Principal Hess stuck his head in the door as Penny was putting on her coat. “How’d it go? Anything I can do? Anything at all.”
Lewis was parked behind the school buses, his exhaust pluming white smoke in the frosty air. He said the Dodge truck was worth a looksee. It had a camper with stickers on it: HUNTING: THE AMERICAN WAY and WHEN THE TAILGATE DROPS THE BS STOPS. The camper latch was busted and the owner said his uncle had lost the key when he was out fishing and had to break the lock to get in.
“I got to have fourteen hundred for it,” he said. Penny wrote him a check for twelve fifty.
When they got back to the farm, Lewis wanted her to wait in the truck while he brought Beverly out to see. “Dad,” she said, “it’s just an old pickup truck. Besides, Hope’s been locked up all day.”
After dinner (Lean Cuisine: Fettucini Alfredo) Penny went into the front room to watch TV and once she’d settled on the couch, Hope cocked an eye, put one paw on the armchair, another, unlawfully flumped himself into the seat and grinned at her. She smiled at his joke. “Okay, I get it,” she said. “Now get down off there.”
On Saturday the Salvation Army came for Lisa’s and Mark’s things, a pair of elderly black men from Winchester who removed their caps each time they came into the trailer. “Yes, ma’am,” they said and “No, ma’am,” and “Are you sure you want all these things to go?” And one said, “I have a niece who’d like to have this,” holding up Lisa’s Sunday jumper.
Beverly came to help but kept bursting into tears, so Penny asked her to stay in the kitchen, make some coffee or something.
Sunday, Penny and the dog walked nearly twenty miles. Farms were side by side along the river bottom and Penny knew all the farmers, so she ignored the no trespassing, no hunting signs, and when one farmer came on his tractor to investigate, he gave her a wave.
That night Penny was ravenous and ate two TV dinners. She showered so she wouldn’t need to in the morning. She sat on the edge of the bed she’d shared with her husband. “At least that junk is out of here,” she said.
Hope lifted his head and sniffed. “I will guard thee against ghosts,” he said.
She said, “Lie down and stop padding around.”
Monday, Tuesday, at school; okay. By Wednesday, the novelty of a bereaved mother as teacher had worn off. The first sign of the return of the old order was when Ralph Lawson stole Margaret Baxter’s arithmetic book and passed the book around the class.
Little Margaret was nonplussed. “Okay, you guys,” she said, “who’s got it? I want my book back right now.” Repeating a line she’d heard from her parents, she said, “Do you think I’m made of money?”
“I’ll tell you what you’re made of,” Ralph whispered, and proceeded to do just that.
Penny said, “Alright Ralph, that’s enough. That’ll do.”
Saturday morning, Penny telephoned. “Come down, Daddy,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Out in the training field, the young dog behaved impeccably, balancing his sheep as accurately as a plumb bob, keeping a distance, stopping on command, standing until Penny called him on.
“Well?” Penny demanded.
“He’s a real crackerjack,” her father said slowly. “Reminds me of the first time I ever ran his father at a trial …”
“But?”
Lewis stuck his hands deep in his pockets. “Might be you’re bringing him on too quick,” he said.
Penny bristled. “Until he’s got flanks, he can’t start to drive.”
“You’ve got plenty time for that,” Lewis said.
“He’ll need to drive in the open.”
“Honey, he’s just fourteen months. He’s too young for open trials.”
“Eikamp’s Rex was two when he won the Nationals.”
“That was Eikamp’s Rex.”
Later, when Lewis looked out the window, Penny was down in the field, training.
That’s what she did, mornings and evenings, train her dog. On weekends, after Hope’s morning bout she’d walk him twenty-five miles a day over snow, and with all his dashing around, Hope was doing four times that.
Hope was happy. He’d found a world perfectly designed for him—as much work as he could do until his attention wavered, and then off for a run until he tired. Hope got hard, stretched muscles over his bones. Once, rushing to get through a farm gate before Penny closed it, Hope smacked into Penny’s legs and Penny fell, and when her senses returned, here was this dog circling her whining, worried to death. She limped into school Monday morning, and when Margaret Baxter asked what had happened she said she’d fallen on the ice. Each time Penny locked up Hope it was like she was leaving her life behind.
While the kids read their lessons, Penny’s mind wandered. She wondered if she really was pushing Hope too hard. “Yes, Bobby. You can go to the boys’ room.” She didn’t notice the kids’ grins—she’d already let two other boys go. Mr. Bahnson, the shop teacher, brought the miscreants back. “You’ve got more faith in these kids than I do. Wait’ll the janitor sees what they did in there.” The three boys looked hangdog, and Penny thought that Hope never looked hangdog. When Hope did wrong and she corrected him, sometimes his eyes got hot and red and she thought he wasn’t going to defer to her. But, always, he did.
ON FRIDAY, December twenty-second, three o’clock, Penny came home and disappeared into her trailer. Lewis Burkeholder let the kitchen curtains fall closed. “Penny’s home early.”
Beverly looked up from her devotional. “Maybe because it’s Christmas?”
Lewis yawned. Wood heat made man and dog sleepy, and Old Nop was behind the stove, snoozing. Lewis answered the phone.
“Lewis, it’s me, Billy Hess. I don’t know how much Penny told you, but it was no big thing.”
Through the gap in the curtains Lewis could see Penny and Hope in the training field.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Billy.”
“We all lose our tempers sometime. Penny isn’t the first teacher to … lose it. She scared him more than hurt him. The Lawson boy was hurting the Baxter girl and Penny stopped it. The Lawson boy’s a real terror …”
“Listen Billy, I haven’t talked to Penny. I’ll call you back.”
“Just tell her nobody wants her to quit. After Christmas, her job’ll be waiting for her.”
PENNY WAS OUT in the big field, fifty acres tucked up against the flank of the mountain. A small flock of sheep had gathered on a knoll, perhaps a half mile down the field, and Lewis wouldn’t have seen them, except for the orange sun glinting off their wool.
The dog was a dark dot against the snow way out there. The wind kicked up ice flakes from the surface of the snow and whisked them against Lewis’s boots, and he wrapped his woolen scarf over his face. Penny stood hipshot, giving no command, showing no impatience.
When the sheep turned to face Hope, Penny put her fingers to her mouth and whistled a single, long blast. Two count, three. Hope was on his feet, marching toward the sheep, implacable.
The sheep angled quietly across the field to Penny’s feet and she called Hope, “That’ll do, Hope,” and Hope came to her, knowing how fine he’d been, delight vibrating off him, and he jumped up then, his snout higher than Penny’s head, once, twice, three times.
Lewis stepped into the circle of the woman and her dog. “Cold out here,” Lewis noted.
“Oh yeah, I suppose it is.” Hope espied an inviting clump of dead broomsedge and snuffled under the golden straw, just like there was something hiding there.
“I got a call from Billy Hess, at the school,” Lewis said.
Penny stuck her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were her mother’s eyes. For a moment, in the fading winter light, Lewis saw the young woman he’d married forty years ago.
Penny said, “I’m not fit to be around little kids.”
Lewis raised his eyebrows and said, “If we don’t get into some shelter I’m going to freeze to death.”
Hope bounced along, snuffling,
thinking that maybe his foolishness could lighten things up a little.
“Hess said it was no big thing, said he wanted you to stay on.”
“So I can smack another kid?”
Two Burkeholders, heads bowed, hands in pockets, silhouetted by the dying sun crunched back across the snowy field.
Christmas morning, Lewis gave Beverly some handspun wool he’d picked up in Winchester, and Beverly gave him a sweater. At noon, they went out for the Christmas Buffet at Shoney’s. Just the two of them.
Beverly was chipper and burbled like a bobolink and said how nice this was and how nice that was and, Lewis, won’t you take a look at this salad bar, but Beverly only took a few things for her plate and didn’t eat most of those.
That evening Lewis went out early for the chores and finished well before dark. Although he saw Penny walking with Hope he and Nop walked the other way.
Nop never strayed far from Lewis’s side. Nop felt sad, but that might have been the sad light of that time of year. He raised his head to sniff the air: the frozen earth under the snow, the sheep who’d passed this way this morning.
Just yesterday, Nop was sailing over every fence on the place, and now he waited, politely, for Lewis to open the gates. Just yesterday they’d been inseparable on America’s trial fields, ranging up and down the country, and victory had become habitual with them. The two old animals trudged back through the winter night to their warm, cheerless home.
LEWIS AND BEVERLY didn’t see much of their daughter in the next few weeks. Neighbors, running into Lewis at the feed store or the tractor dealership would say how they’d seen Penny and that young dog “down at the Miller Place” or “halfway to Braxton’s Mill.”
A little after dinner, on January 12th, which was a Wednesday, Penny knocked and asked if she could come in for a minute, just a minute, I know you’re busy, and Beverly put down her knitting and said, “Oh no, dear, we were just going to watch television,” and Penny said how she wouldn’t want to interrupt their program, and Beverly said it was just MacNeil/ Lehrer and they could watch them any night.
“I’m leaving,” Penny said. After a moment she added, “There’s nothing here for me anymore.”
“I’m just making up some herb tea,” Beverly said. “Lewis doesn’t care for it but I think it’s very refreshing. Where are you going, honey?”
“Ma, please don’t cry.”
Beverly blew her nose into a paper towel, stepped to the counter and scooped three spoonfuls of raspberry tea into her teapot. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be so silly.”
“Me and Hope are going on the sheepdog trial circuit. There’s a trial at the Fort Worth Stock Show and I called ’em up and they’ll let us run.”
“Open?” Lewis asked.
“That’s where the prize money is.”
Sweat dropped off Lewis’s forehead. Beverly always did like the living room too warm. “If you need us,” he said, “just call. Anytime, honey. Anywhere.” Lewis felt weak in the knees, but he didn’t want Penny to think he was too feeble to help her if she needed it. “That truck runnin’ okay?”
She said that it was running just fine. She told her mother if she started to cry again she’d leave right now, and when Beverly did, Penny did.
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Acknowledgments
No real book is written without the courtesy, midwifery and simple forebearance of others. My thanks to those actual Border Collie people who let me mention them and their dogs here. No trial—not even a fictional one—would be complete without them.
Arthur Allen
John Bauserman
Steve Brown
Tom Conn
Bill Crowe
Bill Dillard
Bruce Fogt
Jock Gilchrist
Ada Karrasch
Richard Karrasch
Jack Knox
Lewis Pence
Lewis Pulfer
Ralph Pulfer
Pope Robertson
Mrs. Bryan Conrad, fine handler, incomparable organizer and great friend of the working dog.
Jack Knox, trainer and handler without peer. A kind, patient man, Jack taught me all I know about training stockdogs. Jack taught me how to see them.
Mrs. Mary Warner of Action-81 (Rte. 2, Box 151, Berryville, VA 22611). For years, Mrs. Warner’s heart and help have gone out to those whose pets have been stolen.
The National Endowment for the Arts
Knox Burger
James O’Shea Wade
Jake Hagwood for letting me tell the story of him and his Stink Dog.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to:
—John Holmes, quoted from his book The Farmer’s Dog, 8th ed., London, Popular Dogs, 1978.
—Tony Iley who quotes David McTeir in Iley’s Sheepdogs at Work, 2nd ed., Clapham, North Yorkshire, Dalesman Publishing Co., 1979.
—Anne Marie Rousseau, whose Shopping Bag Ladies, New York, Pilgrim Press, 1981, first showed me the plight of America’s homeless women.
Some descriptions of the Kentucky Bluegrass Open Sheep Dog Trials first appeared in my article “An Honest Dog,” anthologized in The Dog Book, Jerrold Mundis, ed., New York, Arbor House, 1983.
And thanks to Pip and Silk: honest dogs.
About the Author
Donald McCaig is the award-winning author of Nop’s Trials; Nop’s Hope; Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men; Rhett Butler’s People; and Jacob’s Ladder. He, his wife, Anne, and their border collies work a sheep farm in the mountains of western Virginia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Copyright 1948 by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Copyright © 1984 by Donald McCaig
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-1995-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Donald McCaig, Nop's Trials
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