Black Ribbon

What a terrible, terrible tragedy!” Phyllis swept the air with a tiny slicker brush.
    Uninvited but not unwelcome, Phyllis was joining me in an impromptu grooming workshop. Rowdy was resting in belly-up nirvana on a beach towel while I used a porcupine brush on his inner thighs. Phyllis had coopted the steps that led up to my part of the deck as a makeshift grooming table.
    Handsome little Nigel stood patiently as she systematically back-brushed layer after layer of his lovely coat.
    “Grooming is so therapeutic, isn’t it?” Phyllis remarked softly. “What on earth would we do without our dogs!”
    “Yes, what on earth?” I agreed, momentarily interrupting my work on Rowdy’s coat to run my fingers down his neck.
    The exchange led us into a discussion of antidog legislation. Like virtually everyone else in the fancy, we opposed breed-specific legislation. One personal source of my opposition was stretched on the ground having his tummy brushed: The town that begins by outlawing pit bulls may soon create a list of prohibited breeds, a list that eventually includes the Alaskan malamute. Furthermore, as Phyllis understood, legislation forbidding the ownership of specific breeds sets a precedent for global legislation forbidding the ownership of any dog at all.
    Lifting Nigel and turning him around, she asked whether I happened to know whether the town of Rangeley had enacted any such legislation.
    “Not that I know of,” I said. “I’d be amazed. I can’t imagine... If anything, Rangeley seems like a very prodog place. There aren’t a lot of show dogs, maybe, but almost everyone hunts, so a lot of people have gun dogs, and there’s sled dog racing, pets... Besides, people around here are big on individual freedom. I can’t see them supporting legislation that would threaten their right to own dogs.”
    “That’s a dangerous assumption!” Phyllis warned me. “We absolutely must not underestimate the strength of antidog sentiment anywhere in this country!” Still diligently brushing Nigel, she added, “Take what’s just happened here. Now, on the surface, it certainly does appear to be a terrible accident, plain and simple, and nihil nisi bonum and so forth, but an accident that reasonable judgment and basic safety precautions could have prevented. But if the police feel otherwise
    We’ll see, I suppose. If that’s the case, I can’t help wondering…”
    The idea felt totally loopy. I just couldn’t see Rangeley as a hotbed of antidog activists, one or more of whom had snuck into camp and somehow caused the A-frame to crash down on Eva Spitteler. As it turned out, though, I’d initially misunderstood Phyllis. What she had in mind wasn’t an unnamed member of some hypothetical antidog conspiracy. The person she raised questions about was Everett Dow, who, I learned, had a reason to be hypersensitive about the whole subject of dogs. Furthermore, as Phyllis informed me, Everett had built the A-frame.
    “Well, you see,” Phyllis explained, “Maxine has taken him up as a sort of pet project of hers. She’s known him since I don’t know when. His father was the caretaker of her parents’ cottage. And then a couple of years ago, his wife—this one’s wife, not the father’s—was very, very ill—she had ovarian cancer, young woman, too.... Well, so, on some sort of misguided impulse... What happened was that he was in Augusta or Bangor or someplace, and he was walking past a pet shop, and on one of those horrible impulses that get people in so much trouble, he wandered in and bought a little Yorkie puppy. A present, you see—therapy for his wife’s morale. She was bedridden by then, you see. And it worked! For a day or two. I gather that she took one look, and she fell madly in love with the little dog, kept it with her... Well, you can imagine. And then after only a few days, the vomiting and the diarrhea started.”
    “Parvo,” I said. Parvovirus.
    Phyllis nodded. “And at first, they just thought, well, an upset stomach, whatever. But it finally dawned on them that something was very, very wrong, and he got the dog to the vet, and they went through what sounds like a heart-wrenching experience. The puppy’d begin to rally, then the whole thing would start up all over again. But in the end, the puppy didn’t pull through.”
    “The poor people!”
    “Wait! And a week later, the wife died. She’d been very, very ill—but this terrible experience probably did hasten her death.