jack Andrews, the police, or the Siberian husky Shaun had died to avoid hitting. It didn’t say that this man, in whose presence Chip had supposedly been tied, had taken the dog home after Jack’s corpse was found.

  According to the catalog, the main branch of the Brookline Public Library owned Mass. Mayhem. The author was, as Brat had said, one Randall Carey. The publication date was ten years earlier. The book was supposed to be available. The call number, MASS 364.15 C something, sent me to the section about true crime in the commonwealth, the same section that I’d checked on my last visit. The book was not, however, in its allotted place on the shelf. I returned to the terminal and checked the entire Metro-Boston system. Eight local libraries owned, or at least had owned, the book. It was, however, listed as missing from six of the eight, including the main branches of the Boston and Cambridge public libraries. Brookline’s copy, supposedly available, was, as I’d just discovered, not on the shelf. Newton’s main branch was supposed to have a reference copy, one that did not circulate.