Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

The Wanderer

172 l The Wanderer Tuck was the dog that came in out of the rain. He moved firmly into our lives on a wet Monday night in April 1959. Five months later, on an evening in early autumn, he moved on. I was sixteen in 1959. The night he showed up, I had been to a high school meeting that gave me an excuse to take the Studebaker and hang around Late’s Bar-B-Q for a while afterward. It was about eleven o’clock and raining hard when I drove into the open door of our garage. I hadn’t seen anything when I pulled in, but as soon as I got out of the car a dog started whimpering and jumping up. For a minute I thought it was one of our two elderly beagles, Rip and Nip. Maybe Dad had forgotten to let them in. But that couldn’t be; neither of them had enough sense to hide in the garage when it 173 rained. No, I knew from experience that when the beagles were left outside in bad weather they would huddle on the flagstones of our back porch, shivering and waiting to be remembered. I reached down and felt a short wiry coat stretched tightly over ribs I could count with a fingertip. I knelt and the dog leapt into my arms, licking my face with such passion that I had to close my eyes. Holding him, I discovered a little more: male, no collar, maybe twenty-five pounds, with generous ears that stuck up from his head like a terrier’s and then flopped down like a hound’s. I cradled him in my arms and carried him through the rain to the back door. My plan was to sneak him into the kitchen before Rip and Nip caught on, but they were way ahead of me. As soon as I eased the door open and came inside, there was a clatter of claws as the beagles skidded through the kitchen and surged down the back hall. They were flabbergasted to find someone new in their house. They walked around stiff-legged and their back hair rose in ridges, but there was no dogfight. Instead, the newcomer initiated a sniffing ceremony. He allowed himself to be investigated and then examined the beagles. Tails wagged all around, and it appeared that they were going to get along. I shut the beagles in the dining room so I could be alone in the kitchen with the little dog. I sat down on the linoleum floor and he climbed into my lap. He was brown and black, with a coat as dense and curly as steel wool. I guessed he was a cross between a hound of some kind and a wire-haired fox terrier, and probably not more than a year old. After a couple of minutes he hopped off my lap and sat in front of our Coldspot refrigerator, looking expectantly over his shoulder at me, then at the fridge, then at me again. It had taken months for Rip and Nip to learn what refrigerators were for, but this skinny character had guessed right the first time. TheWanderer 174 TheWanderer I poured a bowl of milk and gave him a slice of leftover roast beef. He disposed of the beef in four bites and was noisily lapping the milk when Mom came down from upstairs, tying the sash of her faded red chenille bathrobe. “What in the world?” she said. He looked up at her, his whiskers dripping milk, and turned on his flop-eared charm. “Aww,” Mom said. “Dave, come down here and see what we’ve got.” Dad came into the kitchen, putting on a wool shirt over his pajamas . As he sat down at the kitchen table and picked up his pipe, I explained what had happened to the beef. “Oh, poor little thing,” Mom said. “Look at him, he’s still hungry. I’ll make him a real supper.” She took a pan of chicken broth from the Coldspot and warmed it on the stove. When it steamed, she poured it over a bowl of Gro-Pup and the stranger tore into the hot, wet kibbles, crunching and slobbering. The beagles whined from the dining room. They never got broth on their Gro-Pup. “God, listen to him eat,” Dad said. “It’s like feeding...