Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing - Hardcover

Brewer, Sonny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596920610 ISBN 13: 9781596920613

Verlag: Macadam Cage Pub, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In the same vein as Marley and Me and My Dog Skip, this “mostly true” novel is at once a whimsical campfire mystery and a universal story about the friendship between a man and his dog.

Cormac, a golden retriever who has always been afraid of thunderstorms and lightning flashes, runs away one stormy night while his master is away.

So begins a strange adventure that lands Cormac in the back of a red pickup truck driven by a mysterious woman, takes him to a series of dog pounds and rescue shelters, and ultimately brings him to the suburbs of Connecticut. His owner, meanwhile, devastated by Cormac’s disappearance and trying to juggle a family, a book tour, and writing his new novel, becomes determined to solve the “dog-napping” case. With the help of the local veterinarian, bookstore colleagues, animal rescue employees, and old friends, he picks up on Cormac’s trail and watches his small-town community come together in search of his lost companion.

Inspired by real events, and embellished only to serve the story through the spirit of imagination, Brewer has, as he says, “mainly told the truth in this story of losing my good dog Cormac.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sonny Brewer owns Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope, Alabama, and serves as board chairman of the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. He is the author of the novel The Poet of Tolstoy Park and the upcoming A Sound like Thunder.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PROLOGUE

IT ALL BEGAN with a silver and black-saddled German Shepherd. He was my first dog.

I remember it this way:
The big dog leaned all its weight against my leg. I answered by reaching out my hand to stroke the thick fur between his ears, looking into his deep mahogany eyes. He knew something was wrong, but I had no confidence to share. I turned up my face and searched my mother’s eyes hoping to find some reassurance.

She repeated her instructions, telling me to take a different school bus, telling me not to come home this afternoon on bus 50, to instead find bus 64 and show the driver the note she had just tucked into my shirt pocket. I placed my hand over the pocket, as if to press the note into the skin of my chest so I would not lose it somewhere around school or on the playground.

The only time I had ever been to Big Mama’s creepy house was when my father had taken me there, and never had I spent the night there. It had a woodshake roof going mossy green and gray walls with no paint. Almost all of my relatives and friends now had a television. She did not even have a radio. Plus, she smelled like the snuff she dipped, or she smelled like wood smoke from the black iron stove in her kitchen. She was also huge, her bosom like a fat pillow, and it seemed to me that I should not call her big to her face. My father had hit me across the face for calling Waymon Culpepper by his first name. And this seemed to me a worse thing to say, that my
grandmother was big.

And, she was not my mama.
“Who’s going to feed Rex, Mother?” I looked at my dog and his eyes brightened and his tail wagged, but tentatively.

“I will feed your dog, Sonny. Or your daddy will.”

“No. You have to feed Rex,” I demanded. “You feed him, or I’m not going on the other bus.”

“Young man! You will not speak to me like that,” she said, making fists and propping them on her hips. Then her face went soft and she pushed her fingers through her hair. “Sonny, sweetie, don’t worry about Rex. I will feed him.”

“But why do I have to go to her house?”

“It is not her house. She’s your grandmother,” mother said.My father required me to address her as Big Mama. I think that’s because she used to be married to my Pop Brewer, and “Grammy” was used by Pop Brewer’s new wife. “Look, Sonny, Big Mama’s excited to have you come for the weekend. Why you’re going is so your father and I can–well, take a break from things.Maybe drive to the lake. Just talk.”

“You mean argue?”

“No, Sonny. And I don’t like you saying that. This is a good idea, good for all of us. You stay tonight and tomorrow night at Big Mama’s house. Your daddy and I will come and get you on Sunday morning.We’ll all stay for lunch, and we’ll come home. It’s not like you’re being sent to a work camp, for goodness sake.”

“But, Mother…”

“Rex will be fine. You just be sure to get on the right bus. Mr. Owens drives bus 64.He told me himself that he will watch after you on his bus.”

“I’m eleven years old. I don’t need anybody to watch me.”

“Of course, you don’t, Sonny. It’s just that one of those Rayford boys picked a fight on that bus last week.”

“I’m not afraid of Doug Rayford,” I snapped.

“No, I don’t expect you are.” She tousled my hair and told me to go and meet my bus. “I hear it coming down the road. Better hurry.”

I stopped on the top step of the porch, the morning sun warming my face in the frosty air. I squatted and put down my books and Rex nuzzled my chest. I still could not believe, after almost six months, that he was my very own dog.He wagged his tail and licked my face. I laughed and turned my face to avoid his wet tongue. I heard the bus’s brakes screech at the Dawkins’ house just around the bend. I hugged Rex, grabbed my books, and jumped up. I told Rex to stay, and ran down the hill to meet the yellow bus.

My grandmother did not have a phone. And so I did not learn until Sunday morning that Rex had not eaten since I left.

“If there was any doubt that Rex is your dog, and your dog alone, it’s all gone now,”my mother told me.

My father had not come with her to Big Mama’s.

“That dog sat watching for the school bus the way he always does, and when it went right on past he made like he was going to chase it down. He lay in the yard until dark, watching the highway.”My mother said Rex refused the bowl of food she took out to him, that he walked away from her standing there and went underneath the house.

“Three times yesterday I looked under the house, and there he lay,” my mother told me. “I’d call him, and he’d raise his head to look at me, but he wouldn’t budge.” I sat with the two women, listening to Mama, looking at her as though she told of a hole that opened up in the ground.

“Well, I’ll declare. I reckon I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached,” Big Mama said, pushing her chair back from the table. She got up and took a dish towel from a wooden peg beneath the windowsill. She folded the threadbare cloth into a kind of potholder and, letting down the oven door, wrapped it around the handle of a heavy iron skillet. She took out the pan of cornbread and set it onto the table atop a jar lid that served as a trivet. She left the towel wrapped around the skillet handle and eased down into her chair with a hmmph and a smile.

“Now,” said Big Mama, “let’s say the blessing.” And we bowed our heads and she addressed God in a clear voice, thanking him, and asking him, “…to keep things about the way they are, if you please.” I did not close my eyes, and my eyebrows were locked together in a frown.

As soon as amen was spoken I entreated my mother to tell me more about Rex.

“Nothing more to tell, really, Sonny. He’s upset, I guess, that you aren’t there. And I reckon he’ll be fine as soon as you are.”

“But Rex didn’t eat since Friday. He’s not fine. Can we just go home?”

“Sonny, let me say something,” Big Mama said, spreading butter on a slice of cornbread. She put down the knife and the triangle of hot cornbread. She folded her hands in her lap and drew me into the warmth of her gaze. She spoke my name again. I think my troubled face might’ve softened some, but my eyes were still full.

Big Mama had walked and talked all day yesterday, asking me a thousand questions that I answered, and she had told me a thousand things about the homeplace, as she called her house and land. She had pointed out trees my father had claimed and climbed. She told me of the bull that chased her from the feeding pen just last Christmas, and that she bonged the beast on the head with her bucket.

She told how much she missed Mister Frank, as she called her husband who was like my grandfather only not really kin to me. “I can nearly about feel Mister Frank on these cool autumn evenings, ’specially at twilight when whippoorwills venture to call out from the darkening woods yonder across them hills and hollows,” Big Mama had said, pointing a crooked finger south toward the treeline a mile distant. She asked me, did Daddy still make those long hauls to the West Coast? I told her yes. It did not register with me then that we had not visited her since the middle of summer.

“That’s where...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Macadam Cage Pub
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1596920610
• ISBN 13: 9781596920613
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 228
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar