Penny (7 page)

We drew up and Carol came to the door facing the garage. We got out, and Penny looked at Carol, seemed to duck her head and look away, then went in the open door. Carol looked down at her as she passed and said, “Pokey, aren't you ashamed?” Then looked up at us, smiled, asked us in.

We went through a clean, neat kitchen to a conventional living room with its sofa and two side chairs, its television set and coffee table. Penny-Pokey had taken her place in the corner back of the big upholstered armchair, her special corner, we learned. The baby was asleep in the other armchair, still small enough to lie flat in it.

We had just sat down when a car drew into the driveway and Carol said, “It's Tom. He gets off at four on Wednesdays.”

A moment later Tom came in the back door, saw us and said, “I wondered if it wasn't you.” Then he saw Pokey-Penny in her corner, said, “What did you do, Pokey? Run away again?” She came out to him, all apology and appeal, and he rubbed her ears, talking softly to her. Meanwhile the baby woke up, cried for attention, and Carol went and picked her up, brought her back to where Tom was still communing with Pokey-Penny. “Oh, hello,” Tom said, turning to the baby. “How has she been today?”

“A little fretful.” To us Carol said, “She's cutting teeth.”

Tom turned to Pokey-Penny again. “Go lie down now.” She went back of the chair and he shook his head. “I don't know what to do with her. She just won't stay home if I'm not here. Weekends she's with me, won't leave me. But I guess she gets lonely. And Carol's busy with the baby, so she wanders off. Why don't you take her and keep her?”

But Barbara said no. Then she asked Carol, “You like her, don't you? And she's good around the baby?”

“I love her!” Carol exclaimed, and she obviously meant it. Pokey-Penny wasn't being mistreated. She had a good home.

Tom was saying, “But if she won't stay here, if she keeps running off, going over to your place—”

“She didn't come to our place today,” I said, and I told him about the phone call from the lime plant, how we went down there and got her.

“Oh. Clear down there. She never went down there before.”

I said, “I canceled her license in Salisbury, so I think we'd better take the Salisbury tag off.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Yeah. I've been meaning to get her a license over here, but—well, you know, you put things off.” He got a pair of pliers and took the tag off Penny's collar and handed it to me. “Tomorrow. I'll try to get the license tomorrow. If you're sure you don't want her now.”

“No,” I said. “She's yours, and your wife says she loves her, and you obviously do.” I laughed. “She's your problem child.”

“That's for sure,” Tom said, shaking his head.

We started to the door.

Carol, the baby in her arms, said it was good to have seen us and she thanked us for bringing Pokey home, was sorry we'd been put to that trouble.

Tom said, “Yeah, much obliged. I hope it won't happen again.”

The two of them were at the door as we left. Penny nowhere in sight. The youngsters were still playing Indian, or whatever called for all that war whooping, on the vacant lot down at the corner, and the two tan mongrels were playing coyote. I drove back to the main road and we came home.

Six

The chilly weather persisted. Flickers didn't come back till the first week in April. Daffodils came up but didn't show buds till mid-April. And we didn't hear the spring peepers till April 14, a good two weeks later than usual. By then we were so hungry for spring that when I came home and told Barbara I had heard them she said, “Come on! I want to hear them too!” So we drove to the little bog a mile up the road and sat and listened to the peepers and the redwing blackbirds for half an hour. It sounded like spring, at last. When we got home the temperature was 62. But it dropped into the 20s that night.

The next day was opening day for trout fishing. Morris stopped in that evening. He is a fisherman, one of the best, but he seldom goes out on opening day. He waits till the first-day folk have come and gone, then goes to his favorite holes up the brooks and comes back with his limit. We talked fishing and weather and wondered why it seems always to rain or sleet or snow on opening day. We decided it was a plot but couldn't decide who to pin it on. But we didn't really care.

Finally Morris asked, “Where's the basset?”

We told him, and he said, “I'll bet you miss her. She was a nice little dog.”

“We miss her,” Barbara said, “like a headache!”

Morris laughed at her, remembering how she felt about Pat and how she treats his dogs when he brings them over. She practically cried when Lady, his gallant old foxhound, was lost on the mountain most of one afternoon, and she took her in, fed her, comforted and cozied her when she finally came limping down here to the house. She even likes Smoke, the big black Newfoundland that comes with him occasionally. Morris is the only man I ever knew who hunts with a Newfoundland. Incredible, but he hunts partridges with Smoke. She has a good nose, she stays close by, she puts up birds without pointing and she is a pretty good retriever. They have a lot of fun, up on the mountain in bird season.

Morris laughed at Barbara, but I knew what she meant. She didn't want to miss Penny, who aggravated her and annoyed her and was an insinuating nuisance. Yet she couldn't deny Penny's winning ways. To her, Penny was a delight and an absolute exasperation. Yes, she missed her—like a headache, as she said.

I said, “Good riddance,” and I switched the conversation to foxes. Morris loves to run them with his hound and listen. I don't think he has shot a fox since I have known him, close to twenty years, but he keep a foxhound and he knows more about foxes than anyone else I know. Get him on foxes and he will talk for an hour.

We had a fine fox evening.

Three days later Barbara and I had to go down to New London for a meeting and a speech, and we were thankful all the way that we hadn't had to take Penny to a kennel and remember her woeful complaints. Pat always seemed to think he was being abandoned when we left him at a kennel. He was being abandoned and we were going somewhere that would be exciting and full of wonderful scents and ripe bones and other dogs. And he made us feel like heels for going. Then we had the chore of apologizing when we got home, after we had gone and got him from the kennel and taken him home and assured him that we still preferred him to any other dog in the whole world.

We went to New London with a clear conscience and no dog complaint ringing in our ears, and we saw friends the next day, and we took our time about coming home.

Home, we found three daffodils in bloom on the river-bank. It was April 22. And two days later it snowed again, a couple of inches of snow that turned to rain and washed away. But it had been snow, and I resent snow after mid-April, I bitterly resent it.

In spite of the snow, there were mallards on the river and poking along the brushy banks, obviously looking for nesting places. And the next morning there were two deer in the home pasture, just back of the woodshed. They were very tame, or very hungry for grass, or both. But when a car came along the road they didn't linger. They were at the far fence in a dozen long bounds, and up and over and out of sight in the brush at the foot of the mountain. They were does heavy with fawn.

Then it was April 28 and a brown thrasher was loudly ecstatic in the tallest apple tree in the back yard. Maybe that was what turned the trick, that brown thrasher. He summoned change. On May Day the temperature got up to 74, the box elders showed first leaf tips and the sugar maples in front of the house began to leaf out. We went down to the lake place and found columbines in fat bud and tall meadow rue shooting up like weeds. It seemed strange to see so many hepaticas still in bloom that late, but they made the glades beside the lake lavender with their color. No swimming, though. The lake's water was only up to 56, and there was a gusty wind that whipped the water into frothy rollers that practically boomed against the rocky shore.

The next few days signaled spring, at last. Bloodroot was in bloom, and early saxifrage, and a few violets. The big popple just up the road was in catkin, long, dark reddish-brown catkins big around as a lead pencil. And then, on May 6, it snowed again, on a day when the peepers were particularly loud. Only about an inch, and it was gone by evening, but snow just the same and an insult to spring. I decided to have nothing more to say about the weather in my journal until the Fourth of July.

Two days later Penny arrived again.

I had gone to the village to mail some urgent letters, and when I came home I saw two dogs coming down the road. One looked familiar. Sure enough, it was Penny-Pokey, looking sleek and self-satisfied and thoroughly independent. With her was a nondescript white mongrel, one of those skittish dogs that are constantly on the dodge, expecting a kick or a thrown stone. They came past the garage just as I stopped at the mailbox, and Penny hesitated, looked at me, wagged her tail, obviously wanted to be greeted and welcomed. I ignored her, took the mail on into the house, then went back to put the car away. The dogs had vanished, absolutely vanished as though they had disappeared into thin air.

I decided not to tell Barbara that Penny had been here. We went through the mail. One letter required an immediate answer, a business matter, so I went to the upstairs telephone and called New York. While I was talking I heard Barbara at the front door, then heard her shout, “Here is Pokey-Penny!” I heard her open the door, heard the rattle of claws on the bare floor of the hallway.

I finished my call and went downstairs.

“Look who's here,” Barbara said, half triumphant, half annoyed. “I heard her whining on the porch and went to the door, and there she was.”

“Where's the white mongrel?”

“What white mongrel?”

“I saw the two of them, coming down the road together, when I came in the driveway.”

Barbara shook her head. “She was all alone when I went to the door.”

I went out onto the porch and around the house. No sign of that white dog. I came back in and Barbara had gone to the basement and got the dog food, put out a dish for Penny. She gulped down three handfuls, wagged her thank you and went happily into the living room and flopped in her favorite spot, beneath the bench.

“Well?” Barbara looked at me.

“What do you want to do now?”

“Send her home, I guess. But it's like—well, adopting a child and then sending it back to the orphanage.”

“Oh, not exactly like that. She—”

Barbara turned and went to the phone. She called Carol. “Penny's here,” she said. There was a pause. Carol was talking. Then Barbara said, “I think you'd better come and get her,” and she hung up.

“She says”—Barbara turned to me—“Penny wouldn't eat her breakfast. They put her outdoors and ten minutes later she was gone. She thought Penny was over here, but she kept thinking she would come home.” She sighed. “She'll be over.”

Fifteen minutes later Carol arrived. “I just don't know what to do if she keeps on like this,” she said. “We'll have to do something.”

“Let us know,” Barbara said, “if you have to get rid of her. Meanwhile, if she shows up here we'll feed her and treat her kindly and either take her home or call you to come and get her.”

“I guess that's all we can do. But I do hate to impose on you.” She left, Pokey-Penny with her, rather shamefaced and sullenly obedient.

Barbara turned to me. “What else could I do? What else could I have said?”

“Nothing. You said the only thing there was to say.”

Hindsight is easy, I know, and practically infallible. But I still say I knew then that the Pokey-Penny problem wasn't solved. She was going to be in our lives awhile longer, no matter what we did or said. But for then it was settled and life could go on without her disruptions or distractions.

The pear tree beside the garden came to dazzling white bloom, ten days ahead of the apple trees. The asparagus finally came up, blue with the cold. Nights persisted chilly, the temperature down in the 30s. We went hopefully down to the lake and found the water there was only 57 degrees. Barbara will swim in water so cold it gives me chilblains just watching her, and she thought, on May 18, with a bright sun and a breeze that had no obvious icicles on it, that she would take her first swim. She got into her suit and I, still fully clothed and wearing a heavy sweater, went down to the dock with her. She sat on the dock and dangled her feet in the water until they turned blue as the dungarees I was wearing.

“It's really not very cold,” she said, gripping one hand tightly with the other and practically hunching her shoulders up to her chin. “But,” she said, “I don't think I'll go in today. I've changed my mind.”

“Darling,” I said, “you have occasional flashes of incredible wisdom. Why don't we go back to the farm and heat up the pea soup and sit in front of the fire and eat soup. There's always another day.”

And, amazingly, that is exactly what we did.

But on May 27, two weeks late, at least, we had shirtsleeve weather, the lake temperature got up to 60, and Barbara went for her swim. She didn't swim far, but she went in and swam out and back, and lay in the sun afterward and thawed out and said she was a very brave girl. I said she was not only brave but foolhardy and suggested that she take both antihistamines and antibiotics when we got home. She called me a sissy, which I am, of course. Water colder than 80 degrees is unfit for human occupation, in my estimation, unless one is safely inside a boat that doesn't leak and cannot be capsized.

Then we had a summery weekend, really summery, with the air temperature up to 85 and the water temperature all the way up to 70. Morris helped me take the boat down to the lake and launch it, and I went for my first sail of the season. Barbara swam. It was a beautiful weekend.