One hot Friday night in the late fifties, a station wagon full of McNairs—Mama and Daddy, three rambunctious boys under age six, and a newborn baby sister—scrunched to a stop beside a speaker at the Skyvue Drive-In Theatre in Dothan, Alabama.
We had no clue what was coming our way.
“There’s a dog movie,” Mama had said when Daddy got home from building homes all day. Mama had kids under her fingernails, kids in her hair.
A dog movie was excuse enough. It didn’t take much to flush us out of our one-bathroom house on a dirt street at the edge of the South Alabama woods in the middle of August. Going to the Skyvue was a family vacation. Mama smuggled in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hiding them under her dress as we drove through the ticket booth in case PB&Js were against the law of drive-ins.
The dog movie was Old Yeller. I went to see it giggling, wild with anticipation.
I came home crying so hard my nose ran.
This was a long time ago, and in case you don’t recall Old Yeller, I’ll remind you. But first a warning: If you ever had a dog…or if you now have a dog…or if you ever want to have a dog…you may want to skip ahead.
Otherwise, here’s the plot to Old Yeller, spoilers and all.
We’re in pioneer Texas. Boy meets Dog. Dog ain’t welcome. But Dog saves Boy’s brother from a mama bear. Dog is now very welcome. Boy names Dog “Old Yeller.”
Boy and Old Yeller hunt together, sleep together, adventure together. Old Yeller saves Boy from feral pigs with deadly tusks, but Old Yeller gets mauled. Boy loves Old Yeller back to health. Old Yeller is more welcome than ever.
But—hello, Hollywood!—a big bad wolf shows up. Old Yeller saves Boy and family from wolf. But the wolf has rabies and bites Old Yeller. This means Old Yeller will have rabies too. Just a matter of time.
Devastatingly, to save his family from rabies and Old Yeller from suffering…Boy must shoot his own dog.
Can you imagine?
That night at the Skyvue taught me one of the Big Lessons. As big as the birds and the bees. As big as Jesus Loves Me.
Love comes with heartbreak.
Life had given me a glimpse of this already in my few short years. Hadn’t I lost every pet so far?
My cat. My dog. My fish. My turtle. My parakeet. My biddy. My calf. My turkey. My grasshopper. My lightning bugs. My guinea fowl. My green snake. My owl. My possum. My jar of tadpoles. My other cat. All my cats.
Never, though, was I forced to put down a single one by my own hand. Could the world really be so cold, so cruel?
I cried for Old Yeller all the way home from the Skyvue. I sobbed all night in our little hot house on Parish Street. Mama came to sit by me, and she stayed a long time, and I pretended to stop crying. After she went to bed, I sniffled into my pillow until the sun came up.
I got up that morning, and I went to a shelf where we kept a short row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I found the one I was looking for—a novel by a writer named Fred Gipson. Old Yeller.
And that’s when Old Yeller rescued another boy.
Daddy had a big black typewriter, already an antique, in his office. Underwood. When Daddy used it, I watched in awe, electrified by the swift, sharp sword clashes of metal keys and the ominous guillotine chunk of the space bar key.
That summer morning, I climbed onto Daddy’s chair and rolled a sheet of typing paper onto the platen. I lifted the cover of the Reader’s Digest Old Yeller and put Daddy’s ashtray at the top to hold it open.
Then I started to write, copying the sentences in the book.
I wanted to write Old Yeller.
I didn’t understand exactly why, back then. But more than sixty-five years later, I have an idea.
I wanted to make people feel what I felt when I watched Old Yeller at the drive-in. I wanted to make people feel the howling sadness I had. I wanted to make people feel the way a boy must feel when, to do what’s right, he has to look down a barrel at the best friend he will ever have…and make that friend go away.
One page rolled out of the typewriter. I studied it. No capital letters—how on earth did Daddy make those? Lots of words spelled funny ways. I could read, but what did “dingy” mean? The novel said Old Yeller was a “dingy” yellow.
And mistyped words? They would just have to stay mistyped forever, no going back. I had no inkling about correction fluid like Wite-Out.
By the time Daddy got home that night, covered in sawdust, I had written forty pages of Old Yeller. At that point, I could type no more—I had battered the typewriter ribbon into a transparent spiderweb. It left only ghosts of words on the last pages.
Reader, my Daddy was a hard-driving man. He didn’t like waste. He especially didn’t like wasted money. Spare the rod and spoil the child was the eleventh commandment at our house.
But Daddy never said one word—ever—about his ravaged typewriter ribbon or the forty typed pages scattered everywhere he stepped.
He gave me a pass. Why he did remains a mystery to this day. I’m guessing now it was wisdom.
The story of Old Yeller, that story I tried so hard to tell, that I told until my fingers ached, that I yearned to cast like a spell over anybody else who ever heard its words… that story, I truly believe, once upon a time ignited a writer’s dream inside a little boy in South Alabama who went on to become a novelist.
It also made me love even more the dogs that would come later in my life. Like Bones, old the day we got him, who once gnawed a box turtle shell with his bad teeth all day long and never did make it through to the creamy nougat filling. Like Lem, who jumped off the back of our pickup twenty miles out in the country, and then showed up at the house two days later guided by some uncanny canine GPS. Like Judy, our poodle who nursed baby kittens right beside her own pups when the mama cat wasn’t looking.
But Old Yeller? He didn’t save my siblings from a bear. He didn’t save my daddy from a pack of wild boars or save my mama from a mad wolf.
He did, however, save me. And though there never was a dog like him—literally—there’ll never be another dog in my life to match him.
