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In The Company of Newfies by Rhoda Lerman
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$27.95 |
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Description
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Chapter One
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Publisher's
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Critic Reviews
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Reader Reviews
April 29, 2007: We are changing our ordering process. Until this is
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please call us at 607-648-6199 or use order form to mail or fax.
Click here for order form to mail or fax
 CHAPTER
ONE In the company of
Newfoundlands, nothing is hidden. I slip the halter of what I’ve become.
They slip the halter of what they’ve been, and we live together,
passionately, changed. We share our lives, my Newfoundlands and I. This is a
book about what is possible between humans and dogs, a book about communion,
commitment, and intimacy. This is a book about the dogs who look steadfastly
into my eyes and move their lips in vowel shapes, speaking to me as I speak
to them, because they want to be like me, because their life’s work is not
to be dog, but to be human. They observe me more carefully than I them. They
are alert to every stirring of my body, every change of breath. They don’t
dream of running in traffic, of eating puppies, of digging a tunnel in the
backyard in a return to the feral, the wild, and the distant. They dream of
being with me, like me, lying with me, curved into me, each vertebra pressed
into me, their great heads over my feet so I can’t leave without them. They
work to be human, to be other than what they are, something other than dog.
And I work to be other than what I am. We stretch our limits and change our
lives. My Newfoundlands
live my life as passionately as I live their lives. I sit in their kennel at
a picnic bench and write. They climb on my bed and rest. We share space,
food, blue skies, icy waters, snowstorms. When I am without them I feel
amputated; a part is missing. The empty place it is missing from feels the
pain. My dogs act as if they feel that way also, amputated without me, for
we are parts of one another now.
In the rosy, unrippled dawn of the first day,
I sit at the edge of my makeshift bed overlooking the whelping box and watch
six newborn pups nursing on Molly’s nipples. Molly is a Landseer: a white
dog with black markings. The namesake of the breed’s variety is the artist
Sir Edwin Landseer, who immortalized Queen Victoria’s black-and-white
Newfoundlands in portraits. She wears a black hood, a black saddle blanket
over her entire back. She is very elegant and handsome, with deep dark eyes
and a sculpted large head. Her neck is slightly short for perfection. She
has always moved beautifully, muscularly, on strong, balanced bone. As a pup
she was saucy and charming. As a bitch she is powerful, commanding,
confident, apologetic when corrected. She runs her family with a strong
personality. Tonight she is a mother. I feed her vanilla ice cream by the
tablespoon and she licks the cold, sweet wetness to regain strength.
I’ve crocheted six differently colored wool
necklaces to identify the Landseer puppies until we learn who has what
markings. But already we can tell the male with the ring around the tail,
the female with Molly’s saddle blanket back, the female with the three
spots, the male with the shape of Africa on his back. In a few weeks we’ll
be able to make guesses about their personalities; at seven weeks we’ll give
them personality tests before they are sold so that they go to proper homes.
I will be up watching the puppies all this
night and many, many more. The pups are unutterably vulnerable, pink in the
red cast of the heat lamps secured above the whelping box. On late-night TV,
news of the California earthquake is breaking. I see bodies, live and dead,
pulled from wreckage. The heat lamps give off an emergency glow, mirror the
flashing red lights of ambulances and rescue trucks in Los Angeles. I watch
the temperature, adjust the heat. Molly, unable to complete natural
delivery, had a C-section; four puppies were born dead. Each one is a
tragedy, and if I were to dwell on the deaths, I could not go on breeding. I
continue to remind myself to dwell on the lives of the six we have, for one
is now dying, its head weak on the nipple.
Molly weighs one hundred and twenty pounds;
her pups weigh a pound. They are mole like, velvet sleek, blind, their
faces folded, ears closed. They know temperature, touch, taste, survival.
Their lives are fragile. Molly and her pups will be watched around the clock
for the next three weeks. Whelping tales are replete with disasters. Pups
dehydrate, chill, fade for no reason. Molly might roll over on them, step on
them. The goat’s milk in the bottle might be too hot, too cold; the heat
lamps above the whelping box too hot, burn out. The pups might suffocate
under the corner of a blanket, drown on the goat’s milk when I bottle-feed
them. Sometimes their systems just don’t turn on, can’t connect. Or there is
an accident at birth. I offer Molly water. I can’t leave a bucket in the
whelping box because puppies have been known to drown. There are too many
horror stories. Visitors, the few I allow, will have to wash their hands and
remove their shoes. No one may pick up the puppies. They sleep on polar
fleece throws and fake sheepskin blankets. Outside, the snow rises to the
windowsills of this, the warmest room in our house. The temperatures are
below zero, the winds bitter. The temperature in the whelping room is kept
at seventy-five, the whelping box itself at eighty-five, both of which are
too hot for Molly. Her tongue hangs out. She pants.
The dying one climbs back on. “Don’t give them
names,” the vet warned, “until you know who lives.” Even so, I name him
Billy to give him the bit of existence I can. A rabbi told me once that the
only power of prediction left to humans is in naming their children.
“Billy,” I whisper to him as I hold him against my breast, his head in the
crook of my elbow. “Billy.” Billy was eviscerated at birth, sutured,
revived, but he has a thin chance. He is very beautiful and sad, already.
Billy tries to suckle. His head drops off the nipple of the baby bottle. He
struggles to return to it. I fix the bellyband covering his wound. He seems
to have fattened, filled out. He is the size of my hand. I feed him drops of
Pediolite, of goat’s milk. I try Veta-Lac, a formula designed for orphan
animals. He has no interest. His ears are soft and velvety, like the petals
of anemones. He is deaf, blind, dying. I hope he doesn’t know. The struggle
for existence, the gorgeousness and terror it is, is before me. There are
analogy and metaphor in the drama of the earthquake news unfolding and
crackling as it is on the all-night news programs. Somehow, in the face of
the gargantuan blindness of that earth-cracking act, to wrest these small
and precious lives from the fist of the universe becomes sacred.
Billy has stopped suckling the nipple of the
baby bottle I’ve offered him. His body is long and elegant, well
proportioned. His markings are perfect. He would be a wonderful and noble
male. I draw little circles in his fur to relieve stress. It works on larger
dogs. The household sleeps, the snow silences everything. I pray for him. I
want no one to hear me pray for this unimportant life. There are so many
other human lives at risk. Even so, tears well. It’s foolish, useless,
sentimental, but his is the life that has been put into my hands at this
moment. Molly watched as I lifted Billy from the whelping box. She watched
me feeding him, threatening, watching, judging. She no longer watches.
Perhaps she already knows it’s useless. “Our Father who art. . .” I had
never before thought so keenly of the words. Our Father who art, our Father
who makes, who crafts, who creates. The word art means more than “is.” It
means makes. I am part of this sacred act, this sacred breeding, this art.
Like a priest, I watch over the sacred herd in the small hours, watch them
struggle to life, to fullness, their bodies rounding as Molly’s milk fills
them, their breaths light, their tiny parts perfect and fragile as crystal.
I am part of Molly’s art, of a universal deed, a penultimate creative act
that is sacred, that Molly shares with me. The name of our kennel is Blue
Heaven. The name comes from the song: “Just Molly and me and baby makes
three. / We’re happy in our blue heaven.”
When Molly came into season, Champion
Topmast’s Checkers, the sire of these puppies, was flown down from
Saskatchewan. They met in Buffalo. Molly comes from a noble line of
Newfoundlands, stringently bred, internationally honored. It is Checkers’
line as well. Canadian and American Champion Topmast’s Pied Piper – Molly’s
great-grandfather – and International, World, Danish, Italian, American,
Austrian, Champion Topmast’s Blackberry Blossom – her great-grandmother –
are legends of the Newf world. Piper, who is listed on Molly’s pedigree nine
times, is spoken of in the worshipful tones normal people use for movie
stars. Blackberry Blossom, was, I’ve heard, one of the most beautiful
bitches in Newf history. I flew to their kennel on a ranch in Saskatchewan,
on six hundred acres of brittle winter prairie, to choose Molly’s husband
for this litter. Over the dining room sideboard of John and Margaret
Willmott’s home, where an ancestor’s portrait would be, Pied Piper’s
portrait hung. Margaret is as much a legend as her Topmast champions.
Checkers is a sound and handsome Piper grandson who, it happens, was born on
my birthday. Champion Walden Corbett Jorgensen – Molly’s grandfather – was a
grandson of Champion Topmast’s Pied Piper. There is enormous potential for
greatness in this litter, from many ancestors. But now, in their first few
days, there is potential for loss.
The pups sleep at Molly’s nipples. She shakes
gently, stands very cautiously. I hold my breath. If I direct her out of the
whelping box, over the wood slabs, I might steer her incorrectly. I have to
trust that she knows precisely what she’s doing, that she won’t hurt her
puppies. Fastidiously she cleans the whelping box, eats the excrement, licks
the urine, then herself. Molly steps out delicately; she knows where each
one is without looking, but she looks behind her once as if she can count –
and perhaps she can. Then she climbs up beside me, licks my face for
permission to sit on my bed, licks my face with the same tongue she licked
afterbirth, shit, urine. (I am the pack leader. In the pack, she is the
alpha bitch.) It isn’t easy for me to let her lick my face, but it is her
language and I must listen or she will stop speaking to me. Because I’ve
learned to listen, my Newfies have continued to speak. That is the
difference between my Newfies and the legions of other dogs I’ve owned. The
Newfies have patiently insisted that I listen. I lie down. Molly lies down
with me, curves every weary vertebra into my chest, belly, groin, presses as
tightly against me, into me, as she can, sighs, shudders with exhaustion,
and falls asleep. She snores. We will be awake again in an hour. We are
mothers together. She smells of life. It is not clean.
In the whelping room at the veterinarian’s office, when Molly first went
into heavy labor, a young vet suggested I leave her alone, let her do her
thing. There was no way to explain to him that we are intimate; that we have
done everything together. That we have pierced each other’s worlds. That I
am – what? – her other half. She is not only dog and I am not only human. We
are other than that. Newf owners struggle to explain this. A simple man who
had come to breed his bitch with my stud said, “She took me through my
divorce. She’s a human in a fur coat.” A breeder said, jokingly because he
was embarrassed by his emotions: “We used to have dogs. Now we have
Newfoundlands.” There is some intrinsic difference that we all understand
but cannot bring to words without sounding foolish. I think it is their
commitment to us, their deep and abiding friendship. I sat with Molly at the
vet’s office. I dropped Rescue Remedy – a homeopathic stabilizer – on her
tongue, offered her water, honey, yogurt. She leaned her head on my knee,
looked in my eyes, and then, looking somewhere inside herself, pushed out
her first puppy. It is the one that is dying now. Her placenta didn’t come
loose as it ought to have, and Billy was born eviscerated. The vet, holding
him in his palms, blood leaking through his fingers, dashed past me to the
operating room. If Billy had a chance, it was given to him. We do not take
these lives lightly. “Billy,” I say the word softly. “Billy. Next time,
Billy.” The puppies
whimper, sound like seagulls. It’s time for Molly to return to the whelping
box. I push her off the bed. She groans, climbs back on the bed, presses
hard against me. “Go, Molly. You’ve got to.” She climbs into the whelping
box, lies on her belly, snores. “Roll over, Molly,” I whisper. She rolls
over. The puppies feed voraciously. I pick up Billy, hold him to the warmth
of my chest, feed him goat’s milk. We do our sacred work together in the
strange light, the California earthquake flickering in the drift and sift of
news and soft news repeated again and again as the night turns. I watch.
Survivors are pulled from the wreckage as Molly’s pups were pulled from the
womb. The rest of the
pack, five of them, sleep or keep watch in the hallway just beyond the
whelping room. Three – Celeste, Ishtar, and Pippa – are Molly’s daughters.
Celeste had a crippling disease when she was two weeks old, but she has,
through the finest medicine and homeopathy available, survived. Her sister
Ishtar will very likely be a champion. She is beautiful and gracious. Ben is
their father, Molly’s husband, even though Molly has bred her second and
third litter with other males. Ben is her emotional husband. We call them
Mr. and Mrs. Dog. They are very good friends. Pippa is a huge and gorgeous
female, already having won points toward her championship, just beginning
her career. She is a year and a half and does not yet have her mother’s or
Ishtar’s bitch elegance. Toby is an enormous and handsome stud dog from
another line. Together they listen to the whimpers, the suckling sounds,
Molly’s snores, mine, I’m certain. They know each twitch and scent of my
body, of one another’s. They sniff at the air, at the smell of placenta,
blood, afterbirth, dog milk, goat’s milk, the frozen colostrums I brought
home from the goat farm for emergencies. Certainly they smell Billy, his
infection, his death. I don’t know what they can smell, what they can know.
When Molly was in labor with her second litter, I smelled the same smell I
had when my mother was dying. I knew Molly had dead puppies. My dogs can
know without experiencing things. I suppose one could call it instinct. I
would call it brilliant efficiency. That’s why I listen to them.
Molly’s daughter Celeste approaches, licks my
toes for permission to climb the bed. Celeste has always been sickly, and
Molly has favored her with privileges that her other daughters – Ishtar and
Pippa, lusty, strong bitches – have not been granted. But tonight even
Celeste receives a red-eyed glare from Molly, some arrow of heat, of threat.
Celeste slumps, drops her head, turns away, and lies down in the line of
dogs in the hallway. Molly turns them away from the door. She has made no
sounds, no moves. There are rules that are unthinkably dangerous to break.
Bitches, unlike males, fight to the finish. Molly, I know, would kill to
protect her puppies, but there is no need. Everyone understands. When Molly
had her first litter, on the first night like this, she gave me that
red-eyed, direct, defiant animal challenge, that glare: Get out. It was
terrifying. She had been a silly, amusing thing, a puppy, and young female.
I hadn’t taken her very seriously. Suddenly she was all-powerful. She could
kill me. She always could have killed me. She gave me that glare and I left
the room. This is her third litter. We are friends now, perhaps sisters,
certainly family. Molly and I know each other now. We trust each other.
We’ve come a long way together. We know each other’s limits, habits, quirks,
needs, fears, furies. I know what Molly wants most of the time because she
knows I listen, so she tells me. Nothing is hidden in the company of
Newfoundlands. I can have no secrets. They want none. Molly snores. I climb
over her, sit in the easy chair, and watch the news repeat itself over and
over and wait for the puppies’ first day.
Copyright © 1996 Rhoda
Lerman
Description
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Excerpt
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Publisher's
Note
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Critic Reviews
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Reader Reviews
For more information, contact:
Robert Lerman
607 648-6199
books@blueheavenbooks.com
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