I’m not sure if Grandma brought Brownie to live in the coal yard when she came to stay with us. Perhaps he was a built-in feature of the house at 145 Madeline Street in Pittsburgh. I know he was there until we moved in, and I imagine he still annoys the people in the house, unless they’ve replaced the old coal oven with a new gas heater.
All winter long, I could hear him jumping in the coal bin while I played on top of him in the living room, never leaving the hot air vent where the updraft from the furnace warmed me on very cold days. My invisible friend, Dahlia Brown, also heard about the brownie. We never got close enough to talk to him, but when we caught him coming down the cellar steps ever so gently, we caught a glimpse of the shadow of his peaked cap fluttering across the cinder block wall and disappearing into the depths of the coal bin.
Every morning I faithfully served him a saucer of cold milk, as Grandma instructed me, and when he came back later that day, he was clean as a whistle. Grandma was an expert on elf behavior. Having had numerous brownies in her past, she knew that families who treat them kindly and share their homes peacefully will be rewarded with good luck.
The only time the brownie expressed dissatisfaction with our house was when he was forced to share it with a dog. The first pet we got was Pal, the white collie puppy. Pal seemed friendly enough the day he arrived in a box from my aunt’s farm in West Virginia, but it didn’t take long for him to turn into a monster.
For the sake of neatness, Mother tried to relegate Pal to the basement for the night. As soon as she pushed him down the basement steps and closed the door, leaving him in the dark, the brownie started pestering him mercilessly. In the morning, Pal was in a state of perpetual animation. The moment the basement door opened, he came running out of the depths howling and started hurtling across the living room as if trying to shake off an invisible little man riding on his back.
The more Pal grew, the wilder he became. My father built a sturdy twelve-foot fence that surrounded our backyard. He couldn’t contain Pal. He was so distraught after her nightly encounters with the brownie that he tore down the fence and ran destructively through the neighborhood. The third time he escaped, he found a friend in Reo, the local
automotive mechanic.
Reo chewed large pieces of tobacco. I mistook them for Hershey bars and nodded enthusiastically each time he offered me a “chew.” I was happy to provide a corner for Pal in her greasy garage and couldn’t understand why we had a problem with such a quiet creature. We knew the brownie was the problem.
Our next dog, a beautiful Dalmatian, came to our house when I was six years old. Rex first appeared one winter afternoon when my father was digging out the ashes. Rex approached him shyly, tail wagging.
“Hello, friend,” my father said, before returning to our warm house.
The snow was still on the ground, but it had begun to disappear from the ground in random patches, and it was in one of those barren, muddy places, on a strip of land next to the alley, that Rex spent the night. My father saw him there again the next morning and thought it strange that the dog had not gone home.
He was there the next night… and the night after that. By now, my parents were sure he had been left nearby on purpose and needed shelter. During the Depression, money was tight and food for such a large dog was expensive, perhaps depriving a needy family of basic meals. The father believed that the dog’s owners had brought him to our neighborhood in hopes that he would find a good home there.
During the day, Rex sat sadly in our alley avoiding the ash man, as well as the ice delivery man and baker who sold their wares out of the kitchen doors facing the alley. Grandma and I watched him from the comfort of our overstuffed chair. He was convinced that he had chosen us to be his family, but she was wary.
“We don’t know anything about him,” he said. “He could belong to someone on the next street.”
“Then why don’t you go home?” I replied.
Grandma thought for a moment, then went to the kitchen cupboard and pulled out a burlap sack. “We’ll put this on the back porch and leave the door open. If the dog wants to stay, he’ll let us know by coming into the yard and sitting down.”
From his distant spot on the cold floor, Rex watched Grandma place the sack on the porch. As soon as she walked in, he bounded through the door and out onto the porch, tail wagging tentatively.
“I guess we’d better get him something to drink,” he mused. She found an unused bowl, filled it with water, and placed it by the door. She licked it dry.
Up close, we could see the outline of his ribs. “That dog needs food,” Grandma declared.
Found leftovers in the fridge. As soon as she put them out, he consumed them. By the time Dad got home from work, Grandma and I had decided the dog deserved to come in the house. Mother was less sure. The dog was disheveled from his fight with the elements, she noted. It was not known what kind of germs he harbored. The germs of the mother considered as the deadly enemy of him. At other times, the mere mention of germs silenced any further discussion on whatever topic was at hand, but now that my chin trembled and my eyes filled with tears, I looked to my father for help. Since no one was coming from that direction, he put his hands on his hips and ruled that the dog could not enter our clean house without a bathroom.
Smiles reappeared everywhere. The father had little trouble convincing the dog to enter the basement through the basement door. With some effort, he got Rex into the laundry tub and Mom, now wearing her oldest house dress, scrubbed him down. After Rex dried by the warm oven, he proved to have a beautiful, lustrous coat, and after a few weeks of constant eating, his ribs disappeared and he took on a distinguished air, not unlike the dogs in royal cars in those who fed. he was lowered.
Rex was a kind and gentle dog and wouldn’t have hurt the brownie for anything, but the brownie, remembering how Pal had invaded his sanctuary, was petulant. He worked with Rex in his insidious way until the morning Mom opened the basement door to find him foaming at the mouth, his eyes sad, as if to say, “The brownie did it.”
Our next dog traveled from Parkersburg, West Virginia, on the B&O baggage bus. It was a birthday present from my great aunt Jen, who visited us twice a year while she had her hair done at Joseph Horne’s department store.
A “grass widow” (Grandma’s polished euphemism for “divorced”), Aunt Jen didn’t notice the clock. She routinely sat up all night devouring astrology books and underlining key prophecies. On this occasion, she phoned us at three in the morning to tell us that a puppy was on the way.
“He’s a thoroughbred,” she assured my sleepy father. “His mother was a Scottish thoroughbred and his father a purebred bulldog.”
Aunt Jen never understood that her assessment of the dog’s lineage was wrong, but despite his mixed ancestry, Bruce was primarily a handsome, black little Scotsman whose only traits inherited from his wandering father were short hair and bowed front legs.
From the day we brought him home from the train station, Bruce refused to stay in the basement with the brownie. He earned his freedom from it by clawing at the door and chewing on a piece of the top step. Horrified at the thought of having to account for the damage to our rented house, Mom gave in and outfitted a box for Bruce under the Chippendale legs of the kitchen stove. There she found peace, just as the brownie was granted solitude.