A Man and His Dog

“Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen-door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the FedEx man, picking fights with livestock, and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon.”

If you haven’t figured out yet that Speck is a dog, welcome to Rick Bragg’s latest book The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People.

Here we meet The Speckled Beauty, or Speck, as Bragg and his family call him. He’s a stray who wanders into their lives, makes himself at home in terms of eating and sleeping, and otherwise is about as crazed, rambunctious, and wild as a dog can be. At the beginning of this memoir, Bragg tells us that when Speck intercepts Bragg’s pickup “halfway up the drive,” he goes ballistic: “He yowls, twists, and bounces to a hard stop right on some mark only he can find, usually smack-dab in a red-ant bed or mudhole ….”

To those familiar with “The Andy Griffith Show” of the 1960s, Speck is the canine version of that show’s wild man from the hills, Ernest T. Bass. Speck chases farm animals, runs off into the woods to track some creature no one else sees or hears, and seems like a pain in the derriere who is way more trouble than he’s worth. In some respects, The Speckled Beauty offers a litany of complaints about a dog who irritates just about everybody.

And yet …  and yet ….

At one point, Bragg’s brother Sam, having watched the dog interact with Rick, comments, “If something happens to you, that dog will grieve himself to death.”

His brother then gets up and goes inside the house. Bragg then comments: “The dog looked at me with his bad eye.”

“Well, hell, I thought.”

If we look at the subtitle to The Speckled Beauty, we see that this memoir of a man and his dog is also about “his people,” in this case Bragg’s mother and Sam. His mother has “spent most of her life alone, the rest propping up sorry men,” but she’s also sharp and humorous, sometimes unintentionally so. At one point, she pulls off her hat to show her son her new haircut, which is a bit ragged.

“‘Who cut it?’ I asked.

“‘Me and Jesus,’ she said.”

Early on in the book, we learn that Bragg is in remission from blood cancer—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Later, he recounts a conversation he’d had with Sam, who is also battling cancer. Thinking of his possible death and of his brother’s success as an author, Sam says with regret, “The one thing I hate is that I ain’t got no legacy. I mean, you’ve got the books, when you die.”

Rick assures Sam that in fact he will leave behind a fine legacy, telling him that friends and neighbors will mourn his passing and that they’ll say, “Sam Bragg is a good man … and I’ve heard a woman or two say you used to be good-looking, once.” Rick then reminds Sam, “You’re the guy they depend on when things go bad, when they need someone to pull them out of the ditch, or clear the road with your chainsaw, or jump them off in the middle of the night ….”

As we read about Sam in this memoir, we realize that Bragg is absolutely right, that his brother is a man with a good heart and possessed of that native intelligence so common in our rural communities. We admire him for his competence, his skill at fishing and hunting, fixing machinery, and caring for dogs.

Bragg’s sense of humor frequently softens these meditations on sickness and death. Here, for instance, he offers some thoughts on stress and depression:

“My people do not go to psychiatrists, though they will hang a dead snake on a fence to make it rain, or pay a woman named Sadie five dollars to tell their fortune by gazing into the dregs of a coffee cup. We don’t walk around telling people we are depressed, or that we suffer from anxiety. If a person gets down, they keep on working, living. It’s not real if you can’t put a cast on it, or a built-up shoe, or a truss.”

Rick Bragg and his people—how I love those old Southern words “his people,” bringing to mind family and friends—may not go to psychiatrists, but Bragg does go to his dog Speck for conversation and comfort. Near the end of the book, he writes:

“We talk every night on the steps outside the kitchen door, and when I cannot sleep we talk again, sometimes into the early morning, or till he hears a booger out there in the dark and crashes up the mountain after it. I won’t go inside while he is out there, and sometimes I nod off there on the steps and only wake up when he sticks his cold nose in my ear or in my eye.”

The Speckled Beauty is not just for dog lovers. It offers lessons to all of us, and humor, and the wisdom of a lifetime. Come sit on the porch, Rick Bragg says to his readers, and I’ll tell you some stories.

And what could be better than that?