Cherished by Barbara Abercrombie Read Free Book Online

around, to the very real possibility that Mr. Fluff might go to war.
    If this were a story in an anthology about manipulativeparents, I might be reaching right now for my well-worn volumes of Freud, Jung, or Alice Miller. What did my mother and father think they were doing? They were forty years old when I was born, a time when forty meant you were starting to get old. By the time they happened on Dogs for Defense, they may have felt old, and been so preoccupied with the inconvenience of Mr. Fluff that they dared not dwell on the greater inconvenience of my feelings. (I’m giving them a pass here, but this is not an anthology about manipulative parents.) They probably thought they’d discovered a brilliant solution to a nagging problem, and in a sense that was true.
    They had me where they wanted me, torn between my love for Fluffy and — I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but it’s true — my love of country. This was wartime, after all. Kids my age followed the European and Pacific campaigns avidly on the radio, in the newspapers, and in the main source of our emotional information, the war movies. Sending my dog to war had a special cachet, so I buried whatever grief I was feeling when my father told me that arrangements had been made. The army was sending someone to test Mr. Fluff for gun shyness.
    A few days later, on a Saturday morning in autumn, an army lieutenant came to our house with a clipboard in his hand and a pistol in his holster. It was only a starter’s pistol, but the bespectacled young officer was all business. He took Mr. Fluff out on the front lawn and told him to sit. Fluff sat. The lieutenant fired a blank round into the air. Fluff continued to sit, awaiting developments. The lieutenant fired again. Thesecond round startled me, but Fluff remained impassive. My dog, the officer declared, had passed his gun-shyness test with flying colors.
    A week or so later a sergeant came to take Fluff away in an olive-drab army sedan devoid of chrome. If I said that the moment of my dog’s departure was anguishing, I might be telling the truth, but that’s not how I remember it. To tell the truly terrible truth, I don’t remember the moment very well, but now I’ll give myself a pass and say that the boy I was could not have endured such a moment without putting the tightest of lids on his feelings. (At the time, my mother was doing her part for the war effort by cooking with a pressure cooker, which used less gas; the image of that appliance suddenly feels apt for me.) I do remember getting down on the carpet on my hands and knees, holding my dog’s sweet warm face close to mine, and giving him a last scratch behind his floppy ears. Then he was gone, and I had nothing to show for him but his leash and collar and his empty bowls.
    Nothing, that is, until the following January, when our mailman, Sam, brought a letter, addressed to me and marked WAR DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL BUSINESS . The return address was — or rather, is, since the envelope and its yellowed contents are sitting on my desk as I write this — Assistant K-9 Director, Cat Island RTC, Gulfport, Mississippi. The mimeographed letter, dated 19 January 1944, carries the letterhead HEADQUARTERS, CAT ISLAND WAR DOG RECEPTION AND TRAINING CENTER . Beneath it is a form message, with a few specifics typed in boldface:
    Dear Sir :
    We are pleased to inform you that your dog named Fluff , breed Cocker Spaniel , Dogs for Defense No. New Jersey 501 , has arrived at this center in good condition and has joined other dog recruits in basic training.
    You will be further cooperating in the war effort if you will refrain from writing to this Center or to the Quartermaster General requesting information as to the welfare of your dog and the program of its training. While the interest of each individual in his or her dog is a natural one, it is felt that you will readily appreciate the magnitude of the task of