Companionship, featuring excerpts and poems by Andrew Brown, Gary McClain Gannaway and R. A. Stewart.
6 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
James Thurber was born December 8, 1894 and spent a good part of his career writing for The New Yorker. He wrote lots of short stories, including “The Catbird Seat” and probably his most famous, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” He also wrote some fairytale-like books, including The Thirteen Clocks and The Wonderful O. And he was a cartoonist, too. Some of his most famous drawings were of dogs. So on this episode of Burning Bright, in memory of James Thurber, some pieces about dogs.
Andrew Brown was a poet and a short story writer. Passager published him in its journal and also published his book The Chugalug King and Other Stories. Andy died in November. Here are some excerpts from his short story “Coursing.” At this point in the story, a group of men have gotten together to try to catch a coyote that’s been giving them trouble.
A pawing of the dogs could be heard from the bed of the red pickup, and from behind the little house there came the throat-cutting sound of a kill-hound challenging the intruders.
Barber looked up from the mark he was scratching in the dirt. “You sure, Urst, that dog has the eyes to course the night? Man, I’d hate to drop these dogs on a sheep, or calf. Once my dogs go down they kill anything they run down.”
“You got nothing to worry about,” Urst said. “The hound has good eyes,” Kim Lee added.
The men were in two groups. In the red pickup Barber and Cletus carried the dog pack, and in the white pickup, Urst and the doctor carried the bitch and two more trail dogs. The trail dogs were good for running, and they helped tear at a kill, but they couldn’t catch and hold like Barber and Cletus’s kill dogs. The knack was to drop the whole pack so that they saw the target and the other dogs at the same time. The hunters were aware of times when packs had been dropped too far apart and ended by just tearing at each other.
“Cletus keeps those dogs trained to the line. They ain’t pets, you know,” Barber said.
They all laughed remembering the statement a woman made when her car had broken down and she had stopped at Cletus’s.
“My, such cute little puppies,” she had said at the time, not knowing that she was looking at kill dogs. “Why, I just bet they would make great pets.”
Excerpts from Andrew Brown’s story “Coursing.”
Next, Gary McClain Gannaway’s poem “Morning Ritual.”
For several weeks after the dog died,
He continued the morning ritual,
Emptying and filling the oversized silver water bowl.
He filled it at the kitchen sink
Where his father would have stood
Had his father not been dead
Much longer than the dog.
But before the filling came the emptying.
With the gracefulness of a discus throw,
He would send the water out into the early morning air
And watch the drops hold there in one pure, perfect moment.
Then all the water would fall to earth,
And he never knew that that moment was perfect, too.
From Passager’s Winter 2022 issue, Gary McClain Gannaway’s “Morning Ritual.”
Gary’s poem was about one dog dying. Poet R. A. Stewart said that his piece “A World Without Dogs” started with the title. “What would happen” he asked himself, “if the animals who have been our closest companions for tens of thousands of years, who in some ways are our better selves, suddenly went away?” In the poem, you’ll hear allusions to characters in the Greek myth of Orion and of stars in the Orion and Canus constellations.
The children suffered most, as always.
Suddenly no one understood
what it was with such wide-open heart
to love the world –
to roll in rotting leaves, smile up at the rain
and lunge to savor any crumb that fell.
None but the saints, and of those
there were so few.
Rain fell twelve nights and days. When the sky
cleared, only the astronomers
knew at first what it meant, that great hole in the southern sky.
Alnilám, Alniták, Nair al Sáif, Muliphein, Adára,
Prócyon, Sírius . . . all gone, all gone forever:
the weeping Hunter gone
to seek his companions.
God, with no anagram,
turned his face to the wall.
Even the cats were stunned:
We did not want this, we didn’t want this
at all.
R. A. Stewart’s poem “A World Without Dogs” from Issue 77, the current issue of Passager.
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For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
