I walk in to the parental homestead
to find both Mother and Father sitting mournfully in the front room, looking
much like someone had died. Dick, the
dog, is lying with his head between his paws, his eyes downcast. He looks so inconsolable that I become very
alarmed at the whole scene and ask, in a nervous tone, what had happened. Father tells me I’d better sit down. I look at Mother and she tells me I’d better
sit down. Mother never agrees with
Father, so I realize we have a situation on our hands, and I sit down.
“It’s terrible,” Father begins,
with what looks to be tears in his eyes.
Then I notice that Father’s arm is a massive bruise and he has cuts on
his face.
“What on earth happened?” I
interrupt.
“Oh, just awful,” Mother chimes in.
There is a long silence in which my
heart begins to pound precipitously. Finally,
Father says, his voice breaking, “Dick killed a dog.” I look at Dick who can’t even pick his head
up off the pillow. This is the same dog
that goes crazy with excitement when he’s around me and here he lies, utterly
broken with shame.
There are more pronouncements of
what a terrible dog poor Dick is before I get the story straight. The whole
time Father speaks, Dick lies there in an absolutely pitiful state. From what I gather, Father was walking Dick
down at the end of the alley, almost home after a long dog walk that is
carefully planned to avoid confrontations with other dogs as Dick has had a few run-ins. Father’s friend at the end of the alley came
out to say hello when all of a sudden, the friend’s little white dog came
running out of the open garage and attacked Dick. Dick hates small dogs and he was none too
pleased to be attacked by one. He picked
up the small dog between his giant jaws, and tossed it back down onto the
ground. The dog didn’t get back up. Dick had killed it. In the ensuing melee, Father got knocked down. To hear Father tell it, the white dog lay
motionless in the alley not far from where Father lay bleeding on the ground. Dick stood over the dead dog as if willing it
to get up so he could kill it again. The
whole while Father is telling this story, Mother keeps chiming in with
statements like, “terrible, Dick,” or “just awful, Dick”.
Later that day, apparently the
daughter of Father’s friend came down to see if Father was okay. Father gets choked up again explaining how
terrible he felt that Dick had killed this girl’s “poor, sweet dog”. Dick actually lets out a whimper as he lies
there on his bed, completely beaten down with grief. “Look, Dick,” I say, bending down to rub his
ears, “it’s not your fault. That dog
attacked you and you just were protecting yourself.” He wags his tail slightly. “Poor Dick couldn’t help it,” I say louder to
Mother and Father, hoping to snap them all out of it. “He was attacked! What did you want him to do?” The only answer is another pitiful whimper
from poor Dick. "It's okay, boy." I tell him. "I understand. I was attacked once, too."
Years prior, when I was about a
year and a half old, the whole family piled into the station wagon and took a long
drive up to the northern lakeshore suburbs.
One of Mother’s friends from her nannying days in Winnetka was going to
give us a sheepdog puppy. I don’t
remember too much about this, but I know it was a sheep dog because I
frequently heard about how it was my fault that we never had a dog. Every time we’d see a sheepdog, I’d be
reminded of this fact. “Hey,” one of the siblings would pipe up in a
martyred voice, “that’s the kind of dog we would have had if Mars hadn’t gotten
herself bitten by that dog.” Then numerous
pairs of eyes would shoot daggers at me because clearly toddler me had
purposely gotten attacked by a dog and spent an extended period of time in a
hospital cage just to spite the rest of the siblings.
On the way to get the sheep dog, we
stopped off at a different friend's of Mother.
When it was time to leave, I remember Mother and her friend talking on and on endlessly and me getting tired of
standing, waiting for her, so I squatted down onto the floor of the house, by
the staircase near the front door. Then
I remember, and with the type of painful vividness that really is crying out to
be discussed with a mental health professional, being tied down to an emergency
room steel table in what was essentially a kid version of a strait jacket,
while somebody waved a scary looking clown doll above my face to get me to look
up. All the while, as I recall, I screamed
and thrashed about, futilely. Apparently,
the cocker spaniel that lived in Mother's friend's house had taken a good pound out of my
cheek when I was crouching impatiently by the stairs. The whole incident eventually translated
into a week or so hospital stay for me.
The older, teenaged
girl that I shared the hospital room with had a broken leg that had to be elevated so that
she couldn’t really move. Her leg was
chained somehow to bolts and chains hanging from the ceiling. She moaned all night long. As for me, I was locked away in a crib at
night that had a top on it that closed down around me like a cage. Is it any wonder I am not a fan of closed spaces? Never ending sibling dog bite rebuke, kiddy
straight jacket, medieval torture device chained leg to the ceiling, cage. Almost miraculously, unlike Sibling #3, I don’t even need to
surround myself with the somehow comforting feel of a good paper towel. Not to mention that I should have been a
complete nut case whenever I encountered a dog, but a terror of dogs, fortunately,
never came to pass. Not to say that I
don’t have my issues, but who doesn’t?
Regardless, I was the victim of an
unprovoked dog attack, just like poor Dick.
And just like the siblings did to me, the parents rebuke Dick with every
slump of their shoulders and every heart broken utterance of “what are we going
to do with you, Dick?” As if Dick had a
problem that needed fixing. A few months
pass, and Father’s tread, made far heavier with guilt and grief for the small
dog, does not become any lighter. He frequently tells me how bad he feels about
the whole thing and he doesn’t know what to do with Dick. Dick is nothing short of miserable. He no longer bounds around the house, though
he still sits quite literally at Father’s right hand at the breakfast table,
being fed buttered toast and steak cooked especially for Dick. Still, I think, the guilt has gone on long
enough. I confer with the siblings and
we admit we are all worried. I continue
to remind the parents that, Dick, like me, was the victim.
One day, I go for a visit and
Father tells me when I walk in the door, “You’re not going to believe
this!” I notice that the light is back
in his eyes. He is standing up straighter. And for the first time in ages, Dick jumps up
excitedly when I walk in. I am thrilled
to see that the old Dick is back! I don’t
have to wait to learn what has brought about this change as Father urges me to
sit down, so he can tell me his good news.
“I saw my friend that lives across the alley yesterday,” he begins with
a smile on his face. (This is different
from the friend with the ex-white dog that lives at the end of the alley.) “He stopped to tell me that he’d heard about
what Dick did. He was laughing as he was
telling me this,” Father says. “I kept
telling my friend what a terrible thing Dick did and how I didn’t trust Dick
anymore. But my friend wouldn’t
listen. He kept laughing and then he told me that it was too bad
Dick didn’t kill that ‘little bastard dog.’”
Father continues, “’Wait a minute,’
I told him. ’Dick did kill him’, I
say. I told my friend how I saw the
little, white dog lying in the alley, completely lifeless.”
“‘That dog wasn’t dead,’ my friend
announced. ‘That little fucker was just
playing dead. He attacks my dog all the
time and then plays dead. So when I
heard Dick got hold of him I was hoping he’d killed the little fucker, but no
such luck. The little fucker charged out
of the yard yesterday and attacked my dog again.’” My father just shakes his head, his delighted
eyes wide, not quite believing this unbelievable story. “Is this too much or what? I mean, can you believe this?” he asks, his
voice an octave deeper from mirth. “He
was playing dead! The dog was playing
dead and the whole time I was blaming poor Dick!”
Mother chimes in, “I always knew
Dick was a good boy. Aren’t you Dick?” Dick prances around happily, the truth of the
resurrection dog having set him free. If
only I could as easily toss off memories of being tied to a table while a scary
clown danced before my eyes. Maybe I
need to carry a roll of paper towels with me. Although, there are those that argue a dog is
the best therapy of all. Regardless, it's really no wonder I’ve got
a whole lot of crazy cat lady lurking, along with myriad other issues, under
the long since faded scars of the dog bite.
