The Poet's Dog Read online

  Dedication

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  EMILY—

  WITH LOVE,

  P. M.

  Epigraph

  Dogs speak words

  But only poets

  And children

  Hear

  —P. M.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: Lost and Found

  Chapter Two: Home

  Chapter Three: The Way It Used to Be

  Chapter Four: Gray Cat Gone Away

  Chapter Five: Full of Sorrow, Full of Joy

  Chapter Six: Something Good

  Chapter Seven: Going Away

  Chapter Eight: Curmudgeon

  Chapter Nine: Memories

  Chapter Ten: Silence

  Chapter Eleven: The Past and the Present

  Chapter Twelve: Promises

  Chapter Thirteen: A Jewel or Two

  About the Author

  Books by Patricia MacLachlan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lost and Found

  I found the boy at dusk.

  The blizzard was fierce, and it would soon be dark.

  I could barely see him with the snow blowing sideways. He stood at the edge of the icy pond, shivering.

  He had no hat, and his blond hair was plastered to his head.

  Suddenly a limb cracked and fell down next to him, and when he jumped to one side, he saw me coming through the drifts of snow toward him.

  I nosed his hand gently. He wasn’t afraid of me.

  He was afraid of the storm. I could see tear streaks on his face.

  He led me to his sister crouched under a big tree, a blanket wrapped around her. She was younger, maybe eight. The boy pulled the blanket more tightly around her.

  I nosed her, too. When she stood up, my eyes looked into hers.

  I would take care of them.

  I’m a dog. I should tell you that right away. But I grew up with words. A poet named Sylvan found me at the shelter and took me home. He laid down a red rug for me by the fire, and I grew up to the clicking of his keyboard as he wrote.

  He wrote all day. And he read to me. He read Yeats and Shakespeare, James Joyce, Wordsworth, Natalie Babbitt, and Billy Collins. He read me Charlotte’s Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Morning Girl, and my favorite story, Ox-Cart Man. So I saw how words follow one another and felt the comfort of them.

  I understand words, but there are only two who understand me when I speak. Sylvan once told me this.

  “Poets and children,” said Sylvan. “We are the same really. When you can’t find a poet, find a child. Remember that.”

  Remember that.

  The boy held on to my body to help him stand in the wind.

  “Help,” he said.

  I knew what his word meant.

  Sylvan taught me about rescue.

  I would save them the way Sylvan had saved me.

  The boy took his sister’s hand, and they followed me. We hurried through the woods, past the big rock, down the path by the shed where I had slept after Sylvan was gone. It had only been three days. I had learned to count:

  Day and night one.

  Day and night two.

  Day and night three.

  Or was it four days? Being alone confuses the truth about time.

  Sylvan’s poetry students took turns feeding me. Ellie, my favorite, knew that I couldn’t sleep in the house with Sylvan gone. She would have taken me home with her, but she knew I couldn’t leave either.

  The boy put his hand on my neck. It felt good to me. Sylvan used to walk in the woods with his hand on my neck. Sometimes he spoke in poems.

  I felt like crying. But here’s another truth: dogs can’t cry. We can feel sadness and grief.

  But we can’t cry.

  “Where are we going?” the girl asked, her clear voice like a bell. The wind whipped her hair across her face.

  “Home,” I said, speaking for the first time.

  She wasn’t surprised I spoke.

  She put her face close to my ear so I could feel her warm breath.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  I wished I could cry.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Home

  We reached the clearing, struggling through the snow and wind.

  “Oh!” said the girl when she saw the cabin.

  There was the light in the window. Sylvan had kept it on all the nights and days we lived together.

  “It’s our beacon,” he’d told me.

  I knew the door wouldn’t be locked. I nosed the lever on the door open. Sylvan had given me the lever so that I could go in and out as I wanted.

  We stepped out of the howling of wind into the quiet.

  The boy and girl stripped off their coats and I shook snow from my fur.

  “I’m Flora,” said the girl. “I’m cold. My blanket is wet. He’s Nickel,” she added, pointing to her brother.

  “I’m Nicholas,” he said. “Flora calls me Nickel.”

  “I’m Teddy,” I said. “I like Nickel.”

  It was dark except for the one beacon light. Nickel turned on two lamps.

  “Can you build a fire?” I asked him. “There’s wood and kindling on the hearth.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m almost twelve.”

  Flora hung up her coat on a hook by the door.

  “Why are you lost?” I asked.

  “The car slid into a snowbank, and my mother couldn’t get it started again,” said Flora.

  Nickel had stacked kindling and wood in the fireplace. He found the matches on the mantel.

  “She left her cell phone at home. She saw the lights of a house down the road where a family had been shoveling and left us to get help,” he said.

  “She was gone a long time,” said Flora.

  “We could have stayed in the car, but people came and knocked on the car windows, telling us the car was going to be towed off the road before it got covered with snow,” said Nickel. “Flora was scared.”

  “Nickel was scared, too,” said Flora, making Nickel smile.

  Then the flames of the fire flickered across the room, warming us—the first fire in days. Flora walked over to Sylvan’s computer, touching it.

  I can almost see Sylvan there in the light of the fire, his hair gray like mine—on his head and on his face. Later, when I learn words, I know that this was called a beard.

  I remember when I first spoke words to him. He had read Ox-Cart Man to me several times because he knew I loved it.

  “Ox-Cart Man is a poem,” I say, my own voice startling me.

  Sylvan turns from his computer, beaming.

  “Yes!”

  Tears come to his eyes, and I walk over to lick them.

  Sylvan reaches up and takes a small mirror off the wall. He holds it so both of us can look into it.

  “Same hair. Same eyes. We both think in words,” says Sylvan.

  I’M THE POET

  YOU’RE THE DOG.

  WHICH ONE’S THE POET?

  WHICH ONE’S THE DOG?

  “That isn’t a poem, Teddy.

  “That’s our song.”

  Sylvan makes up a tune for it and sings it to me every so often.

  “I’d better call my dad. He’s probably out of class because of the storm,” said Nickel.

  “No phone,” I said. “Sylvan didn’t like phones.”

  “No phone?” he repeated.

  “No.”

  “The computer?”

  “No. Only for Sylvan’s writing. He didn’t connect it to the outside world. He only used it for his words. And no television. He has . . . he ha
d a device for checking the weather. We can look for that later.”

  “My parents will be worried,” said Nickel.

  “I wrote a note,” said Flora. “I left it on the front seat so Mama would know we had help.”

  Nickel stared at Flora.

  “You? You wrote a note?”

  Flora nodded.

  “I can write, you know. I wrote Were safe in big letters.”

  No one spoke.

  Flora shrugged.

  “I made it up. I think I forgot the apostrophe.”

  “You are safe,” I said. “You didn’t make that up.”

  “You did a great thing, Flora,” said Nickel. “Maybe Mama won’t worry.”

  “I only did one thing,” said Flora. “You saved me. You wrapped me in a blanket. You got me out of the cold car.”

  Nickel shook his head.

  “Teddy saved us.”

  “Maybe it was you who found Teddy,” said Flora stubbornly.

  “We found each other,” I said. “The end.”

  Flora grinned at me.

  A log in the fireplace flamed up. The light bounced off the walls like Sylvan’s words when he read out loud.

  Flora went over to look at pictures of Sylvan. There was one of him surrounded by students in the house. And one of Sylvan and me, our heads close together.

  Flora turned.

  “That’s you,” she said.

  “After Sylvan saved me.”

  Flora turned back to the picture.

  “Did someone leave you behind before Sylvan rescued you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like us,” she said, still looking at the picture.

  Nickel turned from the fireplace, his face sad.

  “She didn’t leave us, Flora. She went to get help for us,” he said.

  “Children tell tiny truths,” Sylvan told me once. “Poets try to understand them.”

  It was Flora who told tiny truths. It was Nickel who found them hard to hear. He didn’t want to think of his mother leaving them for a long time in a fierce storm.

  A log crackled and sent sparks out past the stone hearth. Nickel swept them back.

  It was the way it used to be.

  Flora stared at me. Somehow I knew what she was thinking. It would be Flora who would ask the question.

  “So where is he?” she asked. “Sylvan?”

  Her voice was soft. The question was not unkind. But I couldn’t answer. I walked to the window and looked out.

  Flora didn’t follow me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Way It Used to Be

  We found cans of food: Sylvan’s favorite, baked beans with molasses, and chicken soup, and crackers. No milk.

  “I don’t like milk, anyway,” said Flora.

  The wind picked up suddenly, and the cracking and falling of tree limbs shook the cabin. The lights flickered, and we found an oil lamp in case the power went out.

  “You can sleep in Sylvan’s bed,” I said.

  “I want to sleep with you in front of the fire,” said Nickel.

  “Me, too,” said Flora.

  We gathered pillows and blankets and Sylvan’s old green sleeping bag.

  The wind grew stronger. A large thump of a big tree limb fell outside.

  The lights went off, then on, then off again.

  I lay on the red rug.

  Flora slept right away.

  After a while Nickel turned and put his arm around me.

  The way it used to be.

  In the night I got up once to push up the door lever with my nose and go outside into the wind.

  Nickel raised his head.

  “Where are you going?”

  His voice sounded frightened.

  “I’m going to pee,” I said.

  I heard Flora’s sleepy, comforting voice in the dark.

  “He’s a dog,” Flora said softly.

  “Oh right,” said Nickel. “I keep forgetting that.”

  I came back to my red rug next to Nickel.

  His arm went around me again.

  “Sometimes I forget, too,” I said to Nickel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gray Cat Gone Away

  In the morning the wind still howled. The snow was halfway up the windows on either side of the door, and still falling hard.

  When I opened the door to go outside, the snow was over my head. I couldn’t get through.

  Nickel had leaned the snow shovel inside the night before, and he shoveled a path through the drifts for me. I leaped through the snow.

  Back inside I shook the snow off on the rug by the door.

  “Thank you, Nickel,” I said.

  His hair was plastered to his head. He looked the same way he had when I’d first found him.

  Flora still slept by the fire.

  “I found the weather box and listened,” he said. “The storm will last for days. No one is allowed on the roads. No phone service. No cell phone service working either.”

  “The power went on and off all night,” I said. “We only lost power for hours once that I remember, though.”

  It is a windy afternoon storm. Sylvan’s class of poets sit in a group. There is a fire in the fireplace. I lie on the red rug, listening. The students who want to be poets are eager and fresh, like washed apples. Sylvan and I are the only ones with gray, grizzled hair.

  “They know so little about life,” Sylvan whispers to me as he puts out plates of cookies and seltzer bottles.

  “Maybe they just don’t know what they know,” I say, making Sylvan smile.

  They all pat me. Students are always kind to their teachers’ pets Sylvan has told me.

  One young man reads a poem about a farmer walking his animal to town.

  I sit up. It sounds like Ox-Cart Man. Sylvan nods when he’s done reading.

  “What do you think, Teddy?” he asks.

  The students laugh.

  “Shallow and derivative,” I say before I realize that I’m talking.

  No one but Sylvan hears me, of course.

  “It has been written a different way, Dan,” says Sylvan. “Go read Ox-Cart Man.”

  A thin, nervous girl, Ellie, reads a poem about her lost love.

  Sylvan taps his foot nervously. I know he hates it.

  “Ellie, have you lost a love?” Sylvan asks her when she’s finished reading.

  She shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes.

  I get up from the red rug and go stand next to Ellie.

  Her lips tremble.

  “What have you lost?” asks Sylvan. “What are you really talking about in this poem?”

  I lean against Ellie, and she puts her arm around me.

  “My cat,” she whispers.

  She is crying full-out now, and I glare at Sylvan. I curl my lip at him.

  He looks at me, and his face softens.

  “Ellie,” says Sylvan softly, “write about your cat, dear girl.”

  And the lights go out, Ellie’s tears making the ruff of my neck wet in the dark room.

  “You were not kind to her,” I tell Sylvan later.

  He sighs.

  “I know. Sometimes writers are not thoughtful of other writers. We want to be inspired. Cranky when we’re not. But trust me, she will write a wonderful poem about her cat.”

  And she does.

  It’s called “Gray Cat Gone Away.” It ends:

  IN MOONLIGHT

  NO

  SOFT SWEET PAW ON MY CHEEK

  NO

  FUR CURLED UNDER MY CHIN

  JUST

  A SAD SPACE LEFT BEHIND—

  GRAY CAT GONE AWAY.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Full of Sorrow, Full of Joy

  There was no silence in the cabin, even at night. The wind was like a wild song that pushed away the quiet.

  The power had gone off and on, off and on many times.

  We cooked up many things from the freezer to be heated in the fireplace later. We stored the cooked food in coolers
outside in the snow.

  Today Flora cooked soup on the stove, stirring as she read a book.

  “This is you, Teddy,” she called to me.

  When I walked over to the stove, I saw she was reading a book on Irish wolfhound dogs. A tall dog like me was on the cover.

  “You’re much better looking, I must say,” said Flora.

  If I could smile I would have.

  “Did you know that your ancestors were warriors?” she said, peering over the book at me.

  “So Sylvan told me,” I said.

  “Your great-grandfather or grandmother may have pulled soldiers off horses with their teeth,” said Flora.

  “I myself have never done that,” I said, making Nickel laugh.

  “It says here you have a kindly disposition,” said Flora.

  “Does it say he’s a best friend?” asked Nickel, tossing more wood on the fire.

  Flora lowered the book and stirred the soup, tossing in some herbs from a small jar.

  “Yes,” she announced. “It does. And often the Irish wolfhound loves children and cats.”

  “I have met a cat or two that I liked,” I said.

  “We have a cat at home,” said Flora.

  “Is it a spitter?” I asked.

  Flora gave me an insulted look.

  “She is not a spitter.”

  A sudden sweep of wind sent snow against the cabin. Outside a limb fell. We all looked up.

  “This is lasting a long time,” said Nickel. “The batteries for the weather box are getting low, and I don’t know how to charge them. But the storm is expected to last for a few more days.”

  “Good,” said Flora. “I like it here.”

  “I like it here, too,” said Nickel. “As long as there’s wood to burn and food to eat.”

  He paused.

  “And as long as Mom and Dad aren’t worried.”

  “Remember, I wrote a note,” said Flora.

  “There’s wood in the shed,” I said.

  “If we can get there,” said Nickel.

  “And food in the pantry,” said Flora.

  “I like it here, too,” I said suddenly. “I do.”

  Sylvan types on his computer, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning and muttering to himself.

  I sit up on the red rug and yawn my yawn that ends with a squeak.

  He looks over at me.

  “Being a writer is not easy, you know. It is, now that I think of it, either full of sorrow or full of joy.”