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Set Free
by Helen Peppe
1 The
dog sat on the grass near the house, his tongue out. There was a red collar around his neck. A long
cable wound from his red collar to a hook on the house. It was strong. The boy knew it was strong.
Everyone knew it was strong. They had seen the dog lunge and jerk at the end of the thick cord
barking at the cars, the cats, the people, forcing against the cable and hook with its black chest.
It hurt the boy to see the dog strain so frantically, so uselessly. He hoped that the cable would
break so that the dog could be free. The boy felt the dog’s frustration as if it were his own.
He knew it was like the frustration he felt when his father held him tight in his arms and
wouldn’t let go. Even though it was a game, and his father laughed, he hated it. It was no game
to him. At those times, the boy felt hate that he was incapable of expressing to anyone, but he knew
the dog knew how he felt. It was not right for the dog to be tied just as it was not right for his
father to hug him tight and laugh at him as he struggled to free himself. The pain was too real to
the boy; he had to do something.
2 The boy walked to the dog and gently rubbed his
black pointed ears. The dog responded by licking the boy’s hand and butting him with his smooth
black head. The boy slid his small hand under the dog’s collar. The fur was hot and rumpled. He
knew it would be easy to unfasten the clip from the hook on the collar, but other things were not so
easy. The question of where the dog would go ran through the boy’s head. Would he just run so
fast that no one could catch him, not even his father, who could do anything? And the question that
the boy wondered the most, would the dog ever come back?
3 The boy loved the dog. The
dog was the only one who shared his hate and anger. The dog was his closest friend.
4
The boy removed his fingers from the collar and instead wrapped his small arms around the
dog’s neck. The dog endured this new form of attention for a minute, then struggled free,
although he still sat next to the boy.
5 The boy sat down on the grass. A new thought
entered his mind. His father would be angry when he discovered that the dog was gone. The dog had
cost a lot of money and they had him for only six months. They had needed a watch dog, a Doberman,
his father had insisted. No other dog scared people enough.
6 The boy had found this to
be true. The kids next door had not taken his bike or played on his tire swing since the dog had
come. Cats had certainly been scarce too. His father hated the mess that cats made and they all hated
the yowling of the cats fighting under their windows at night. The boy didn’t like cats. They
were not like dogs, and no one could convince him that they were as fun to play with or that they did
not make as much mess. He could smell the difference when he went to his friends’ houses in the
city. He moved toward the dog again, this time gratefully, and patted the dog’s head. Maybe if
he let the dog loose, the cats would come back. The boy instantly realized that it was a selfish
thought. Enduring the cats would be a small price for the dog’s freedom. He made a move to set
the dog free, but just at that moment his mother came out of the house with the dog’s supper.
The boy wished that he had thought of this himself. It would have been terrible to let the dog loose
without his supper.
7 His mother patted him on the head and told him that his own
dinner would be ready soon. The boy nodded but stayed where he was. It would have been awful if the
dog had to eat out of garbage cans to get his supper like the dogs he saw on his way to school. The
boy hated that. He wished that he could feed all the dogs in the neighborhood so that they
wouldn’t have to eat someone’s old potato peels and beef gristle. But the boy knew that
he did not have enough money. At eight, he barely had enough to weight his piggy bank down. On windy
days he always had to remove his bank from the sill or he would find it on the floor, the black eyes
of the pig staring up at the ceiling lamenting its inadequacy.
8 The dog sure was
hungry. The boy knew his mother did not feed the dog enough. An eighty-five pound dog needed more
than one bowl of food a day. It wasn’t right. But his mother had gotten mad at him for bringing
the dog his own mashed potatoes. The boy had always hated potatoes even though his mother always
insisted that they didn’t taste like potatoes when they were mashed. He still had stray lumps
of potato in his jacket pocket. He was beginning to think that he would never be able to forget about
trying to feed the dog his potatoes. And anyway, the dog hadn’t liked them either. That was how
his mother had found out. Mashed potatoes don’t disappear very quickly from black
pavement. The boy smiled. He was glad that the dog didn’t like potatoes either, even mashed.
The boy bet that the dog also wouldn’t like liver. For that reason, he hadn’t tried to
sneak it to him. It was not right to feed liver to people who did not like it. The slimy liver
residue lasted indefinitely on the dinner plate destroying the taste of the best elbow
macaroni.
9 He wished his mother felt the way he and the dog did. But no one seemed to
care how he or the dog felt. Anyone could see that the dog needed to run, but his father only walked
him once a day. The boy knew that wasn’t enough. The dog had so much energy. And the
boy’s mother wouldn’t go near the dog unless it was to feed him or clean up his messes.
She said that the dog was dangerous. She had wanted to get a poodle. She thought that Dobermans were
too much like Pit Bulls. But his father had insisted on a Doberman. No other dog could do it, he
said. As far as the boy knew, his father had been right.
10 The dog started toward his
dog house, then turned and studied the boy. It was obvious that the dog was puzzled by the extra
attention. The boy thought instead that the dog was looking to him for more food. The boy turned an
angry look toward the house. His mother should know better. She was the one always talking about
paying twenty-five dollars a month to adopt a foster child. But his father always made a disgusted
face and said there were better things they could do with twenty-five dollars. But the boy knew
though, that his mother sent money secretly. He wished that he could do things secretly too, but his
parents always found out.
11 He wondered what his father would do when he saw that the
dog was gone. Maybe he wouldn’t do much. His father had called the dog the boy’s when
there had been a mess in the driveway last week. Maybe the boy had the right to do with the dog what
he wanted. This thought made the boy move again toward the dog’s collar.
12 The
dog’s short black hair tickled the boy’s fingers. The boy looked anxiously toward the
house. He hoped his mother was busy, maybe on the telephone. She was on the telephone a lot. The hook
felt cold on the boy’s fingers in relation to the dog’s fur. He slid his fingers around
the metal clasp. For a minute, he hesitated. He hoped that the dog would not get lost. This misgiving
was quickly suppressed with the thought of the dog’s approaching happiness, and, before he
could change his mind, he undid the metal clasp. With his hand still on the dog’s collar, he
kissed the dog, and hugged him tightly. A tear squeezed out between the boy’s lids. He hoped
that the dog would come back. He was his only real friend.
13 He released the
dog’s collar from his sweaty hands and stood back feeling miserable at the near separation. The
dog yawned and stretched, glad to be free from the boy’s restrictive arms. He looked at the
boy; then he licked his whiskered mouth for the last vestiges of his supper. The boy waved his hand
slowly and whispered a bye. The dog stretched again and yawned with a high pitched sound. Then he
moved toward the side of his dog house, lifted his leg, and urinated against the rough boards. He
gave the boy another look as if to ask, “Are you through? Is there anything else?” then
moved to the front of his dog house and kicked up his hind legs scratching up the grass.
14
Then the dog went inside, turned around, and laid down resting his pointed nose on his strong
paws. The boy stared at him in confusion then walked to the dog house. The dog raised his eyes not
bothering to lift his head. “You’re loose,”
the boy whispered.
“Don’t you realize that?” The dog closed his heavy lids with a grunt. There was a
gurgle from the depths of his black rounded stomach.
“Set Free” © 1991 by Helen Peppe. An original story published
by The Charles Press, Publishers. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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Summer of the Raccoons
by Fred Bauer
1 If
I’d had my way, the story would have ended that day where it began—on the sixth hole at
Stony Brook.
2 “What was that bawling?” my wife, Shirley, asked,
interrupting me in mid-swing. Without another word she marched into a mucky undergrowth and
re-emerged carrying something alive.
3 “Rrrit, rrit, rrit,” it
screamed.
4 “It’s an orphaned raccoon,” she said, gently stroking a
mud-matted ball of gray fur.
5 “Its mother is probably ten yards away, has rabies
and is about to attack,” I scolded.
6 “No, it’s alone and
starving—that’s why the little thing is out of its nest. Here, take it,” she
ordered. “I think there’s another baby over there.”
7 In a minute she
returned with a squalling bookend—just as mud-encrusted and emaciated as the first. She wrapped
the two complaining ingrates in her sweater. I knew that look. We were going to have two more mouths
to feed.
8 “Just remember,” I declared, “they’re your bundles
to look after.” But of all the family proclamations I have made over the years, none was wider
of the mark.
9 When, like Shirley and me, you have four children, you don’t think
much about empty nests. You don’t think the noisy, exuberant procession of kids and their
friends will ever end. But the bedrooms will someday empty, the hot bath water will miraculously
return, and the sounds that make a family will echo only in the scrapbook of your mind.
10
Shirley and I had gone through the parting ritual with Laraine and Steve and Christopher. Now
there was only Daniel, who was chafing to trade his room at home for a pad at Penn State. So I was
looking forward to my share of a little peace and quiet—not raccoons.
11
“What do you feed baby raccoons?” I asked the game protector over the phone the next
morning. We had cleaned them up, made them a bed in a box of rags, added a ticking clock in the hope
it would calm them, found old baby bottles in the basement, fed them warm milk and got them to sleep,
all without floorwalking the first night.
12 However, they revived and began their
machine-gun chant shortly after Shirley had run out the door, heading for classes. In anticipation of
a soon-to-be empty nest, she
had gone back to college to get a master’s degree so she could
teach.
13 Meanwhile, I had my own work to do—various publishing projects that I
handle from home. As the only child remaining with us, Daniel was my potential raccoon relief man. Or
so I hoped.
14 “Whose bright idea was this?” he asked with the tart tongue
of a teenager.
15 “Your mother thought you needed something more to earn your
allowance,” I cracked. “Will you heat some milk for them?”
16
“Sorry, I’m late for school,” he called over his shoulder. He and I were at
that awkward testing stage, somewhere between my flagging authority and his rush for
independence.
17 The major problem with trying to feed the raccoons was one of flow.
Milk was flowing out of the bottle too fast and through the kits the same way.
18
“Thinner milk and less corn syrup,” the wildlife man suggested, adding that he would
send along a brochure for raising them. “The object,” he coached, “is to take care
of them until they can go back to the woods and take care of themselves.”
19
“I’ll do anything I can to make that happen,” I assured him.
“They’re about eight ounces each”—I had weighed them on my postage scale.
“They’ll be old enough to be on their own in a couple more weeks,
right?”
20 “Not quite,” he said. “Come fall, if all goes well,
they’ll be ready.”
21 I’ll strangle them before then, I said under my
breath. I prepared a new formula and tried it on one. The kit coughed and sputtered like a clogged
carburetor. The hole in the nipple was too big.
22 Maybe I could feed them better with a
doll’s bottle, I concluded, and set out to find one. At a toy store, I found some miniature
bottles, one of which was attached to a specially plumbed doll named Betsy Wetsy. “My Betsys
are wetsy enough,” I told the clerk—declining doll and diapers, but taking the
bottle.
23 Back home, I tried feeding the raccoons again. Miracle of miracles, they
sucked contentedly and fell asleep. (Only twelve more weeks to September, I counted
down.)
24 During the next month and a half I functioned faithfully as day-care nanny
for Bonnie and Clyde, named for their bandit-like masks. The kits apparently considered me their
mother. When I held them at feeding time, they still spoke in the same scratchy voice, but now it was
a contented hum. The only time they may have perceived me to be an impostor came when they climbed on
my shoulders, parted my hair and pawed in vain for a nipple.
25 Before long the kits
graduated to cereal and bananas. When they became more active, our back-yard birdbath became an
instant attraction. Bonnie, the extrovert of the two, ladled the water worshipfully with her paws
like a priest conducting a baptism. Clyde followed suit, but cautiously, as if the water might be
combustible. Next Bonnie discovered the joy of food and water together, and thereafter every morsel
had to be dipped before being eaten.
26 By July the kits weighed about three pounds. I
built a screened-in cage and moved them outdoors. When they had adjusted well to their new quarters,
Daniel suggested we free them to explore the woods and forage for food.
27 “I
don’t want them to get lost or hurt out there,” I said, sounding more like a mother hen
than a surrogate father raccoon.
28 “They should get used to being on their
own,” Daniel insisted. We left their door ajar so they could wander during the day. At night,
we called them home by banging together their food bowls. They came out of the woods at a
gallop.
29 Still, I was afraid we might be rushing their initiation to the wild. One
windy afternoon while Daniel and I were playing catch in the back yard, I spotted Bonnie, twenty feet
off the ground, precariously tightrope-walking the bouncing branches of a mulberry tree. She had
eaten her fill of berries and was trying to get down, or so I thought.
30 “Be careful, babe,” I called, running to the
tree. “Quick, Dan, get a ladder!”
31 “Let her go,” he said
calmly. “She’s on an adventure. Don’t spoil her fun.” And he was on the
money. When I returned later, she was snoozing serenely in the mulberry’s cradling
arms.
32 However, the raccoons did get into trouble one night when they let themselves
out of their cage with those dexterous forepaws. Shirley and I were awakened at 2 A.M. by a horrendous
scream.
33 “What was that?” I asked, bolting upright.
34
“The raccoons?” she wondered.
35 “They’re in
trouble!” Tossing off the covers, I grabbed a flashlight and ran outside in my
skivvies.
36 As I came around the south side of the house, I heard something rattle the
eaves and jump into the maple tree. Next, I got jumped. First by Bonnie, landing on my shoulder, then
by her brother, shinnying up my leg. Circling my neck, they jabbered their excitement:
“Rrrrit, rrrit, rrrit!”
37 “It’s okay, I’ve got ya,
you’re safe,” I said, cuddling them in my arms. Apparently a wild raccoon, defending its
territory, had attacked Clyde. He had a bloody shoulder
that didn’t appear serious; Bonnie
was fine.
38 July gave way to August, and August to September. Soon the days were
getting shorter, and the raccoons were six-pound butterballs. I was fascinated by their creativity
and intelligence. One evening after I banged their food bowls together, there was no reply. When I
reported anxiously at the breakfast table that they hadn’t come in the night before, Daniel
laughed at my concern.
39 “Now we’ll see if you’re as good a teacher
as a mother raccoon.”
40 “I already know the answer,” I said.
“By the way, what time did you get in last night?”
41 “About
midnight,” he answered.
42 “Your eyes say later.”
43
“I’m not a baby anymore,” he shot back.
44 Outside, I beckoned
the raccoons again, and this time they reported: effervescent Bonnie in a flat-out sprint, Clyde in a
tagalong amble.
45 Near the end of September they
were missing a week, and I suggested to Shirley that they were probably gone for good.
46
“You know it’s a mistake trying to hold on to anything that no longer needs
you,” she counseled.
47 “Who’s holding on?” I protested. But
when I continued scanning the woods, hoping to catch sight of them, I knew she was right.
Reluctantly, I dismantled their pen, stored their bowls and put them out of my mind. Or tried to. But
they had got more of a hold on my heart than I ever thought possible. What I had considered a
nuisance had, in fact, been a gift; what I had labeled a burden, a blessing. Why is it, I
asked myself, that with so many people and things, we only appreciate them fully after
they’re gone?
48 One Saturday near the end of October, Shirley, Daniel and I were in
the back yard raking leaves when I spotted a ringed tail beyond the gate that opens to the woods.
“Look, Shirley,” I whispered. And though I had no idea if it was one of ours, I called,
“Bonnie . . . Clyde.”
49 The magnificently marked animal rose on its hind
legs and looked us over inquisitively. For a frozen moment, we faced off, statue-like. Then I called
again, and the animal moved in our direction. It was Bonnie, and we went to meet her. Kneeling, I
held out my hand, which she licked while I rubbed her neck. She purred her most satisfied rrrit,
rrrit, rrrit.
50 “Go get a banana for her,” I suggested to
Daniel.
51 “No, it’s time she made it on her own,” he replied firmly.
“She’s a big girl now. Don’t do anything for her that she can do for
herself.”
52 I looked at Shirley and winked. Tall, broad-shouldered Daniel
wasn’t talking raccoons. He was talking parents. The object is to take care of them until
they can take care of themselves, a haunting voice echoed. It was time to let go.
53
After rubbing Bonnie’s neck one last time, I stepped back. She sensed my release and
bounded off joyfully in the direction from which she had come.
54 “Have a good
life,” I called after her. Then she dipped behind a tree and was gone.
“Summer of the Raccoons” by Fred Bauer. Reprinted by permission
of the author from the August 1992 Reader’s Digest. © 1992 Fred Bauer.
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