We moved to that hilltop farm northwest of Charlottesville,
Virginia in November of 1955. Now, of course, I don’t remember that. I was only
2 and a half years old at the time, and the prodigious mental powers that have
propelled me through life were extremely nascent in 1955. (I’ll call “BS” first. There may be some
small debate as to those prodigious mental powers, but my memory back in
1955 wasn’t much better than it is now – and it has not improved one little bit
since!)
But there are some things that a man remembers – no matter
how flawed his memory is – his first love, a particularly pretty sunset, his
first car, shooting his first gun, the sun rising over the Canadian prairie on the
morning of September 11, 2001. . . And one of the things that I remember, as
clear as if it was this morning, was life with “that sheep killing red dog”.
Dad rescued Red Dog shortly after we moved to
Charlottesville. As I remember the story. Red Dog was a stray, running the
streets in town, who had been trained to terrorize blacks. In the segregated
South, certain people trained their dogs to chase and attack black people.
Sometimes, some of these dogs became so vicious that they had to be put down. Dad
brought the dog home and for all the years that he was with us, Red Dog never
showed any aggression toward anyone.
Back in those days, at least in Virginia, there were 2
“County Agents” – agricultural advisors from Virginia Tech agriculture college
- in every county. Due to segregation there had to be a “white county agent”
and a “Negro county agent”. Dad developed a very strong working relationship
with Mr. Butler, the “Negro county agent” in Albemarle County. They worked
together to improve the hog management skills of the Negro farmers. Dad thought
that improving the farm profits of the black farmers was an important step in
improving things in the area. Mr. Butler would take help from any source to
help his people. Mr. Butler was a frequent visitor at the farm – and I have
snips of memories of Dad and Mr. Butler sitting in the shade in the yard with
Red Dog laying down between them. Red Dog wasn’t any more of a “white dog” than
I am a ballerina! It was a bad rap, but it got Red Dog his “forever” home – as
the cliché is today. I’ve wondered sometimes if Red Dog’s owner conned Dad into
“rescuing” the dog. Being a “damn Yankee”, that Gerow fella wound be an easy
mark for saving Negroes from a “white dog.” Whatever the real story, Red Dog
was a perfect fit for us.
So, Red Dog plays into all of my memories of the early years
on that hilltop farm. He was a big,
gentle, loyal dog. He loved Mom and was very protective of us kids. He stayed
with us kids when we left the yard to play in barnyard, the orchard, and the
close in pastures. There were strict limits to how far we were allowed to go
away from the house. I remember Mom walking us around the boundaries of the
yard to show us where we could play first. Our first outside world was bounded
by the chicken house and out-buildings to the east, the white board fence to
the north, the orchard fence to the west, and the tractor road and garden to
the south. We could play there – anytime – as long as we told Mom that we were
outdoors. Going outside those boundaries would have resulted in Mom using the
wooden spoon on us and then Dad giving us a lecture.
The lecture was a helluva lot worse than the wooden spoon!
The wooden spoon stung, but the lecture always left all 3 of us in tears. Dad’s
lectures always ended with, “Now, go apologize to your Mother.” The Man was
good!
But I’ve wandered off down a different trail here.
We hadn’t had Red Dog too long when the Game Warden, Grayson
Johnson, came to the house. He told Mom
that somebody had reported a big red dog chasing and killing sheep on the
Wingfield place.
Mom told him that it couldn’t be our dog, that he was always
in sight of the house and that he was too old to chase sheep. Things didn’t get
out of hand until Grayson Johnson said something about taking the dog. Then, I
guess, all hell broke loose. Mom started crying and big sister lost control of
little brother and me and the 2 of us attacked the Game Warden! I guess that we
threw our selves at his legs and were hitting him and trying to bite him –
remember now, we were probably 3 and 4 years old. Finally, Grayson Johnson
started to back away and the end of the conversation was, “Mrs. Gerow, I
wouldn’t care if there was a dead sheep right over there! Ain’ no way I’m
messing with your damn dog!”
Now, to fully understand this, there’s a couple things that
you need to know. At the time this happened, Red Dog was an old dog. Dad would
put him out at night when he went to bed – 10ish or so, and the dog was always
in the yard when Dad would go to the barn at 5 in the morning. The pastures at
the Wingfield place were almost 3 miles away through some of the roughest,
steepest country in the county, covered with some of the thickest trashiest
woods you’ve ever seen. There wasn’t any way that old dog could have trekked to
Wingfields, run down a flock of sheep, killed some, and made it home in time to
meet Dad at 5 in the morning. He never had blood on him and never looked like
he traveled that rough country at night. He didn’t kill sheep, but that became
the joke – “that sheep killin’ red dog”.
The story doesn’t end there, though. About a dozen years
later, we were at church one Sunday, when Mom introduced me to a newcomer to
the church. It was the former Game Warden, Grayson Johnson! As we shook hands,
he looked at me and said, “You aren’t gonna try to bite me again, are you?”
Nothing lasts forever. As John Knowles wrote in “A Separate
Peace”, “Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”
We don’t know that when we’re children. Children think that whatever is
happening is the way things are always going to be. I’m not sure that we accept
the finality of things in one big learning step. Maybe we “learn” it once, but
only accept it in steps through time as different parts of our lives end.
Thinking back on those endless summer days of childhood – sunlight and shade in
the yard, cows grazing the tall grass on the hills, Mom and Dad – I thought
they would never end. But, there came a time when no cows grazed the hills and
there came a winter when Red Dog started having trouble with his hips and
shoulders. I don’t remember how it started, but in my memory, by summer the dog
couldn’t get up without help. He’d go outside of the yard fence and then not be
able to get back until we could find him and help him to his feet. Mom was
terrified that he’d go off, get down, and die alone. Mom and Dad made the tough
decision to put the old dog down.
Of course, I don’t remember, but I’d like to think that Red
Dog left this world surrounded by his people and I have no doubt, that he was
waiting at the Pearly Gate when Mom got there.
“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by
violence,”, not even the grief of losing a great dog. And life on the hilltop
farm went on, different without Red Dog, but it went on.
High summer was coming, and Dad was gearing up for the barley and wheat
harvest. Dad hired one of his hunting buddies to combine the grain with his
bigger, self-propelled combine. Now, Pete Walker was a Virginia back country
original. He did a little “shirt-tail” farming in the low country east of
Charlottesville. He was a good plumber and electrician when he wasn’t in the
woods. Pete and his wife lived almost off the grid, long before it was cool.
They lived in a big, old plantation house that hadn’t seen
any paint and few repairs since before Lee surrendered to Grant. The
outbuildings around the house were in various stages of collapse and chock full
of machines, parts of machine, cars in various stages of construction – and
deconstruction, a few sows and piglets, and the ubiquitous flock of feral
chickens. The only orderly things at Pete’s place were the huge garden, and the
range marking stakes reaching out from the back porch to the woods a quarter
mile away. Pete’s wife Mary used these for shooting deer from the back porch.
These folks lived off the land and “them dam’ deer keep eating the garden”! But
Pete Walker had one heck of a bird dog! If there was a turkey within a day’s
walk, that dog would find it. My Dad and Pete Walker walked many miles
following that dog through the Louisa County woods. I’m not wandering down
another rabbit trail of memory here, nor butting my head against the sky, Pete
Walker and his bird dog are an important part of this story.
Shortly after we sent Red Dog home, Pete Walker showed up
one morning to service the combine before going to the field. He rolled into
the barnyard in his well – used Nash Metropolitan. He called kid brother Jeff
and me over to the car. He opened the door and handed us a white puppy with a
black ear and a couple of black spots. This odd-looking puppy was out of his
incredible bird dog.
“Here,” he said, “he mightn’t come on to be a bird dog, but
he’ll sure as hell be a good dog for you boys!” he started up the Nash, and
rattled off to the field, leaving us with a puppy that we weren’t expecting.
After licking our faces and waging his whole body at having us, he squirmed and
wiggled until we set him down. He sniffed around. Learned his first lesson
about barn cats. Lapped up a little of the cat’s milk and ran back to us with
that sideways run that puppies do. Jeff and I headed to the house with the
puppy trying mightily to keep up with us. We had to pick him up to carry him
into the house – he couldn’t make the steps by himself. Mom was sitting at the
dining room table when we burst through the door.
“Mama! Mama!” we yelped, “Pete Walker just gave us a dog!”
We set the puppy on Mom’s lap and he proceeded to do all the things that puppies
do to make us fall in love with them, licking at her hands and face, snuggling
up close, and wagging his tail a mile a minute. Mom burst into tears and said,
“That’s not a dog – that’s nothing!” And so, it was that Nothing Dog got his
name, his own “pack”, and his first “for-ever” home.
And so it was that Nothing became part of the ever changing
tapestry of the Gerow family. He never really replaced Red Dog; he made his own
very unique place in our lives. The “sheep killin’ red dog” and Nothing were as
different as night and day, but each was loyal, fiercely protective, and a
source of unending, unquestioning love and devotion. Maybe there are some of
the things that we are supposed to learn from dogs – that we each have an
endless capacity to love, that no two objects of our love are ever exactly the
same, and we shouldn’t try to replace a lost love, but rather we should build
on those earlier experiences.
We will leave that hilltop farm of my long ago childhood –
for now. If you’re out that way, drop by and set a spell. It doesn’t take long
to make coffee and I’m sure there will be stories yet to tell.
