Cormac McCarthy Loves My Dog

by Linda Rodriguez

I’m a big rescue-animal person. I’ve had rescue dogs and cats all my adult life. When I’ve lost a dog to the cancers and other vicissitudes of old age, always a heartbreaking situation, I go looking for a replacement in the dogs on death row—those scheduled for euthanasia. I have found so many wonderful dogs in this way.

I’m thinking about this because next week is the adoption anniversary of our current dog, Dyson. Eight years ago this fall, we had lost our much-beloved sixteen-year-old Husky-Sharpei, who’d been adopted at seven on what was supposed to be the last day of her life and given us so many more wonderful years. After grieving for a month, we began looking online at the adoptable dogs of local shelters. Hearing that the Kansas City Animal Shelter was overcrowded, we decided to go visit and adopt one of their desperate dogs slated for death.

I walked into the shelter the week before Thanksgiving with certain criteria in mind. I wanted an older female dog who was already housebroken and calm. I knew older dogs were harder to find homes and figured I’d be able to choose among several older females. No stubborn, rambunctious, untrained young males for me. I was no longer the young, strong woman who had trained such dogs years before.

As luck would have it, someone showed us an emaciated, big, male dog with a strange brindle coat, starved and sad-eyed, who was scheduled for euthanasia the next day. He walked placidly for me on the leash and looked at us without hope. My husband and I were hooked by those big sad eyes. Even when we were informed that he had heartworm, which costs hundreds of dollars to treat, we weren’t dissuaded and signed up to adopt him that day, all the time telling ourselves how crazy this was. As we signed papers and laid down money, people who worked at the shelter began to filter into the office. “Are you the folks taking Dyson?” they would ask, and then shake our hands and thank us, telling us what a good dog he was. Then, we found out he was less than a year old, big as he was—and that he was a breed of dog we’d never heard of before, the Plott hound.

Dyson, who should have weighed at least 70 pounds at that time, was so starved that he weighed less than 40 pounds. (The first photos of him are then, the later photo of him now.) He had never been neutered and never been in a house, we discovered. We would have to keep this long-legged creature crated for weeks at first because of the heartworm treatment. If he became too active, he could have a stroke. What possessed us to continue and sign up for this dog, I can’t begin to understand.

Thus, began my education in the dogs Cormac McCarthy calls “the ninja warriors of dogdom” and of whom he says, “They are just without fear.” Developed in the 1700s by a German immigrant family (from whom they get their name) in the Great Smoky Mountains who never sold any outside of the family until after World War II, Plott hounds are the state dog of North Carolina. They were bred for centuries as trackers and hunters of bear. They are practically triple-jointed and can perform acrobatic feats while avoiding the claws of huge bears they have brought to bay. They are highly valued by big game hunters all over the world, who pay thousands of dollars for trained Plott hounds to use to hunt bear, cougars, and other large predators.

We don’t hunt. While on a leash for walks, Dyson constantly charges into the hedges and emerges with a big possum or feral cat in his mouth, which we’ll make him drop—always uninjured since he has the softest mouth. Other things we’ve discovered about

Plotts are that they are extra-smart and yet goofy and playful. And so he is. Also, loyal, affectionate, protective, and he loves fibers and textiles, often in early days pulling my knitting out without harming it and lying before it confused at why he couldn’t do what Mommy does with those sticks.

Though he was the opposite of the placid, female, older dog we wanted and he truly does seem to be without fear, Dyson has been the perfect dog for us, always a source of fun and joy. And the inevitable mischief that a young, boisterous male (for once he regained his health, he regained his personality) commits is a small price to pay for the love he shows when he lays his massive head in my lap and looks at me with love in his big, now-happy eyes.

That lack of fear that McCarthy so admired and the resilience that allowed Dyson to bounce back from abuse, starvation, and potentially fatal illness are two qualities I'm trying to achieve for myself as a writer. Dyson refuses to believe that he can't take on any challenge that presents itself. He's absolutely sure that he's equal to any task. Such confidence drives out fear, and I'm trying to cultivate it in myself. I suspect that belief in self is also linked to the resilience Dyson has exhibited, that ability I desire to be able to recover from professional, physical, and financial disaster. The sad dog I rescued has become my sensei in professional matters. If Dyson had opposable thumbs, how would he handle this? has become a recurrent question.

Happy birthday to His Majesty Dyson the Toy King Sweetie Boy Rodriguez-Furnish!

Linda Rodriguez's Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Dark Sister: Poems will be published in May, 2018, and Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear August 15, 2018. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

After the crime: Fear and resilience

by Julie Tollefson

In reading and writing, I am drawn to the dark side. Murder. Suspense. I get a thrill from peeking over the edge at the worst of human nature, knowing that at the end of the ride the payoff will be the triumph of good over evil. Nice and tidy and controlled.

Last spring, our community (population 5,000) experienced two incidents that caused me to reflect on the connections between the fiction I love and the reality I find reprehensible.

In the first, as winter gave way to spring, someone scrawled a note on the bathroom wall at my son’s school, threatening violence against the student body the next day. In light of school shootings in recent years, and the mass shooting at a business less than 200 miles away a few days earlier, the threat was seriously scary. 

Increased anxiety accompanied the increased police presence in all of our small district’s schools. Two hours after the district notified parents of the threat, I sat at my desk going through the motions of work, cleaning out drawers and organizing files and attempting other tasks that didn’t require my full attention. My thoughts were 20 miles away, with my son and my husband, a teacher in the same school. 

The next day, when I sent my child to school and my husband to work in a place that potentially could be the site of the next headline news, was even worse. My husband could have called in “sick.” We could have kept our son home. Many, many parents did. Only two students showed up for my husband’s first class of the day. His largest class size was six. District-wide, more than half of students stayed away. 

But as a family, after a lot of conversation, we agreed that we did not want to be held hostage to fear instilled by other people. It’s the kind of decision you never want to get wrong, but we thought it was important to show that we weren’t helpless.

A couple of months later, a local man allegedly shot a police detective in a nearby town, then fled through a series of carjackings. My husband and his students stayed at school under lockdown while tactical units surrounded a house a block or so away. 

Both of these incidents caused me to think about the implications for my writing. I enjoy reading a sweeping Jason Bourne-like tale of multinational intrigue, but big drama also happens on a smaller scale, locally, at the family or individual level. That’s the sort of fiction I gravitate toward in my writing, where I can explore the consequences for an individual or a community when someone breaks the social contract and commits a heinous act. 

When I started writing this post, I thought the message would be “In fiction, unlike in real life, you get to control the outcome. You get to celebrate when the good guys win.” But the real-life incidents I described above were scary, and the consequences rippled throughout the community, even when the outcomes were the best possible under the circumstances (no one attacked the school and police caught the suspect in the shooting of the detective without further harm to innocents). And that is a lesson I want to explore more deeply in my fiction. Crime at all levels leaves scars, and how people—real or fictional—heal and cope in the aftermath determines whether they and their communities let fear win or find the fortitude to be stronger and more resilient despite threats and violence.

How do real-life events influence your thinking about the fiction you read or write? 

Bouncing Back or Not

Not the woman I'm writing about

In the June 1^st issue of Time Magazine, there was an interesting article by Mandy Oaklander on resilience and those people who rebound from setbacks and those who can learn to be more like them. I was interested in this because last summer, I’d finally met the woman who I’d delivered meals to for many months. I’d met her husband a few times, and he told me to not knock on the door, but instead to leave the meals in a basket by the door. That first time I met her she was washing her car, and a more miserable person I had yet to meet. One of her two son’s had suffered severe PTSD and committed suicide three years before. She was angry with her younger son because he wasn’t the one who died, and didn’t want him to come home from another state, angry with the doctors she felt let her older son down, angry with her husband for some reason I didn’t understand, and everyone in the community who dared to mention the word suicide, and that people no longer came around. I’d heard she suffered from alcoholism.  On that summer day, I took time from my route to listen to her. I didn’t give her any advice, because grieving people don’t need advice, but I did give her a hug before I left and my telephone number when she asked for it. She never called.

A few days before the storm

I met her again during a horrible snowstorm last January when I got stuck in their driveway. I called for a tow truck, but because of so many cars in trouble, it was a long wait. The husband came out and asked me to come in to wait. Both husband and wife were welcoming, and although she still had the saddest face I ever saw, we talked of many things and even laughed a little over the antics of their little dog and I told them stories about my dog. We were able to discuss the deaths of her son and my son and the fact that we both believed they were in Heaven. We discussed this when her husband wasn’t there. His mother had died the night before, so he left the room often to check on the plane bringing their other son in during the storm. On that day, although she smiled rarely, she looked more normal and she even wanted to fix me lunch. I thanked her, but turned her down expecting the tow truck to show up at any time.

Then a few weeks ago, I saw her for the first time since January. She was outside by a little flower garden and looked totally lost. Her hair was wild with a few rollers in it. I greeted her and said it was good to see her outside doing some gardening. She replied she didn’t know what she was doing and kept staring at the stake or stick she held. Then she looked at me and said, “I know you. You’re the lady who lost her son, but I don’t remember how.” So I spent some time talking with her, but mostly listening. Again, I told her I believed our sons are in Heaven, and she smiled and agreed, and then wanted to know my name again and the days I delivered. Will she remember? Who knows, but it may be many months before I see her again. The one positive note was she told me she was visiting a troubled friend to help her. That is positive.

Dr. Dennis Charny, a psychiatrist and Dean, ICAHN School of Medicine, who with Dr. Steven Southwick, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, has studied the science of resilience for two decades, and through studying brain images have found that stress has an impact on the brain, including the daily stresses of driving in traffic, problems at work, fights with the spouse or others, and all the daily stresses we go through. Even though we almost all have major traumatic stresses during our lifetime, it’s often the countless, smaller stresses that take a toll which can lead to heart disease and possibly even brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers have wondered for years why some people are more resilient than others, especially children, and in the 1950’s Emmy E. Werner, a developmental psychologist and pioneer in resilience research, were gradually progressing toward an answer. In 1955, she and a team from the University of California, Berkeley, began an important study in the field involving a 40-year project following nearly 200 children in Kauai, Hawaii, during the aftermath of WWII. Many of these children had alcoholic parents.  She found a third of the most vulnerable children adapted exceedingly well over time.  She discovered having a tight knit community, a stable role model and a strong belief in their ability to solve problems helped children to succeed.

The article is too long to go through everything, but it advised on how to develop resilience.

1.     Develop a core set of beliefs that nothing can shake.

2.     Try to find meaning in whatever stressful or traumatic thing has happened.

3.     Try to maintain a positive outlook

4.     Take cues from someone who is especially resilient

5.     Don’t run from things that scare you; Face them

6.     Be quick to reach out for support when things go haywire.

7.     Learn new things as often as you can.

8.     Find an exercise regimen you’ll stick to

9.     Don’t beat yourself up or dwell on the past.

10. Recognize what makes you uniquely strong – and own it.

One of John's graduation pictures taken months before.

One of the questions my Mobile Meals client asked before I left was “How do you remain so cheerful? How did you go on after your son died?” I remember all too well the many people who said to me after John died, “I could never go on if my child died.” And I always thought, what’s the alternative? Crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head?  I had a core set of beliefs that were only briefly shaken in the beginning, but after a while I found meaning – sort of – in John’s death. I had three children and a husband who were also grieving, and I didn’t want my younger three teenagers to think their brother was more important to me than they were so I tried to walk that line while still showing how much I missed him, too. At the time one survives each day and goes on. A lot of those steps to develop resilience I did without thinking about it.

Prior to discovering my son had cancer, a neighbor and I thought of starting a craft business. A month after he died, we did our first house party at a neighbor’s home. We took the crafts we made – my paintings and many other things – to home parties like the Tupperware parties.  My neighbor dropped out after a month, because I made and sold more things. While sitting with him in the Cleveland Clinic as he went through chemo, I worked on needlework. After his death, working on my paintings and other crafts was therapeutic, although nothing totally takes away the pain. Strangers at the party would ask me how I made so many things, and I was able to tell them about the death of my son, sharing it with people who didn’t feel obligated to do anything more for me after I left. Over five years even during college and my first year of teaching I did 85 of those home parties.

My little scientists dissecting a paper wasp nest. 

I started college a year after John’s death as a non-traditional student to become a teacher. It was the best thing I could have done. I loved the academic world and was that enthusiastic student sitting in the front row. After the first semester, I took an overload each semester because I found so many courses that interested me. Teaching is a healing process, too. One is too busy to focus on losses. I also think nothing can beat teaching third grade. What’s not to love about this age group?

My first day of backpacking with a too heavy pack

Over the years, I tried other new things; clogging, banjo lessons, lap dulcimer lessons, back packing, and eventually writing.

When my marriage of 31 years collapsed, I bought a small farm with a pathetic derelict old farm house with a leaking roof and two basement walls collapsing.  With most of the work done by my second son, Joe, it turned into a comfortable home. Never underestimate the value of ridding oneself of anger by knocking out walls with a hammer and ax.

My son gutting my house preparing to replace the old wiring. 

I’m fortunate that I’ve had a strong family; parents, siblings, in-laws, grown kids, their spouses and grandchildren as well as numerous cousins and at the time many aunts and uncles. They were there when my marriage collapsed, my parents died as well as a six year old granddaughter and three years ago the death of my best friend of fifty years and the brother I was closest in age to and loved. I was also lucky I had months to care for my son before he died, and that he died at home in my arms. The woman I deliver Mobile Meals to didn’t have that to comfort her. So I owe much of my resilience to most of those ten steps without being aware of it at the time. That certainly doesn’t mean I’m hard hearted. I tear up easily whenever I hear of something sad, and probably more so than when I was younger and hadn’t experienced life’s traumas. I recently heard on a TED talk on NPR, that’s common as we age.

How is your resilience?

How could you improve yours?