Mattie River: A Life
The Death of Mattie River

by Charles McGuigan 03.2011

Mattie River looked like a puppy when we first found her. She was small and frightened, could barely stand on her own paws. Her wants seemed so insignificant—food, water, warmth, a little love—yet it was apparent she had had none of these things for a long while. Indirectly, she led us to Shelley Whittington of Hanover County who takes in strays of all descriptions and has been doing so, along with her husband, Gary, for the past 26 years on their 20-acre farm near Farrington. Mattie made great strides over the few weeks we knew her: It really looked like she was going to make it.

We were driving toward the Mattaponi Reservation on a narrow two lane road that cuts a thin asphalt swath through farmland that was frozen and dun-colored. It was late January and there wasn’t a hint of spring and the temperature, even in the early afternoon, hovered near freezing. Rebecca saw her first coming out of a clump of woods, an island of trees and underbrush in the fallow field. She saw a little face fitted with eyes wide and dark. When I turned to look my eyes made contact with a small animal that crept out of the woods. It could have been a cat, it was that small, but when I pulled off into the drainage ditch we both realized it was a dog. It was unlike any dog I had ever seen. As I approached the dog she started moving toward me, a little beagle who at first seemed like a puppy. She had a blue merle coat and was shaking on frail hind legs. Her tail was curled back up under her. One eye was clear; the other coated with a film giving it the appearance of a raw oyster. I went back to the Jeep and grabbed a towel from the back seat and swaddled her in it then picked her up and cradled her in my arms. That’s when I noticed how thin she was. I could see the entire rosary of her spine through her pelt and every rib showed through her sides like corn rows in a field. There was no belly. She could have been used in an osteology exhibit of canines—you could see every bone that clearly.

Rebecca held her on her lap as we made our way back to Richmond. She held her like a baby and stroked the head that seemed disproportionately large for the body. This little beagle, who we named Mattie, didn’t as much as whimper during the entire trip home. 

Back at our house in Bellevue, Mattie ran with little speed to the porch next door and then moved to the safety under our porch where she found a depression in the loose soil and curled into it. After some coaxing we got her out and took her inside where she immediately found Sophie’s enclosed kitty litter and climbed into it as if it were a doghouse. She was curled among the kitty litter, she liked small confined spaces. She must have felt safety there. Rebecca noticed, when Mattie ran, that there was something wrong with her hips. “She might have been hit by a car or kicked or something,” she said.

Later in the afternoon, Rebecca tried to feed her some dog food and give her water, but Mattie wouldn’t have any of it. She opened Mattie’s mouth to look at her teeth, most of them were ground down, no points to any of them, and the dugs near her belly were distended and black. “She’s a pretty old dog,” said Rebecca and I nodded.

And that mad up our minds not to adopt Mattie. We’d been talking about getting a rescue dog but I didn’t want to get one that was real old because I didn’t want my son, who’s about ten, to go through the heartbreak of that kind of loss. Charles is very sensitive and so is my daughter Catherine, five years his senior.

It was late in the afternoon and we weren’t going to take Mattie to the pound, so we started settling in for the night ahead. Mattie didn’t make any noise, no bark, no growl, not as much as a whimper. She did shake as if cold and she kept her tail tucked up between her legs.

When it gets really cold we sometimes move the queen size mattress out of our bedroom and into the dining room where the fireplace is. We’d done it on Friday night when the temperature dropped. Sleeping in front of a roaring fire, a foot away from the mouth of the hearth, lets you tumble into deep winter dreams and never nightmares: Flames seem to burn the bad away.

Next to our bed we made a small bed for Mattie, who just lay there wrapped in a towel. Every so often she would stick her neck out and move her head toward the fire. We could both tell she loved the fire, so we kept it going through the day and the night. We scavenge wood on the alleys, half rotted limbs that I cut down to size on a chop saw I move out to the front porch. There is always free wood because of the trees in Bellevue. “How can this all be free?” Rebecca sometimes asks and we both know it’s a gift. And so too is Mattie.

Rebecca is, among other things, a nurse practitioner and she tended to Mattie as a patient, loving on her, trying to make her comfortable. On Saturday night Mattie lapped at water in a stainless steel bowl Rebecca held up to her. And then Mattie ate food, chewing it slowly with a satisfying crunch. She drank and ate some more, but Mattie didn’t pee and Rebecca was worried her kidneys had shut down. As a healer Rebecca is as good a diagnostician as any doctor I’ve ever met and her bedside manner better than any I know.

The fire was essential. One of Rebecca’s heroes, Florence Nightingale, had this to say more than one hundred years ago: “The safest atmosphere of all for a patient is a good fire and an open window, excepting in extremes of temperatures.” Because of the extreme cold, the windows were all shut, but the fire continued to roar and I fed it wood when it wanted more.

When we woke the next morning, Mattie was gone from her makeshift bed. She had risen on her own and peed on the yellow rag rug in the kitchen and pooped on my daughter’s nylon portfolio. This was something; Mattie’s plumbing was working. And that day she ate three bowls of food and lapped up three bowls of water. We moved the mattress back into the bedroom and left Mattie’s bed next to the fireplace where the wood continued to burn through day and night.

Late that night she seemed to be trying to talk or bark or murmur, but all she could get out was a sort of grunting sound deep in her throat. She did make eye contact with us and her eyes were brown and mooning. Mattie also liked the attention. She seemed to lap it up, though she still didn’t wag her tail which remained close to her torso like the landing gear on a jet. And Mattie’s coat smelled very bad, a not just the wet wool sweater fresh out of mothball smell either—this was a God awful odor like something that might be rotting. But she was too weak to bathe.

On Monday morning, after Rebecca left for work, I took her over to a nearby vet who treats animals and helps them find homes, but she was on vacation and the receptionist there told me she wouldn’t be back for a week. 

On Lakeside Avenue I checked with Nancy LeBlanc who works at Grace Underfoot and also does a lot of volunteer work with Hanover-based BARK (Bandit’s Adoption and Rescue of K-9s).

Immediately Nancy went to work and put me in touch with Shelley Whittington of Hanover County who lives right next to BARK’s headquarters out in Farrington. 

A half-hour later I was out there on an old farm site bordered by horse fencing.  Shelley greeted me and held Mattie then took her to a stable and found her a snug, warm space.

Shelley told me that she and her husband have been tending to unwanted animals for the past 26 years. “My first horse was born here he’s still out in the field,” she told me. “We have a little farm where animals seem to know to come to recover or to hang out. It’s like the word is out amongst the animals to come here and we’ll help and give them food and medicine and whatever they need. And lots of love.”

Shelley remembers the very first dog that came to her. “It was probably my hardest heartbreaker,” she said. “It was this little hound dog, it was a puppy, and I was riding my horse around the back property, and this little puppy picked me up, and started following me. I had no idea where he came from. My husband and I were young and had just bought this place. And I set this little hound dog up in a shed that day and that night it got very sick. It had distemper and ended up passing away and it just killed me. That was the very first one and I still think about it all the time. He was following me because he was sick and I happened to be there. Our paths crossed.”

Which is pretty much what happened with Rebecca and Mattie and me. We just happened to be passing on that country road at that exact moment at just the right speed. If we had been an hour later or an hour earlier, Mattie might not have been there to greet us. And had we been going a little faster we would have missed her altogether. Or if Rebecca had been looking to the left or ahead, she might never have seen Mattie.

Later that week Rebecca and I returned. As soon as Mattie heard Rebecca’s voice her tail started to wag. It was the first time any of us had ever seen her little tail come uncurled and straighten into a wag. Mattie, whose name was now Mattie River, seemed to be coming along nicely.

A few days later, Rebecca and I returned with my son in tow.  Shelley’s report was optimistic at that time. “She’s doing really good,” she told us, and then added. “I worry about her some days. I tried giving her some pain meds but they seemed to upset her stomach and she wouldn’t eat.  I think eating is a little bit more important than moving around so I cut that out and do a little bit of physical therapy now every day.”

From the manner in which Mattie acted, Shelley was able to deduce a few things about her life, reading her like a book. “I don’t think she’s ever been in a house,” Shelley told us. “Bless her little heart, she’s old, at least ten, and has had a really hard life.”

Mattie’s bowels and bladder were working and she was eating, though only when hand-fed. And Shelley confirmed what Rebecca had thought that first day. “I think it hurts her to get up because her hips were injured,” said Shelley. “She has the choice of either a heated bed or a bed with hay. She always chooses the bed with hay and I usually have to reach in there and pull her out and say let’s go outside and get her moving before she wants to eat.”

Then Shelley tells us something that Rebecca had suspected as well.  “If you hadn’t found her she would have been dead in a day or two,” Shelley said. “I really do I think she would have been gone. I’ve seen some skinny dogs in my time, but she was beyond even standing up. She was probably the worst one I ever saw.”

 We left Hanover that afternoon feeling fairly optimistic. But things declined and on the last day of February, an hour after Rebecca had left for work, Shelley called me and asked me to come out to Hanover. An itinerant vet would be there to examine Mattie and make a recommendation. 

“About what?” I asked.

“About what to do with Mattie?”

On the drive out, spring was working its way back into the world. You could see it in the coral colored blooms of the quince and bursts of sun yellow forsythia, and the tops of maple trees had turned a burnt red. I rolled down the windows well before I tooled up the drive to Shelley Whittington’s place. The air was brisk but there was a hint of moist warmth to it.

The vet prodded Mattie then listened to her breathe through a stethoscope. She then told me that Mattie’s lungs were filled with fluid and that her kidneys, now hard as two small stones, had shut down. And what’s more, there was a mass beneath her rib cage. 

Mattie was in pain and the vet said there was nothing more that could be done. So, she injected her with a sedative in her left hind leg and within a minute, Mattie’s tongue rolled out. Then the vet felt for a vein in her right front leg, just above her paw, and injected her with a cocktail that included phenobarbital. The entire time I stroked Mattie’s left flank with my palm, slowly and deliberately, with loving pressure. As I stroked her, a flurry of dander worked its way to the surface. 

She was still staring at me when the vet told me her heart had stopped. Mattie was dead fifteen seconds after the second injection. It struck me how fast life had left her. Truly a brief candle. Alive one second, dead the next, from animate to inanimate in the blink of an eye. I wanted Rebecca by my side; I wanted to talk with her, but already Shelley and her husband were preparing to dig a grave down in a hollow near a small stream. As we left the stable, a red-tailed hawk flew low over the entrance and Shelley took it as a sign. Mattie was wrapped in a blanket and carted from the stable in a wheelbarrow. Gary and Shelley worked hard with their shovels, digging deep into the clay, beneath the topsoil and the hardpan. When the whole was three feet deep, they lowered Mattie into the grave and I plucked the only flower I could find, a dandelion, and dropped it on the purple plaid blanket that covered Mattie. And then they began to shovel the dirt in and on the top of her grave they planted a small holly tree that would send its roots deep and nourish itself on Mattie. On the way home, in a field along Mountain Road I saw a beagle running toward me at full charge through a thicket of winter rye that was green as emerald and I thought about what Rebecca had said the first day we met Mattie River, “No matter what happens, we can at least give her comfort, give her food, give her warmth.” And then this: “Give her some love. Even if she only lives another day at least she’ll know somebody loved her.” That’s what Rebecca said. And Mattie gave us so much more.