The Pets, The Kids, The Barn

The pets, the kids and the barn were part of our environment; we had them - they had us. It was our concern to live with them.

Most families with children and the space have pets of one kind or another. We, having children, have had our share of pets; occasionally it was Father who wanted a hunting dog - pet? He ignored it once it had come home. We have had birds, cats, dogs, fish, both gold and tropical, geese, and turtles; but, fortunately no hamsters, rabbits, snakes, spiders or white mice. Except that, living on eighteen acres, we had rabbits, garter snakes, ground hogs, turtles in the lake with muskrats pursuing fish while mallards swam on top of the waters, raccoons, voles, and moles, and many mice. All over our space - that being nature's way. A Tennessee farmer nephew, Jones Edward - son of Clyde - gave his uncle a hundred pounds of rye seed; C. Allen, filled with good intentions for its use, dropped it in a corner of a small shed and forgot it; the rats found it and grew fat. I discovered it after C. Allen's death and cleared the whole thing out; the rats disappeared. What a waste!

Some of our creatures were intentional; some of them simply adopted us or our backyards.

At the little house on Forrer with its fenced-in and gated small back yard, we were adopted by a white dog, part husky; we decided on that lineage because it was impossible to keep her in the yard. She would jump the four-foot high wire fence and be gone; eventually she would return - probably had another family some place else. We were also adopted by a big black male cat - I do not know where it could have come from for John and Campbell were too small to go chasing cats. He lived with us until we moved to Birmingham; then he gave us up.

The days on Lake Mendota with cottage, large yard and the lake brought us a black and white dog. The boys enjoyed playing with that one. We had to leave him behind when we returned to Birmingham and school in September. Of course, there were broken hearts; but I knew that just as he had found us, he would find another family.

There was one small gray what'sit in Bremerton, a pup that John wanted. When it became ill, I took it to a vet who diagnosed spinal meningitis and put the pup away for me for I was concerned about the health of my children whose sister had died of that disease. I came home from the vets with my sad story and a need to cleanse the Bremerton basement floor for that pup, ill, had spent several days there. That was a rough job - no drain.

There were no other pets until we were settled in at Silverdale. Then Campbell came home with a forlorn black pup, swollen of belly with stick legs, sure signs of starvation, that had been whelped on one of the garbage dumps that surrounded an over-expanded community of shifting drifting people. Could he keep it? What else? He really took care of the dog until the neighbor began taking potshots at it for the neighbor said that it had been 'killing his chickens.' C. Allen sided with the neighbor. What chance would a boy and a stray dog have?

There were two dogs during the time in Birmingham; then it was C. Allen who wanted them. One was an English Setter. When that one was gone and I was insisting on a smaller dog, a city lot, a city house sized dog, he came home with an Irish Setter. A smaller dog? There was no winning that battle and I gave up. To C. Allen all dogs required as little care as the ones which he had known as a boy. For us there seemed to be no way to keep an animal; the Irish Setter followed the English Setter into oblivion.

Once settled in at 3535, there was no restraining the explosion of the pet population. There was a black and white cat that C. Allen hated; the children enjoyed that cat. It seemed to enjoy following Jeanne batting at her twinkling white socks as she ran after her busy father. In an earlier life, that cat had been mishandled for its personality was not the best. I did not know how to properly care for it and was too busy with children and big house to find out. Goldfish could be enjoyed safely in their bowl; like all goldfish, they did not live long. The same was true for the painted turtle. Jay and Jeanne enjoyed giving Mother gifts of canaries. It seems to me that there was more than one over the years; but the only one which I really remember we named Orange Sherbert. Jeanne, bringing me supplies for Orange Sherbert, brought me other pets - cockroaches by the hundreds, newly hatched in the boxes and wrappings from Kresge's. I opened the package by the kitchen tub, and they all disappeared down the drain in a deluge of hot water. (There is another way of doing roaches-in that also works for carpenter ants - equal amounts of Twenty Mule Team borax and powdered sugar. They come for the sugar, ingest the borax and die; the best part of that cure is that it attracts no other creature. That bit of information came from Aunt May who, at one time, was the manager of an older apartment building in the center city where roaches abounded. I gave that recipe to the Gudums when they were living in New Orleans while working on the Hughes job there for HEC. Easter Gudum cleared the insects out of their apartment; her neighbors kept theirs. I hope that you never meet a New Orleans roach. Some of them, all hard-shelled, are about three inches long.) The only problem with a canary is that, between songs, it scatters seeds about the floor. The mice liked that. Finally Orange Sherbert died when his cage was upset; heart failure probably.

Contemporary with the canaries in the house were C. Allen's birds outside of the house. He had bought and installed on the lawn one gander and four geese; the intent was that they should look decorative as they paraded in line. They did - all summer long. Then cold winter weather drove them up to the house (C. Allen had made no winter arrangements for them and had completely forgot them.). Then I began to complain because they all made obscene remarks at the front door. Mercifully, Helmuth Krippendorf took pity on me, carried them off and gave them to some poor soul who complained that they had been poorly fed. True. I was glad to see them go.

C. Allen had other winged creatures which he treated kindly - until he forgot them. In Silverdale he had brought to the house a wasps' nest from that long-leaning barn. Fascinated he brought it into the house; fascinated, I put it out. Another came into the house at 3535 in late November; that one came in over my protest. "that's all right, Ivabell, everything in it is dead." No way! The warmth of the house roused the dormant inmates; they emerged and sought escape through the highest windows, well out of my reach. There was a paper wasps' nest built into the branches of a great pine at the south of the house. It was not to be touched; its inmates were to be carefully evaded. Was that small white spot, that we thought we saw, on the backs of many of them only a parasite or the mark of a hornet? Do wasps have parasites? The snows and the winds of winter blew that nest away.

Then there were the hives of bees. We had seen on a trip west the wagons of bee-keepers who hauled their insects from blossoming field to blossoming field; the Drummonds knew some one who kept the insects for profit. C. Allen brought in to the house a small wooden box, which he could easily handle and lift, holding one queen and her workers. For a couple of years, we had hives. C. Allen harvested the honey and brought the frames to me to separate the honey from the wax. I had no equipment; I could only warm the frames in a kettle on the stove top until the softening honey ran from the wax. We had honey; we had wax (I still do.); we had friends who enjoyed honey in the comb - or out. Joe Henninger enjoyed C. Allen's gifts of honey in the comb until he discovered that his family, scraping the honey from the dish, left for him only the comb. As with so many other things: a little became too much. The hives died out because of neglect.

Campbell came home with a Dalmatian, beautiful dog; it turned out to be mine. That dog had several unnecessary habits: I have seen it watch three strangers walk together along the river and out of sight; it never uttered a growl; I suppose that was in character. Turned outdoors to take care of its daily needs, it would come in to leave a deposit on the family room floor. Inclined to run, he disappeared one day and we surmised that he had been hit by a car. Another time Chris Teeter, dog breeder, gave C. Allen a pair of Cocker Spaniels. Again, they were my dogs. I was soon tired of diaper and paper duty together, but there was nothing to be done. I turned the pair outdoors for a run a week before Christmas; they disappeared. No one asked about them until a week after Christmas. They were probably stolen. Why do people insist that every boy should have a dog? None of our boys ever needed the companionship of a dog; they had plenty of playmates.

The Drummond family gave us a tank of tropical fish - now they were good pets: quiet and contained. The mama black molly was a specialist at packaging; she delivered seventy (our count) lively black commas at one birth. Campbell was fascinated watching the snails oozing across the sand - one mile an eternity. This tank increased into Wet Pet and All Pet; then the mania died.

I, for myself, finally bought a dog - Doberman. I had decided that, being so often alone with devilishly clever neighbor kids and the barn having become a place for sin and frolic. (Wrong words? Well that depends upon your definition of 'fun'.) It was during the late sixties which were the days of drugs and amateur sex; the barn was the chosen spot of many. Baron would at least keep them away from the house.

That was the time that we had the streaker - except that he never streaked - he watched; he strolled; he enjoyed walking about the woods. Beth and her girls while driving home saw him one evening walking along the road . Tricia said: "He's wearing yellow socks!" He was and that was all. Sida and Beth, on the way to a movie, saw him standing in the bushes at the foot of John's drive, arms akimbo, watching their car as it came down the hill. He was seen standing watching people gathering for some event at the school; he was always dressed the same - shoes, his horned rimmed glasses and nothing else. The hunt was on. He would be sighted by some one at the school; the police were called. It took only a few steps around C. Allen's property to disappear behind another bush. I began to despair of his ever being caught - and clothed. We Harlan women jested that catching him really did not matter for he would catch pneumonia. C. Allen and the neighboring men organized; it took a sighting, a phone call and they would be out after him. Baron was enlisted in the hunt, but he was no bloodhound. The police told me one evening that there were fresh footsteps in the snow on the terrace; he was probably watching the fire in the fireplace. Why is it that a problem turns into a source of jests? Could that be one way of handling fear? At any rate he was eventually caught by the police who had been going to the area's psychologists and asking if they had a patient who spoke of hallucinating about walking nude through a woods? One of them did. The police were waiting for the young man when he came home from a walk. He was an engineering student from the university; he had taken to drugs. What a waste!

The barn? Its story is an extension of the same conditions which created the social conditions which caused the ramblings of the young man in the paragraph above. C. Allen had found an old barn, bought the heavy timbers, rebuilt the barn and covered it with aluminum. Then began the extended battles with the bottled-in-bond neighbor for the reflected glare of the morning sun daily disturbed his sleep. The barn never really belonged to us for the barn and the land surrounding it had been deeded to HEC; the use: storage. It was so used for a few years; it also became the repository of any over-used piece of kitchen equipment which I might discard. The tractor and the yard tools were kept there. Harvey Beach, gardener, clearing up a tulip bed, one year, stored all of the bulbs in a large drum that had no cover. An old raccoon fell in, grew fat and died of eating too many tulip bulbs. While the barn was used by HEC, the contents were routinely ordered; then the kids would come along and disorder the whole. One year the MacAlarnys kept a Thunderbird there; they were in Florida; I was thankful that that car came out whole. Eventually HEC stopped using the barn. The company left old ladders there which became for destructive kids illegal entry tools into the school next door. C. Allen used one end of it to store new cut timber. Carie Carie and Sam Apple, Art Academy students, had helped him seal and stack the wood which was intended for use at the Morgantown motel. Soon the visiting vandals unstacked; there was always so much energy to be used destructively.

Two different years the graduating classes of Lahser High School asked permission to build their float for home-coming. Both times they were warned about fire: pine trees surrounded the barn and the floor was covered with creosote blocks. They cleared and ordered the area which they planned to use. That last time, some one from one of the other schools decided to destroy the float; they destroyed the entire barn and its contents. All the great beams which Campbell had hoped to use to build a house, all the timbers which C. Allen had intended for use in the West Virginia motel were burnt. Some young boy, on his excited way to see the fire, was hit by a car; he spent months in a coma. I talked with some of the girls who had been involved in building that float; they expressed their regret over the loss of the barn and they were very concerned about the boy who had been hurt so badly. I wonder about the youngster who lit that match. Does he know about the injured boy? Will he soon put that act and the responsibility for the loss of weeks from one young life out of his mind? Or does he have no feelings of responsibility whatever?

Mr. Cousins, yard contractor, dug dirt from beside the barn for use in filling the swimming pool. I had become concerned about the probability of one of those delightful neighbor children falling in and drowning. Then, into the hole which had been created, he pushed all of the burnt and broken pieces of the barn. I was saddened to see the barn and its contents destroyed. At the same time, that fire had destroyed an aggravating problem.

But back to Baron, the first Doberman who loved all the ladies in the area, was forever breaking free to go visit them. He was too clever to be easily caught but did come contentedly home when corralled. C. Allen struggled to get acquainted with him, would take him out, fasten him to a log, tree, whatever and then go to work on the job at hand. Baron would lean into the breeze, break his chain, slip his collar, and go off to visit. I retrieved. He lived outdoors on a heavy chain; nights he slept in the house. I bought Gigi, Doberman, to keep him company. They shared as bed the space back of the kitchen sink, a space divided into 'his and hers' by the expanding gates used to corral children; Baron slept on one side; Gigi slept on the other. Gigi, being young and not having the control of Baron, would struggled over the barrier during the night to leave her deposit on his side; then she struggled back to her own clean bed. Then he complained and I came to wipe up her mess before there was finally peace and a night's sleep. Finally Baron died of a heart attack; the police were called too carry away the body.

Once again one dog for the house; I had bought the female Doberman to keep Baron company and, then, a gentleman to keep her company. He was, they both were gentle dogs. Gigi and Pierre - who would suspect that a pair of dogs so named were Dobermen. I loved them both and they returned the affection. The house was robbed one time while Gigi was in it alone, before the coming of Pierre. It had to have been neighbor kids for they knew the dog and they knew where to look for the things which kids steal. Jay had money in metal boxes which were broken open. He and his Father had bought firecrackers in Kentucky; they were gone. His room was in disarray; he was in Germany. Finally they found the safe in my sewing room, tried all the keys they could find and resorted to a mallet and a heavy duty screw driver to open the door. There was little in there other than some foreign coins, papers and a few silver dollars. My unexpected return thwarted their plans; they took off through the family room door, leaving a twenty-two and a projector by the door. Gigi clung to me and shivered; she knew that something wrong had happened. There was no way to tell me. Off and on, all summer long I could hear the sound of firecrackers being fired across the river. Do parents never ask the origin of things which kids possess?

Then I moved. The papers read 'no pets'. I had to dispose of both dogs. I kept Silly Animal. Silly Animal was the name Jay gave to one of the cats which Jeanne had given him when he complained about the loneliness of his Ann Arbor apartment. Off to the wars for him; I got the cat. That is an old pattern: mother gets to keep the pet left behind. Silly Animal is company for me now; we live together - two old females. (late note - Silly Animal died of old age on the 4th of May, 1987; she was 17 years old. I miss her but I am growing so old that I dare not take a new pet for, whatever it may be, it will outlive me.)

Humans need pets; pets, in our complex times, need us.