HATE MAKES ROT

HATE MAKES ---- ROT

I can’t stop. Thoughts are piling up around me like pine straw against a chicken wire fence, and I can’t seem to get rid of them without writing about them. Thotman has a very poignant post today about the loss of a dog, that was actually handed to the dogcatcher. His post has a very vivid lesson about how pride can be so negative in our lives. It brought to mind a different dog story that reminds me of a totally different negative emotion.
I lived in the little village of Alameda, Idaho, as suburb of the somewhat larger city of Pocatello. I had a best friend who lived just across the street, and, until we got into Jr. High School we were closer than most brothers. Donnie had a little dog named Patty. She was brown and white and looked a little like a double sized Jack Russell terrier. I had a dog at that time too, but he was more of a homebody that stayed in the back yard and didn’t go out much. Patty followed Donnie everywhere, so she became a sort of “my dog too”, because Donnie and I weren’t separated by much at any time. In front of Donnie’s house, but on my side of the street was a big box elder tree. The tree had very thick foliage on the end of the limbs, but not much in close to the trunk. Donnie and I frequently used the box elder tree as a sort of tree house, because there was a lot of space near the trunk, and no one could see us without standing directly under the tree and looking out. We had a lot of adventures in this tree which I will write about sometime soon, but generally we just sat up in the tree and read comic books, or other books, and often smoked cigarettes which Donnie stole from his dad. When we sat in the tree, Patty often, even usually sat at the base of the tree and waited for us to come down.

One day we were up in the tree when an old pickup truck screeched to a halt below us.
We heard a male voice calling “Comeer dog, come on, come on dammit!! It was an angry voice and we quickly shunted down to the ground. It was Mr. Haines.

I have to explain a little about Mr. Haines. Alameda was a village. It had about ten employees total, including the fire department. The city clerk was sort of an ex-officio mayor or city manager, and all the other employees except the fire chief kind of followed his orders. Mr. Haines was one of three or four employees who did about everything, including police work. I think he was officially a city marshall, but he drove the garbage truck and went out with other men to fix pot holes in the streets, as well as investigated what crime we had, and even chase down speeders in the old pickup truck that he drove. He appeared to boys to be a skinny vulturous creature with a high sharp voice who really seemed to enjoy yelling at boys who came to close to his pothole repairs or watermain repair trenches.

When we got to the base of the tree, he was yelling at Patty, who was cowering behind the tree. “This yer dog, boy?” he yelled, more or less at both of us.

“Mine,” said Donnie.

“Damn vicious mutt aint got a license”

“He aint vicious and he’s got a license. His collar broke, so he doesn’t have it on.” Said Donnie. I actually don’t think that either Donnie or I knew that dogs needed licenses—I’m not sure, even at this time that Alameda offered them. But Donnie would defend Patty the best way he could. Mr. Haines was holding a stick, and made a kind of dash at Patty yelling “Come here, ya damned dog.”

Patty responded with a yelp, and a snap at the stick. What happened next is still a bit fuzzy in my mind, but Mr. Haines went back to the pickup and brought out a small rifle (probably a twenty two, but I wasn’t sure then, and I am not sure now.) My memory says that he pointed the rifle at Donnie and told him to pick up Patty and put her in the truck. My good sense says that not even Mr. Haines would draw down a gun at a eight or nine year old boy. Whatever happened, Patty started to run away, and Mr. Haines shot her. She was hit in the side and fell, then pried herself up and tried to drag herself away. Mr. Haines calmly went over and shot her in the head, then picked the lifeless body, threw it into the back of the pickup and drove away.

Two boys were absolutely traumatized. Donnie started to run tell his mother, but we could see that she had a customer (She had a small beauty shop in her house), so I yelled “Come on!” and we ran to my mother and told her what had happened. She said, in a consoling way, “Now boys, I’m sure Mr. Haines wouldn’t do a thing like that” and she walked out into the street with us where we showed her the frothy pink congealing mess that was on the street where Patty’s head had laid. She got quite excited, and went in to call the town clerk to complain. After a number of phone calls Mr. Haines was contacted, and he stated that Patty had been hit by a car and was so badly injured that she couldn’t have survived, and he was real sorry that he had had to put her down in front of us.

That was when we two boys discovered hate. We didn’t feel that our parents would ever believe us over Mr. Haines. (I think they did, but couldn’t prove anything), so we focused on hating Mr. Haines. We would get together and walk down the bank of the irrigation canal thinking of ways to get even. We talked about puncturing the tires of the old pickup he drove (it was actually a village owned vehicle), of going to his house and throwing rocks through his windows. Most of all we just simmered in hate.

This actually lasted for two or three years. I am not sure it isn’t one of the reasons that Donnie and I didn’t hang around together much after we got into Jr. High. Every time we got together we jointly hated Mr. Haines so much that it encompassed our relationship. Mr. Haines lived several blocks away, near the Alameda Park, and we used to go there, stand in the park and think of terrible things to do to him. We heard from somewhere that if you could get some “skunk juice” (the real stuff that skunks use to defend themselves) and put in on the cast iron block of a car that it would be unremovable, soaking into the block and stinking up the car so much that it would be impossible to use.
We didn’t know where to get a skunk, but we put out the word that we could pay five dollars for some skunk juice. We did get some, and it had the right stink, but in trying to get under the hood of Mr. Haines’s car, we got it all over ourselves. (Have you ever had a bath in tomato juice? That was my fate when I came home stinking of skunk). In the mean time, we soaped his windows, not just on Halloween when it was customary, but several times over a two year period. We actually pulled several Halloween tricks on him, on one occasion, putting some fecal matter that we shoveled up out of an outhouse in a paper bag, putting some lighter fluid on the paper, then lighting it on fire on his doorstep and knocking on the door. When he came to the door, he stomped on the bag to put out the fire and got both his porch and his shoes ( and who knows what else) covered with outhouse residue.

One thing we decided to do but that we did not do (I think) was to wait till he went on vacation, open a window in his house, put in the hose and turn on the water. I say “I think” because I had a very vivid dream that we had done this, and sometime later, talking to Don (as we got older we shifted from Dickie (me) and Donnie (him) to Dick and Don) about when we had done it, and he looked at me like I was out of my mind, and said “If you did that, I don’t want to know about it, but I was never involved”. I went away a little confused, but then I, subtly as I could, asked around about it to see if such a thing had happened to anyone in town, and no one had ever heard of such a thing, so I determined that I had just dreamed it. (I will guaran-darn- tee that my memory of it included Don, and that he was serious about not remembering any such thing.)

The point I am trying to make, is that hate like that will eat at you, ruining many of your life experiences and the relationships that are involved. Certainly it poisoned the relationship between Don and myself, that even living less than a hundred yards from each other, we reached the stage that being together, even just to play checkers, became an unpleasant experience, not that we hated each other, but that we had shared such a virulent hate for such a long time.

I can honestly say that I have never hated anyone since that time. Being in the company of someone who hates just make my stomach upset. I wish Mr. Haines were still around so I could ask his forgiveness. (Though remembering that poor little dog lying in a puddle of blood in the middle of the street would make asking forgiveness difficult.—