A Dog's Purpose (10 page)

That day I was a bad dog again, for some reason, and even had to spend the evening out in the garage instead of lying at Ethan’s feet while he worked on his papers.

Then one day the kids on the big yellow bus were so loud I could hear them shrieking five minutes before the thing stopped in front of the house. The boy was full of joy when he burst out and ran up to me, his mood so high that I ran around and around in circles, barking extravagantly. We went to Chelsea’s house and I played with Marshmallow, and Mom was happy when she came home, too. And from that time on, the boy didn’t go to school anymore and we could lie in bed quietly instead of getting up for breakfast with Dad. Life had finally gotten back to normal!

I was happy. One day we took a long, long car ride and when we were done we were at the “Farm,” a whole new place with animals and smells I’d never before encountered.

Two older people came out of a big white house when we pulled into the driveway. Ethan called them Grandma and Grandpa and Mom did, too, though later I also heard her call them Mom and Dad, which I dismissed as mere confusion on her part.

There were so many things to do on the Farm that the boy
and I spent the first few days on a dead run. An enormous horse stared at me from over a fence when I approached, though she was unwilling to play or do anything but look blankly at me, even when I climbed under the fence and barked at her. Instead of a creek there was a pond, big and deep enough for Ethan and me to swim in. A family of ducks lived on its banks and drove me crazy by taking to the water and paddling away when I approached, but then the mother duck would swim back toward me whenever I grew tired of barking at them, so I’d bark some more.

In the scheme of things, I put ducks right down there with Smokey the cat when it came to their value to the boy and myself.

Dad left after a few days, but Mom stayed with us on the Farm that whole summer. She was happy. Ethan slept on the porch, a room on the front of the house, and I slept right with him and no one even pretended the arrangement should be different. Grandpa liked to sit in a chair and scratch my ears, and Grandma was always slipping me little treats. The love from them made me squirm with joy.

There was no yard, just a big open field with a fence designed to let me in and out at any point I desired, like the world’s longest dog door, only without a flap. The horse, whose name was Flare, stayed inside the fence and spent the day eating grass, though I never saw her throw up once. The piles she left in the yard smelled as if they’d taste pretty good but were actually dry and bland, so I only ate a couple of them.

Having the run of the place meant I could explore the woods on the other side of the fence, or run down and play in the pond, or do just about anything I pleased. I mostly stuck close to the house, though, because Grandma seemed to be cooking delicious
meals almost every minute of every day and needed me to be on hand to taste her concoctions to make sure they were acceptable. I was glad to do my part.

The boy liked to put me in the front of the rowboat and push it out in the pond, drop a worm into the water, and pull out a small, wriggling fish for me to bark at. He would then let it go.

“It’s too little, Bailey,” he always said, “but one of these days we’ll catch a big one; you watch.”

Eventually I discovered (much to my disappointment) that the Farm had a cat, a black one, who lived in an old, collapsing building called the barn. She always watched me, crouched in the darkness, whenever I took it into my head to go in there and try to sniff her out. This cat seemed afraid of me and therefore was a major improvement over Smokey, just like everything at this place.

And one day I thought I saw the black cat in the woods and took off in hot pursuit, though she was waddling slowly and, as I got closer, revealed that she was something else entirely, a whole new animal, with white stripes down her black body. Delighted, I barked at her, and she turned and gave me a solemn look, her fluffy black tail held high up in the air. She wasn’t running, which I figured meant she wanted to play, but when I jumped in to paw at her, the animal did a most curious thing, turning away from me, her tail still in the air.

The next thing I knew, a plume of horrid smell enveloped my nose, stinging my eyes and lips. Blinded, yelping, I retreated, wondering what in the world had just happened.

“Skunk!” Grandpa announced when I scratched at the door to be let in. “Oh, you’re not coming in, Bailey.”

“Bailey, did you get into a skunk?” Mom asked me through the screen door. “Ugh, you sure did.”

I didn’t know this word “skunk,” but I knew that something very odd had occurred out there in the woods, and it was followed by something odder still—wrinkling up his nose at me, the boy took me out into the yard and wetted me down with a hose. He held my head while Grandma carted up a basket of tomatoes from the garden and squeezed the tart juices all over my fur, turning it red.

I couldn’t see how any of this helped matters any, particularly since I was then subjected to the indignity of what Ethan informed me was a bath. Perfumed soap was rubbed into my wet fur until I smelled like a cross between Mom and a tomato.

I had never been so thoroughly humiliated in my life. When I was dry, I was consigned to the porch, and though Ethan slept out there with me, he kicked me out of his bed.

“You stink, Bailey,” he said.

The assault on my person thus complete, I lay on the floor and tried to sleep despite the riot of odors wafting around the room. When morning finally came I ran down to the pond and rolled in a dead fish that had washed up onshore, but not even that helped, much—I still smelled like perfume.

Eager to figure out what had happened, I went back into the woods to see if I could find that catlike animal and get an explanation. Now that I knew her scent, she wasn’t hard to locate, but I’d hardly begun to sniff at her when the same exact thing happened, a blinding spray that hit me from, of all places, the animal’s rear end!

I couldn’t figure out how to resolve this misunderstanding and wondered if I wouldn’t be better off just ignoring the animal altogether, making her suffer for all the ignominy she had put me through.

In fact, that’s exactly what I decided to do once I trotted
home and was put through the entire cycle of washings and tomato juice dunkings again—was this my life, now? Every day I’d be slathered in vegetables, have stinky soaps rubbed into me, and be barred from entry into the main part of the house, even when Grandma was cooking?

“You are so stupid, Bailey!” the boy scolded me while he scrubbed me out in the yard.

“Don’t use the word ‘stupid’; it is such an ugly word,” Grandma said. “Tell him . . . tell him he’s a doodle; that’s what my mother always called me when I was a little girl and I did something wrong.”

The boy faced me sternly. “Bailey, you are a doodle dog. You are a doodle, doodle dog.” And then he laughed and Grandma laughed, but I was so miserable I could barely move my tail.

Fortunately, around about the time that the smells faded from my fur the family stopped behaving so strangely and allowed me to rejoin them. The boy sometimes called me a doodle dog, but never angrily, more as an alternative to my name.

“Want to go fishing, doodle dog?” he’d ask, and we’d shove out in the rowboat and pull tiny fish out of the water for a few hours.

One day toward the very end of summer it was colder than usual and we were out in the boat, Ethan wearing a hood that was attached to his shirt at the neck. And suddenly he jumped up. “I’ve got a big one, Bailey, a big one!”

I responded to his excitement, leaping to my feet and barking. He wrestled with his rod for more than a minute, grinning and laughing, and then I saw it, a fish the size of a cat, coming to the surface right next to our boat! Ethan and I both leaned forward to see it, the boat rocked, and then with a yell the boy fell overboard!

I leaped to the side of the boat and stared down into the dark green water. I could see the boy vanishing from sight, and the bubbles rising to the surface carried his scent to me, but he showed no signs of resurfacing.

I didn’t hesitate; I dove right in after him, my eyes open as I pushed against the water and struggled to follow the trail of bubbles down into the cold darkness.

I couldn’t see much of anything down there in the water, which pressed against my ears and slowed my desperate descent. I could sense the boy, though, sinking slowly ahead of me. I swam even harder, finally catching blurry sight of him—it was almost like my first vision of Mother, a smeared image in murky shadows. I lunged, jaws open, and when I was right up to him I was able to seize the hood of his sweatshirt in my mouth. I lifted my head and, dragging him with me, rose as quickly as I could toward the sunlit surface of the pond.

We burst up into the air. “Bailey!” the boy shouted, laughing. “Are you trying to save me, boy?” He reached out and snagged the boat with his arm. Frantically I tried to claw my way up his body and into the boat, so I could pull him the rest of the way to safety.

He was still laughing. “Bailey, no, you doodle dog! Stop it!” He pushed me away, and I swam a tight circle.

“I have to get the rod, Bailey; I dropped the rod. I’m okay! Go on; I’m okay. Go on!” The boy gestured toward the shore, as if he were throwing a ball in that direction. He seemed to want me to leave the pond, so after a minute I did, aiming for the small area of sand next to the dock.

“Good boy, Bailey,” he said encouragingly.

I looked around and saw his feet go up in the air, and then an instant later he vanished under the water. With a whimper I turned right around and swam as hard as I could, my shoulders lifting clear out of the pond with the effort. When I got to the trail of bubbles, I followed the scent. It was much harder to get myself down this time because I hadn’t dived out of the boat, and as I was headed toward the bottom of the pond I sensed the boy coming up and I switched directions.

“Bailey!” he called delightedly. He tossed his rod into the boat. “You are such a good dog, Bailey.”

I swam beside him as he pulled the boat over to the sand, so relieved I licked his face when he bent over to haul the boat onto the shore.

“You really tried to save me, boy.” I sat, panting, and he stroked my face. The sun and his touch warmed me in equal measure.

The next day, the boy brought Grandpa down to the dock. It was much hotter than it had been the day before, and, racing ahead of the two of them, I made sure the duck family was out in the middle of the pond where it belonged. The boy was wearing another shirt with a hood, and the three of us trotted to the end of the dock and looked down into the green water. The ducks swam over to see what we were looking at, and I pretended I knew.

“You watch, he’ll dive underwater; I promise,” the boy said.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Grandpa replied.

We walked back to the shore side of the dock. Grandpa grabbed my collar. “Go!” he shouted.

The boy took off running, and after only a second Grandpa released me so I could follow. Ethan sailed off the end of the dock and made a huge splash, which the ducks complained about to each other, bobbing in the waves. I ran to the end of the dock and barked, then looked back at Grandpa.

“Go get him, Bailey!” Grandpa urged.

I looked down at the frothy water where the boy had gone in, then back at Grandpa. He was old and moved pretty slow, but I couldn’t believe he was so daft that he wasn’t going to do anything about this new situation. I barked some more.

“Go on!” Grandpa told me.

I suddenly understood and looked at him in disbelief. Did I have to do everything in this family? With one more bark I dove off the end of the dock, swimming down toward the bottom, where I could sense Ethan lying motionless. I gripped his collar in my jaws and headed for air.

“See! He saved me!” the boy called when we both surfaced.

“Good boy, Bailey!” Grandpa and the boy shouted together. Their praise pleased me so much I took off after the ducks, who quacked stupidly as they swam away. I got so close to being able to nip off a few tail feathers that a couple of them flapped their wings and briefly took flight, which meant I won, in my opinion.

The rest of the afternoon was spent playing “Rescue Me,” and my anxiety gradually dissipated as I learned that the boy could pretty much fend for himself in that pond, though it so delighted him whenever I hauled him to the surface I dove after him every single time. The ducks eventually climbed out of the
water and sat by the edge of the pond and watched us without comprehension. Why they didn’t fly up into the trees with the other birds I’d never understand.

I could see no reason to ever leave the Farm, but when Dad arrived a few days later and Mom started walking from room to room, opening drawers and pulling things out, I had a feeling we were going to move yet again and began pacing anxiously, afraid I’d be left behind. It wasn’t until the boy called, “Car ride!” that I was allowed to climb in and hang my head out the window. The horse, Flare, stared at me with what I assumed was unrestrained jealousy, and both Grandma and Grandpa hugged me before we drove away.