The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

DOGSTAR MAN Nancy Willard

When I was twelve years old, my father, who rarely touched anything stronger than 7UP, got mildly drunk with a man named Olaf Starr who kept a dog team. This happened in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up. My father, Carl Theophilus, owned the Treble and Bass Music Store there. Maybe you’ve heard of it. The store carried accordions, drums, trumpets, harmonicas, guitars, pitch pipes, tambourines, and sheet music. Five free lessons came with all the instruments, except the harmonica, and my father built a tiny soundproof practice room in the back. Saturday mornings a boy from Madison High School came to give the free lessons to languid young girls, who emerged from the practice room sweaty and bright-eyed, all of them promising to practice. My father also repaired instruments. By the time I was in high school, he’d sold the business and was doing repairs full time and making lutes, dulcimers, and Irish harps on commission.

He kept shelves of exotic woods, rosewood and purple heart, teak and lignum vitae. One man ordered a guitar made of lignum vitae for his son, who played in a rock band and smashed his instrument every night, but by God, he wouldn’t be smashing this one. Mainly my father stocked the commoner varieties, basswood and oak and black cherry and ash, which he used for the curved bodies of the lutes and the harps. He also had a few odd pieces of golden chinkapin and water tupulo, hornbeam and hackleberry, for which there wasn’t much demand except when he did inlay work on the sound holes of the lutes. You never knew, he said, what a customer would ask for. He wouldn’t work with ivory, out of respect for the elephants, though he has always loved Chinese ivory carvings, especially those that keep the shape of the tusk. I believe there’s not a book on Asian art in the Madison public library that my father hasn’t checked out.

Olaf Starr lived outside of Madison on land that his father had once farmed. All the Starr Cheese in Wisconsin was made there, and it was a big business in the thirties and forties. That ended when Olaf took over. Forty years later, when I was growing up, the house was gone and the barn that stood in the north acre was in ruins; snow had caved in the roof, leaving a confusion of broken timber in its wake that made me feel I was peering into the stomach of a vast beast. The windows of the stable were broken, and stars winked through the holes left by shingles that had blown or rotted off. Over the stalls, you could still read the names of horses: Beauty; Misty; Athena. Behind the stable, Olaf Starr parked his pickup truck.

On the south acre, Olaf had built himself a log cabin and a dog yard, with seven small cabins, low to the ground, for his dogs. After a heavy snowfall, he would hitch them up and drive to a general store just in town. No one else in Madison drove a dogsled. Mornings when I went out cross-country skiing on the golf course behind our house, I might catch a glimpse of him on the horizon, his dogs strung out in a thin line, like Christmas lights, with Olaf Starr standing on the back runners of the sled. I called him the dogstar man, and I half expected to see him drive into the heavens. He was a big man, with white hair, who carried a knapsack and wore the same Levi’s, suspenders, down jacket and boots, day after day, shedding the jacket in summer, resurrecting it at the first snowfall.

My father said that the dogstar man’s wife had left long ago for a more comfortable life of her own, so during the one night I spent at the cabin I never met or saw any evidence of her. I was in sixth grade and trying to write a report on cheese as part of a unit on agriculture. I did not like agriculture, which was a vast general thing. You could not put anything in the report about how cows look, standing in a rolling field, though that is so important it should come first. From far away, they look like ciphers that someone has written with a thick brown pen, and I wished I could write my whole report using the ponderous alphabet of cows. And you could not put in anything about the hiss of milk in the pail, or the salt licks that rise in the fields like dolmens or ancient shrines, and you could not put in the peculiar appetites of goats for wind-dried bedsheets on the line and children’s sunsuits and anything scented with human use.

So I asked the teacher, Mrs. Hanson, if I could write a story about cheese, and she said, yes, but it could not be a fairy tale. The cheese must not talk or sing or dance or have adventures. The story must be about how cheese is made. I could write that story.

I did not know the first thing about how cheese is made. My father told me to go to the library and find a book that would tell me. But my mother said, “Go and watch somebody making it. That’s better than a book.” My father agreed and suggested I call the Wisconsin Wilderness processing plant to see if they gave tours.

Suddenly my parents had the same thought at the same time and said almost in unison.

“Olaf Starr makes cheese. He’d be glad to show you.”

The dogstar man had no phone, so on Saturday afternoon my father drove out to the farm. Ten inches of snow had fallen a week ago, and the cold had kept it on the ground, though the main roads were clear. My father turned off 1-90 and took the road less traveled. The dogsled track cut a deep ribbon across the white fields on either side of us, and where the road ended at the broken barn and we got out of the car, the sled track disappeared into a pine woods.

You could hear the dogs yapping and yelping. A hundred seemed a modest estimate.

“We should’ve brought our skis,” said my father.

That would have been far easier than walking in, which took us twice as long. I’d seen the outside of the dogstar man’s house in summer but not in winter, and I’d never seen the inside.

In the dog yard, seven hounds sat on the roofs of their houses and barked at us, and the hair on my neck prickled in a primitive response to danger.

“They’re tied,” said my father.

Only when I saw that they could not spring far from the stakes to which they were leashed did I begin to savor the adventure of doing something entirely new. I thought of our yard, so small and neat that when my mother bought two metal lawn chairs and a patio umbrella, my father complained of the clutter. The dogstar man’s yard was a sprawl of empty cable spools, old oil drums, ropes, ski poles, harnesses and the dogsled itself, which hung from a row of pegs on the cabin wall. The grass on the sod roof was blond.

The dogstar man, hearing the racket, opened the door. He knew my father as a man who ordered firewood from him; he was surprised to see both of us on his doorstep. His face remained perfectly impassive as my father explained our errand while I stared at Olaf Starr with the greatest interest, as if I were examining a hawk or an otter, some wild creature always seen in motion and from a distance.

A brief silence marked the end of my father’s speech, and when the dogstar man was quite certain it was the end, he nodded and motioned us into his house. It was not so much a house as a lair, a den, that an animal might make and stock with all that instinct told him would carry him through the winter. Firewood was stacked solid against one wall. Against the opposite wall stood five fifty-gallon drums of water, a shelf of dishes and crocks and large cooking pots, a treadle sewing machine, and a dozen huge bags of dog food.

From under the four burners on the surface of the wood stove shone a thin rim of fire. The flame in the oil lamp on the table danced in its glass chimney with such shifting brilliance that the air in the cabin seemed to be alive and breathing, steadily and quietly.

My father and I drew two stools up to the table.

The dogstar man took down a large crock and set it on the table between us.

The secret of cheese is patience, he said. “Cheese has taught me everything I know about life.”

He set three spoons and three brass bowls of different sizes on the table.

I traded a year s supply of firewood to a professor at the university for these. And when I got them home, I made a discovery. Listen.”

He brushed his hand over the rim of the largest and a deep hum filled the room.

He brushed the smallest and a higher hum, a fifth above the first, spun out of it. He brushed the last bowl, and it sent forth a note that completed the triad. But if I say the bowls hummed, I do not tell you how they hummed. Not like a cat or a spinning wheel, but like a planet whirling down the dark aisles of the galaxy.

“The best way to make cheese is, put it in singing bowls,” said the dogstar man. “This is also the best way to eat it. ”

He dipped a spoon into the crock and began to ladle cottage cheese from the crock into the bowls.

“Also,” he said, “the voice of the bowls quiets the dogs.”

My father, astonished into silence by all these marvels, found his voice.

“But these are singing bowls from Tibet,” he exclaimed. “I’m sure they’re worth a good deal of money. If you ever want to sell them, come to me with a price.”

“But I won’t sell them,” said the dogstar man. “I’ll trade them for something I need.”

“What do you need?” asked my father.

“Nothing now,” he said, “but next week, dog food. I buy dog food by the ton. Ground barley is good,” he mused, “and fish meal.”

He spooned cottage cheese from the crock into the bowls.

“When I was at the university, I didn’t study at all.”

“You went to the university?” exclaimed my father.

“For one year, in 1927. And when my father asked me what I was majoring in I told him I wanted to major in philosophy. Philosophy! He didn’t understand about philosophy. I told him that philosophers consider problems of time and what is the true good. I told him it was like majoring in cheese; something solid emerges from what is thin and without definition.”

The whole of our visit, he talked and talked—and not one word about how to make cheese. The next day my mother took me to the public library where the Encyclopaedia Britannica revealed to me the secret of making cheese. In my report, I mentioned rennet and casein. I did not mention singing bowls, and I did not write a story. I got my report back with praise from Mrs. Hanson written across the top: Good work, Sam! You put in a lot of information and you stuck to your subject.

The next afternoon the dogstar man appeared in my father’s music store. He admired the guitars, the accordions, the new shipment of tambourines, and asked him if he could make a whistle that the dogs could hear from a great distance.

“How great a distance?” asked my father.

The dogstar man opened his pack, drew out a map of the United States, and spread it out on the counter.

“Here,” he said. “I’m planning to visit my sister, and I want my dogs to know I’m thinking of them.”

And he put his thumb down on the whole state of Florida.

In three days, my father finished the whistle, and the dogstar man drew from his pack the largest singing bowl and gave it to him. It was as if an honored guest had moved in with us. My father made a little house for the bowl to sit in, a replica of a Tibetan spirit house, he said. This he put on top of the china cabinet.

Once a day the bowl was played. Sometimes my mother played it, sometimes I played it, and sometimes he played it himself. Often I dreamed of whales singing, a music I did not yet know existed.

A week later the dogstar man returned and said he wanted to exchange the whistle that called dogs for one that called birds. So many of the birds he loved had gone south. He wanted to let them know he’d welcome them back any time, if the warm countries weren’t to their liking.

“Why did you tell me to make a whistle that calls dogs if you wanted one that calls birds?” asked my father.

The dogstar man was interested in more practical questions.

“Can you fix it so it will call both?”

My father said he would try. He added a section of wingwood with a dovetail joint that was nearly invisible, and the dogstar man was very pleased and said it was exactly what he wanted. He reached into his knapsack and pulled out the medium-sized singing bowl. My father closed the shop and carried it home at once and nested it in the other bowl, in the little spirit house.

The bowls were not beautiful but they were immensely present, and when we ate in the dining room we were always aware of them, and we did not complain about the cold weather or who should have taken out the garbage the night before. No, we were pleasant to one another, in the way that people are pleasant before a guest or stranger to whom they wish to show their best side.

A postcard arrived from Paradise, Florida, showing the roseate spoonbill in glorious flight. The dogstar man’s message was brief: “It works!”

Three days before Christmas, the dogstar man appeared again, holding the whistle.

“This whistle,” he said. “I wonder if you could fix it.”

“In what way is it broken?” asked my father.

“It’s not broken,” the dogstar man assured him. “I just wonder if you could improve it.”

“Improve it?”

“I was wondering,” said the dogstar man, “if you could fix it so it would call stars.”

“Stars!”

“I thought I’d get me in some ice fishing. The fish do like clear nights best.”

My father took the whistle back. The section he added this time was purely ornamental. He cut it from coral, which has no resonating properties, and he vowed to go the dogstar man one better. He added a link of hornbeam, on which young stags love to rub their budding antlers; and a link of alder, which beavers prefer above all other trees for building dams; and a link of mulberry, whose small dark fruit the wood mouse loves. He did not cut these links into simple rings but joined them in interlocking shapes, pieced with bits of shell and horn, bone and silver.

On a Saturday morning, when I was helping my father put new price stickers on the sheet music, the dogstar man arrived, and my father gave him the improved whistle and waited for some sign of praise, a whistle of admiration, perhaps.

But the dogstar man said nothing about my father’s exquisite workmanship. He tucked the whistle into his breast pocket and reached into his knapsack and took out the smallest singing bowl and set it on the counter.

Then he looked at me and said, “Do you like books?”

“Sure,” I said. I never say no to a book.

Out of his knapsack he pulled a volume bound in leather softer than the chamois my father used to polish the violins. When he put it into my hands, I felt he had just given me a small animal seldom seen and beautiful to the blind who see with their fingers.

I opened it to the title page: Palmer Cox’s Juvenile Budget, Containing Queer People with Paws, Claws, Wings, Stings, and Others Without Either.

“This book was mine when I was your age,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

I flipped through the book and thought, What a god-awful present. The stories, all of them in poetry and small print, were crammed on the yellowing pages, and the illustrations, done in scratchy pen and ink, crowded into the text as best they could. Still, I was the kind of kid who would read anything, and I knew I would have a go at the Juvenile Budget. But I could not say it gladdened my heart.

“Thank you,” I said.

My father had the habit of carrying the spirit house, with its nested singing bowls, from room to room, to keep them near him. On Christmas Eve he put them on the mantel to watch over the tree. Of course I did not believe in Santa Claus, but I played the game and so did my mother and father. Growing up is watching faith descend to the level of a beloved ritual.

At nine o’clock I put my two presents under the tree: a Sheaffer pen, which I bought at the drugstore, and a pillow with the name Jerry Garcia embroidered on it, which I made in school after the principal went to a conference on new trends in education and became convinced that boys should take home ec for one semester while the girls took shop. I was not convinced. I would never make one of those sleek, useful projects the teacher recommended. I would not even make a pattern. The pillow turned out to be the size of an overgrown pincushion, nothing you’d choose to sit on, unless you had hemorrhoids. I knew Mother would love it because it looked handmade.

The card said, “For Mother and Father,” as the pen and pillow were suitable for both.

At ten o’clock, when I announced I was going up to bed, so as not to displease Santa, my mother looked relieved. She had all the presents to wrap yet. I hung my stocking under the singing bowls and was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang and the door, which was unlocked, burst open.

The dogstar man filled the front hall with his enthusiasm. He’d spent the day ice fishing on Waubesa Lake. He’d pulled from the still, chill bottom of the lake three bass, two trout, a sunfish, and a pike, and he was the first person in the county to catch a two-point buck with a fishhook. He’d brought in enough meat to feed himself the rest of the winter.

He pulled out a bottle of schnapps and presented it to my father and lingered, waiting for him to open it.

I could not possibly go to bed now. I might miss something.

My father and the dogstar man sat down at the dining room table and drank. That is to say, the dogstar man drank a lot and my father nursed a single shot glass, which was nevertheless enough to skew his judgment. He did not even remember to bring his singing bowls with him.

“All I own of value in this world is my sled and my dogs,” said the dogstar man, “and when I am gone, no man is worthier to have them than yourself. Give me pen and paper, and I will write my will.”

Every shred of scrap paper, which usually cluttered around the telephone, had vanished from sight, and my father could find nothing better than a circular for a grand sale at Happy Jack’s—“Everything must go, to the bare walls. ” The dogstar man turned it over, and on the blank side wrote his will, making my father heir to seven dogs. He ended by writing out the names of the dogs, along with their rank in harness.

Then he turned to me and my mother.

“I’ve left space for you to sign. Two witnesses.”

To humor him, my mother signed. I signed because I’d never been asked to witness anything before and I did not want to pass up this opportunity. Without reading it over, the dogstar man pocketed his will, shook hands with each of us and took his unsteady leave, and my father and mother thought no more on the matter.

At midnight on Christmas Eve, the snow started falling, and it did not stop until the next afternoon. And then, quite unexpectedly, it turned warm.

The day before New Year’s Eve, the dogstar man disappeared. A skier, hearing the howling and baying of seven ravenous huskies, called the police. Because the snow around the dog yard was deep and undisturbed by human tracks, the police broke into the dogstar man’s cabin. The presence of the will on the kitchen table suggested suicide, but the circumstances of his death convinced them otherwise. At the lake they found the dogstar man’s pickup truck. On the ice they found the shelter he’d built. The current ran strong under the thin ice where the shore curved toward the jagged hole in the ice, through which they concluded he had fallen. They did not find the man himself. It is hard to grieve for a man who has disappeared and who might return someday. I think my father and mother expected to receive another postcard from him. We did not really believe he was dead until the sheriff stopped by our house and asked my father to come and fetch his dogs.

Seven dogs at a stroke! Neither my father nor my mother knew the first thing about caring for dogs. Days of lawn chairs and umbrellas, farewell! My father bought a book called Your Sled Dogs and How to Care for Them and hired a man to put in seven tethering stakes and help him move the sled and bags of dog food and the doghouses into the backyard. Then he phoned a veterinarian, Dr. James Herrgott, and told him what had befallen us.

Dr. Herrgott made a house call and examined the dogs. From the kitchen window, we watched him, a tall lean figure in a wool cap and down jacket and boots and Levi’s with holes in the knees. One by one, he knelt before each dog, examined its fur, its eyes, the lining of its mouth.

Wrapped in an aura of cold air, he sat down at our kitchen table and told us what we owned. Finn McCool and John Kennedy and Melville and Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were young dogs, between two and three years old, all mixed-breed huskies. Hermes was at least five years old and part Siberian husky.

“One of the big old-style freighting dogs,” he observed. “Most mushers nowadays like the smaller breeds.”

My father looked terrified. For the first time, I perceived a weakness in him and a superior strength in myself, and I took on the job of feeding the dogs in the morning. This meant rising at six instead of seven; ten minutes’ snoozing and I’d miss the school bus. The front door slamming shut in the milky light before dawn would wake them, and by the time I’d hauled the big canister of dog food into the yard, they would be yapping and tugging at their chains and stretching, their tails switching and waving like flags. The smell of their food—a thin yellow gruel of ground barley and fish meal and fat, which I ladled into deep tin bowls—made my father nauseous.

After school I fed them again and fetched a shovel and cleaned the dog yard.

My mother assigned herself the task of putting fresh hay in the doghouses. That was a fragrant and pleasant occupation; the dogs would crawl into the hay and move round and round, hollowing it into a nest.

Sometimes my father ran the dogs and sometimes I did it, but soon he relinquished that job too, because I enjoyed doing it and he did not. The intricate maneuvers of running dogs in harness daunted him. He could never remember who hated whom and what dogs got on well together.

After school I slipped their harnesses on and hitched them to the sled and we headed for the golf course behind the house. I never saw snow so deep that Hermes could not break a trail in it. When we crossed the frozen stream at the back of the course, the clicking of their toenails on the ice always startled them. I loved the crossing; the shadow we cast on that bright surface made a grand sight.

In February the temperature fell to thirty-five below and stayed there. My mother could not bear to leave any animal outside in that weather. My father reminded her that we had no basement, no garage, no shed of any kind.

“We have a big living room,” she said. “We could partition it. Half for the dogs and half for us.”

She kept after him till he put a chain-link fence down the middle of the living room, while my mother took out the rug and the furniture. From then on, the dogs slept indoors. A maze of smaller fences separated them from each other. The gates on these fences were never locked. When I stayed up to watch the Saturday-night movie in the living room with my parents, the loping and breathing and snuffling and growling did not bother my mother or me, but it drove my father wild. I think he could have gotten used to this, but something happened to me that changed everything for all of us.

I got the flu, the kind that keeps you in bed for two weeks. I felt as if someone had sucked all the strength out of me and left me on the small white shore of my bed to find my way back to health. My father took over my tasks and did them, in his own way.

He exercised the dogs, but he did not take out the sled. He walked them singly. Of course, as he pointed out to me, he could not walk seven dogs every day. My mother walked them when she had time, but she reminded him that the dogstar man had willed them to my father, not to us.

He fed the dogs, but he refused to handle the fish meal and fat, and he bought canned meat and dehydrated chicken kibbles in hundred-pound bags that scarcely lasted a week. Soon the dogs were demanding four meals a day and howling at night. My mother found that if she opened the gate in the living room fence, the dogs grew quiet. After everyone was in bed, they would leave their quarters and gather in my room.

It is not easy sleeping with seven dogs, even when you love them. In the safety of my bedroom they went on dreaming of their old fears, just as I went on dreaming of mine. Roused by a remembered injury, Lou Gehrig would leap out of sleep and sink his teeth into John Kennedy’s neck, and I would fly out of bed to part them. When sled dogs fight, generations of jackals and wolves snarl in their blood. All night part of my mind stayed awake, listening for the low growl that signaled the beginning of a quarrel. When morning came, I never felt rested.

And Melville got sick. His fur fell out in odd patches, though my mother washed him with Castile soap and sponged his legs, chest, face, and tail with a special foam that Dr. Herrgott recommended for shedding animals.

A thaw surprised us in February, and my mother agreed to let the dogs sleep in the yard again. But the dogs had caught the scent of being human and could not get enough of it. From darkness till dawn they howled. I was back in school but not strong enough to take over caring for the dogs, and I suppose it was the howling and complaints from the neighbors that finally drove my father to make what he warned me was an important announcement.

“I’m going to sell Olafs dogs. I can’t afford to keep them.”

We had just sat down to dinner, and he looked at me to see how I would take his words. I said nothing.

“We’ll only sell them to someone who can really take care of them,” said my mother.

That night I fell asleep to the howling of the dogs. What woke me was a silence so sinister that I jumped out of bed and hurried to the window, certain they’d been poisoned. My heart nearly thudded through my chest when I saw someone was indeed in the yard. He was unchaining them. First John Kennedy, then Babe Ruth, then Hermes.

I never thought of calling my father. No, I pulled on my clothes, snatched my jacket from the bedpost, and marched out into the yard. When the thief turned his face toward me, I was speechless with fright.

“I’ve come for my dogs,” said the dogstar man. “They miss me, and I miss them.”

“You’re dead,” I whispered. My teeth were chattering. “You fell through the ice and drowned.”

“That’s true,” said the dogstar man. And he went on unchaining them. They were lining up, letting him slip the harnesses over them, taking their old places. Hermes first, then Finn McCool and Melville in the second spot, then Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and in the last position, Eleanor Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

“If you’re dead, how are you going to take your dogs?”

“Easy,” said the dogstar man. “They can cross over. Didn’t you know that? Didn’t they teach you anything?”

The dogsled was leaning against the back of the house, and he pulled it down, hitched the dogs to it, and took his place on the back runners. He beckoned me over.

“For you,” he said. “I don’t need this where I’m going.”

And he dropped the whistle my father had made into my hand.