by Jim Kraus
George, in a moment of expansiveness, had pulled in and cajoled a most reluctant and hesitant St. Bernard inside.
It must smell like a vet’s office because as soon as we stepped into the parking lot, Lewis got the heebie-jeebies.
Lewis had whimpered the whole way inside. If Lewis had been scared, Luella had calmed him immediately with her honey-thick Southern drawl and kindergarten-teacher patience.
Lewis was treated to a bath, a four-legged pawdicure, and a thorough dethatching. Luella had described the process as stripping out his dense undercoat, but George saw it as dethatching, plain and simple.
Lewis looked twenty-five pounds lighter when she was finished.
“When it gets hot like this,” Luella had said, turning the word hot into a three-syllable effort, “he should get this treatment every month or so. Y’all from around here? I could sign y’all up for my ‘big-dog-double-discount program.’ ”
George had demurred on the offer, explaining they were on a road trip of America.
Lewis had wuffed and danced as Luella had pronounced him finished. He’d stopped in front of the floor mirror in the spa’s entryway and had spent nearly a full minute looking at himself, admiring himself, as it were, turning several times to fully appreciate his new look.
“First time I’ve seen a dog do this, Mr. Gibson. Lewis looks like he likes it. You got a special dog there.”
George had nodded.
“Trouble is, he knows it.”
* * *
And now the lighter-looking Lewis and same-weight-as-ever George were headed up to the Lookout Mountain Battlefield Park, at the top of the mountain. The last two days had been spent exploring downtown Chattanooga, sketching some old steel-truss bridges and exploring the massive train station.
It’s called the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel now, but the name feels stupid to say, so I won’t.
George had already sketched the incline railway up the eastern face of Lookout Mountain and now wanted to see the city from above.
He puttered the scooter to a stop. The parking lot was sparsely filled with cars and only one tour bus.
George could now determine the crowd-ability of certain attractions by the number of tour busses parked out front. He’d developed the equation in Washington, D.C.
More than ten busses equals moving on to the next site on your list. I don’t like being tediously shoved aside by a slow-moving horde of senior citizens from Reading, Pennsylvania, all intent on making it back to the bus before it heads off to an early-bird special.
Lewis did not seem to mind waiting so much. He would sit as a long column of travelers trudged past, a fair percentage of them staring at their feet, looking like prisoners on a death march, and grin up at them, hoping to lure one or two or a dozen to stop and pet him. This stoppage, of course, would disrupt the entire delicate balance and schedule of the Reading Senior Citizen Spring Fling, usually causing the tour leader/cattle drive foreman to shout out, “Stay with the group! Stay with the group! No stopping.”
Watching with a critical, yet dispassionate eye this slowly unfolding spectacle was the only way George could enjoy an overcrowded venue.
But Lookout Mountain was not on anyone’s top-ten list of must-see sights, nor any bon vivant’s bucket list, and as such, it remained blissfully uncrowded.
“Let me get your helmet, Lewis.”
This time, Lewis submitted to the unbuckling process without complaint. A few times, he’d adamantly refused to relinquish the protective gear, and had spent all afternoon wearing it, like a first-grader wearing a favorite Halloween costume for days afterward.
George locked the goggles and helmets in the small storage area built into the rear of the sidecar. He retrieved his sketchbook, and they made their way toward the point, to the peak of the mountain, where the Confederate artillery had set up before the Civil War battle in 1863.
“See, Lewis, this looks like no one could ever storm the mountain, but it’s what the Union forces did. The Confederates couldn’t get their cannons raised up high enough to shoot down the face of the palisades. And even if they could, the cannonballs would simply roll out of the cannon. So if you wanted to storm these positions, all you would have to do is follow the trails leading up here. Not easy, but not impossible, either.”
Lewis appeared distracted. He politely listened, George assumed, but his attention was elsewhere.
And now I’m thinking he understands what I’m saying about everything. One of us is losing it.
George found a bench near the promontory and opened his sketchbook. Lewis happily sighed and sat down, looking back toward the park, rather than out and over the city.
“One of the units fighting in this battle was the Twentieth Con-necticut Infantry. They fought at Gettysburg, too.”
When Lewis heard the word Gettysburg he lowered his head for a moment, almost appearing reverential about it.
George reached over and put his hand under Lewis’s chin and gently lifted his head.
“Lewis, it’s okay. I know you remember Gettysburg. It’s okay to be sad.”
George scratched at Lewis’s chin as he remembered. They’d reached Gettysburg the day after being lost in the Bedford Valley and spending the night in the darkened parking lot of the shuttered Western Acres motel. Across the street had been a twenty-four-hour mini-mart, so George had not felt he was compromising his safety by using an abandoned lot as a campsite.
George had spent the first day sketching monuments on the battlefield. It’s where he’d learned Civil War veterans from Connecticut had erected eight monuments around the battlefield. None of them were as ornate and large and impressive as the one erected by the Pennsylvania veterans, but each was moving in its own small, stone way.
The monuments had not seemed to affect Lewis. George had liked them for their precision and their enduring testament to their fallen friends.
But on their third day at Gettysburg—the place they’d visited had seemed to affect Lewis. George had taken the scooter and sidecar and had stopped at the Devil’s Den. He knew drawing things of nature was not a strength of his, but on a battlefield, a Civil War battlefield, a lot of the important elements and locations were simply fields and fences and ditches and tree lines.
Devil’s Den was a little different. It was a huge outcropping of boulders, just by Little Round Top and Big Round Top. The solid bulk of rock jumbled above the horizon, every bit as intimidating and formidable as any man-made fort.
George had let Lewis off the leash, and Lewis had stayed by his side without complaint. George had rehearsed what he would tell a ranger or a security person if they’d objected to a dog on park grounds.
“He’s a service dog,” George had rehearsed. “I have to keep him with me to avoid unpleasant outbursts. My psychiatrist recommended I get a therapy dog for use at all times, and it’s what Lewis provides—therapy and safety.”
George would not volunteer the unpleasant outbursts at being left alone would come from Lewis and not his human companion. And so far, he had not been called on to employ his elaborately constructed ruse. It seemed as if most people were willing to accept a dog, in most places, if the dog was obedient, quiet, and friendly—of which Lewis was all three.
Even though this breaking of the rules was a bit unsettling to George, he justified it by explaining to himself Lewis was a wonderful, well-mannered, well-behaved, and inordinately docile dog, who did not chase or bark or run after squirrels, and if he had any “accidents,” George would immediately clean them up.
So George had hiked around to the front of the rocks, the front of Devil’s Den, and had come at them from the same direction as the Confederate infantry would have taken in their effort to storm the position.
It’s when Lewis had started whimpering.
George had immediately stopped and bent to him.
“What’s wrong, Lewis?”
Lewis’s eyes had met George’s, and then they had moved to focus in on the rocks looming ab
ove them, and then to the ground they stood on and then back to George. There had been an immense sadness in Lewis’s eyes, as if somehow, after all these years, Lewis could still sense the sacrifice and the immense loss this ground had witnessed.
Lewis had whimpered, then he lay down, with his head between his paws.
For a moment, George had imagined Lewis was trying to pray.
Behind them, a breeze had stirred, coming through where the wheat field and the peach orchard stood. Lewis had lifted his head and sniffed and then whimpered again, a soft noise, coming from deep in his throat.
George had never experienced anything like this with an animal.
But he was there with a purpose, so he’d sat down next to Lewis, put his arm over his shoulder for a moment of comfort, then had taken out his pad and drew what he saw before him—the rocks, the shadows, the clouds, the trees and scrub foliage around the base—and had imagined what it felt like and sounded like all those years ago.
Despite the fact George felt drawing things of nature was difficult, the sketch of Devil’s Den might have been his most compelling drawing yet on the trip.
He’d made the sketch in a hurry, but the style was anything but hurried. It looked precise, as were all the drawings George had done, but the ink lines seemed imbued with more emotion than any man-made structure.
Lewis had appeared relieved when George closed the book and said, “Let’s go home, Lewis, okay?”
* * *
And now, they were on another battlefield, but while this field of combat may have had a more dramatic setting, George had read the night before some historians called it more of a “glorious skirmish than a true battle.”
Lewis did not seem upset here, but he also faced away from where most of the fighting had taken place.
Maybe he’s just a sensitive animal, George thought.
Instead of drawing right away, he flipped through the pages of his recent drawings and their itinerary stops. There were eleven pages on Gettysburg, then in Philadelphia, he had drawn Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and Ben Franklin’s simple grave marker. In Washington, D.C., he had done the Washington Monument (“Ridiculously easy to draw”), the Vietnam memorial, the Capitol Building, and both the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, plus the National Mall from the vantage point of the Lincoln memorial steps. Lewis seemed to have the most empathy with the Vietnam memorial. Visitors still left personal effects at the foot of the wall, and Lewis was most reserved in sniffing at them. In Williamsburg, he had drawn the Governor’s Palace, the Capitol building, and a series of small houses and shops. In Annapolis, he’d found a view of the harbor and the Maryland State House in the background. At Kitty Hawk, he’d drawn a series of the high dunes and the sea grass marking the spot of America’s first powered plane flight.
He had drawn other places—some famous, some simply visually interesting.
His original intention had been to focus only on famous locations, well-known structures or landmarks, but then, after only a few weeks, he found stopping in small towns, drawing abandoned and empty buildings, was curiously compelling. He found those subjects were every bit as stirring and moving as some well-known, iconic image. He’d drawn an abandoned Chevrolet dealership in Gladstone, Virginia. It seemed to sum up man’s desire to achieve greatness as well as man’s inability to hold on to the frail human greatness. He’d drawn a shuttered Dairy Mart in Madisonville, Tennessee, which told stories of summer nights and shared malts. He’d drawn an old five-and-ten store, George thought might have been an old Kresge’s but could not be sure—though the windows and the stairs and the façade reminded him of a similar store back in his childhood memories of Gloucester. He’d drawn an abandoned farmhouse virtually in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on a back road in Kentucky.
He had already filled four notebooks and run through several dozen pens.
And now the two of them were in Chattanooga, two days away from heading further south, to Atlanta first, then on to the coastal cities of Charleston and Savannah.
In spite of having every stop pre-planned and laid out with great precision, he had been forced to modify his schedule. The first time, he’d agonized over cutting one visit short. The second required staying longer than expected in Williamsburg. And after the third unplanned stop, it became easier and easier for George to follow his original route—in a general sense, and not exactly—but shift days with less emotional trauma and apprehension.
There is a freedom in this. I know where I started and where and when I will finish. What’s in the middle . . . well, we’ll take it a little easier.
George opened to a blank page and began to draw. He could see the river and part of the city, but not all of it. He drew the trees and the clouds and the cannons, still keeping guard at their assigned position.
His work went faster now, as he had now practiced it for months. The lines flowed easier, and there was less hesitation in his hand. He employed more detail, his trees bore leaves, clouds appeared in the sky. George realized, or began to realize, after all those decades of drawing straight lines and using instruments to carefully make curves and radii and arcs, he could simply look and translate what he saw onto paper. It was a heady achievement to someone trained to execute exacting, millimeteric precision.
The park remained quiet as George drew. A few people wandered past and peered over the edge. The younger the tourist, the closer they came to the rocky edge, leaning over, holding onto the railing with one hand, extending one arm out to get a better vantage point with their camera. Older people stayed away, a few feet from the railing, content to see the city from three feet further back.
“The people who shouldn’t take chances,” George said quietly to Lewis, “are the ones tempting fate. The old folks, like me, who have much less time left, are the ones who play it safe. It doesn’t make logical sense, does it, Lewis?”
Lewis answered with a wuff, this one sounding like a bad starter in a 1967 Ford Fairlane—a car George once owned. It seemed to George that each one of Lewis’s wuffs were just a bit different; though his vocabulary was small, his intonation was expansive. We wuffed again, this time more solidly. Then he bent his head forward, peering into the distance.
He wuffed again, then again and then once more, even louder, louder than he normally conversed in polite, private dialogue. These were declarative wuffs, as if he were stating something quite important.
Then Lewis stood up and bounced, front paws up first, then the rear, like doing the wave from front to back.
“Lewis, settle down. What’s got you so hepped up?”
And no one says hepped up anymore, do they?
George swiveled on the bench, thinking another dog wandered nearby or a pack of surly ground squirrels were plotting, bent on mocking Lewis’s slowness by rushing past him in a blur.
But it was none of those things.
He saw the red van before he saw anything else.
Lewis was now dancing in anticipation.
George noticed the driver lean out the window and wave enthusiastically.
It was Irene, and she was piloting her red and white VW bus, and it rattled and squealed to a jerky stop in the parking lot.
36
Irene moved quickly for a senior citizen.
Or so George thought as she jumped from her van and ran—not jogged or trotted or ambled, but ran—toward them.
Must have been on the track team in high school.
Then George smiled at the thought.
Like it would translate into being in shape and speedy a half century later.
“George! Lewis!” she shouted out as she came within hugging distance.
She hugged George first, much to Lewis’s obvious annoyance, but she hugged Lewis longer, which appeared to pacify his initial indignant expression.
When the hugging was done—and to Lewis, hugging was never really done, only postponed to be picked up later—Irene stood, put her hands on her hips, and assumed a scolding expression.
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“Where have you been? I have crisscrossed your path more times than I want to count these last months.”
George looked confused.
Irene glared at him, but in a good way.
“You showed me your itinerary. I took note of where and when you would be at places. I may be old, but my memory is still pretty darn good. And I saw you had all your planned RV stops marked down. And I followed you, sort of. Either I would get there early—probably—or show up four days after you left.”
“Well . . .” George said, obviously unsure of how to explain whatever offense Irene thought he had committed.
“You’re an engineer, for heaven’s sake,” Irene blurted out. “If anyone is going to follow a schedule, it would be you. You need to surrender your engineering society membership card.”
“I’m a retired engineer, Irene. Maybe I’m losing my need for precision.”
Irene snorted, surprising Lewis, who also snorted, as a way of showing canine solidarity with this person whom he had met months earlier and was so happy to see again.
“Malarkey.”
George tried not to grin.
“No one says malarkey anymore, do they?”
Irene narrowed her eyes, took a critical stance, then softened.
“You do it, too? Hear yourself using words that no one ever uses anymore?”
Lewis wuffed loudly.
“Well, I’ll be. I thought I was the only one.”
Irene pushed a strand of errant gray hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. She was wearing some sort of dangling gold and red stone earrings.
“So,” Irene said, summing things up. “I found you two. Thank heavens. And now, we need to go to dinner to celebrate. You game, George?”
Lewis answered for him with a series of wuffs and a stately, furry, bulking dance around the pair of them, bobbing up and down, prancing like a short Clydesdale, with none of the grace, but all of the enthusiasm.
Irene looked back to the parking lot.
“So where is the black Maria?”
