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10:27 am | 30 July 2003 | ZP guest spot: "cindy & sugar"

today's entry is a beautiful guest spot from ZP (email her here) that preface could not do justice. thank you, ZP.


By the age of ten, I had experienced death of humans and wild things. Four years earlier, my maternal grandfather died, dropped dead at the close of one of my grandmother�s stoically endured dinner parties. He, I recall, was a quiet man for whom affection bore little or no value. An engineer, he was the first college graduate from either side of my family tree. Alcoholism contributed to his heart attack. Despite my tender age, I remember, vividly, the news of his death because I was entrusted to tell my three-year old sister, for whom death did not exist.

Because of my father, a hunter, I knew that bullets or shells expelled from guns at a fantastic rate of speed would cause the death of wild things, feathered and furred. Mostly, we ate these things. My mother cooked wild game, quail, venison and the like, to disguise the taste. She knew no other way. Only one time did we not make use of the dead wild thing. My father shot a groundhog. The farmer whose land backed our subdivision solicited my father�s assistance, willingly supplied in exchange for a field in which to train his birddogs (Cindy and Sugar). An excellent marksman, my dad, he downed the bothersome beast with one shot to the abdomen. The neighborhood preteens gathered around, and Joe Belcher (of Couri league pitching fame) rolled the animal over with the toe of his sneaker, so that we could all see the distended innards breaching the belly of the unfortunate. The mass of groundhog intestine was purple, solid and the size of a baseball. I wondered, for weeks, about the color of my insides. Pink, I hoped.

In 1976, my aunt and uncle announced their divorce. Actually, my aunt sat on our rust-brown, coarsely woven early American sofa and tearfully proclaimed that her husband had wronged her, and then left her. We never heard from uncle Terry. It took her four hours to relay the details of their sordid split and procure the assurances of her audience that Terry was a shit. During this time, my mother assigned me to entertain my cousin. This job rankled, as my cousin, age five, was the fussiest child I knew. Adding insult to injury, she proved incapable of following directions for the most simple of imaginary games, like Speed Racer or Charlie�s Angels. Hey, it was 1976-- and I was nine. Commanding this four-hour chunk of time became one of the most unforgivable things my aunt ever did.

We owned two hunting dogs, Cindy and Sugar. Cindy, an English Short-Haired Pointer with liver markings, was the most loving hunting dog I ever met (until my current dog, Frieda, who is childlike in her quest for hugs or belly-rubs). Cindy was not beautiful, in the conformation sense, and sported a rather tragic under bite. Her face, carried largely by apologetic, clear brown eyes, begged for attention. She was my favorite. Sugar, an English Setter with black markings, was a bit of a spook. Sugar held a position of honor in my heart because she gave birth to a litter of joyous, romping puppies when I was seven. Sadly, she bit the meter man who came into the basement during her guard over the four week old furballs, and that earned her a poor reputation in the family (though I was secretly glad that she was such a good mother, and believe to this day that the idiot in gray coveralls leaned into the baby-pen to pet or retrieve a pup, thus making the whole matter his fault). He denied such conduct, but I believed Sugar. Later, when my sister, curled on the kitchen floor with Sugar, accidentally stroked a hunting injury, Sugar rewarded her with an angry snap to the face. My father, a strict disciplinarian with the dogs, beat her severely.

My father did that: beat the dogs. Every single time he hit one of our dogs I burst into furious, impotent tears, pitifully yelling at him, �Daddy, please stop hurting her.� I had little other recourse, save to throw myself at my father, hoping he would accidentally strike me. This I did, unsuccessfully, on more than on occasion. But I knew that if his fury caused him to mark me, my mother would intervene. She did not otherwise insert herself between my dad and the object of his rage. She fared poorly in my opinion as a result. Oddly, the dogs did not hate him. I did.

He tried to explain that beating the dogs was part of discipline, and thus acceptable. No statement he ever made frightened me more. Unlike the meter man, my father was not lying; he believed this to be true. Once he even suggested that it didn�t really hurt the dogs, which I promptly called bullshit on, pointing out that the dogs yelped and cried while being beaten, thus evidencing pain. He became angry with me then, and suggested that they were only reacting to being startled. I said, �That�s not true, Dad, it hurts when you hit. I know because Michael Tinker hit me last week at school and it stung, bad.� He yelled at me then, and I wondered if I could make him mad enough to hit me. It took ten more years, but eventually he did.

Given the existence of random acts of cruelty in the lives of my dogs, I appointed myself their salvation. While I couldn�t prevent a beating, I could make each moment of time we shared together happy, so that on balance, they would remember their life on earth as good, only occasionally marred by the pain of a beating. When I learned more about hunting dogs, I realized that both Cindy and Sugar had moments of unadulterated ecstasy in their lives. By in large, dogs with hunting in their blood love nothing more than to tear around a field in the fall, employing their noses as sophisticated, radar-accurate detection devices, locking up on point when discovering a covey in hiding, and then retrieving the fruit of the Remington�s bounty. The reason those dogs never hated my father is that he took them hunting. He gave them their reason for living. In the way that dogs see you only at your best, always forgiving, in hope that you will eventually sustain your own grace, those dogs loved my father. I loved them more for it. He benefited little in my eyes for their benevolence, and in fact, it made him less in failing to recognize the great, unconditional love of his dogs. I say �his� because the dogs belonged to him, as did all things. But the dogs were mine, too.

According to my father, serious hunting dogs did not live in homes. Such pampering, his theory went, would ruin their noses. My dogs, then, were relegated to a pen in the yard, concrete slab, seven-foot tall chain-link fence, and a house built for two. So I played in the yard with Cindy and Sugar. They did not play with balls, because balls did not smell of anything worth retrieving. They did not enjoy walks on leashes, they enjoyed running. So we ran. They chased me, I chased them. They chased each other. We rolled in the sweet summer grass; I smiled and laughed as only a child with dogs can.

My dogs never left my sight when I was willing to play running games with them. When my father released them from the kennel, outside of hunting season, they ran for the farmer�s field to investigate, to roll in some filthy thing, perchance to find some birds. Cindy and Sugar would often run far, and not come back for an hour, at which time my father would begin calling them home. They usually returned within a few moments, tearing down through the connected back yards, spasmodically happy white streaks, full from their adventure. I believe they knew that failure to promptly heed the call or whistle would result in bad things. Some days, they would accept the bad thing-- and I imagined that they justified their extra half-hour on the lamb, knowing that if they endured a minute of his torture, they would be more than compensated by my tenderness. Well, that, and the sheer joy of freedom. I prayed that God would make them smarter, so that they would never miss first call.

I fed them tidbits of food stolen from the table. I asked the butcher for extra bones or scraps for my dogs. He always came through for me. I curried the nettles out of Sugar�s coat, after hunting trips, with a wire comb. I tended to Cindy�s battered paw pads. I made them toys to play with, which they ignored, suspicious of the lopsided heads and missing feet. I loved them with all of my nine-year old heart. I believe they loved me back. Why else would Cindy press her nose against my neck, just beyond my ear, and gently snuffle my hairline? Why else would Sugar stand immobile, resting her head on my thigh, staring at me through black lashes, as I read books to her? It was love.

The day my aunt and cousin came to share news of their membership in the then-exclusive club of divorced families, my father let the dogs out for a run. It was February. He then ignored them for the next four hours. They ran away, and I never saw them again.

At first, my parents pretended that nothing was wrong-- that the dogs were out on a lark. I knew better. I was terrified that they would be alone, in the cold, and not have a place to sleep. I walked, with raw, red meat the pockets of my snowsuit, for hours. Crying, calling their names, choking back the fear that threatened to take hold of my lungs and squish out the breath. My dogs were gone.

For weeks, I put up posters, with poorly drawn sketches of my dogs. The small print on the posters informed the patient reader that Cindy liked to be rubbed on the belly, and Sugar liked to have her ears scratched, both at the same time. I called the police. I called the fire department. I called animal control. No adult would help me find my dogs. The kids in my neighborhood organized search parties, and we would set out, with leashes, water, first-aid kits, and some sandwiches. We violated every geographic boundary set by our parents. We returned home tired, dirty, broken and empty-handed.

Having an active imagination, during a crisis, is not good for a nine-year old child. All of the horrors that I feared would befall me if I were alone, became the fate of my dogs. They were captured and tortured. They were hungry and cold. They were afraid. They were separated from one another. They were trapped. They were injured. They were frightened and lost. They were in a laboratory, subjected to experiments. I sobbed uncontrollably every day for a month. Then I wept quietly. In due course, denial took root in my soul, and I believed that my smart, crafty dogs had found a place to live where the hunter would not hit them. I dreamed them in open fields with other dogs, having the time of their lives. When I became convinced of a better life for my dogs, I felt a stab of betrayal-- that they would choose a life without me.

As time passed, the pain grew more distant. I could summon it at any time, but it sat on a shelf in my heart, towards the rear, no longer consuming. When I realized that the pain did not exist every day, I was ashamed that I did not have enough grief for the friends that brought so much to my life. Then I would pay penance by drawing pictures of Cindy and Sugar, pricking myself in the heart so that I would feel more.

When my father expressed sadness for his loss, I stared in disbelief. His brazen, unmitigated gall revolted me. He who beat them could not mourn them. He who left them out in the cold was not permitted sorrow. Fuck you dad, it�s your fault, was what I heard in my head.

For sixteen months, I knew nothing of the end of my dogs� lives. Then came Lance Garrity. My father owned a farm, 280 acres in the middle of Missouri. On the eighty tillable acres, he planted winter wheat, beans and the occasional milo field. He recruited his friends� sons to help him disc, plow, plant, fertilize and harvest. Lance was one of the first in a string of substitute male offspring. One day in June 1977, Lance sat at our kitchen table, speaking to ingratiate. At the time, he called my father Mr. Connolly. Later, because my father�s initials were the same as that murderous football player, Lance started calling him Juice. Lance was, in my young opinion, exceptionally good looking. Blue eyes, quick smile, rowdy laugh, and a wiry-strong frame, he treated me like the child I was, earning him a position oddly balanced between admiration and contempt.

I sat, in striped canvas shorts and a yellow tank top, on the kitchen counter. I was barefoot, swinging my legs in small circles. I wasn�t paying attention to their conversation, and certainly not participating. I stayed because it was unusual for one of the girl children to be alone with the male grown-ups. At the age of seventeen, Lance was considered an adult. My mother was thinking about whether I would be allowed to go to the farm that day, and I was being quiet and well behaved in order to influence the mysterious scales of permission that resided in her brain.

As I write this, I cannot recall what Lance said, the exact words he spoke, but his statement included, �your dogs,� �lost� and �drowned.� His tone approached sympathetic. Truly, it matters not what he said. My small body jolted, as if struck. Electric current buzzed in my ears. My stomach and heart felt fused together in, or by, ice. Simultaneous to this reaction, I looked at my father, who stood leaning with his back to the sink, not four feet from me. His face, eyes looking at mine, showed fear. I turned to Lance, and said, �What?� And Lance, not reading the call for silence in my father�s face said, �I�m sorry you lost both dogs, and to have them drown at Hunter�s. Too bad.� Too bad, indeed, you fucking bastard.

I bolted off the counter and ran toward my room. I heard my father, in a tired yet exasperated tone, remind Lance that the girls didn�t know.

When I reached my bed, I threw myself on it, hugging stuffed animals and sobbing uncontrollably. There is a special kind of pain for children with broken hearts. My father had deceived me. He let me wonder and fear the fate of my dogs, while knowing the truth. His footsteps approached. I felt the bed shift to accommodate his weight. He did not touch me. I curled into a ball, howling out my anger, my pain, my broken heart.

He told me that the dogs had run over to a nature preserve, Hunter�s, a mile from our house as the crow flies. He said the dogs must have run out onto the frozen lake to chase geese. He said they must have fallen through thin ice. The caretaker, he said, found their bodies after the spring thaw, and buried them on a hill beside the water. My father told me this, patted me on the back, and then left my room. He went to the basement and returned with a box. He opened the box, and there lay the leather collars my dogs once wore. Tags still affixed. I took the box. They were my dogs. He left, and drove to the farm with Lance. For hours, I laid atop my bed, numb. Sometimes crying, feeling the fear of my dogs as they searched for an opening in the ice, as they struggled for air, as they succumbed to the cold water. Drowning is a painful death, and I cried for their pain. I cry now for their pain and fear, twenty-six years later. I cry now because they died without me.

I hung Cindy�s collar over my bed. I hung Sugar�s collar next to it. My mother said it was maudlin. My father said it was fine.

For Sugar and Cindy: May your heavens be filled with feisty quail and a never-ending supply of love.


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