My Dog Skip (12 page)

I went to college in another state far away For our first paper in English composition the professor assigned us a two-thousand-word autobiography; I began with a description of the fading lonely sunlight outside my dormitory window, went back through the years with Skip, and concluded with much rhetoric in the same dormitory six hours later. One sentence read: “My dog and I wandered the woods and swamplands of our home shooting
squirrels.” To which the teacher appended the comment: “Who was the better shot, you or the dog?” When I telephoned my parents from college, they got Skip to bark at me from the other end. When I came home in the summers we did the same old things, but it was different—not that I was not as close to him as I had been, but that I was not a boy anymore, and that the whole outside world was beckoning to me.

And that Skip himself had somehow grown old. He was eleven when I graduated from college, and feeble, with arthritis in his legs. Sometimes he still had the devilish look of eye, but he did not retrieve sticks anymore, and preferred lying in the shade of the trees, or under the steps to the back door, and he did not want to ride in the car, and he never woke me up in the mornings; it was I who had to wake
him
up.

I won a scholarship to England to complete my studies; I would be away three years. The day came when my parents
had to drive me to meet the train East, where I would take an oceanliner. I knew I would never see Skip again.

My parents were waiting in front of the house when I went to the backyard to say good-bye to him. He was lying under our elm tree, the one in which he had trapped Bubba and me years before, with the same old tree house up there, a little forlorn and neglected now. I sat beside him not far from the grave of the little kitten we had buried those years ago and rubbed the back of his neck, in the spot he had always wanted to be rubbed. He lifted his head and looked at me, then put his head in my lap, nuzzling me with his nose as he had done the first time I had seen him as a puppy. I told him I had to go and that I would miss him. He looked at me again, and licked my cheek. “Thank you, boy” I whispered. Then I left without looking back.

But as the car pulled away from the house, I looked back. Skip was walking along the front lawn, and then sat down and gazed at me. I watched him until he was just a tiny speck.

A month later there was a transatlantic call for me at Oxford University. I went to the front lodge of my college to take it. “Skip died,” Daddy said. He and my mother had wrapped him in my baseball jacket and put him in the ground, close to the grave of the little kitten.

I wandered alone among the landmarks of the gray medieval town. A dozen chimes were ringing among the
ancient spires and cupolas and quadrangles, all this so far in miles and in spirit from the small place he and I had once dwelled. Walking alone in the teasing rain, I remembered our days together on this earth. The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, and love, and death: Old Skip was my brother.

They had buried him under our elm tree, they said—yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.