In Rick Bragg’s world, pet owners don’t have to visit the pound to rescue dogs. When their canines arrive at the driveway with a lot of dirt, they are exhausted and bloodied. An upset would result from two good ears.
Bragg’s people dwell in the hardscrabble foothills of northeastern Alabama and have been collecting strays for generations. They don’t name dogs right off. The wanderers might be gone or dead by week’s end.
“The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Lost and Found” (Knopf, 256 pp., ★★★½ out of four) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s latest foray into arcane southern mores. Speck, for short, is the family’s latest acquisition. Free range doesn’t do him justice. He is wild and crazy and incorrigible, harasses the livestock, attacks dump trucks and fights with fellow rescues, generally terrorizing his environs. He’ll stay in the house a whole half hour before he gets fidgety, perchance to roll all over a decaying deer carcass in the woods.
‘Where I Come From’:Rick Bragg explores complicated relationship with the South
When a deliveryman asks the inevitable question, “Does he bite?” Bragg replies, “He even bites me.”
Bragg has done it again, focusing his lyrical prose on one aspect of his Southern roots while managing to embrace much larger terrain in the process. His cast of characters encompasses not just Speck but his 83-year-old mother, his brother Sam and enough barnyard and woodland creatures to populate a decade’s worth of Disney movies.
Bragg is the only one of the family who takes Speck seriously. Perhaps because they have both been through a lot along the way. Both are in danger of losing their lives over the years. Both eat the same food, including collard greens and fried okra, cornbread, buttered beans and short ribs.
Sam, his older brother and stalwart, is diagnosed with cancer. His aversion towards Speck begins to change. He stops spitting at his head when he gets close to the source. Bragg has mastered the art of blending misery with laughter. He informs his ailing brother that he had pet Speck during chemotherapy. Sam shakes his head and replies, “That just doesn’t sound like something I would do.”
There is plenty of melancholia herein and while this may not be Bragg’s masterpiece, it still delights the senses and is as honest as the day is long. Bragg himself is in remission from cancer, and in his 60s is living in the basement of his mother’s house. He is now seeing a psychiatrist and breaking an unwritten code Southern machismo. He writes: “We do not go to therapy. We do not talk about our feelings, unless it includes a quart of Wild Turkey, or a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and then we mostly cry about our daddies.”
In the face of all of the above, Bragg launches his first solid laugh line by page three – and his prose can make the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up: “I know this is reading a lot into a dog who falls asleep in his food bowl, suffers shivering apoplexy when you rub his belly, and acts as if every wayward possum is a sign of the end of times. But I don’t think any dog knows home better than the one thrown away once already.”
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