A lot of the time, the one thing we’re here to do is the thing that we’re actually not all that good at. When we try to express the thing we feel, most of the time it comes out wrong. No, wait, I have found myself saying over and over again, perhaps more than any other phrase I have uttered in this life. That’s not what I meant!
On the other hand, given how inarticulate we are in the language of love, we’re absolutely fluent when it comes to expressing our hate.
This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been.
This is a book about men and boys, written by a woman who remembers the world in which they live the way an emigrant might, late in life, recall the distant country of her birth. Back when I lived in the Olde Country—like many men—there were times I found it impossible to express the thing that was in my heart. But the love I felt for dogs was one I never had cause to hide.
This is a book about seven phases of my life and the dogs I loved at each moment.
It’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of that vanished boy and his endless desire.
There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that mysterious child, his ferocity—and his fragility. Sometimes he seems to fade before me, like breath on a mirror.
But I remember the dogs.
* * *
It’s worth noting what happened on the one day Gomer finally got the thing he’d always wanted, by which I mean my throat.
Gomer’s mistress, Joy, was the manager of a stable. There my sister rode horses and hung out with stable boys who mucked the stalls and listened to the Rolling Stones on a transistor radio. I was just a scarecrow in those days, hanging around the barn with my partner-in-crime, an older boy named Jimmy. That was my name, too, back then anyway, and we were like two mobsters: Jimmy Slingshot (him) and Jimmy Fly-trap (me). We shot wasps’ nests with slingshots; we crept around the perimeter of the nearby Delaware County Prison and watched the convicts planting corn in their orange jumpsuits. We walked across farmers’ fields with his dog, Fleece, who had only one eye. We sat in the leather seats of his brother’s stock car, a coupe that sat up on blocks in the Slingshot family’s garage. Its front fender was crushed, from an accident during the last race the brother had run.
The brother, Bob Junior, wasn’t around anymore. Now he was in Vietnam, flying a chopper. While he was away, Jimmy Slingshot’s father, Bob Senior—who had worked at Boeing developing the very chopper that his son was now flying—turned completely gray.
One day Jimmy Slingshot and I came upon a huge pile of dead pigs in a field. Flies swarmed around them.
What did we do? Just what you’d expect: we got out our slingshots and shot pebbles at the carcasses. That being the custom among our people.
I would, of course, have rather been back at our house, secretly experimenting with my mother’s pink plastic rollers. But how could a person put this desire into words? The only thing you could do with such yearning—even if it was, ultimately, the utter truth of your being—was to keep it locked down in a hole. Or so I then thought.
In the afternoon I left his house and went looking for my sister, who was supposed to be currycombing her pony, Iris, down by the barn. In order to get there, though, I had to walk through Joy’s farm, a place that had clearly once been a thriving enterprise but had fallen on some strange misfortune. The biggest of the old barns had burned down decades before, and it now stood collapsed in upon itself, a tangle of stone foundations and charred timbers. A series of old stone steps led from Jimmy Slingshot’s house, down a hill, and into the heart of the old farm’s ruins, a complex that included not only the barn with my sister’s pony but Joy’s home, too, a stone farmhouse surrounded by mud well pocked with hoofprints.
Gomer sat at his usual sentry post, the top step of Joy’s front porch. A chain dangled from his neck.