The Second-Chance Dog Read online

  My father did not walk around after King with a plastic bag to pick up King’s poop. King would not have lasted long if he had.

  King did not go to the vet, not once in his life. If the dog got into a fight or cut himself, he got a Band-Aid, just like the rest of us.

  King did not wear a collar or walk on a leash. Ever.

  In the morning, my mother opened the door and let King out to roam our working-class neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. He often terrorized children on their way to school, tore apart our neighbors’ garbage, scattered it on lawns, brought some home. Every morning, alerted by the clanging of milk bottles, he took off after the milkman, who would usually, but not always, make it back to his truck in time.

  Several times a year, King would get the postman and tear off a chunk of his pants, or worse. My parents would pay for a new pair. I never heard anyone mention legal action, although, in retrospect, King seems to me like a lawsuit on four paws.

  King was not neutered, and the idea would have seemed absurd to my parents. A dog’s sex life was not something we worried about. He roamed the neighborhood, chasing after his girlfriends, having sex, and routinely impregnating the neighbors’ dogs. There were little Kings all over the neighborhood. I was afraid of King, who would often growl at me, or nip me if I tried to touch him. I didn’t often try.

  In the evening, my mother would open the back door, yell “King!,” and leave out scraps from dinner. King would appear mysteriously, eat his food in the backyard, and then come into the basement to sleep.

  Times have certainly changed. If I saw a dog like King today, I would probably report his family to Animal Control. Not only would most of this behavior now be considered illegal; I would deem it neglect or abuse, and so does the law.

  To the end of their days, my mother and father talked about King, about how much they loved him, what a great dog he was, and what great dog lovers they were.

  I remember my mother meeting one of my dogs at some point and smiling (I never saw her actually touch a dog). “We loved our dogs so much,” she said sadly. “I really miss having one.”

  Our life with King was not unusual. Most of the dogs in the neighborhood lived that way. Dogs mirror life, really, and their lives mirror the times in which they live.

  King was hit by cars several times, and when this happened, he was let into the basement to recover. Mostly, he did, although he had a distinct limp. One day, King never came home, a not uncommon occurrence then in the lives of dogs. We learned later—from a neighbor who’d been passing by at the time—that he was hit by a truck he was chasing, and sanitation workers came to haul away his body.

  My parents did not want to claim the body, or bury it. Nor was there any grieving I could remember. Two weeks later, they went out and adopted another dog at the pound (as shelters were called back then). Sam, a basset hound who had been found roaming the streets of East Providence, cost one dollar. My parents were not asked any questions about how he would be kept, sheltered, or fed. They just took him home.

  Nobody can trace the nearly unfathomable chemical, emotional, and biological factors that cause some dogs and some people to find each other and bond. It is a ballet of love, circumstance, psychology, and need. Our lives with these creatures is, after all, a dance we embrace almost intuitively and instinctively but are rarely called upon to understand, at least not in the moment.

  When I met Maria and Frieda that warm, sunny day in the barn, I had joined the dance, although I didn’t know it then. I had no idea that Frieda would enter my life and alter it in the most profound way, but that’s one of the beautiful things about animals. They change you, and you almost never see it coming. There are people who say they knew right away when they saw a dog that it was meant for them.

  I am not one of those people. I generally grasp that the train is coming just before it plows right into me.

  When I tell people my friendship with Maria began in barns, they look at me a little funny. We first met in a barn she was restoring, but the real turning point in our friendship—the place where the plot thickens—was in another barn, one of the four barns on Bedlam Farm, the one we called the “studio barn.”

  After our first meetings, I hadn’t really expected to see much of Maria again, but I kept thinking of her and her crazy dog.

  Although she seemed almost painfully shy to me, and very guarded, she caught my attention. I barely knew her, yet I felt completely at ease with her. I could always make her laugh, and she had the most radiant smile.

  It was a point in my life where I was uncomfortable with almost everyone, even my own family. Yet I was so comfortable around this stranger, this nomad who moved from house to house, restoring and bringing beauty to old and dilapidated structures. Who didn’t have a computer or a cellphone. Who was an artist who made no art.

  I didn’t want to lose this friendship.

  Several weeks after we met, I called and invited her and her husband to dinner. She agreed, and so we began the first phase of our relationship—friends with similar sensibilities, living in the country, having dinner at a local tavern. Casual conversation, banter about politics, about living in the country. I heard my first stories of Frieda, how she could not be near dogs or people. How she had to be walked at night, out in the woods. How fearful Maria was that she would frighten people, harm other dogs, so much so that she would not invite many people to their home.

  At this point we became dinner friends, couple friends. Every so often, Maria and I and her husband, plus my wife when she was visiting, would get together. Maria and I do not care much for politics, but our spouses did, and so the conversation would often turn to that. We talked about their work, restorations; my work, book writing; and my wife’s work, teaching and journalism. From the beginning, Maria and I did most of our important talking together, not out at dinners with family or friends. Neither of us felt comfortable talking about our art among them, or seeking encouragement.

  At these dinners, Maria didn’t say much; she deferred: to me, to her husband, to others. She was always the quietest person at the table; she said the least. People would argue about politics, get upset about the left or the right, but when other voices rose, hers became silent. I would ask her questions to draw her out, and I soon began to see the warmth and openness that underlay her cautious veneer. And she was funny, I discovered. She had a quick, wicked sense of humor and often ribbed me about contradictions between what I said and what I wrote.

  I told her once at dinner that I didn’t embrace much of the “spiritual mumbo jumbo” about animals and people. She just smiled, but her eyes flashed. “Well, one day I’ll get a video of you singing to Lenore and put it up on YouTube, and we’ll let everybody see what a hard-ass you really are.”

  She had a gift for putting me in my place, and the odd thing was that I always needed that, knew it was good for me.

  We talked about animals, artists we knew, books we were reading. We were often in our own side conversations, neither of us wanting to argue about the stories on the news, the outrages of the day. I always wished I could just sit down with her alone, and I always had the feeling she did, too. She seemed to always expect trouble to break out, and she always tried to steer the conversation to safe topics.

  It went on like that for months, but I had been a reporter for a long time, a good one, and I began to put pieces of the puzzle together.

  It was very clear to me that she loved Frieda as much as she loved anything in the world, that they were somehow two refugees clinging to the same raft. And that she was an artist in her heart and soul, and that she pined for her art and the making of it. And that she was gentle and loving. I saw that she needed a lot of wine at the end of every day. I saw that there was something inside her that wanted to come out.

  It was nice for both of us to find a friend, but that was all we expected, and we were grateful for it.

  It’s easy to see now that I was drawn to her, but at the time, it seemed very random and
natural. We were “just friends,” but we were friends with a deep connection. Without consulting each other or saying a word about it, we were very careful about the time we spent together. Our conversations had boundaries. Frieda was always a safe subject. We could talk about her, discuss her training, quite easily. She was the first thing we shared.

  When you move upstate from a place like New York City, you learn quickly that you will never be seen by the locals as being local. Generally, your home is never known by your name, but by the name of the last “local” who lived there. Ralph Keyes was the farmer who built the studio barn. And whenever anybody asks me where my farm is, I always say, “It’s the old Keyes place,” and everybody knows. It’s hard for me to imagine my farm ever being referred to as “the old Katz place.”

  Bedlam Farm is situated on about ninety acres in a remote chunk of upstate New York a couple of hours northeast of Albany. The farm was built in 1861 by a carpenter and businessman named James Patterson. Patterson ran a mill, raised pigs and cows, grew potatoes, and had various business interests. The big barn was probably the first building to be constructed on this sharply sloping hillside, beautifully sited with a view of West Hebron and, beyond it, the Green Mountains of Vermont. The farmhouse Patterson built in 1861 was grand by the standards of the time. Multiple additions were added over the years, and now it sprawls, with a big living room with beautiful high ceilings on one end and a large woodshed, now a family room, on the other.

  Around the farmhouse, almost in a circle, are four barns: the big dairy barn, which housed cows and hay; the carriage barn, where the horses and buggies were kept; a pig barn, where the farm’s pigs were slaughtered; and an odd little clapboard building called the studio barn. This is the ugly duckling of my barns, more a large shed than a barn, really.

  In the front of the farmhouse is a wooden fence, backed by wire mesh, where my dogs often sit and look out at the world. Behind the farmhouse is another, more secure fenced-in area originally built for goats and donkeys, now used when we want to put the dogs out and don’t want to worry about them digging a tunnel or leaping to freedom, two ever-present concerns with border collies.

  Across from the farmhouse, and by the carriage barn, a beautiful old dirt path leads nearly a mile into the deep woods. It is where I’ve walked the dogs ever since I moved to Washington County.

  One day back in 2003, I was driving along Route 30 when I looked up and saw this old farm sitting up on the hill. I called a real estate agent and said I wanted to buy it. I didn’t know why, really; I just felt I needed to be there, to live my life and do my work as a writer. I had never really spent time on a farm; I’m not sure I had ever set foot on one before. However, I sensed, rather than thought, that this would be a wondrous laboratory in which to explore my ideas about dogs and other animals, and to write about rural life, which fascinated me. And eventually I came to know why I was running so far away from my life in New Jersey.

  Without really understanding it, I had embarked on what Joseph Campbell calls the hero’s journey. I would learn the perils and joys of the pilgrim who sets out to find the meaning of his own life, and to live it. Maria and Frieda were setting out as well, and it was in this ugly little studio barn—built as an appliance repair shop by a struggling farmer—that the three of us would collide.

  In January 2008, I offered Maria the use of the studio barn, a gesture that was to alter our lives in ways neither of us had considered. Maria was trained as an artist, and she worked with discarded fiber material. She made quilts, mostly, and dresses and scarves. She had not worked as an artist for more than a decade, something that filled her eyes with sadness whenever she mentioned it.

  Maria is not a person who takes things easily, or ever asks for them. She did not trust many people, particularly men. When I offered her the studio barn, she looked as if she had been struck by a lightning bolt.

  She was quiet for a while.

  “I can’t take that—it’s your barn,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.

  I told her the barn was empty, that I had been looking for a good and creative use of it.

  “I would love to have it, to use it,” she blurted. “I can’t take it for free.”

  Then she said she would think about it. She wasn’t sure. But I saw the gleam in her eyes, and I sensed that she badly wanted to have this space of her own.

  Since I had four barns and was using only one, I had thought nothing of offering her the use of this space. Unlike the other barns, it had heat—though not much—and water. I had been thinking of tearing it down. Offering it to Maria didn’t seem like a big deal.

  I had this fantasy that the farm would become an inspirational place for creative people, a place of community and support. Life in upstate New York is rough in some ways, and encouragement can be hard to come by. People have other things to worry about. I had always craved the idea of encouragement but had not often received much. So I felt the power of it.

  Maria thought about my offer, hemmed and hawed, struggled with the idea. She eventually came back and said she would love to use the barn, provided that I would let her help with farm chores and animal care on the weekends. She wouldn’t take the studio space for free. Even better, I thought. At the time, the farm was beginning its rapid descent into chaos: there were sheep, donkeys, goats, chickens, barn cats, two Swiss steers and a dairy cow, plus three dogs. I had a tractor, and work crews were tearing up the house, the barn, the grounds. I was losing control, and felt exhausted and frightened. I was thrilled at the idea of Maria coming around on weekends to help out. She could come for only a little while, she said, on Saturday and Sunday mornings. She would check the water and the hay.

  “You’ve got a deal,” I told her. For me, it was a big deal, the biggest deal, my own Louisiana Purchase.

  I think on some level we were both instinctively worried about how Maria’s presence on the farm might look to other people, so without any discussion, we observed strict boundaries.

  I never knew when Maria was coming to the studio barn, and she never told me.

  On weekends, Maria would show up early in the morning, her pockets stuffed with carrots and apples for the animals; she would haul out the hay and check the water.

  Maria reminded me of a skittish deer. She was quiet, introspective, even brooding. But she had a striking rapport with the animals. She loved them all, even the sheep, whom I found exasperating, and the chickens, who also left me cold. She brought food for them all, talked to each one, knelt down and looked them all in the eye. She had a word for everybody, and she spoke in a calm, soothing voice that made the animals feel comfortable and safe. Me, too. I found that she was a real animal lover, that she had the gift of communicating with them, making them comfortable. She was never afraid of them or nervous around them.

  If I ran into her, she would say good morning, look away, and then leave. She never initiated a conversation or joined in one, unless it was to tell me an animal was limping or looked ill. “Mute” was the word that kept coming to mind when I thought of her. She just seemed to have no voice.

  She also had a creative streak that was evident in her clothes and her speech (on the few occasions when she could not avoid conversation). She always noticed color and texture, spotted a beautiful flower, appreciated the quality of light, the mist in the field. She was clearly artistic, but she had not been making art for some time, and a great sadness swirled around her. Vulnerability and pain just seemed to radiate from her, but she never spoke about it. Having her own space meant the world to her; that was obvious. And she would soon be making her art, something she so clearly ached to do.

  As always, Frieda hovered like a ghost, even if she wasn’t present.

  Maria never brought Frieda to the barn or to the farm. It was just understood. She rarely brought Frieda anywhere, she was so worried about someone getting hurt.

  I was glad about that. Sometimes Frieda was in the car when Maria came by. Once or twice she walked up t
he hill with Frieda. It was never a pleasant or encouraging experience. The sight of my dogs made Frieda crazy, and she nearly foamed at the mouth trying to get at them.

  A few days later, deep in the night, I heard some sounds outside and I looked out my bedroom window. The studio barn was lit up like a freighter on the seas. I could see a shadow flitting across the new blinds that had been put up—sheets of colorful fabric. I could hear music drifting softly across the road.

  Lenore was listening too, looking out from her vantage point at the foot of the bed. “Look, Lenore, listen,” I said, and Lenore’s tail began thumping. I was crying for joy. I could only imagine what this gifted and endearing and vulnerable human across the road was feeling.

  In January 2008, while Maria was restarting her life as an artist, mine was unraveling. I was in a dark and lonely place, disconnected from my family and my past. I saw a therapist. “I don’t want to end my life like this,” I told her. “Then don’t,” she replied.

  So I decided I would not. I would do whatever I had to do to find love and peace in my life, even if there might be only a few days left of it. I would not live a life bounded by fear.

  My therapist told me that I was not really married anymore, and the truth of this statement brought my world down around me.

  I was, in fact, married and had been for thirty-five years, but I had come to the farm by myself, and was alone there most of the time. When I realized my marriage was coming to an end, I broke down. I remember looking at a big bag of dog food and thinking that I was just like that bag after the string on the top had been pulled. I had spilled out.

  I stopped sleeping, started vomiting, sweating, fending off one panic attack after another, talking in circles. I didn’t have many friends, and the ones I had quickly vanished, and who can blame them? What an awful mess I was.

  As a child, I’d been paralyzed by fear, and I’d figured out early that if I gave the fear to other people, and let them run my life, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it. Now that was no longer possible, and it was fear’s turn to run amok in my life. I was like a five-year-old boy suddenly finding himself with a book contract and a farm to run. Except I was sixty. The boy and the man needed to get to know each other, and fast.