Read Online My Dog Skip by Willie Morris - Free Book Online

of his life, and this angered me: he strolled audaciously among the tombstones and even jumped on top of the gray, lugubrious Darrington crypt to survey the scene. The least anxious thing to do, I concluded, was to climb into the tent and force myself to go to sleep. As I lay down on the blanket I was aware of dancing shadows and the swirling rustle of leaves. Shortly Skip climbed into the tent and snuggled next to me, and I was glad to have him there, I can tell you.
    I must have fallen into a long but fitful slumber, filled with odd, shapeless wisps of nightmares, suffused with the sound of shovels digging into earth, when I was suddenly awakened by Skip's rising from my side, and as I anxiously peered through the darkness I saw him standing at the entrance to the tent silently looking out, taut and pointing the way he did with the squirrels in the big woods. I glanced at my Woolworth's wristwatch; it said quarter to two. Icrawled toward him and looked out too. What I saw in that moment in that cemetery chilled me in the blood as nothing in my whole life ever would.
    About fifty yards away I made out the form of a battered pickup truck parked at the side of the road. Then, off to the left of it, I sighted four strange men in work clothes bending down before something. In that instant a cloud drifted away from the moon. I tried to rub the heavy sleep from my eyes. Were they actually digging up a grave?
    In my impenetrable fright I tried to ponder what to do. Skip was still standing next to me. I recalled the words in a movie I had once seen at the Dixie about the United States Military Academy at West Point:
Duty. Honor. Country.
I remembered, too, my Boy Scout oath as it related to conscience and obligation: ‘On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country/’ These words resonated now in my brain. Perhaps I could identify these insufferable grave robbers. “Let's get closer,” I whispered to Skip. “Don't make a noise.”
    Stealthily the two of us crawled in the direction of the villains. We were only twenty-five yards or so from them and hiding behind a tombstone:
Robert Stacy Yarbrough
, 1831-/899. From the farthest distance down in town I could hear the courthouse clock chiming two A.M. I glanced out again over the top of the tombstone. The silhouettes of the four figures were clear to me now. One of them had a gruesome pockmarked face, another a red mustache, but I had never once seen any of them, and from the place-nameon the license plate of their pickup truck, they were from a county many miles away
    Then, to my horror, Skip began to bark. He growled, then barked some more. I tried to put my hand around his mouth, but in the act of doing so I stumbled and fell out from behind the tombstone, then looked desperately up and realized that the men had seen us. The one with the pockmarked face began walking swiftly in our direction. In seconds he was standing over me.
    “Well, look at this!” he said. “Come join the party!” He gazed down the way. “You been sleepin’ in a
pup
tent? This is some crazy town.” He dragged me by the hand and staggered toward the pickup truck. His three companions amiably greeted me there. They were drunk as could be. My deceived eyes in the cemetery's gloom had convinced me they were robbing a grave, but what they were really doing was drinking beer out of long bottles and getting drunker all the while; I dared not ask them why they had chosen a graveyard in the middle of the night for these revels, and on quick reflection acknowledged I myself would find it difficult to explain my own presence, not to mention my dogs, in these circumstances. One of the men was feeding Skip some peanuts and potato chips and making him feel at home; and then he handed me an opened bottle of beer and told me to take a swig, which I obediently did, and then another. It tasted awful. After the deranged hallucinations of that night, one thing I did not need was beer.
    It also must