Penny (14 page)

December passed with just enough snow to cover the ground. After Christmas, January brought a storm that left two-foot drifts and subzero temperatures. Not the kind of weather that invites even restless dogs to go wandering. We wondered if Penny had settled in and become a tractable house dog, but we had no word from Sybil and we didn't call to ask. As the weeks passed, our concern for Penny lost its intensity. She had a home where she was cosied and cared for, and she had people who admired, and tolerated, her independence. She evidently had friends all over that area who welcomed her whenever she went visiting. She was a privileged individual. We were only a couple of people she had known in passing, you might say: acquaintances, good to know. So the ties of affection were loosened in us and began to fall away.

February was blustery, as usual, and March came in like the proverbial lion. But soon after the vernal equinox it quieted down to the lamblike temper that can make an occasional New England spring a delightful surprise. Usually we have little or no spring; we go from late winter right into summer, with maybe a couple of mild days between. But this year the tree frogs were yelping by the last week in March, the pussy willows were fat and furry, and the migrant robins were back in our pastures, great flocks of them, and the redwing blackbirds
ka-reed
from the trees along the river. Spring's outriders arrived and we welcomed them with open arms. A benevolent April is an event here. We don't so much expect April showers to bring May flowers; we only hope April showers won't turn into sleet storms or snow, and we expect the May flowers to take care of themselves. They always do, even though we nearly always have hard frost right up till the end of the month. We have had snow in May, and we have had killing frost the first week in June.

But that year April was gentle and May was balmy. We got the vegetable garden planted. We opened the place at the lake and we watched the water temperature there. This looked like an early swimming year. We had worked all winter, finished one book, got a start on another. We could take time off that summer. We came up to Memorial Day with things well in hand. Then Barbara said, “I wonder when Penny is going to arrive.”

“What?”

“Don't tell me you have forgotten already.”

“I had pretty well put her out of my mind, yes. Till you brought the matter up.”

“This is fine traveling weather. Just about a year ago now she was coming and going from here.”

“I would just as soon let sleeping dogs lie.”

So we went to the lake and she had her first swim. I put the sailboat in the water. When we got home that evening she said, “I'm going to call Sybil.”

They talked almost twenty minutes. When she had hung up, Barbara said, “I think we are safe. But apparently it was quite a winter, up there.”

Penny, it seems, discovered a ski slope a few miles down the road. She found that many youngsters were there on weekends, subteen-agers who came by bus Friday evening and were on the slopes all day Saturday. Most of them were novices learning to ski. Penny took to going down there Friday afternoons, meeting the bus, spending the night at the ski lodge, then having an all-day romp Saturday. The youngsters rode the ski tow and Penny ran up the slope after them. When they skied down she dashed right along, often underfoot. She accounted for dozens of spills but, miraculously, for no broken bones. The children loved her. The cook at the lodge fed her salami sandwiches. Evenings she stretched out in front of the big fireplace and napped. When the youngsters went to bed she went along and crawled in with one little girl or another.

Sybil went down there after her one Saturday and said, “There she was, walking around the ski lodge as though she owned the place. With that princess air. She wouldn't even look at me. I had to put a leash on her to get her out of there, and if I hadn't locked the door when I got her home she'd have gone right back.”

Some weekends, of course, she passed up the ski lodge. She needed variety. There were five or six houses that she visited more or less regularly for a meal and a bed, and if the accommodations were particularly good she often stayed several nights. And once she went out into the woods and spent two nights, bitter nights, well below zero. Sybil and Bob heard her baying, but when they went to look for her she kept quiet and they never found her. After the second night she came home, limping, with one forepaw frostbitten. It healed all right, but it was sore for a couple of weeks and she didn't travel.

She made friends with the rural mail carrier. It was while she was lame. She went out to the main road, probably hoping someone would give her a ride. The mailman came along, stopped at a box, and there was Penny, practically begging, looking downright pathetic. He let her in his car and she rode the rest of his route and went back to the post office with him. There the postmaster checked her license and phoned Sybil, told her he had a special delivery package she'd better come and get. Sybil asked why, and he said there was postage due. “Postage due!” she exclaimed. “Send it back!” “It's just one penny,” he said, laughing. And Sybil went and got her.

“Penny,” Sybil summed up to Barbara, “is completely blithe. She's going to have to pay the price, some day, I suppose. But meanwhile she's going to live the way she wants to. This morning she wanted out, and she just sat there on the lawn and looked, this way and that, and you could almost hear her saying to herself, Well, this is a warm, inviting day. Something exciting will turn up, if I just go somewhere. And pretty soon she took off. I don't know where she went, and she's still gone. But I've stopped worrying about her. She'll come back when she gets good and ready.”

Twelve

It was a quiet summer. The memory of Penny didn't vanish like morning mist, but we did stop looking out the front door to see if she was on the front porch and we no longer walked wide of the bench in the living room. Sybil hadn't phoned or written and Barbara hadn't called Sybil since the first week in May.

Labor Day passed, and there we were in September, practically in autumn. Barbara said, “It's been a year now. A little over a year.”

“What's been a year?”

“Since Penny left.”

“Oh. You mean since Penny was given her walking papers, as my grandmother used to say.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means scram, scat, go on away, get lost.”

“Still mad at Penny, aren't you?”

“No. How can anybody be mad at a free soul? At freedom?”

“I'd like to call Sybil.”

“Go ahead. But for heaven's sake, don't wish Penny any happy returns.”

I went out and sat on the front steps while she made the call, listening to the whippoorwills on the mountainside, watching the slow current of the river. When she had finished, she came out and sat down beside me.

“Situation pretty much unchanged,” she reported. “Penny goes and comes pretty much as she pleases. A little while back she spent a week with folks five or six miles away, and they said they would like to keep her. Sybil agreed, but just a few days later she was back at Sybil's. The minute those folks treated her as though she was theirs, instead of an honored guest, she walked out.”

“Princess Penny.”

“Sybil says folks call her Agent Seventy-seven. That's her tag number, and apparently it's known all over the area. In July she vanished for almost a week, and then Sybil had a call from a horse farm twenty-odd miles away. Penny was there, hobnobbing with the horses. Loved horses, the man said. Sybil went down and got her and she's stayed close to home since.”

“Meaning that she's there from time to time?”

“I suppose so. Sybil asked us up.”

“When?”

“Any time.”

“Why? Anything special?”

“To see Penny. To see if she still knows us. Sybil says she has changed, grown up.”

“To see if we won't take her back.”

“Oh, for goodness sake! Sybil's not trying to get rid of Penny.”

“Of course not. Sybil admires Penny.… When do you want to go?”

“Not this week. Maybe next. I told her we'd phone a day ahead, so she could make sure Penny is there.”

Ten days later Barbara phoned Sybil, said we planned to go up there the next day. “That'll be just fine,” Sybil said. “I'll be here, and Penny's here. I'll keep her in. Lucky you didn't call earlier. She's been gone two days and didn't get home till about an hour ago.… We'll see you tomorrow.”

It was a bright, sunny, late-September day. The color had begun to come in the trees, the swamp maples fiery red in places, the sumac marching along the back roads like Indians in scarlet feather headdresses. The aspens and the gray birches were greenish gold, making the hillsides shimmer. And the asters were everywhere, whitening the roadsides and frosting the old meadows, with here and there a brilliant patch of the big purple New England asters with their rich yellow centers, the royalty of the whole aster family. The blue jays looked twice as blue as they had all summer, somehow reflecting the blue of the autumn sky, and the crows were black as sin.

“What a beautiful day!” Barbara exclaimed. “And Penny is being kept in. I'll bet she's fit to be tied.”

“If Sybil is at all bright, Penny
is
tied.… Think she will know you?”

“Of course she will.”

We passed Barrington and headed northeast on the winding, hill-country road. Finally we climbed to a plateau and the road leveled out somewhat, with reclaimed farmhouses here and there, most of them closed for the winter. Next April they would begin to come to life again, and after a month or two of weekending they would come to life with summer animation, with women and children and dogs, and with men on weekends. Several of them, nicely restored old country houses, had swimming pools in their side yards, strange substitutes for the woodsheds and privies that had been there originally. Only a few of the houses, occupied by year-rounders, showed signs of life, smoke from a chimney, a car parked in the driveway, open garage doors. None of those occupied houses seemed to have a swimming pool.

We topped a gentle rise and a hundred yards ahead of us was a dog, a short-legged black and tan dog with a familiar rolling gait. A basset, trotting up the road. Barbara exclaimed, “Penny!”

I slowed the car. The dog turned off the road at a rural mailbox, went up a driveway to a gray Cape Cod house set a little way back, almost at the edge of the woodland. I braked to a stop at the head of the driveway and Barbara shouted, “Penny! Penny!”

The dog paid no attention.

“Drive in!”

“It's not Penny. It's an older dog.”

“Please. I have to find out. You know as well as I do that if Penny decided to go somewhere, Sybil couldn't stop her. Please!”

I drove up the driveway. The dog had disappeared. Barbara went to the door and knocked. A woman in a turtle-neck sweater and pink slacks answered.

“The basset that just came in here,” Barbara asked. “It's Penny, isn't it?”

“The basset? Oh, did he just come home?”

“Yes. We followed her up the driveway, and—Oh, there she is! Penny!”

The dog came around the corner of the house, stopped and stared. The woman laughed. “Sorry, but it's a he. Lord Jeff, we call him.” The dog went to her, glanced at Barbara in the rather distant way of the more supercilious bassets, then went past the woman and into the house.

“I'm sorry to have bothered you,” Barbara said, and turned back toward the car.

“There
is
a basset named Penny, I believe,” the woman said, “who gets around quite a bit.” She said it with a knowing smile. “But I haven't seen her in some time.”

“Thanks.” And Barbara got into the car. I turned around and we went back to the highway. It was another six miles to Sybil's place. We didn't see another dog.

Sybil came to the door while we were parking. We were halfway up the path when she said, “You're going to hate me. I said I would keep her in, but she's gone.”

“She's not here?”

Sybil laughed ruefully. “Come on in and sit down and have a drink. That dog is just too bright for her own good. We can visit, and maybe she'll come back. You never know, with Penny.”

We sat on the couch in the living room, as before. Sybil got drinks. “That dog!” she exclaimed as she sat down. “She knew I was keeping her in, but she pretended not to care one little bit. She waited and bided her time. She knew—I don't know how she knows these things, but she does—she knew Bob had to go to town today. So she just waited till he got his coat on and was all ready to go. Then she crept up behind him, and the minute he opened the door one crack, out she went. She almost knocked him over. I made a grab for her and got hold of her collar, but just with two fingers. She ripped off those two fingernails.” She held up her right hand, with the two broken nails. “Out she went, like a streak. And then she didn't know where to go. She hung around for half an hour before she actually disappeared.”

I lifted my glass. “To the free soul.”

Barbara glanced at me with a faint smile. Sybil said, “I never knew a more completely blithe and free spirit. I think that's probably what makes her so appealing.” She stood up. “You haven't seen her in a long time. I've got some pictures.”

She left the room, came back with an album of snapshots, handed the album to us and stood there as we leafed through.

“She's grown up, as you can see. Lost the puppy look. Oh, she's a very handsome dog now. But you can see that independent air, can't you? It's written all over her.… Oh, now in that picture she has the sedate look. But see that look in her eyes, the way her ears set? She's all ready to tell you right where you can go. You can go your way, she's about to tell you, and I'll go mine.… I wonder. I just thought, maybe she's down at Marion's. Marion lives not far from the ski lodge, and Penny goes to visit her every week or so. Marion feeds her steak and lets her sleep on her best sofa. I'll just give Marion a call, if you'll excuse me a minute.” She went into another room.