Dogland | Page 6

furniture, new friends, and new swings. I considered this for hours, then asked "Mommy, will we be getting a new Daddy, too?")
Ma must have cried too as she said goodbye to her neighbors, her pink house with its pink General Electric appliances, and a life of some security, no matter how small. In South Carolina, Pa had brought home a check from the Army, and at the farm in Minnesota, he had worked part-time as a butcher, and in New Orleans, he had been paid by the owners of the horses he had trained, and later by the bank for which he had sold insurance. But now he was going to work for his dream, and dreams can't be counted on when it's time to pay your bills.
Pa sold everything that would not fit into or on top of our station wagon. When the pink house was bare, we drove away. Remembering later trips, I can guess some of the details of that one: Pa sang "Little Joe the Wrangler" and "The Streets of Laredo," and Ma sang "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and "Roll Over, Roll Over." I sang the Daniel Boone theme song, and Little Bit sang any words that passed through her mind. We ate at hamburger stands and truck stops and Mom and Pop roadside restaurants where Pop tended the grill and Mom made a special of the day in the back kitchen. We stayed in little motels run by elderly couples in partial retirement. We drove all day, departing in darkness and arriving in darkness. If we drove past something that interested any of us, we did not turn back. If we missed a road we had intended to take, Pa told Ma to find the next one that would intersect the one we wanted. In the afternoon we stopped by city parks or country streams, and Pa napped while we kids ran around, chasing each other and yelling and doing our best to get a full day's playing into half an hour. Ma sat in the shade with a magazine, sometimes reading, sometimes fanning herself, always glancing at us through large sunglasses to be sure no one was eating dirt or chasing large dogs.
That must have been the trip when Digger got his name. George Abner Nix had a metal construction crane with black rubber wheels and a movable front scoop. He played with it constantly. He rarely talked, but one of the words he knew and used was "digger," the name of his toy. Pa started calling him that, and everyone, including Digger, thought it was funny.
Little Bit got her name because she had trouble pronouncing Letitia Bette Nix. She was a tiny girl with short brown hair and big brown eyes; "Little Bit" seemed appropriate to Pa and to everyone.
I never had a nickname other than Chris. I knew I had been named for Mark Christopher Nix, my father's brother, the brother who'd taken care of him when he was little, then gone off to the Second World War, that great war that followed the Great War to End All Wars, and died a hero. I didn't know then that he'd been shot down over Italy by American forces after returning from a successful mission; I didn't know then that the good guys kill the wrong people, too. I had seen a picture of Uncle Mark looking like John Wayne in his pilot's uniform. Ma was keeping his little pin-on silver wings for me until I was old enough to take care of them. Being named for him was better than any nickname could be.
As we drove toward Florida, land of flowers, where Spanish moss and oranges grew on every tree, Pa told me Grandpa Wade and Uncle Mark stories late at night, when I had the navigator's job of keeping the driver awake while watching for the next road that we wanted, and Mom and Digger and Little Bit slept in the backseat.
Wade Nix, so far as I knew, sprang like Adam from the American Midwest at the beginning of the twentieth century. He married Bette Kalff, a girl much younger than him, and they settled on a farm in northern Minnesota among the descendants of Norwegian and Swedish pioneers. In photos, they are a small, dark, handsome couple, but they may only seem small and dark next to their tall, fair-skinned neighbors. A picture exists in which a lean, weathered farmer smiles with a laughing baby on his knee; Wade Nix died soon after meeting me, before I had a chance to remember meeting him.
The Grandpa Wade story I heard most often was from late in his life. He and Bette had taken a trailer house down to Florida for the winter. Every morning, he would go out and look at