Well, I've left myself exactly 24 minutes to get this day's post written. (Note to the particular among you: I've slightly altered my self-imposed conditions -- it's okay if the post isn't actually published until after midnight, as long as it's begun before. Phew. That's a relief)
And, even with that additional leeway (the clock is ticking ticking), I find myself stymied, about what I should say tonight. Maybe, in light of yesterday's post about The Farm, I'll talk about Dead Dog. That's nice and depressing.
As you may recall, when I was living out in the country during my undergraduate years, our nearest neighbors were, shall we say, a poster family for the cliched Appalachian clan -- desperately poor, desperately undereducated, and amazingly prolific. I don't really know how many people lived in that house that was slowly sinking backwards into the creek behind it. But there were plenty of kids all over the place. Whether any of them succumbed to their father's game of shooting at them as they ran desperately down the road, I can't say for certain.
I can say, though, from the howls and screams we heard on a regular basis, from that general direction, that there was a steady stream of physical abuse at work there -- as steady as the undermining creek just a few yards away. And the general scenario seemed to be thus: Dad is drunk, screams at Mom and smacks her around a bit. Mom may or may not be drunk as well, but regardless, turns her anger to the oldest child -- or at least, the one closest to hand. Probably the larger ones were easier to connect with. And in the time-honored tradition of such rituals, the abuse would trickle down, (maybe this is where the Reagan economic model came from?) from the older kids, to the younger ones, with the family dog on hand, to take whatever smacks and kicks were left over, or couldn't conveniently be delivered to the desired target.
Actually, we didn't now that the neighbors had any pets -- the yowling from their house had an animal quality in any event, and could have been coming from almost anything vertebrate, with vocal cords. (Did you know, by the way, that giraffes have no voices? A propos of nothing in particular) But one day, I happened on a strange dog-like creature on our front porch, nosing around the cat food plate. The plate had been pretty much cleaned up, as we fed the cats that came with the property (the perpetually pregnant Mrs. Cat, her son White Boy, and a daughter, Grey Girl), plus my cat Nabisco, and another kitty, Buffalo. That's a lot of feline mouths plowing through a can of Cadillac Cat Food. (Don't let the Cadillac fool you. Maybe some of the fish had been run over by a high-end vehicle, but that's where the connection to fine quality began and ended) And then, after the cats had finished, and the sun had gone down, the loathsome possums would trundle up onto the porch and gnaw at the edge of the plate, where perhaps a little bit of some sea creature was left behind.
So, the pickings were slim, for this poor shriveled creature. Being an older brother, and inured to taking care of the less fortunate (when I'm not cursing them out in my car, that is), I spoke to the dog in what I hoped was a reassuring tone of voice, and went into the house to find something edible for it. The thing was a mongrel of any number of hounds, virtually skin and bones, and his back legs were stiff and immobile, probably as a result of distemper, I think. It was impossible to pet him -- he associated all human touch with a beating, and shrank away, and fell over, in a way that would have given Charles Dickens food for thought. When I found some leftovers in our fridge, and offered them to him on the well-licked cat plate, he cowered at the end of the porch until I'd gone into the house. I peeked through the screen door, as he sneaked up to the dish and sniffed, then began devouring this little peace offering in great gulps, until I made a noise. He immediately stopped eating and backed quickly away, fell off the end of the porch, and scurried off through the bushes. Down the hill and across the creek. Toward the neighbors' house. Which made sense.
Over the next few weeks, I tried everything I knew, to make some sort of contact with this dog -- who have become a semi-regular visitor, cowering under the big forsythia bush until he felt it was safe to venture out and examine the porch for bits of food. But no matter what I did, he was always quivering with rank fear whenever I got too close, and I will always believe that I could see, in his eloquent dark eyes, the battle between a desire for a softer kind of human contact (to say nothing of something to eat), and the leaden certainty that, if he got too close to anything on two legs, he was sure to get a cracking across his spine. What led me, finally, to abandon any attempts at establishing some kind of rapport, was the discovery that he was breaking into our trash cans, and making a terrific mess, searching for still something more to eat. Even when I freely offered something to this poor creature to eat, he was so damaged that he still had to steal it.
So, in our mordant college-style humor, we dubbed our slinky visitor Dead Dog, because it was only going to be a matter of time before he really would go to join his canine ancestors. And, as you may imagine, there was more than simple sympathy behind my efforts to rehabilitate this wrecked creature. As I will compulsively pick up scraps of plastic from the street, hoping to give meaning to these bits and pieces, by working them into some piece of art (there would be no museum on earth large enough to house all the work I could make, from my supply of detritus), I also hope to rehabilitate myself, and give myself something like value, in spite of a life that, for many years, seemed designed to eradicate any sense of personal worth, either in the present or the future. I still struggle with this, today.
There was a quote from Frederick Douglas, shared on Facebook the other day. I don't recall the exact wording, but the sense of it was that, even if a child had been reared as a slave, that child could grow into an adult who would be able to leave these early experiences behind, and become a full, whole person in his or her own right. When I read things like this, I feel guilty, and there's a kind of catch inside me, where my pacemaker is now embedded. I know, and continue to emphasize, that I am wildly fortunate in my current life. But underneath this, I still wrestle with something like the difficulties I saw in Dead Dog's eyes -- a longing to believe in something better, but the imprinted certainty that anything that comes too close is going to hurt. And hurt bad.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
No comments:
Post a Comment