Dog House Page 8

  What’s a pogo, you ask?

  Think cat.

  Though to be more precise, “pogo” is the dog aficionado’s term for a pup that can—from a standing start—spring straight from the floor to the top of your dresser, say, to the top of your sofa, your kitchen countertop, to your guest’s food-filled lap. Although Blue, as it soon became disappointingly apparent, wasn’t having laps. She wasn’t having people much at all, to be absolutely frank about it. And not to speak ill of the bitch, but if canines can have attention-deficit disorders, Blue was highly in need of meds.

  Manifesting utter disinterest in Millard or me or any drop-by kids or birds or pink-tailed, be-whiskered vermin—which our new house had in spades—Blue came to us with the metabolism and attention span of a fruit fly. She was so un-Cosi, she might as well have been a Lab. And if we’d been thinking at all, she should have been. Although to be honest, Labs have always been much too popular for me. In common with certain nameless German cars you see everywhere in certain nameless suburbs, Labs are like fleas on a dog. Personally, I like the odd. The Georgian named Millard. The falling-down house. The Humber (I’d now worn out four). The suit-wearing child.

  This Jack Russell/Chihuahua/fruit fly dog?

  Well, one thing was certain: There’d be no sending her back. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t easily overlook what transatlantic horrors the poor little thing may have undergone that had turned her overnight from a Jack Russell terrier into—could dogs transmogrify?—a This. This sui generis Blue. She didn’t want to be with us, or snuggle with us, and she didn’t care when we got home or went out. Alone in our kitchen, she busied herself with creatively chewing the muntins around the glass in the kitchen door and when she tired of that, the cookbooks on the counter. (Most dogs like books, you know: It’s their spines—all that animal glue. Though most dogs have natural good taste as well, and therefore like books.)

  And in case you’re wondering why she was loose in our kitchen munching books, all the foregoing took place before that lovely wire crate with the little fleece on the floor became the training method of choice. And by the way, Blue wasn’t eating that door in hope of escape. She just had a mad passion for aged wood with lead paint sauce. Unfortunately for her (as I’ve come to appreciate lately) we had plenty to gnaw. But little by little, as I got used to Blue’s appearance and disposition and tried very hard to accommodate those few of her peculiarities that were either likable or nondestructive, it hit me like a brick one day. Her English breeder had taken big-time advantage of our purported American naïveté as well as our distance from wherever she lived in Oddogshire to ship us—not merely the runt of the litter but her single unsalable pup.

  Had we been had?

  We missed our Cosi even more.

  Though we tried to make the best of Blue. We’d always been inveterate glass-half-fools.

  Time drifted by, maybe even another year, during which we made genuine and satisfying progress on the house. We patched and cleaned and waxed the wood floors, cut down dead trees, stopped that seepage in the basement (cleaned the gutters!) and hired a weirdly suited-up exterminator to take a beehive out of our attic; a beehive that was unquestionably, the fellow reported to us with some pride, the largest hive he’d ever seen in any inhabited living quarters. Some fifty pounds, as I recall (about the weight of a year-old bear). When he left, I spent the afternoon cleaning gob-bets of lovely sticky honeycomb off the attic floor, shoveling them into black trash bags and washing the old pine boards. I adore honey and would have eaten all those remnants on the spot had they not been studded with hundreds of dead, poisoned bees.

  Now that the honeybee is in dire straits, of course I’m filled with retroactive remorse. Should we have smoked the hive and carried it outside? Should we have left it to flourish and sealed off that room? Should we have put on veiled hats and elasticized suits and become beekeepers? Should we have lived in a buzz of mutual amity? Will I ever do right by Mother Nature?

  Although our house had been constructed in the early 1860s, we discovered photos taken in the 1880s, and poring over these, we were able to begin, slowly, to return bits of the structure to what each once looked like. Hand-chamfered wood railings replaced wrought iron on the porches. We’d already returned the decorative open spandrels to the upper corners of the porch roof supports when we belatedly discovered these were beloved of barn swallows, which may have been why they’d been boarded up to begin with. We even installed a reproduction of the old roof cresting. A kind of “icing” around the top of our house, this was basically an architectural fillip, but terrifying to install. Millard had cleverly re-created it by first making a casting of a segment we’d found at a flea market and then, at his plant, reproducing eighty or so feet in aluminum. We were starting to have fun.

  One day, through the careful research and good offices of a neighboring preservation buff (which we were inadvertently becoming ourselves), we discovered that a rendering of our house had once appeared in the 1860s equivalent of a design magazine, and in the text accompanying its proud architect’s own engraving of his vision, he’d set out his hopes for how the interior might be finished.

  If his creation had ever looked that way, it utterly didn’t now, but preservationists that we were and following his directions, we tried our best to finish his house for him. We painted the faux stone walls in the hall. Millard held the straight edge and I painted, though we quickly discovered that I lacked his steady hand. So I held the straightedge and Millard painted. (And that’s why a good one-third of the front hall’s “stones” looked hand-hewn while two-thirds looked machined.) I spent weeks on the faux-grained woodwork, making a point of continuing the whole onto the second floor, because I’d read somewhere that most graining was confined to main floors because the majority of nineteenth-century homeowners couldn’t afford to have all of the house grained. I didn’t want anyone to think we were only about show (and with DIY, after all, we could be big spenders).

  In period-speak, we “gussied our house up.” And we did it all ourselves.

  Except for the hall tile. We didn’t lay tile.

  And then we made a marvelous discovery.

  I was still addicted to reading the antiques trade papers, and one dull winter evening, stretched out on the living room floor, leafing through page after page of gray text and grainy ads, I came across an arresting full-page photo; an advertisement for a cast-iron birdhouse that looked, gee, very much like our house. The porches were in strange places and there seemed to be a bay window where we didn’t have a bay, but still ...

  “Mill, take a look at this,” I said, sticking the paper under his pipe.

  My spatial relations had always been a running joke between us, but Millard snapped to attention.

  “That’s our house! It’s definitely a miniature of our house.” He was really excited. “Call the dealer. See if we can buy it!”

  He actually wanted to buy something! He was so excited he spilled pipe ash down his sweater and burned a(nother) hole.

  I called immediately but was disappointed. We were too late. The dealer had sold the little cast-iron birdhouse almost immediately to another dealer. (Which, in case you didn’t know, is how the antiques world stays afloat.) Still, after I’d confided my improbable tale to him, and perhaps, because this particular dealer was one I’d known for years, he tried to buy it back for me.

  And whaddya know? He did.

  Which was how we came to own a cast-iron miniature of our own house—labeled by its maker and dated 1868. Not only that, but it appeared that we’d been making a nest for ourselves in perhaps the only extant piece of residential architecture in the United States with a signed and dated birdhouse in its likeness. Over time, for those who inquired, we invented the following romantic, almost-plausible backstory:

  Mr. Miller, a cast-iron maker in Providence who had until quite recently been engaged in making cannon for the North, was reading a shelter magazine in his foundry one day (I did say “almost”) wh
en he turned the page and came across architect Frederick S. Copley’s engraved illustration of his “Model Suburban Cottage: In The Old English Or Modern Gothic Style.” And the enterprising Mr. Miller, who’d been looking around for some way to salvage the fortunes of his moribund cast-iron factory, said to himself, “Now wouldn’t that make a handsome, salable birdhouse?”

  He had a nose for the birdhouse business, did Mr. Miller, because he seems to have done quite well making multiples of our house, along with a number of other, perhaps not so successful, houses. At the Rhode Island School of Design, we found a Miller Iron Company catalog from which we learned that our house was the most costly model the company offered. New and painted white, it sold for ten dollars. Had automobiles been around then, it might have been “the Caddy of the line.” Unfortunately, however, because it wasn’t actually possible for Mr. Miller to see the rear of the house in the engraving, he got that part wrong. And later, when the traffic increased on our nearby road, one of our predecessors moved two of the porches, so we no longer matched the picture in the book. Clearly, though, it was our house.

  We never put our “own” birdhouse outside; we kept it indoors, safe from entropic rust and the depredations of Nature. But we did find another of the Miller birdhouses to put on a pole in the garden. You wouldn’t imagine that birds would actually want to live in a cast-iron house (hot!), but every spring, modest brown house sparrows nested in ours.

  Meanwhile, though Millard and I were ashamed to admit it, Blue was increasingly turning out to be an unsatisfactory Cosi. After a mildly searching review of our consciences and hearts and an exercise involving some convoluted logic I don’t care to recall, I arrived at the skewed but gratifying conclusion that since we only had a half—Jack Russell, a second Jack Russell would give us the whole, ideal dog. No, we’d never had two dogs before, I explained to my objecting-as-usual husband. But they were small. And two couldn’t be any more trouble than one.

  (We’ll let that lie there for a bit.)

  Besides, if Blue couldn’t find a soft spot in her peculiar little heart for humans, maybe something with fur could seduce her. And maybe, too, a little friend to play with and tussle with and chase balls with might distract her from the woodwork.

  Which is how Billy the Jack came into our lives: a walking, eating, yawning example of the hair of the dog that bit you.

  Following the usual half-baked modus operandi with which you’ll now be more or less familiar, I did a good bit of reading about the owning of two dogs. I was no longer borrowing dog books from the library, it will interestyou mildly to know. I had gone pure hard-core and was buying my dog books now. Some arrived in plain brown wrappers from England, because my addiction had become too pressing, too immoderate and too often occurring on weekends or after midnight, when the library was closed.

  That’s where I’d read in my now well-thumbed Raising Jack Russell Terriers that the key thing is, even if your female has been spayed (Blue had), it’s almost never recommended that you put two bitches together, basically because nothing is as vicious to a bitch as another bitch, as everyone who watches reality TV already knows.

  Impatient as usual, I scouted out a litter that had a boy: nearer by this time, only in Connecticut. The pups in this litter were broken-coated Jacks, i.e., dogs with rough or curly coats. To my mind, these weren’t as caressable as the smooth coats, but in their fuzzy-wuzzy way, they were cute. And Billy, with his curly white coat and brown-encircled eye, was a sweetie. From the get-go, he was this docile little ball of fur that was happy to eat and sleep and little else. For as long as he was with us, actually, Billy didn’t do much but eat, sleep and grow rotund. Very rotund.

  He was also a champion yawner.

  Blue seemed okay with her new roommate, although I wouldn’t say she welcomed Billy, or that she and Billy even liked each other, which made me sad. Because when it had first occurred to me to get a second dog, I’d had fond imaginings of the two of them curled around each other in a (tartan, perhaps?) dog bed. You know, like in the puppy calendars? But without the little bows and hats? Mostly, however, they ignored each other: Blue spending days standing on the sofa back, idly chewing on a particularly pricey gimp while keeping one eye on the squirrels out the window; Billy lying hopefully under the kitchen table, waiting for the escaped grape or the errant chip of toast. At dinner he ate twice as much as Blue, though as he grew from puppyhood to adulthood, from pudgy to portly, Billy snuffled around our table less, being happy just to lie on his bed and yawn. Eventually, I came to see Billy as the canine equivalent of some elderly member of an Edwardian gentlemen’s club.

  But he liked us, at least, for which we were pitifully grateful. Billy thought our laps were nice warm beds; beds that were a little too prone to sudden disappearances to suit him, maybe desire-able but all the same. Not laps of the gods, for sure. Not even laps of extraordinarily important buds/owners/pals. But useful and handy and his.

  Which is not to say that either of our Jacks didn’t love having his/her ears scratched or, at least once a day, come nosing around for one of my inimitable tushie rubs. It was those tushie rubs that started it all, in fact. For one night, as Millard and I and the dogs lolled together in front of the television, we got a lesson on the Animal in animals.

  Billy was about eight months old, which meant he’d begun to cock his leg to pee, and had we not made him a eunuch (forgive us, waxed-coat guys), he might have felt stirrings toward Blue. Well, maybe not Blue, who was always a little weirdly androgynous, but other, girlier dogs. Besides, Blue had been living with us longer and was aggressively top dog—although an arthritic field mouse might have topped our plump and mellow Bill. Despite his being such a walkover, Blue took evident pleasure in lording it over him. She ate his food, went first out the door or down the stairs (a major canine status thing), and if Billy found some neat doggy prize to investigate and Blue showed up, he’d drop his ears, tuck his tail and pad away.

  On the evening of our epiphany, Blue was allowing me to share her cushion on the sofa and Billy was stretched on the floor at my feet when idly, I began to rub his tush. Billy had just sighed and yawned hugely and stood up and stretched some more, and leaned his paws against the cushion to give me a better angle, when, with a heart-stopping screech, Blue launched herself upon him.

  Now, Millard and I lived a gentle, quiet life. Literally. We were soft-spoken. Lovers of classical music. (One of us, anyway.) We weren’t door slammers or pot clatterers or dish throwers and we never, ever yelled in anger.

  Well, hardly ever.

  So you can imagine how the yelps, growls and snarls of a dogfight shocked us. Galvanized us, in fact, and we were up off our butts in seconds, staring down appalled at a shrieking tangle of teeth, limbs and fur. Billy, in his newfound maturity, was—incredibly—fighting back. He was howling, too—obviously in agony—as Blue swarmed all over him, slashing at his sides with bared, sharp teeth and screaming mean. We’d never seen a real dogfight (though I belatedly flashed on those elbow-length gloves at the terrier races), and we stood there, momentarily stunned.

  But then Billy was on his back, and Blue was going for his throat. So Millard reached down to separate them—and stood up, bewildered, to see a stream of blood pouring down the arm to which Blue was attached.

  Omigod.

  I tore the snarling dog off his arm and threw her on the sofa as Millard clutched his forearm and ran for the kitchen sink. I looked around for Billy and saw, strangely, no blood on him anywhere. He was sitting on his quivering haunches and crying and whimpering and licking at his astonishing, unblemished fur.

  Dogs and bitches didn’t fight?

  Well, that was why I hadn’t read the How to Break Up the Dogfight parts, and why I didn’t know you’re never supposed to try to separate them. You’re supposed to throw water on them.

  Yup. You know, run to the kitcken—rummage around under the sink till you find a big pot—wait while it fills up (hot or cold?), run back to the fight site witho
ut spilling any, and dump.

  And you know those dog book authors. Never a word about your newly refinished floors.

  Fifteen stitches later, my husband and I sat alone in our bedroom and talked. We were rattled. Shaken. Hours had elapsed since the fight and the dogs were sleeping peacefully in separate rooms, but my heart was thundering in my chest at just the recollection of the thing. Wimps that we’d accepted we were, the ferocity of the set-to had terrified us. A dogfight in our house? That is notwhy one has dogs. Not me, anyway. Not us.

  “It was jealousy, of course,” I began. “Which means,” Millard continued, “that from now on, we’ll have to watch everything: which dog is where and which dog gets what.” We gazed at each other in perplexity and surmise. (And yes, I’m aware of the fact that the real Dog People, the ones who run those terrier trials and judge Westminster, take the occasional dogfight with a grain of salt and maybe a shot or two of Johnnie Walker Red. They also attend multiple births, deal with—god forbid—dead puppies, raise packs of unmanageable “outdoor” dogs and are as emotionally invested in them, in all likelihood, as Mongolian goatherds.)

  Suburban pet owners like us, on the other hand, didn’t deal well with the Animal. We were all about anthropomorphizing the furry things we lived with and cared for, and even the furless things sometimes, like the whales and the manatees and the penguins. But any dog that was going to live with Millard and me, that was going to go out for a Frisbee, that was going to share the idyll of our tranquil, untroubled, restorative house, had better not fight.

  Early next morning, I got on the phone and called the Connecticut Jack Russell breeder for advice, and for the first time—it wouldn’t be the last—heard the politely expressed suggestion that I might not have the right personality for the breed.