Suzie

Mulak Reader - Suzie

This one has come to be known as the “lemon meringue story.” Enough of my friends have heard that part of this story retold over and over to be familiar with the incident. I even referred to it in Pointing Dogs Made Easy when I told another little boy’s story about Suzie. So by popular demand, I have included it here in The Mulak Reader.
The story originally appeared in Brown Feathers, and was illustrated by the pen & ink entitled Ben-English Setter Portrait. George Cosmopolous’ dog Ben looked exactly like the Suzie that I remember, and I used Ben’s portrait even though it was of a male dog. No blood, no foul: I understand that of the several Collies that played Lassie, not one was a female.

SUZIE

A Dog Story

                                                 "...I think that if in handling other dogs
                                                 I have owned, I have tempered justice
                                                 with mercy, and have tried to win them
                                                 by love rather than force, the virtue, if
                                                 virtue it be, can quite justly be
                                                 attributed to the little black and white
                                                 spaniel who lies in the unmarked grave
                                                 which everyone but me has forgotten.

Burton Spiller

          An old, yellowed document came into my hands the other day. It states that an English setter female named Lyndon's Princess Susan was whelped on April 2nd 1949. The pedigree shows that she had three lines to Sport's Peerless, and that 14 of her ancestors were champions.
          Suzie of the soft brown eyes, I still remember you.
          We had a springer before Suzie, but I have only a few vague childhood memories of that black & white puppy, the most vivid of which involve his dying of distemper. So my father looked for a replacement to help heal the hurt of a family who had lost a dog they had just gotten used to loving. Somebody at work knew of a somebody who was getting rid of a setter. She had spent her life in a kennel as an unsuccessful "shooting dog" on a field trialer's string. Although she had all the credentials, after several seasons of training and campaigning the somebody who owned her decided that she simply wasn't going to make it as a field trial dog. Too soft, he told my father. He had tried to cash in on her pedigree by using her as a brood bitch, but she proved unsuccessful at that, too. There was no reason for the somebody to feed her any longer, but he assured my father she'd make a good hunter and family dog. After all, she was "fully trained". Even more alluring to my father, who's previous dogs had all been of dubious lineage, she possessed the ultimate status symbol—she had “papers.”
          So Suzie came into our lives. She wasn't a "boy's dog", like Lassie or Ol' Yeller, but when she wasn't hunting with Dad she belonged to my brothers and me. She pulled a sled out in the winter street while I pretended I was Sergeant Preston, and she loved to come to the park with us in the summer, more to cold-nose-it with the neighborhood mongrels than out of any protective instinct for her charges. She lived in the house with our family, and spent her evenings in the den by the TV. On hot summer nights she would sneak into the bathroom and curl up next to the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl. After five years in a kennel, life at our house must have seemed like heaven. Except during thunderstorms. Although she was never gun shy, I've never known another creature to be more afraid of thunder, and there was no calming her when lightning split the clouds open.
          As a kid, I was in no position to judge her hunting abilities. My Dad was a kind and generous man, but never pretended to be a trainer of bird dogs, at least not to the extent that he could undo the mistakes of another man. He took in a dog that had spent her life with any number of professional trainers, all shaping her for one single purpose—winning field trials. Her inability to respond to the often hard-handed production line methods of the pros was the reason she became available. Now, when she tried to do right by her old discipline she found that my father, a pheasant hunter, wanted something entirely different from her. I never knew Dad to actually hit either dog or boy, but he could deliver a blistering "verbal correction" while holding onto a dog collar (Or in my own case, an ear.) that left no doubt as to his displeasure. Whenever Suzie would decide that the time had come to tear-up the back course, she would soon after discover my father holding onto her collar, slightly out of breath, and shouting something new to her: "Hunt close!"
          And in her confusion, Suzie would cry.
          Her crying was the one most exemplary character trait I remember about her. She would cry when other dogs would have barked; At the door to be let out, and again on the other side to be let back in again. She would cry while her food was being prepared, and cry when she was put into the cellar for the night. She cried with excitement in the car on the way to go hunting, and then cry again at the end of the day. She would cry in her sleep, and, most unfathomable to a little boy, she would cry when I'd pet her.
          I didn't then understand what she'd been through. In my memory I can see a cool blue afternoon on the Agawam meadows through the eyes of a boy who is shorter than the dried-up milkweed and goldenrod around him. I can see my father coming out of the standing corn without the pheasant he and Suzie went in to retrieve. We wait a while for the dog to return, then start walking down the farm road, pausing every few steps to call for her. We finally spot her coming along the road behind us. She is covered with swamp muck and is carrying a long-tailed rooster. Dad kneels to accept the bird from her, and while he tells her what a good girl she is he reaches out to pat her head. Suzie pulls away from his hand, crying.
          I recall Dad telling a friend that he never once called her in when she didn't expect a whipping. Though he never laid a hand on her, she was that way as long as she lived. Significantly, my father never again owned a dog that he did not start himself from a puppy.
         Although she was ever welcome in the house, Suzie slept in the cellar, and was sent to "go lay down" in the basement whenever she got in the way of goings-on, as a 50 pound dog will often do in a tiny house.
          It was Thanksgiving. The refrigerator was already full to overflowing, so amidst a barrage of warnings to be careful, I carried four oven-hot lemon meringue pies down the cellar stairs and set them, as instructed, on the concrete floor to cool. Two hours before dinner, my aunts and uncles began to crowd in. Each new arrival that came through the door was greeted by Suzie's cold nose against a nylon- stockinged leg. In near-automatic reaction, my mother collared Suzie and with a practiced ease led her to the cellar door, never interrupting the stream of conversation she was carrying on with her sisters.
          A few minutes later I happened to be looking directly at my mother when she did a classic double-take, complete in every detail save the light bulb going on over her head. A small scream was screamed and the cellar door hurriedly flung open. Suzie was on the top step. Bits of meringue still clung to the parts of her whiskers and eyebrows her tongue couldn't reach. She stood around the kitchen, tongue busy, while my mother hustled Dad into the room to see what "his dog" had done. Long after it stopped being a joke, Suzie continued to happily lick her face, for once ignoring the scolding she was getting. My grandmother and I thought the whole thing was quite funny, although, with the dog, we were a minority of three. I don't recall how things turned out that Thanksgiving, but knowing my mother's penchant for holiday desserts, I'm sure there were several other choices on the menu. But in my fondest memories of her, I can still see Suzie of the soft brown eyes with persistent bits of meringue clinging to the fur on her face.
          She lived her days in our suburban back yard, fenced in to become a 60 by 40 kennel which she shared with the rest of the family. Although she tolerated my mother's laundry hanging at one end of her domain, she sabotaged any attempt by my father to grow shrubs in the yard, and eventually chewed the life out of any rose or lilac planted along the fence. And although she was always gentle with people, she harbored a deep hate for the neighborhood cats that ventured along the fence. Other dogs simply detest cats. Suzie became a legend because of her animosity toward them.
          We were stripping tobacco at my uncle's one fall evening when her opportunity for fame arose. Tobacco stripping is the process of removing the cured leaves from the stems on which they have been hanging. It's tedious work, and the atmosphere is not unlike a masculine version of a ladies' quilting bee, except that it takes place in a tobacco barn under the harsh glow of a Coleman lantern, and the conversation is punctuated by the frequent stomping of cold feet on the dirt floor. One of my uncles was running on about his tough old farm cat, telling everyone who would listen how it had run off a stray mongrel just that morning, and how it would outsmart any dog it couldn't beat in a stand-up fight. To be sure, the cat could have passed for a lynx if it wasn't for his long tail. He was a big, big tom who stared out at the world through squinted eyes and would permit no little boys within rock throwing distance of him.
          In reply, my father casually mentioned that he happened to own a dog that didn't fool around much with cats. She just killed 'em. Now, I myself had never seen Suzie actually catch a cat, but I had seen her sprint the length of the yard after them, and my imagination was vivid enough to fill in the blanks each time she nearly nabbed one. I promptly agreed with Dad.
          The conversation grew louder, and though the men never lost the laughter from their voices, there was a determined look on my father's face when he left the barn and drove off into the night in our old Plymouth. It must have all been agreed upon before Dad left, because there was hardly a word spoken when he returned with Suzie a half hour later. The lantern was moved to an open spot. My uncle placed his cat down on the dirt floor, and Dad let go of Suzie's collar.
          She approached the cat with raised hackles. The cat arched its back and hissed wickedly. Most dogs will circle, not sure of what to do and offering the cat a chance to run so they can chase it. Suzie didn't feint or circle. She walked close to the cat, paused for just an instant, then lunged and clamped onto the tom with an animal quickness I hadn't realized she possessed. She shook him twice, wildly, then gave the cat a deliberate snap and threw him to the ground. She had broken the cat's neck, but had only thrown him down to get a better grip, for now she picked up the lifeless tom and continued to shake him—perhaps as a surrogate for all the others that had escaped over the back yard fence.
          My uncles found something interesting in the dirt they scraped with their boots while Dad collared Suzie and brought her out to the car. When he returned, several pieces of folding money changed hands, and afterward only Dad was smiling. In the entire gathering of perhaps a dozen men, only my father had thought gentle Suzie was a match for the farm cat.
          The event became a legend: When Floyd Patterson knocked out Ingamar Johannsen in the first minute of what was supposed to be the heavyweight fight of the century, Dad pronounced it "Just like Suzie and the cat." If in my fondest memories of her I see meringue on Suzie's whiskers, I'm sure my father conjures up an image of her as the self-satisfied dog he permitted, for once, to sit on the front seat of the Plymouth as we drove home that night.
          A dog's life is short by any measure, and Suzie had already spent half her allotted years when she came to us. Arthritis shortened her life. Dad took her to the vet's one time and didn't bring her back home again.
          But I still see her.
          At field trials there is always an abundance of misfit dogs; People-loving dogs obviously out of place on the string of a professional trainer, and sensitive dogs that will never be successful because they need a larger amount of love than their impersonal handlers can afford to give. There are easy-going dogs being pushed to run like race horses, and wound-up dogs that want nothing more than to run and hunt, but mostly just to run, being hacked down by men determined to make walking gun dogs out of them. No, there is never any lack of misfits.
          She's there. Sometimes she even looks the part: There are always a few feathery square-muzzled English setters at any field trial, some without a single patch of solid color in their ticking. I am a chronic petter of all dogs. Saying "Hello" by scratching a dog's ears is something of a compulsion with me. But I am attracted to misfit bird dogs for other reasons, too—I look hard, and in their eyes I can often see Suzie looking back at me, and in my imagination I can sometimes see meringue on their whiskers.

* * * * *

This site was last updated 09/21/06