“Incoherent,” she paused. “The sick man was incoherent.” “Incoherent.”
My left arm curled around the top of the page hiding a small scrap of paper. On the paper several words were written in tiny print. She continued with “incomprehensible,” “divisible” and 17 other difficult words to spell.
It was the Friday before Thanksgiving and our sixth-grade class had just completed weekly math and spelling tests. I had cheated. I didn’t know why I cheated or where the urge came from, but it was not to be denied. I wasn’t caught that I knew of, but from the moment I passed my paper forward, I regretted my deed. I didn’t know where the regret came from either, but it stayed. Cafeteria lunch was special that day, it made me forget things. Turkey and dressing, my favorites. I waited anxiously for the week of vacation that lay only two hours away.
We spent the free afternoon watching a National Geographic film about domesticated dogs and how they evolved from wolves. “Dogs today,” the narrator pointed out, “often still show strong wolf tendencies.” The film began with a scene of actors portraying ancient hunters tossing bones and bits of meat into the darkness surrounding the glow of an open fire. Sounds of fierce animals were heard fighting and snapping their teeth.
Subsequent scenes showed the bones landing within the light and wolves rushing in to swoop up the food. The flickering image on the screen then displayed a litter of wolf pups being suckled by what seemed to be a tame she-wolf tied to a post just outside a thatched hut. Other scenes depicted half wolf canines straining against long rawhide leashes as their masters speared wild boar. Much later in the evolution process the film showed long haired, feather tailed setters crouched in front of a fleeing covey of partridge. After each such scene, modern day dogs were shown doing much of the same things. Border collies herding sheep and pointers cat walking into the scent cone of pheasants hid among corn stalks.
Quail Heaven by Rod Crossman
About three quarters of the way into the film, the classroom lights came on and the projector reels rolled to a stop. Mr. Laird, the school principal, red-faced and slightly out of breath, stepped into our classroom. I sat near the door. He looked directly at me. Everything about his demeanor was urgent. “I never thought I’d see this day come, Lane Sharp.” My heart raced. How did he know?
He began reading from a folded sheet of notebook paper, as he often did when summoning certain pupils to his office. “At 12:30 today in Dallas, Texas,” he read, “President Kennedy was assassinated.” There was other information he read, but the initial shock he gave me, and the stunning nature of the announcement, left me blank. It was a day I will never forget, the day Lee Harvey Oswald and I sinned.
On Thanksgiving Day, the year before, Mr. Reed’s bitch Red Oak Lady, “Bess,” we called her, whelped a litter of six pups. I was charged by Mr. Reed to raise the pups and “make ’em man friendly,” according to Mr. Reed. Besides their weaning and daily feeding, I walked them and held them and stroked them, and sent them out across the lower pasture. When they were out of sight, I would be silent and hide to make them use their noses and instinct to find me, and see which ones wanted to be with me.
Invariably, five of them always found me, jumped up on me and licked me. The sixth one could have cared less about me. He hunted by himself and came home by himself. They became, of all the pups I would ever raise, the strangest litter of pups I would ever encounter. Strange, because five of them were the easiest, most natural born bird dogs I’ve ever trained. The last one, however, though identical in every apparent way to his litter mates, was not only hard spirited, but mean. He would snap, bite, run up birds and eat every downed bird he found. I couldn’t break him. “Bad seed, that one,” Mr. Reed often commented. For months he had tested me, and now a year later, Mr. Reed’s patience had run out.
By Saturday morning, America had more information about the assassination. Dealey Circle, the grassy knoll and the schoolbook depository became everyday words. To others, my sin probably seemed small compared to the events taking place in Dallas, but it was swelling in me like a biscuit too many.
As a class, we had not long prior, read Profiles in Courage. We read about PT109 and how Kennedy saved a fellow crew member. He sure didn’t seem like a bad man to me. By Sunday morning, though, I heard others say, “Got what he needed.” For a 12-year-old who had recently sinned himself, the circumstances were convoluted, didn’t ring true, were hard to sort out.
Sundays in our house meant going to church—Sunday morning and Sunday night. Questions flowed as Mother and I walked to church Sunday morning.
“Why would someone kill the President?” I asked. “Why would someone kill anybody?”
“It’s our nature,” Mother answered. “We’re never far removed from our carnal nature. Man is meant to be above the animals, but sometimes we aren’t that far removed. Like that Malamute in the film, I thought, and that bad pup, still part wolf. I wondered how much wolf he still had in him. How far removed was he? How far removed was I for that matter? I held secrets that no one knew, wolf secrets.
That pup got everything the others got. He was fed with the rest of them and picked up and held just like all the others. When I put him down though, he’d run off and pull a sheet off the line or chase the cat up a tree, just mean. He held a book salesman at bay for more than an hour one day. Wasn’t until I got off the bus and collared him that the poor man could gather his chewed up papers and leave.
“You’ve got to let that kind go,” Mr. Reed told me. “That kind will always give you trouble, it’s in his nature to be bad and bad he will be. Bad seed, I tell you, bad seed.” I had heard that said about my father, too, and surely it was just a matter of time before they’d be saying it about me.
I was convinced at the time Lee Harvey Oswald was a bad seed, too, and got what was coming to a bad seed. Jack Ruby saw to that.
Mr. Reed said for me to leave that rowdy pup locked up in the horse stall and he’d “take care” of it. I didn’t, I couldn’t. The pup didn’t deserve that. I’d later wonder if Lee Harvey Oswald deserved what he got; I think not. It just didn’t seem right to punish someone or some pup who just wasn’t strong enough to deny their own wolf nature.
Mother and I walked to church again at dusk. It was less than a half mile and we seldom caught a ride. I didn’t understand at the time how the preacher knew that the wolf had come out in me at school, but he did. He preached straight to me and scared me. He preached about a man who left church one Sunday night sometime ago without getting forgiveness for his sin. The man was killed in a car wreck on his way home. He pleaded further, “Don’t leave here tonight, my friend, and take that chance.” I was in tears. My prayer wasn’t for forgiveness though, it was that Mother and I wouldn’t get run over on our way home. It was the scariest 15-minute walk I ever made.
When we did get home safely from church that night, Mother cut me a slice of pie and my heart exploded in front of her. “I cheated on the test, Mama.” The admissions of guilt and tears spilled forth quicker than her questions could be asked.
She took a soft cloth and dried my face. “That’s your conscience crying,” she said. “It’s pushing all that bad nature out. Tears… those are something the animals don’t have, you know. That’s your heart washing itself. It shows that you know right from wrong. Right from wrong, that’s something they don’t know about either. It means you’re growing up and that you’re not a bad person.”
I would be baptized in the Amite River that July but will always remember the forgiveness and cleansing I received as the guilt of my first sin was washed away by my mother’s hand.
And that pup? We kept him, Mr. Reed and me. I named him Rowdy. I talked Mother into letting him sleep in my room for a while, like he was still a wolf sleeping in a cave. He was afraid at first but came to trust me somewhat. Mother fixed a box for him to sleep in, but as dark fell, he’d get up out of the box and come to the window near my pillow and stare into the sky as I fell off to sleep. In the morning he’d be right there curled up on the floor below the windowsill.
Over the course of several months, I could see the wolf nature settle deeper into him and it seldom surfaced again. He turned out to be the best of the bunch. He wouldn’t quit, just kept going. If you knew what you were looking at, you could see his wolf gait. He never tired. Often, he’d wind scent a half mile away and go to it with his head raised, loping, weaving through the sedge grass like a wolf headed to a kill. When others tired from the heat or got cut up in rough briars and quit, Rowdy, bloody ears and all, wanted more. He was a dog man’s dog.
He never kenneled well. He slept and kept watch at our back door well into his old age. Mr. Reed never would admit it out loud, but for being such a “bad seed” he sure did breed a lot of bitches to him.
During my life I would confess many sins and have many of them confessed to me by others. “It’s good for the soul,” they say. Turned out, as I saw it, President Kennedy was a good man, too, but still just a man with faults like we all have. He didn’t deserve to be shot. Jack Ruby died in the hospital from cancer. What a hard way to go. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord,” Mother said.
That next summer as the nation gave way to the rest of the 1960s, images of hate and war and sin entered my world, often taking the form of young men being slain on foreign shores or heads being bloodied in our cities. From the day that everyone remembers as the day the President was shot, sin took on a very different and personal meaning to me. I learned that I was not beyond sinning myself. But like most of us do, I suppressed those secrets, those secrets that rush in out of the shadows to nip at our flank—those wolf secrets.
This article originally appeared in the 2022 November December issue of Sporting Classics magazine.