If you love dogs or just good southern writing, read Rick Bragg’s new book, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People.
Like many of the things Bragg has written over his long career, this story will evoke both elation and anguish.
That’s because Bragg’s writing comes more from his heart than his head. He has deep passion for his family, dogs, the South, and good food. That fervor is reflected in this book and his others.
Bragg and this “terrible dog” Speck adopted each other a few years back. They were both struggling and suffering and needed the affection and comfort the other provided.
Speck generated a lot of chaos and havoc in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama where Bragg, his mother and brother lived before he captured their hearts.
This book is a love story. Not just about an imperfect dog but of a family, its roots, its way of life and the powerful bonds that hold them all together in good and awful times alike.
Books about dogs usually leave me broken hearted. The lifespan of dogs is too short. Losing dogs of my own and even stories of other people losing dogs cause me sorrow.
I put off starting this book for a few days until discovering that Bragg and Speck are still together. I’m sorry to let that cat out of the bag and apologize also for this reference to cats.
Bragg speaks often in this book and other writing about how much he dislikes cats.
My son Randy loves dogs and plans to read the book now that he knows Speck didn’t die.
Randy lost his old, gray-faced dachshund a few years ago and had not recovered when he watched the tear-jerker movie Hachi.
It is, they say, the true story of a dog in Japan that met his owner at the train station every evening for years when the man returned from work. After the owner died, the dog still waited at the station each day for nine years until his own death.
After losing his beloved dog and watching the movie, Randy said he stayed home from work for two days and grieved.
But, as Rick Bragg often says, I digress. Bragg, who has won more than 50 writing awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper columns and books like All Over but the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man, hit a rough patch a while ago.
He was diagnosed with cancer and suffered from heart and kidney failure, depression, and other health problems. As he was emerging from those difficulties, he met up in 2017 with Speck, who had big problems of his own.
Speck had been “thrown away” as Bragg described it. He was apparently someone’s pet as a pup but was dumped out and left to fight for his life in the tangled thickets and brambles of the foothills surrounding the Bragg place.
The dog started showing up to attack Bragg’s truck, terrorize farm animals, spread the stench he picked up rolling in the remains of dead creatures and sink his teeth into everything around, including Bragg several times.
Despite advice from his 83-year-old mother and older brother Sam to get rid of the dog, Bragg kept it and spent a fortune for a veterinarian to deal with Speck’s lifetime of damages.
Speck’s transition from a destructive stray to a far gentler dog that sprawls on the porch with his head resting on Bragg’s feet and plays Peek-a-Boo with Bragg’s mother is heartwarming.
Even Sam, whose battle with pancreatic cancer is an important part of the book, takes comfort toward the end in softly stroking the head of this dog that he thought was a lost cause.
The book lifted my spirits and made me laugh out loud when I was not crying.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES