Farm pets and life lessons

On the farm one of the harsh life lessons we kids learned early on is that animals, ranch and pet, come and go. It was 1960. We had a cat, Sylvester, a milking cow, Betsy, her calves, Barney and Clementine, a duck, Yacky, some nameless rabbits, and even a beehive. We had an indoor dog, Sammy, a little black terrier with an underbite that suggested ferociousness, but only with cars. Sammy would chase them. That’s why he was an indoor dog.

We had lots of other dogs. Nearly every spring one of them would have a litter and the four of us kids would get our pick, and there was always an amazing variety to choose from. Few of them would survive the harsh midwest winters and some of them not even that long, disappearing with our father shortly after the keepers were picked and named. We couldn’t afford to look after them. They had to fend for themselves.

But first there was Sylvester. I was about 3 when I called out to my mom that Sylvester’s poop was squirming on the rug. Turns out Sylvester was a mother. We kept the kittens until they could be given away. Like I said, it was easy come, easy go, well maybe not-so-easy.

Sylvester liked to pester Betsy and would maneuver its way close enough to lap up splotches of milk that would dribble from Betsy’s teets. I’d noticed Sylvester had gone missing for a few days. I asked my mom about it and she said Sylvester had gotten too close to Betsy. “She kicked it to the moon,” my mom said. I believed her. There was no trace of that cat. I was in a trance for the rest of the day, imagining we had a cat in outer space.

My older brother, Jim, had a beauty of a border collie, but just like in the movies, it was mistaken for a sheep killer and was shot to death. There had been talk around of a sheep killer that looked like Jim’s dog, but we knew it wasn’t him. But some guy shot it anyway. And then when more sheep went missing, we all knew someone had made a mistake and what was worse, that no one had believed my brother who knew his dog like no one else. That was hard. My sisters and I didn’t even feel right playing with our own dogs, knowing that our brother was so sad without his. Someone came over to say they were sorry and mumbled something about it being an accident. Didn’t make any of us feel any better. Not at all.

The dog I had, I named Falstaff, a peculiar name for a 5-year-old to give his pet. Falstaff beer was the sponsor of the baseball game of the week on TV. I loved my baseball, and still do. And I just liked the name Falstaff. I didn’t know anything about beer. We never had any in the house. Shakespeare? We didn’t have him, either.

Falstaff got hit by a car. Just about all our dogs did and we lived out in the middle of no where. Our dogs were too fast and set their ambush too well. Once they caught the car, they then found out in literally their last instant that cars aren’t for herding.

Sammy, too. We moved to town and Sammy snuck out and just like that got squished by a UPS truck.

Some years later, my next older sister Jane rescued a couple of mutts. One, a little black poodle thing she named Bebe Rebozo, for one of Nixon’s crony pals. Bebe would run around the family room and like Sambo’s tigers, just go faster and faster, using our laps, the couch cushions and everything else as a banked track and at a furiously dizzying pace could go higher and higher around the walls of the house. I can picture him now, but I can’t see how he ever stopped himself without breaking a lamp, or his neck.

My mom had cleaned out the aquarium and had set it in the back yard to air dry. Bebe started tearing around and crashed right through two sides of the aquarium, bashing through one side and coming out the other. Mom had cleaned the glass so clear that, well, we just couldn’t have anything nice in the house. That’s what she said anyway. A lot.

I found Bebe in a shallow burrow she had dug for herself in the dirt floor of our basement. She was trying to give birth and was dying from it. My dad was home so I went to ask him. He’d know what to do, only he said there was nothing we could do. Just to comfort her but be careful. In her state she could turn on you. I stayed with her til the end. We buried her next to Sammy. Her pups never born.

Jane’s other find was just a wiry mess of a dog, so ugly it was cute and even nuttier than BeBe. It had been caught wandering a state park where Jane worked and was to be sent to the pound. The dog was still there the next morning so Jane brought him home. Now our Mom had been long done with dogs by this time. But Jane, being clever as she is, cajoled her into coming up with a name for it. “If that dog was yours, what kind of name do you think it’d have?” She said it looked like an Oscar. Immediately that softened her heart and so we kept him. Oscar Wilde Dog. He was scared of everything, so Jane called it Spook, and dad gave it a third name, Arf, for the sound of its bark. Nothing about this dog stood out, aside from the confusion over his name. It was simply a warm and loyal companion. And the last dog our family ever had.