The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Read Online Free

and I suffered if, by mischance, my father found a copy of the
Woman’s Boon Companion
hidden under the cushions of the living-room couch. With the offending magazine in his hand, my father would take the floor and subject his captive audience to concentrated and vitriolic comment on the future facing a world that allowed such sabotage of all that he held dear.
    These incidents were fortunately rare, yet they occurred from time to time when one of us grew careless. It was as the result of one such incident that Mutt came to suffer the blues.
    It began on a spring evening in the second year of Mutt’s life. Mother had had visitors for tea that afternoon, and one of the ladies had brought with her a copy of a famous woman’s magazine which she neglected to take away again.
    My father was restless that evening. He had forgotten to bring the usual armful of books home from the library. The mosquitoes were too avid to allow him to indulge in his favorite evening pastime ofstalking dandelions in the back yard. He stayed in the house, pacing aimlessly about the living room until my mother could stand it no longer.
    â€œFor Heaven’s sake, stop prowling,” she said at last. “Sit down and read a magazine – there’s one behind my chair.”
    She must have been completely preoccupied with her knitting when she spoke. It was seldom that my mother was so obtuse.
    In my bedroom, where I was writing an essay on Champlain, I vaguely heard but did not heed her words. Mutt, asleep and dreaming at my feet, heard nothing. Neither of us was prepared for the anguished cry that rang through the house a few moments later. My father’s voice was noted for its parade-ground quality even when, as in this case, the words themselves seemed quite inscrutable.
    â€œWhat the devil
do
the neighbors say when they see your dirty underwear?” he thundered.
    Mutt woke so suddenly that he banged his head painfully against my desk. Champlain vanished from my thoughts, and I wracked my mind frantically for memories of guilty deeds connected with underwear. Then we heard mother’s voice, soothing and quiet, dispelling the echoes of the blast. My heartbeat returned to normal and my curiosityled me out into the hall to peer through the living-room door.
    My father was pacing again, with a sergeant major’s tread. He was waving an open magazine in front of him and I caught a glimpse of a full-color, full-page advertisement which depicted an unspeakably dirty pair of drawers swinging like a flag of ill fame from a clothesline. Running across the page in broad crimson letters was the mortifying accusation:
THESE MAY BE YOURS!
    Mother was sitting quietly in her chair, but her lips were pursed. “Really, Angus!” she was saying. “
Control
yourself! After all, everyone has to live, and if that company can’t sell its bluing, how can
it
live?”
    My father replied with a pungent, and what I took to be an appropriate, suggestion, but Mother ignored him.
    â€œPerhaps it
is
a trifle vulgar,” she continued, “but it’s just intended to catch the reader’s attention; and it does, doesn’t it?”
    There could be no doubt that it had caught my father’s attention.
    â€œWell, then,” Mother concluded triumphantly, “you
see?
” It was the phrase with which she always clinched her arguments.
    The magazine was quietly consigned to the incinerator the next morning, and Mother and I assumed that this particular storm had blown over. We were in error, but neither of us had much knowledge of the working of the subconscious. We never guessed that the incident was still festering in some deep and hidden recess of my father’s mind.
    Summer drew on and the sloughs again grew dry and white; the young grain wizened and burned, and another season of drought was upon us. A film of dust hung continuously in the scorching air and we were never free of the gritty touch of it,