The Dog With the Old Soul (3 page)

Maryellen Burns

Knock! Knock! Knock!!

Six-thirty in the morning! My husband, Leo, and I wake up. Someone’s incessantly knocking on the door downstairs. I panic. Who is it? A loved one had an accident? A neighbor found one of our cats dead in the street? I try to shake off my anxiety and the five cats that had rooted themselves to my lap and legs all night.

We stumble to the door. My friend Angela is there. “I’m sorry to come over so early,” she says, “but I’m supposed to shoot a commercial for Safeway grocers at seven-thirty and my scheduled location is kaput. You have such a wonderful kitchen. Could I possibly bring a film crew here in an hour?” Her British accent adds an extra note to this early morning request.

My first thoughts are,
Leo has to teach and the kitchen is a mess.
We haven’t cleaned up from dinner last night. Piles of
dishes are in the sink and on the stove. We’d need to hide cat bowls and kitty litter, and vacuum up
mucho
cat hair.

Second thought?
Yes!
We spent two years restoring our kitchen and are proud of its 1910 Craftsman features: a six-burner, double-oven Magic Chef range, lush redwood-veneer cabinets, a black-and-white soda-fountain floor and old-fashioned comfiness.

We look at each other. A lot needs to get done. Leo rushes to the kitchen to feed cats, clean and make coffee before dressing and going to work, while I attempt to de-cat the living room.

An hour or so later a crew of eight gathers on the front porch—producer Angela; three men with camera gear; Rosa Nosa, our fluffy tortoiseshell, who has rushed out to greet them; and three outdoor cats, who scramble to hide.

Opening the front door is a struggle because Nishan, our little disabled, back-legs-all-tangled-in-on-themselves cat, is parked in front of it.

I finally get the door open, and a sullen-voiced man, the director, asks, “How many damn cats do you have?”

“Nine,” I tell him. “Or possibly more. You never know who they brought home last night.”

“There aren’t going to be any cats in the kitchen, right?” he asks.

I assure him that the kitchen can be shut off from the rest of the house and it won’t be a problem.

Brushing cats away from his legs, he hurries through the living room and into the kitchen, as if he knows the way.

“We need to set up. No time for niceties,” he says.

I follow him, and there is Rosa, sitting on the butcher-block island, looking every bit the superb hostess she is.

He picks her up and plops her roughly to the floor. “I said no cats in the kitchen!”

I pick her up, reassure her and take her outside.

“What have you done? Angela said your kitchen had a slightly messy, warm, lived-in look. You’ve cleaned it. Now we’ll have to dirty it again!”

Angela and I look at each other. I can tell that this guy is a major pain in the neck, and I hope I can get through a whole day with him in my house. He gives the room a cursory look.

“I like the stove. I want a pot of water, steam rising from it. Mess up the counters. I want fresh vegetables, canned tomatoes, a flour sack spilling out. Move the butcher block to the center of the room. It should be the focal point. What’s that cat doing here? I thought I told you to remove
all
the cats!”

Angela picks up the cat. It’s Rosa Nosa again. She starts to purr, presses her red nose against Angela’s face. Meanwhile, Hephzibah and Honky, the two oldest cats in the household, wander in, looking for food and water. They jump up on the kitchen table, demanding attention.

For the first time, the director spots Nishan hiding under the kitchen table. She scurries out, dragging her useless hind legs. The director looks disgusted. “What is it with these cats? Get. Them. Out. Of. The. Kitchen. Now!”

“Oh, Terry,” pleads Angela. “The talent won’t be here for an hour. Let the cats be. We’ll clear them out before we start filming.”

He looks as if he might relent, but something in the tone of his voice spooks the cats.
This is not a cat person.
They scatter. Except for Rosa, who insists on taking up residence beneath the butcher block with Nishan, her shadow.

To understand Rosa and Nishan’s relationship, you need to know a little about how we came to keep them. Rosa was born about three months after my mother died, one of six kittens from Little Guy, Mom’s faithful companion throughout her illness. Of all the kittens she was the prettiest, the liveliest, a furry lump of playfulness with an air of responsibility, a dignified poise and a beautiful red patch across her cute little nose. Everything about her reminded us of my mother, Rose. We wanted to keep her but couldn’t justify it, because she had so many offers of a home and we had so many kittens to place. We gave her to Monica, a little girl who lived down the street.

Within twenty-four hours, Monica was on our doorstep, a squirming kitten in hand, face and cheeks swollen and red. She was allergic. Would we keep her until she could give her to a new home on Monday? My mother had always said she’d return one day as a madam of a cathouse or as one of Leo’s cats. There was a reason this cat had come back to us. We were meant to keep her.

A year later Rosa and Giselle, a loveable stray we had taken in, bore kittens within a few days of each other. A couple of weeks later Giselle moved her kittens atop a bed in Mom’s old room, except for the runt, a tortoiseshell that looked a little like Rosa. Leo picked her up. For the first time we realized she had twisted, deformed hind legs. “I don’t know if this one is going
to survive,” he said, carrying her to Giselle and placing her at a teat. But Giselle rejected her and moved the other kittens again. This happened two or three more times.

Leo is softhearted. He hates to see any little critter suffer. Obviously, Giselle didn’t want her. Something had to be done. The next day we took her to our vet.

“If her mother refuses to nurse her, she could die in a couple of days on her own, but she looks like a survivor to me. It’s a big responsibility, but why don’t you try again? You could feed her by hand, and in a week or two we could put a cast on her legs and try to straighten them.”

Home she went. Giselle wouldn’t nurse her. That night she moved the others yet again. Next morning we’re lying in bed. Rosa is nursing her kittens under our desk. We see a little face peeking in at the foot of the doorway and then watch the disabled kitten scurry across the floor to Rosa and push all the other kittens out of the way, looking for sustenance. Rosa begins licking Nishan all over and looks up at us as if to say, “What’s one more?”

When almost all the kittens had new homes, my niece Penny showed up with six more, barely three weeks old. Someone had abandoned them. Would Rosa nurse them? Rosa didn’t hesitate. All kittens were welcome, but Nishan was her favorite. She never grew beyond the size of an eight-week-old kitten. Rosa continued to nurse Nishan for almost two years. Wherever Rosa went, Nishan followed.

They are together now, watching the crew ready the kitchen for filming. The actors arrive. Rosa runs to the door to greet them and lead them into the kitchen.

Everything is ready for the first take. Spaghetti pot boiling on the stove, lettuce washed and dried by hand, husband and wife intimately touching shoulders as they laugh and make dinner together.

“Cut! Where did that damn cat come from?”

There is Rosa, perched majestically on the lower deck of the butcher block, taking a keen interest in the proceedings. I pick her up and put her on the back porch.

The director sets up the shot again. “Camera’s rolling,” he says.

The salad is being tossed; noodles are placed in boiling water. I see Nishan, who had remained hidden, peer out from behind a butcher-block leg. Within minutes Rosa is back in place, following every move of the camera. The director doesn’t seem to notice at first. When he does, he silently picks her up by the scruff of her neck and tosses her out.

Minutes later she is back, arching her back against the director’s legs, as if trying to seduce him. Again, he picks her up and tosses her out the French doors.

Before you know it, she’s back again, under the stairs. Neither the director nor the crew has noticed there is a cat door. As I wonder if I should block it so Rosa can’t get back in, she suddenly leaps from the floor to the kitchen table and then takes another flight to the butcher block.

“There are too many cats in the kitchen!” the director barks and stomps out of the room.

Angela follows him. I hear muffled voices, his strident and nasty, Angela’s soft and lilting as she tries to calm him. One
actor has picked Rosa up and is tickling her under her chin. She responds with a rumbling purr and a gracious movement of her head.

The director comes back, temper under control, but barely. Angela follows, a catlike smile on her face. “A few more takes and we’re done,” he says. “I give up.”

Rosa remained in place for the rest of the morning, looking like Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
demanding her close-up.

“That’s a wrap,” the director called.

He never broke a smile or thanked us for giving up our house and our time. He just watched silently as the rest of the crew packed up the camera gear, the lights, the food, petted Rosa one more time and left.

A week or so later Angela called to say that the commercial was going to air at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday and would be rebroadcast for a month or two.

We set up the television recorder, gathered all the cats on the bed and waited to see Rosa’s debut. The commercial ended. The editor had left all Rosa’s scenes on the cutting room floor! The ad was okay but we thought it lacked the emotional punch Rosa might have given it.

Rosa, in one of her rare acts of petulance, jumped off the bed. In solidarity the other cats followed her. Only Nishan remained to ease our disappointment. A strong union household, we boycotted Safeway for a while but realized it wasn’t their call; it was the call of a director who didn’t realize that the biggest joy of all is too many cats in the kitchen.

Suzanne Tomlinson

As a longtime journalist,
I never imagined a writing assignment from a popular horse magazine would lead me to personal transformation. But that was exactly what happened when I met a horse with a giant letter
U
branded on his well-muscled neck.

I’d been asked to write a piece about how to have a successful match when adopting a horse from a rescue center. A lifelong horse-crazy gal with horses of my own, I was excited about the assignment.

I interviewed the Grace Foundation director, Beth DeCaprio. She provided some solid information and great tips on how to find a perfect equine partner at a rescue organization. Then she told me about an upcoming project—the HELP Rescue Me Trainers’ Showcase. It had grown out of a crisis involving wild horses.

In the Midwest about two hundred of the Bureau of Land Management’s mustangs had gone through three auctions with no bidders. When that happens, the BLM brands the horses nobody wants with a big letter
U
to identify them as unwanted. They are no longer the responsibility of the BLM. Most of the horses with this sad scarlet letter go to slaughter operators. These particular two hundred
U
horses were sent to a ranch in Nebraska, where a rancher placed them on his property and then left them to fend for themselves.

The Humane Society of the United States rushed in to help but not before many of these horses died from starvation. Horse rescue groups, including the Grace Foundation, traveled to a rehab center where the surviving mustangs were being held in the hopes that they could be helped. Beth and her volunteers agreed to take thirty-one of the
U
horses back to her center in California, near Sacramento. Other rescue organizations took on the remaining unwanted horses.

Beth came home with the daunting task of finding these horses forever homes. Suddenly an inspiration hit her. Why not pair professional trainers with each of her thirty-one mustangs to give these wild horses seventy days of training and make them more adoptable?

Local trainers took to the idea. They came to the Grace Foundation and each picked out a mustang. At the end of the training period Beth brought the whole gang—mustangs and their trainers—to the big annual horse expo in Sacramento to show off. She called it the Trainers’ Showcase. Each trainer demonstrated to the crowd what had been accomplished in
those seventy days of training. I watched in the audience as thirty-one horses and thirty-one trainers entered the arena to show what an untrained wild horse could learn in a very short time. The crowd in the stands was moved to standing ovations again and again. Many of the horses were under saddle and seemed at ease with the chaos of the arena, the lights and the noisy crowd. Some of the
U
-branded horses had learned impressive dressage movements; others jumped obstacles with confidence; all had the beginnings of trust with humans, despite the fact that all the humans they’d met in the past had brought them nothing but hardship and pain. At the end of the event the mustangs were offered for adoption. Would they still be unwanted?

I wrote my story about adopting a horse from a rescue organization, plus a sidebar about the unwanted horses at the horse expo. Editors at the magazine suggested I check on the
U
-branded horses in a few months and find out what had happened to them.

In the meantime my life suddenly, unexpectedly, turned upside down. My seemingly solid twenty-four-year marriage crumbled, damaged beyond repair. For a time I thought the shock and the pain would kill me. I fled to the guesthouse on our property to be alone. In those first few days of facing the ugly truth about a marriage I had thought was based on faithfulness, I asked God for help. I remember praying,
Dear God, if what I feel now is going to kill me, please take me now. But if I am supposed to survive it, please let me rest and feel your peace. Show me your light and I will know I can get through this.

For the first time in several days I slept for many hours. What awakened me was not the jolting remembrance of the nightmare I was living. It was the brightest light of morning I had ever seen, streaming through window blinds that were closed…the light so bright, so lovingly piercing, it woke me up. Something had shifted in that dark night of the soul. In the recesses of my mind there was a knowing—
I am deeply loved by God and the divine that dwells within me.
The pain, the anger, the unbearable grief just dissolved away. God’s peace was all around me and in me.
Thank you, God,
I said to myself.
I have my answer. I can go on.

In the days that followed I began to count my blessings. Our children were grown and on their own. I had financial resources. And I had strength beyond anything I could have imagined. Upon filing for divorce, I moved out. I found a nice house on five acres with a perfect setup for horses and moved in, along with two dogs, one cat and my two horses.

Complete healing would take some time, but I was no longer afraid to face the truth. I also knew I had to plumb the depths of my own emotions to try and understand why I had been burned by the scorched earth of betrayal time and time again throughout my life.

I thought of the
U
-branded horses and realized, though I didn’t carry that letter outwardly, I carried it inwardly. To most people, and even to myself on a conscious level, I was a happy, optimistic, career-driven woman with lots of love in my life. I had children I adored and many relationships I treasured. But I had been drawn to men who seemed to love me on one level
and hate me on another. I would start out with the warm glow of feeling cherished. But invariably over time the relationships brought a cold, sad message—I was unwanted.

My mother delivered that scarlet letter
U
for “unwanted” when I was just a girl. She was a troubled person, depressed and addicted to alcohol, which further twisted her mind. Underneath it all, there was always a spark of meanness. I tried to steer clear of her sting and just let it drift past, but the day came when her darkness changed my life.

I don’t remember what I asked of her. It could have been a ride to a friend’s house. I know it wasn’t much. She sneered at me, a suspicious, small smile curling her lips. Already I was on alert.
Nothing good is going to come out of her mouth,
I thought.

She said, “Suzanne, dear, you are such a lucky girl, aren’t you? You’ve had the security and safety of feeling loved all your young life, haven’t you?”

Why is she saying these things to me? There is something sinister brewing.

“Yes, poor dear, the truth will confuse you, but here it is. I have never loved you, never wanted you, never cherished you. You are unloved.”

People underestimate the power of words. These words, her words, devastated me. It was the deepest betrayal from mother to daughter—an intentional fire set to burn down the trust of an innocent, unsuspecting child.

Looking back over my life, I think my mother loved me. I also think she very much wanted to hurt me. It’s hard to reconcile those feelings and actions—loving and hurting seem so
discordant. But I have come to understand that her desire to hurt must have derived from some deep wound of her own. Over the years and after her death from the effects of alcoholism, I thought I had forgiven her. What I didn’t know was that I carried that wound of her words deep in my subconscious mind, and it colored my opinion of myself. Unwanted. Unloved.

Again I had walked into the fire of someone else’s loving and hurting. Had I stayed married to a man for twenty-four years because in my subconscious he replayed my mother’s themes?

I had to try and heal this deep hurt, or I was destined to invite betrayal into my life for unlimited visits. But how to heal? How to forgive? That seemed like a tall order. There was another way to keep betrayal from my door and it seemed easier.
Just never love again,
I thought. For a short while that seemed like the best answer. Then I met the plain brown horse with the big
U
on his neck.

I had checked back on the unwanted mustangs from the Grace Foundation’s Trainers’ Showcase. There on the website I found a listing of the
U
-branded horses. As I scrolled down, I could see in bold letters next to their names the word “adopted”! It was exciting to see that so many of these most unwanted of the unwanted had found forever homes—except one horse, at the bottom of the list. They called him Vigilant. He was a plain brown ten-year-old mustang with a sturdy-looking body and a kind eye. The vet had noted that he had been gelded and was healthy, with no apparent problems other than the trust issues that went along with being severely neglected. There was no happy, bold “adopted” next to this horse’s name.

I wanted this unwanted horse. It just felt right to start my new life wanting the unwanted. It would help remind that little girl who resided in my subconscious, she was wanted and loved very deeply. I made a promise to bring that kind of sacred love to my life in any way I could. I had rescued two abandoned dogs, so why not this horse? And this is how Vigilant found his forever home with me. I spoke with the trainer who had worked with him, and she told me that he had a willing attitude but definitely did not offer automatic trust to all who approached. She suggested I start all over again in his training…being careful to first establish that trust.

And so the two
U
-branded souls began their work together. The first week I fed him only over the fence and let him settle into his new space next to my other two horses. He didn’t seem nervous but I could tell he was wary. The second week I went into his pasture and tried to approach. He ran from me each time. I didn’t try to catch him. I just stood as near as he would let me and talked to him softly.

And then like a tightly closed bud protecting itself from winter’s frost, the horse, like the flower, began to open to me. He let me approach and stroke his neck, moving my hand over that awful
U,
wishing I could erase it. The following week, when I opened his pasture gate, he trotted over to me, inviting me to pat him. When it seemed time to put a halter on, he lowered his head into it willingly.

Still, I moved very slowly with him—one little success at a time. In a month I thought he was ready for some round pen work on a lunge line. I discovered that wonderful foundation the
first trainer had established. This horse followed my commands perfectly when I asked him to walk, trot, stop and then move out again. When I asked for the canter, it was clear he had no idea what I wanted, but he tried, anyway, trotting ever faster as I urged him to move out. I changed my communication style. Instead of using my voice to ask for this faster gait, I moved my own legs to the cadence of the canter.

Now he was really confused. I could sense what he was thinking.
You want me to run? But mostly I run when I’m fleeing something threatening. Are you scary?
How could I tell him I didn’t want him to run in fear? I wanted him to run in a new way, slower, more controlled, a dance I might one day join him in. I talked to him softly, moving my feet to show him what I wanted, and when he began to gallop too fast, I said encouragingly, “Good boy! Now just slow it down a bit.”

One day I just thought,
It’s time to get on this horse.
Moving things along very slowly, I put my foot in the stirrup and stepped up to the saddle, then down again. He was so quiet. In a few days I felt sure enough of him to put my foot in the stirrup and swing all the way up and into the saddle. I asked him with my legs and my voice to move out at a walk. He responded perfectly. And what a perfect moment for me.
Never trust, never love again?
This horse had been abused, neglected and betrayed, yet he was showing me
he
was willing to trust again. Who was
I
to shut out the world? If I could build mutual trust with this horse, building it with a human being might be possible. This horse was showing me the way. I would be open to love
again someday and then I would know how.
Just take it slow
.
Build it step by step
.
Be wary, but be willing.

I thought back to that moment of deep self-love in my dark night of the soul. That love was a bridge to freedom—freedom from anger, sadness, regret, self-recrimination…freedom to be wholly and holy loved. Now riding this
U
-branded horse, I reached down and stroked his neck. “You are not unwanted and will never again be unwanted. I want you. You are loved.” The horse and I had stepped up to our challenges. I was healing that
U
brand in my soul. I would not be a slave to betrayal.

My plain brown horse deserved a name that would transform that sad
U
into something fitting his grandness. Why not Underestimated and Ultimately free? Now I open his pasture gate and call his new name. “Good morning, Freedom!” He calls back with a whinny and trots to my side.