Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, Page 21

  We shot past a large walnut tree, then between two wild cherry trees, miraculously avoiding all unyielding objects as we crashed through the underbrush, brambles tearing at us. It suddenly occurred to me that just up ahead was the bank leading down several feet to the creek, still unfrozen. I tried to kick my feet out to use as brakes, but they were stuck. The bank was steep, nearly a sheer drop-off, and we were going over. I had time only to wrap my arms around Marley, squeeze my eyes shut, and yell, “Whoaaaaaa!”

  Our toboggan shot over the bank and dropped out from beneath us. I felt like I was in one of those classic cartoon moments, suspended in midair for an endless second before falling to ruinous injury. Only in this cartoon I was welded to a madly salivating Labrador retriever. We clung to each other as we crash-landed into a snowbank with a soft poof and, hanging half off the toboggan, slid to the water’s edge. I opened my eyes and took stock of my condition. I could wiggle my toes and fingers and rotate my neck; nothing was broken. Marley was up and prancing around me, eager to do it all over again. I stood up with a groan and, brushing myself off, said, “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” In the months ahead it would become increasingly obvious that Marley was, too.

  Sometime toward the end of that first winter in Pennsylvania I began to notice Marley had moved quietly out of middle age and into retirement. He had turned nine that December, and ever so slightly he was slowing down. He still had his bursts of unbridled, adrenaline-pumped energy, as he did on the day of the first snowfall, but they were briefer now and farther apart. He was content to snooze most of the day, and on walks he tired before I did, a first in our relationship. One late-winter day, the temperature above freezing and the scent of spring thaw in the air, I walked him down our hill and up the next one, even steeper than ours, where the white church perched on the crest beside an old cemetery filled with Civil War veterans. It was a walk I took often and one that even the previous fall Marley had made without visible effort, despite the angle of the climb, which always got us both panting. This time, though, he was falling behind. I coaxed him along, calling out words of encouragement, but it was like watching a toy slowly wind down as its battery went dead. Marley just did not have the oomph needed to make it to the top. I stopped to let him rest before continuing, something I had never had to do before. “You’re not going soft on me, are you?” I asked, leaning over and stroking his face with my gloved hands. He looked up at me, his eyes bright, his nose wet, not at all concerned about his flagging energy. He had a contented but tuckered-out look on his face, as though life got no better than this, sitting along the side of a country road on a crisp late-winter’s day with your master at your side. “If you think I’m carrying you,” I said, “forget it.”

  The sun bathed over him, and I noticed just how much gray had crept into his tawny face. Because his fur was so light, the effect was subtle but undeniable. His whole muzzle and a good part of his brow had turned from buff to white. Without us quite realizing it, our eternal puppy had become a senior citizen.

  That’s not to say he was any better behaved. Marley was still up to all his old antics, simply at a more leisurely pace. He still stole food off the children’s plates. He still flipped open the lid of the kitchen trash can with his nose and rummaged inside. He still strained at his leash. Still swallowed a wide assortment of household objects. Still drank out of the bathtub and trailed water from his gullet. And when the skies darkened and thunder rumbled, he still panicked and, if alone, turned destructive. One day we arrived home to find Marley in a lather and Conor’s mattress splayed open down to the coils.

  Over the years, we had become philosophical about the damage, which had become much less frequent now that we were away from Florida’s daily storm patterns. In a dog’s life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us. We could have bought a small yacht with what we spent on our dog and all the things he destroyed. Then again, how many yachts wait by the door all day for your return? How many live for the moment they can climb in your lap or ride down the hill with you on a toboggan, licking your face?

  Marley had earned his place in our family. Like a quirky but beloved uncle, he was what he was. He would never be Lassie or Benji or Old Yeller; he would never reach Westminster or even the county fair. We knew that now. We accepted him for the dog he was, and loved him all the more for it.

  “You old geezer,” I said to him on the side of the road that late-winter day, scruffing his neck. Our goal, the cemetery, was still a steep climb ahead. But just as in life, I was figuring out, the destination was less important than the journey. I dropped to one knee, running my hands down his sides, and said, “Let’s just sit here for a while.” When he was ready, we turned back down the hill and poked our way home.

  CHAPTER 23

  Poultry on Parade

  T hat spring we decided to try our hand at animal husbandry. We owned two acres in the country now; it only seemed right to share it with a farm animal or two. Besides, I was editor of Organic Gardening, a magazine that had long celebrated the incorporation of animals—and their manure—into a healthy, well-balanced garden. “A cow would be fun,” Jenny suggested.

  “A cow?” I asked. “Are you crazy? We don’t even have a barn; how can we have a cow? Where do you suggest we keep it, in the garage next to the minivan?”

  “How about sheep?” she said. “Sheep are cute.” I shot her my well-practiced you’re-not-being-practical look.

  “A goat? Goats are adorable.”

  In the end we settled on poultry. For any gardener who has sworn off chemical pesticides and fertilizers, chickens made a lot of sense. They were inexpensive and relatively low-maintenance. They needed only a small coop and a few cups of cracked corn each morning to be happy. Not only did they provide fresh eggs, but, when let loose to roam, they spent their days studiously scouring the property, eating bugs and grubs, devouring ticks, scratching up the soil like efficient little rototillers, and fertilizing with their high-nitrogen droppings as they went. Each evening at dusk they returned to their coop on their own. What wasn’t to like? A chicken was an organic gardener’s best friend. Chickens made perfect sense. Besides, as Jenny pointed out, they passed the cuteness test.

  Chickens it was. Jenny had become friendly with a mom from school who lived on a farm and said she’d be happy to give us some chicks from the next clutch of eggs to hatch. I told Digger about our plans, and he agreed a few hens around the place made sense. Digger had a large coop of his own in which he kept a flock of chickens for both eggs and meat.

  “Just one word of warning,” he said, folding his meaty arms across his chest. “Whatever you do, don’t let the kids name them. Once you name ’em, they’re no longer poultry, they’re pets.”

  “Right,” I said. Chicken farming, I knew, had no room for sentimentality. Hens could live fifteen years or more but only produced eggs in their first couple of years. When they stopped laying, it was time for the stewing pot. That was just part of managing a flock.

  Digger looked hard at me, as if divining what I was up against, and added, “Once you name them, it’s all over.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “No names.”

  The next evening I pulled into the driveway from work, and the three kids raced out of the house to greet me, each cradling a newborn chick. Jenny was behind them with a fourth in her hands. Her friend, Donna, had brought the baby birds over that afternoon. They were barely a day old and peered up at me with cocked heads as if to ask, “Are you my mama?”

  Patrick was the first to break the news. “I named mine Feathers!” he proclaimed.

  “Mine is Tweety,” said Conor.

  “My wicka Wuffy,” Colleen chimed in.

  I shot Jenny a quizzical look.

  “Fluffy,” Jenny said. “She named her chicken Fluffy.”


  “Jenny,” I protested. “What did Digger tell us? These are farm animals, not pets.”

  “Oh, get real, Farmer John,” she said. “You know as well as I do that you could never hurt one of these. Just look at how cute they are.”

  “Jenny,” I said, the frustration rising in my voice.

  “By the way,” she said, holding up the fourth chick in her hands, “meet Shirley.”

  Feathers, Tweety, Fluffy, and Shirley took up residence in a box on the kitchen counter, a lightbulb dangling above them for warmth. They ate and they pooped and they ate some more—and grew at a breathtaking pace. Several weeks after we brought the birds home, something jolted me awake before dawn. I sat up in bed and listened. From downstairs came a weak, sickly call. It was croaky and hoarse, more like a tubercular cough than a proclamation of dominance. It sounded again: Cock-a-doodle-do! A few seconds ticked past and then came an equally sickly, but distinct, reply: Rook-ru-rook-ru-roo!

  I shook Jenny and, when she opened her eyes, asked: “When Donna brought the chicks over, you did ask her to check to make sure they were hens, right?”

  “You mean you can do that?” she asked, and rolled back over, sound asleep.

  It’s called sexing. Farmers who know what they are doing can inspect a newborn chicken and determine, with about 80 percent accuracy, whether it is male or female. At the farm store, sexed chicks command a premium price. The cheaper option is to buy “straight run” birds of unknown gender. You take your chances with straight run, the idea being that the males will be slaughtered young for meat and the hens will be kept to lay eggs. Playing the straight-run gamble, of course, assumes you have what it takes to kill, gut, and pluck any excess males you might end up with. As anyone who has ever raised chickens knows, two roosters in a flock is one rooster too many.

  As it turned out, Donna had not attempted to sex our four chicks, and three of our four “laying hens” were males. We had on our kitchen counter the poultry equivalent of Boys Town U.S.A. The thing about roosters is they’re never content to play second chair to any other rooster. If you had equal numbers of roosters and hens, you might think they would pair off into happy little Ozzie and Harriet–style couples. But you would be wrong. The males will fight endlessly, bloodying one another gruesomely, to determine who will dominate the roost. Winner takes all.

  As they grew into adolescents, our three roosters took to posturing and pecking and, most distressing considering they were still in our kitchen as I raced to finish their coop in the backyard, crowing their testosterone-pumped hearts out. Shirley, our one poor, overtaxed female, was getting way more attention than even the most lusty of women could want.

  I had thought the constant crowing of our roosters would drive Marley insane. In his younger years, the sweet chirp of a single tiny songbird in the yard would set him off on a frenetic barking jag as he raced from one window to the next, hopping up and down on his hind legs. Three crowing roosters a few steps from his food bowl, however, had no effect on him at all. He didn’t seem to even know they were there. Each day the crowing grew louder and stronger, rising up from the kitchen to echo through the house at five in the morning. Cock-a-doodle-dooooo! Marley slept right through the racket. That’s when it first occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t just ignoring the crowing; maybe he couldn’t hear it. I walked up behind him one afternoon as he snoozed in the kitchen and said, “Marley?” Nothing. I said it louder: “Marley!” Nothing. I clapped my hands and shouted, “MARLEY!” He lifted his head and looked blankly around, his ears up, trying to figure out what it was his radar had detected. I did it again, clapping loudly and shouting his name. This time he turned his head enough to catch a glimpse of me standing behind him. Oh, it’s you! He bounced up, tail wagging, happy—and clearly surprised—to see me. He bumped up against my legs in greeting and gave me a sheepish look as if to ask, What’s the idea sneaking up on me like that? My dog, it seemed, was going deaf.

  It all made sense. In recent months Marley seemed to simply ignore me in a way he never had before. I would call for him and he would not so much as glance my way. I would take him outside before turning in for the night, and he would sniff his way across the yard, oblivious to my whistles and calls to get him to turn back. He would be asleep at my feet in the family room when someone would ring the doorbell—and he would not so much as open an eye.

  Marley’s ears had caused him problems from an early age. Like many Labrador retrievers, he was predisposed to ear infections, and we had spent a small fortune on antibiotics, ointments, cleansers, drops, and veterinarian visits. He even underwent surgery to shorten his ear canals in an attempt to correct the problem. It had not occurred to me until after we brought the impossible-to-ignore roosters into our house that all those years of problems had taken their toll and our dog had gradually slipped into a muffled world of faraway whispers.

  Not that he seemed to mind. Retirement suited Marley just fine, and his hearing problems didn’t seem to impinge on his leisurely country lifestyle. If anything, deafness proved fortuitous for him, finally giving him a doctor-certified excuse for disobeying. After all, how could he heed a command that he could not hear? As thick-skulled as I always insisted he was, I swear he figured out how to use his deafness to his advantage. Drop a piece of steak into his bowl, and he would come trotting in from the next room. He still had the ability to detect the dull, satisfying thud of meat on metal. But yell for him to come when he had somewhere else he’d rather be going, and he’d stroll blithely away from you, not even glancing guiltily over his shoulder as he once would have.

  “I think the dog’s scamming us,” I told Jenny. She agreed his hearing problems seemed selective, but every time we tested him, sneaking up, clapping our hands, shouting his name, he would not respond. And every time we dropped food into his bowl, he would come running. He appeared to be deaf to all sounds except the one that was dearest to his heart or, more accurately, his stomach: the sound of dinner.

  Marley went through life insatiably hungry. Not only did we give him four big scoops of dog chow a day—enough food to sustain an entire family of Chihuahuas for a week—but we began freely supplementing his diet with table scraps, against the better advice of every dog guide we had ever read. Table scraps, we knew, simply programmed dogs to prefer human food to dog chow (and given the choice between a half-eaten hamburger and dry kibble, who could blame them?). Table scraps were a recipe for canine obesity. Labs, in particular, were prone to chubbiness, especially as they moved into middle age and beyond. Some Labs, especially those of the English variety, were so rotund by adulthood, they looked like they’d been inflated with an air hose and were ready to float down Fifth Avenue in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  Not our dog. Marley had many problems, but obesity was not among them. No matter how many calories he devoured, he always burned more. All that unbridled high-strung exuberance consumed vast amounts of energy. He was like a high-kilowatt electric plant that instantly converted every ounce of available fuel into pure, raw power. Marley was an amazing physical specimen, the kind of dog passersby stopped to admire. He was huge for a Labrador retriever, considerably bigger than the average male of his breed, which runs sixty-five to eighty pounds. Even as he aged, the bulk of his mass was pure muscle—ninety-seven pounds of rippled, sinewy brawn with nary an ounce of fat anywhere on him. His rib cage was the size of a small beer keg, but the ribs themselves stretched just beneath his fur with no spare padding. We were not worried about obesity; exactly the opposite. On our many visits to Dr. Jay before leaving Florida, Jenny and I would voice the same concerns: We were feeding him tremendous amounts of food, but still he was so much thinner than most Labs, and he always appeared famished, even immediately after wolfing down a bucket of kibble that looked like it was meant for a draft horse. Were we slowly starving him? Dr. Jay always responded the same way. He would run his hands down Marley’s sleek sides, setting him off on a desperately happy Labrador evader journey around the cramped exam r
oom, and tell us that, as far as physical attributes went, Marley was just about perfect. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” Dr. Jay would say. Then, as Marley lunged between his legs or snarfed a cotton ball off the counter, Dr. Jay would add: “Obviously, I don’t need to tell you that Marley burns a lot of nervous energy.”

  Each evening after we finished dinner, when it came time to give Marley his meal, I would fill his bowl with chow and then freely toss in any tasty leftovers or scraps I could find. With three young children at the table, half-eaten food was something we had in plentiful supply. Bread crusts, steak trimmings, pan drippings, chicken skins, gravy, rice, carrots, puréed prunes, sandwiches, three-day-old pasta—into the bowl it went. Our pet may have behaved like the court jester, but he ate like the Prince of Wales. The only foods we kept from him were those we knew to be unhealthy for dogs, such as dairy products, sweets, potatoes, and chocolate. I have a problem with people who buy human food for their pets, but larding Marley’s meals with scraps that would otherwise be thrown out made me feel thrifty—waste not, want not—and charitable. I was giving always-appreciative Marley a break from the endless monotony of dog-chow hell.

  When Marley wasn’t acting as our household garbage disposal, he was on duty as the family’s emergency spill-response team. No mess was too big a job for our dog. One of the kids would flip a full bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on the floor, and we’d simply whistle and stand back while Old Wet Vac sucked up every last noodle and then licked the floor until it gleamed. Errant peas, dropped celery, runaway rigatoni, spilled applesauce, it didn’t matter what it was. If it hit the floor, it was history. To the amazement of our friends, he even wolfed down salad greens.

  Not that food had to make it to the ground before it ended up in Marley’s stomach. He was a skilled and unremorseful thief, preying mostly on unsuspecting children and always after checking to make sure neither Jenny nor I was watching. Birthday parties were bonanzas for him. He would make his way through the crowd of five-year-olds, shamelessly snatching hot dogs right out of their little hands. During one party, we estimated he ended up getting two-thirds of the birthday cake, nabbing piece after piece off the paper plates the children held on their laps.