everything you need to know

I asked a Nebraskan if the descriptions of the countryside in My Ántonia sounded true. She said she had never read Cather but now she was remembering a book called Sarah Plain and Tall, 1985, about a woman who migrated to the central grasslands from the Maine coastline to marry a farmer whose wife had died. Within a few minutes she had recalled another childhood book, A Dog Called Kitty, 1980, the story of a boy who is bitten by a dog with rabies. The anti-rabies injections he receives are so agonising, the Nebraskan said, that he learns to associate dogs with pain. Some years after the rabies attack he bravely shows tolerance to a stray dog who comes to eat with the cats on the farm where he lives. He slowly recovers from his fear and learns that dogs can be a source of pleasure. One night when the pair of them are lost in the wilderness because of some cows, this dog, Kitty, has his intestines ripped out while he is saving the boy from coyotes. That part of the book is so horrifying, said the Nebraskan, that you are in tears because you think the noble animal is dead, but then you turn the page to the last chapter and they are walking along a road together months later with the dog healthy and peppy and you are happy again for a few moments until a piece of a building site adjoining the road falls off and Kitty is fatally crushed. Later, she added, they made us read Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961 as well, because they hadn't finished with us yet.

Old Yeller, I said, to show that I knew what we were talking about, though I hadn’t read any of the books and nor had I seen Old Yeller. I pictured a child going from Kitty to Red Fern but now, instead of sadness, when the dogs die, she thinks for the first time: this is genre. From then on she is in luxury, as, one after the other, all of the dying fictional dogs she comes across become new pieces in a resplendent puzzle. What habits are they teaching us, I wondered. Growing up, learns the Kitty boy, means that you can stop feeling your pain and start seeing it in other people instead. So the narrator of My Ántonia sees the pain of actually marrying Ántonia and being stuck in Nebraska forever, thrust away from him so forcefully that it lands on a man from Vienna. (I still have not read My Ántonia, only the closing chapters.) But this intelligent building site in A Dog called Kitty knows us well.* You notice it is not like an animal in that it will not let the writer make it suffer pain. Its strength is respected. The building will probably still be there when the boy dies of old age. For the rest of his life it will stand there saying, I killed Kitty. The rabid dog vanished from the boy's life and so did the coyotes. But the building endures and he has to put up with it. So much for flesh, says the building.



*After I had gone through all of this in my head I looked for some reviews online and found out that other adults were not interested in the words "building site" when they were describing Kitty's death. They preferred the word "pipes." One of them was specifically interested in "oil-pipe." This is their entire review:

The dog doesn't get killed in the heroic fight to save the boy. He dies in the next chapter, when an oil-pipe pointlessly falls on him. Those darn oil companies, eh?

This tells you everything you need to know.

(Amazon Customer, November 26, 2011)

(Kitty was written by Bill Wallace, Sarah by Patricia MacLachlan, and Red Fern by Wilson Rawls.)

and I knew that I must eat

Scott G.F. Bailey smartly follows my last post with two sentences about a chicken being eaten in a different story. The new bird comes from My Ántonia, 1918, by Willa Cather, a book I've never read but there are three copies of it at the Goodwill up the road so it must be on the curriculum at American universities. The lines he quotes are these: "While I was putting my horse away, I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him at six." This character, she has the mind of a French kitchen maid or pre-enlightened (if that's the word) upper-middle-class grandmother (Crevel, Babylon), I think when I read that, and then I look up the chapter and see the narrator is not a woman but a man or boy named Jimmy. The chapter seems interesting because nothing in it tells me why he is sighing. Nobody asks him to kill the rooster, as far as I can see, and he doesn't appear to know the bird personally, although that relationship might have been established in an earlier part of the book. Stop: maybe he has already been established as a chicken-killer and Cather knows she doesn't have to spell it out. All right, he'll kill the rooster, the little bastard. No wait, does the squawking mean the rooster is already in the process of being murdered? That's it: this is a death-squawk. Originally I thought it was just expressing itself. Oh I'm stupid. Whose rooster is it? "Cather takes predation and death for granted," writes Bailey. "The predator suffers, not the prey; the poor prey is fated to be relief for the predator, and there is only so far our sympathies should carry us." What a bitch this Willa Cather is, I think, which is interesting all over again because it puts me back in French kitchen labourer (Proust-Françoise) territory. World War II came about because of people like this Cather, I say to myself. Jimmy's sigh is offered up to his creator, the one who wants him to acknowledge his position of effort at the top of the food chain. The squawk was his last contact with the vital life-force of a unique bird, born in all its complexity from an amazing egg and going to all the trouble of eating seeds and muck for years only to die screaming at three o'clock so that this genuflecting creep can sink his teeth into him. Superbly horrible, looking at your watch. Is this rooster-slaughter inserted here to whet my mind for the anecdote Widow Steavens is about to tell Jimmy about Ántonia, who has been preyed on by a man in Denver? No one can mourn these birds innocently. "I am not a sign," rooster screams, "I am the present," but the predator sails on, seeing time ahead.