Kizzy Ann Stamps (10 page)

I cannot believe the upside-downness of the world. One day your biggest problem is whether you feel like you can work with a man whose eyebrows are alive, and the next minute your problem is that your country’s president is dead. When the principal came to the door and then you told us school was closing because someone had killed the president, I thought you were just joking around. Then I could see you were crying and Mr. Glenn was crying, and I could feel a blanket of sad covering our school and our state and our nation. I hope no black man did this. I’m running home to my barn to hide, just in case.

My mama cannot stop crying. She made pancakes this morning, which she only does for funerals and birthdays. Today is nobody’s birthday.

We ate our pancakes in silence, as silent as the syrup when it pours slow and smooth across the fist-size pancakes my mama stacks high. Daddy usually complains about those pancakes — he calls them two-bite pancakes — but he just swallowed one after another, barely chewing. His hand went from plate to mouth like the automatic pie machine I saw at the bus station. Pie gone, pie there, pie gone, pie there. The sad seeps over us all. It never occurred to me to walk today. I went to the bus stop automatically. When I called Shag to walk with me to the bus stop, she kept her head down the whole way. Of course I only know because I kept mine down too.

Mr. Fielder didn’t say a word when he swooshed open the bus door. He usually mutters, “Watch out, darky,” or something like that, but today he kept his eyes straight ahead and his mouth shut.

None of the kids moved as I walked down the aisle. Tommy Street didn’t stick his foot out. Laura Westover didn’t flounce her hair at me.

I eased into my usual spot right next to the big tear on the backseat and felt the silence settle around me.

You’ve given us extra time to write, now, as if even you can’t stand to break the quiet. I can see Laura crying, but she’s not sniffling out loud. And it seems the clock isn’t ticking as loud as it did just Friday.

How can one man dying make the whole world hush?

After school I sat with Shag at the kitchen table. I couldn’t study my spelling-bee words. I know we’re supposed to keep studying on them and working for that big bee at the end of the year, but it seems pointless in light of all that is happening in the world. Shag was lying at my feet, and I was kind of tranced, smelling the hot iron from Mama in the other room and feeling weighed down by the silence. And then the quiet cracked.

James slammed into the house like a wind flying down from the Peaks of Otter — always a bad sign.

“Show of respect, my foot,” he said. “They ain’t canceling the varsity homecoming football game.”

Mama came around the corner. She was holding a pillow cover, and her eyes were pooled up with tears. “What are you riled up about?” she said, her voice shaking as those pooled-up tears flowed over and tracked down her cheeks.

“They’re canceling the JV game and the junior-varsity hop. Because of the assassination.”

Mama folded the pillow cover she’d been ironing, then snapped it open and folded it again. “Sounds like a respectful thing to do, James. President Kennedy was a fine man.”

Shag scrambled up and away as James clomped over to the sink. Her toenails skittered across the wood floor, and I was reminded again of how quiet it had been. But that silence was shattered now — by Shag’s toenails, by the words and footsteps, by anger and resentment leaking loud in my home.

“But they ain’t canceling the varsity game, just our game. Life will go on if you’re a white football player, a white cheerleader, a white high-school student. It’s just if you’re black that things will stop.”

“Hush, James,” Mama snapped, her voice soft and hard all at the same time. “You don’t know who’s listening — I swear even the walls have ears, this kind of thing happening and all.”

My mama is flitty right now. She figures the white world was set on edge by the Medgar Evers assassination, and he was a black man — there is no telling how tender the relations between races will be now that a white man has died. No matter that he died at the hands of another white man, a Communist to boot. We had all better tread lightly, she says, and James’s silence-shattering frustration is not a light tread at all.

I am afraid too, I guess. But not for the same reasons as my mama. I’m afraid mostly for my brother.

My brother is broken, Miss Anderson. He has wanted to play at the big homecoming game since forever. He stomped around in the kitchen, and then he found the noisiest piece of equipment in the barn, a tractor that just cannot find its gears, and he slammed tools around it, into it, and on top of it, all the while fuming and cussing and generally protesting the way life just will not let us get ahead.

Losing a dream is a hard and very loud business. I worry that James will never really feel better about it. I guess I hadn’t realized how much Mr. McKenna and his work with Shag and me was helping me find a way to fit in to that hard world I talked about.

I’ve been to Mr. McKenna’s again. We put Shag in the pen and stand with her. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. I like it that way, as I don’t know how much I can say to him and I sure don’t want to get all deep into President Kennedy or the new President Johnson or how the price of corn could affect life around here. Shag has gotten pretty good, Miss Anderson, maneuvering in and out, and I thought all was going along well.

But today was a different story. “She’s been in the pen with sheep enough,” he boomed when I walked Shag over to the pen where the sheep were waiting.

“What else is there to do? She already knows how to herd animals. All she needed to learn was to get used to those sheep.”

“Och, girl, are you stupid, then? She’s raw.” He got even louder on the word
raw.
I hadn’t thought he could get any louder, but
raw
erupted like a thunderclap right behind my ear.

I marched up to him, my head no higher than his chest. “She’s
not
raw. She’s a good dog, and she can already herd. She doesn’t need you to tell her how to be a working dog.”

“Prove it.” This time his words were soft and slow. He narrowed his eyes, eased over to the sheep pen, and pulled the gate open. The sheep spilled out into the meadow. “Prove it,” he repeated.

I stepped out, and Shag, thank goodness, stepped out with me. She started her task with no direction from me, no signal, no help. I admit, Miss Anderson, I’ve never had a part in Shag’s work with herding. I just sit back and watch. It took her a pretty good while — about forty minutes — but she got them back into the pen and Mr. McKenna closed the gate behind them.

He was booming again as he turned to me. “Raw. She’s lots of natural ability — hard to meet a border collie without it — so aye, she gets her job done. But every good dog can be better, in the hands of a good handler.

“You,” he said, “you did absolutely nothing. Zero.”

“I thought it was all about her and what she did.”

He put his head in his hands and sighed. I’ve never heard a sigh that boomed, but this one did for sure. “Och, girl, perhaps you are stupid, then. She’s a
dog.
You’re the
master.
What she looks for is guidance so you can help her be the best she can be. Do your job and think. Lead her. Direct her. Handle her.”

Shag growled, then looked to me.

I wanted to walk away. I wanted to give up. Maybe I was embarrassed or just tired — I don’t know. I wanted to just plain leave it all behind me.

But I thought of Laura Westover dismissing Shag and me. I thought of Mrs. Warren knowing I stand up for things I need to. I thought of Shag, looking up at me, counting on me to help her be her best. And I thought of James, and all the bad that comes when you don’t have enough to believe in to make you care.

“Teach me,” I said. And I’m hoping he will.

It isn’t easy, Miss Anderson. First, Mr. McKenna had me learning the history of border collies. I won’t bore you — you would be bored, Miss Anderson — but I’ll tell you that border collies are among the smartest of dogs, and they have helped people with herding for a long, long time. Just like people, there are some who stand out, and one of the most famous is Shep. He was a border collie who amazed Scotland with his talent combined with a demeanor that allowed him to work easily for his master.

Shag also has a good attitude, at least for working with me. She doesn’t, however, take to just everybody, so that could work against her in a trial, which is what the border-collie world has. Yes, it turns out that something like dog shows exists here too. You can win the big prize or the second place and so forth, but it’s not about how your dog
looks.
It’s about how your dog
works.
This seems the better place for Shag and me. Still, I think the dog may need to take commands from a judge, and Shag is none too happy about taking commands from anyone but Mr. McKenna or me.

“I’ve written a list of commands for you,” he announced one day. He held a walking stick, and he had a pink tinge to his face as he shoved the paper into my hands. “It’s written in the language of sheepdogs and shepherds. You’ll need to be learning that. Learn it by heart — once you and Shag know them together, you’ll truly be a pair.” He said this as he marched toward the distant meadow, filled with his white woolly sheep.

I looked the list over, and, Miss Anderson, I have to tell you my eyeballs clear jumped. “This is a bunch of nonsense. What does ‘go by’ mean? And ‘outrun’?”

Mr. McKenna gripped his walking stick so tight his knuckles turned white as his hair. “The language of dogs. The language of Scotland. And I’ll appreciate you saying nothing negative regarding it.” He stared straight ahead, his gait eating up the ground to the meadow.

I was trotting to keep up. I’ll have to admit that it is hard for me to apologize. But apologize I did. “I’m sorry. It’s just I don’t understand.”

He smiled at me, a crack in his demeanor for one split second. “We all have things to learn, girlie. You’re not alone in that.”

He cleared his throat and explained as we neared the gate to the meadow. “‘Go by’ means you want your dog to circle to the left of the herd and drive them to the right a bit. We need you and Shag to work almost instinctively, but I do say
almost,
Kizzy Ann. Because the border collie has instincts closely tied to the wolf’s, and sheep killing is an instinct we never want a border collie to experience. It is hard to bring them back once they’ve been to the edge. A dog like that has no place then on a farm, and without good work, your dog is lost.”