Bus Tag

He was my third dog.?There had been Ceasar the German Shepherd, so protective of me that he would not let me walk, kept knocking me down on the carpet grass outside.?It was easier for Caesar to keep me out of trouble if all I could do was crawl.?So, Ceasar went to live with Robie McKnight and his family down on their farm in Leesville, Gonzales County, South Texas, where we would live near them someday.?Then there was Happy, a sweet Brittany Spaniel bred and raised by my Uncle Dick up in Nacogdoches, back in the Piney Woods of East Texas.?Happy was a great dog, and rightly named and he and I truly loved each other.?But, after we moved from San Antonio to Leesville and to our little farm way out in the country, Happy made him a friend he liked more than me, and that was Blackie, my Grandfather’s dog, possibly a Labrador retriever, who Pappy always said was probably smarter than most of the people running the country.?Blackie knew how to do anything and everything.?He could, on command, jump into the creek that ran through my Grandparent’s place, submerge and come up with a perch in his mouth, which he then proceeded to eat, sushi-style we would say now, while my Grandfather laughed.?I never saw Happy catch a fish that way, but he ran hunting rabbits and squirrels, opossums and probably even armadillos and Lord knows what else with old Blackie, and very often.??We always knew when those two had been hunting all night because they would show up at our farm, a couple of miles from my grandparents, absolutely covered in mud and grinning from ear to ear.?They had had themselves a good time, but now it was my time to squirt them both clean with a garden hose and for my Dad to let Blackie hop up in the bed of his Dodge pick-up truck so Dad could drive him back home.?Blackie was tired, and preferred to be driven.

One of the many things Blackie was really good at was killing snakes.?You had to be quick for that, and Blackie was real quick.?We would find the remains of rattlesnakes, water moccasins (the meanest snakes there are!), copperheads , and the odd and unfortunate chicken snake as well, all of them looking as though they had been run over by a lawn mower, only the lawn mower had not been run lately.??Once, when I was outside at Nonnie’s and Pappy’s (Yes, Nonnie was my Grandmother) running around barefoot as usual, playing on the swing under a big cottonwood tree, I saw a pretty looking thing, all shiny and red in the slick, dark green Saint Augustine carpet grass, and it was kind of getting closer to me and my little pink toes.?Somebody else saw it too, and a black growling slobbering blur zoomed into my line of vision and turned what Nonnie identified as a coral snake into snake cole slaw.?That was Blackie, who had been bitten so many times by so many snakes that he was immune to their venom and he was out to kill all of them, every single one.?This was an important skill that Blackie had perfected over years, and I am sure that he tried t teach it to Happy.?

But, Happy was not immune, and a snake had bitten him on the neck on one of their all-night hunting parties, and the two showed up at our place expecting us to do something about it.?A call was made, and, this time without the shower bath, Dad put those two in the back of his truck, picking Happy up because he was in so much pain. And taking them over to Nonnie’s and Pappy’s where Robie McKnight who both farmed and worked for my Grandfather as a laborer and was also pastor of a little African American Baptist Church nearby, was waiting.?Robie dearly loved dogs and he knew all about them.?He had doctored Blackie for snake-bite plenty of times when the young pup thought he was a big old dog. ?He would try to do the same for Happy, but it didn’t look good.?The bite was very swollen and high up on Happy’s neck, and it was badly infected.?But Robie tried.?We laid down some tarpaulins and Nonnie brought out some old bedding for Happy because he was going to have to be tied to one of the pieces of heavy machinery in Pappy’s shop, a ban saw I think it was, with a piece of really thick hemp rope like Pappy and his men used on their construction jobs.?The dog might be alright if he did not go out of his mind with pain and itching and get loose, and I was forbidden to go near him in hat state. But, he did get loose, and that one time, it was in the hottest part of he afternoon in that summer of the Great Drought of 1956, he showed up back at our farm by himself without his buddy, standing off in the distance, just looking at the house and then at us when we came out, and shaking violently.?Dad got the shotgun, told Mom and me to go inside, and it was over pretty quick.?

Robie had a chance to return our favor of giving him Ceasar, by driving up to our place one day pretty soon after that with a big smile on his face and a big white shorthaired dog in the back of his truck.?Out he bounded, the clumsiest dog my Mother had ever met, she proclaimed.?And he made a beeline for me, paws on my shoulders, tongue all over my face.?This ‘country bumpkin,’ again to quote Mom, never really bonded with Blackie the way Happy had, though they did get along.?Blackie would come over to visit is country cousin and mainly lay around with him in the shade of the Chinaberry Tree, contemplating the chickens and turkeys we raised, but remembering that Nonnie had broken him somehow of ever chasing her chickens, and so nothing further came of it.?Then, as one did, Blackie would inquire of my Father whether it wasn't time to drive him back to his estate, which Dad always did.?

But Tag stayed put.?That’s what we called him.?It was so obviously his name.?Tag was not interested in travel.?Tag was not interested in going hunting.?What Tag was interested in was whatever I was interested in.?If that was digging foxholes to defend us from the Japanese, Germans, North Koreans and/or Russians, that was just what he wanted to do, and he was very good at it.?If it was time to dig potatoes, Tag was good at that too.?He tagged along with me over every acre of that farm and down the lane to the Littlefields’ where I played with Mary Sue and William, and Tag was very sweet to them when they came up to play with me.?Oh, and Tag was a good watch dog “as though we need one,” Mom quipped, “with eleven Guinea hens perched in the Chinaberry Tree outside our bedroom window.”?She was never entirely sold on the idea of the farm.?

But all was well, and Tag was a good addition to our little family, though a problem arose with the onward march of time.?I had to start to school in the fall of 1957, and I had to get to school, just like the Littlefield kids, by taking a school bus that picked us up way down at the end of a lane that crossed a little creek (the ‘little creek,’ a tributary of the Guadalupe River that had overflowed and almost completely destroyed Leesville decades before).?It was a little adventure for us, and what was an adventure for us was also a very fine adventure for Tag.?Though he was no fan of riding in pickup trucks, the old beat-up school bus must have looked interesting, especially as it was chock full of children.?On the bus went Mary Sue, and William, and I, and Tag.?Poor Tag was unceremoniously dragged by the collar off the bus by the bus driver, who was also the principle of Nixon Elementary School, eleven miles away.??Mom said that she had not seen him that whole day when he followed me home at a respectful distance on my return.?Tag must have simply found someplace near where he thought the bus might bring me back, and there he stayed.?I had a serious talk with Tag the next morning before leaving to rendezvous with the Littlefields and the school bus.?He listened attentively, let me walk on ahead, but no sooner had we three kids gotten on the bus on the second day of school than in burst Tag, and out he went just as quickly.?

Mom received a stern phone call, long distance from Nixon and the principle-school bus driver, who told her in no uncertain terms that that dog would either have to be controlled by us or impounded by order of the school district.?So, Mom held on to Tag after that, and I am sure she talked to him gently, until she could hear that the bus was on its way with me in it.?But that dog was my dog, and he had a plan.?Every single afternoon Tag would leap out of the thicket, as if I did not know he was there, tail a-wagging and a big smile for me as he bounded toward his boy!?

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?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/03/2023