Daddy Sure Could Pick a Good Dog

Good dogs always lived at our house because Daddy knew how to pick a good dog.  Boy I really thought Daddy could do anything and I expected all Daddys to be that smart, but one day I saw a man lose a dog to a stranger and the dog just ignored his owner.

I asked Daddy, “Why on earth would anyone let their dog go off  like that with a stranger?”

“Well, Ludy,” he said, “Some owner’s don’t treat their dogs too good, but I know that dog was treated real good.  That dog is any man’s dog that’ll hunt him.  All dogs are not good, Sugar.”

Now is probably a good time to go backwards and tell you a little about me and my family and our good dogs.  See, we were poor country people and my earliest remembrance was after Mama and Daddy sold Grandmas’s farm and we moved to the city.  There were seven of us kids at that time and Mama had two more later on making out family nine kids and two parents.  Well Mama was like a kid and Daddy treated her like one.  She never had to whip me (today that would be known as spanking) but when she told Daddy I needed one he took care of business and we knew not to cross Mama.   So, where was I?  Oh yeah, nine of us kids living in the city was a recipe for problems; however this is a story of what I remember first hand as a child and believe you me, there have been many stores told to me that I don’t feel I should share since they aren’t mine.  When the ninth baby was born, he was a puny little thing and lived on mashed bananas but he had a head full of glorious blonde curls that would make any Scotsman proud.  By all that is right, Mama named him after the doctor who saved her and her baby.  Calvin Theo.  Those first years in the city were tough and we had no dog that I remember.  Daddy traveled putting up billboards on the side of the road and one of my finest remembrances was the one when I sat on the curb, every Friday in Meridian, Mississippi waiting for my Daddy to come home.  Thrilling was not the word for how I felt when that old red paneled truck came around the corner and he was finally home.

I was still young enough to be lugged on my older sisters’ hips but old enough not to need diapers because I could walk or run all over the place, and when I couldn’t keep up I was thrown upon a hip. The next remembrance I must share because it was a tale told about me and to me.  My sister, Becky with her bright red curly hair and big blue eyes could scare me almost to death and if she told me something, she would say, “And you better believe it too.”

 I certainly did for many, many years.

She told me, “You were on my hip and I was running around the corner of our brick house and you fell backwards and hit your head on those bricks.  Well I dropped you on the ground and took a screwdriver and bored a hole in your head to pour green stuff in your head, since I had knocked out your brains.  You are not smart because of that, so I will tell me what to do from now on. “

 And she did.

I remember two other things about that period of time in the brick house and one was Daddy’s ability to pick a good dog.  It was cold one night and we young ones were sitting on the floor in front of a heater when Daddy came home.  He opened his jacket and pulled out a tiny little German Shepherd pup that was shaking like crazy.  My brother, Calvin Theo had been born on December the 12^th and you remember he was a puny runt, so Daddy brought Calvin a puppy that the police department did not want, because the pup was a puny runt and would never fit in.  I was four-and-a-half years old and that made perfect sense to me.  I don’t remember who named him but my brother, Lavon adopted that little fellow and we called our dog Bullet.  Well Daddy knew how to pick a good dog because Bullet proved to be the best.

Daddy had a brother living over in Jackson, Mississippi and the brother wanted him to come there too, so off we went to another city not fit for country kids.  There is one thing about our family mixed with Scottish, Irish and Cherokee, and that is not a surprise considering Mississippi had 13 flags that flew over her before Old Glory reigned, so all of this mixture assured everyone that we knew how to have fun. Moving to the big city was ok with us if Daddy said so. Jackson was a tough town when you lived on Gallatin Street. One night we were all asleep when someone decided to steal the gasoline from Daddy’s car and Bullet was on guard that night.  When Daddy heard men screaming and that dog growling just before Ole Bullet came unglued, he took off out the door.  All of that commotion certainly woke us up and he came back in the house holding the fabric from the seat of somebody’s britches that Bullet didn’t care for. If my memory serves me right they did not get the gasoline but we moved to a different neighborhood. 

Bullet became our family hero and we depended on him, especially Mama and Daddy depended on him to watch over us, since kids weren’t allowed to hang out in the house and we spent most of our time outside.  I remember all of that sunshine and good times.  My sister, Mary, used to drag me down the sidewalk to go to a walk-in-theatre on Saturday.  Oh she didn’t have to make me go, but she was saddled with babysitting me and that little girl was always in a hurry.  Well my love for western movies was born in that theatre.  I especially loved Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and most of all, Trigger, but Mary wanted to watch Ester Williams swim so I didn’t always get my way about seeing horses, dogs and cows on the big screen.  Remember I was born in the country and that country was in my blood even though I lived three years in the city.  We had some hard times and I guess that same country ran in Daddy’s blood too because after my sixth birthday we moved to the cotton fields of North East Mississippi to a little community called Van Buren.

We arrived on a cold winter night but that is another story all together.  Bullet was about to get his first taste of country living at its purest.  It seems funny sometimes but he was always around when us four youngest ones were outside.  He stayed between us and danger always so I will share a few of these memorable moments in this story.

Our house was a typical sharecropper’s house with four large rooms, two on each side, a small room on the right for a kitchen, a huge middle hallway, a screened in back porch and a front porch that covered the width of the entire house.  Each room had a significant purpose with no wasted space.  These houses were known as shot-gun style houses.  You could stand on the front porch and shoot all the way through the back.  That was my take on the meaning anyway.  The yard around the house was swept clean of grass so there were no pests to contend with, except a few pesky house flies. I was six-and-a-half by then and Bullet and Calvin were four. There was so much for a four year old dog to discover and learn the hard way, and I can assure you that God watched over that nosy dog and us four kids.  I wore dresses and we all went barefoot, but people started calling us the four boys.  I hated being a girl because that meant I was weak and those boys were strong he-men.  It became second nature for Bullet to be with me when I rambled around the place making me think he was a super dog who took care of all of us at the same time.

Every morning Mama called from the back porch door, “Hey Bullet come and get it.”

He was never very far away and truth be told he was waiting for that yell every morning.