Stories & Pictures
The Dog by the Cradle, The Serpent Beneath by Erika Ritter
Beautiful Joe Heritage Society
An excerpt from the upcoming book by Canadian Author Erika Ritter.
Below is a wonderful excerpt from Erika Ritter's latest book, which refers to her experience with the Beautiful Joe story.
My new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath, takes an ancient story about a faithful dog wrongly punished for killing a snake and uses it as a way of examining humanity's long and sometimes contradictory relationship with animals. The actual burial place of the dog in the old, old tale became, at one point in history, the focal point of rituals seeking the dog's intervention to cure ailing children.
A very different, but equally rare, example of a memorial to an animal is "Beautiful Joe Park". The novel Beautiful Joe and the dog himself figure into my own book in a number of chapters. Here, in one of my favourite excerpts about Joe, I describe how it feels to visit the grave of a heroic character from the literature of childhood:
Within humans as individuals, as much as within our entire species, the pattern of our quests are set early. My own adult pilgrimage to the heart of the paradox of animals and us began with a story about a dog and a serpent that I read in childhood. But the seeds of that quest may have been sown even earlier by another book: Margaret Marshall Saunders' Beautiful Joe. It was many years before I realized that the dog at the centre of Saunders' novel had actually existed. And many more years passed before I learned that Joe's gravesite had not only been preserved, it had become the centre piece of a public memorial in Meaford, Ontario.
When I finally made the trip to Beautiful Joe's grave, seeing that actual plot of earth surrounded by a fence gave me an unexpected jolt. It was a feeling similar to what I could recall of my first visit to Boston, walking along the "Freedom Trail" and coming upon a small tombstone inscribed "Paul Revere."
Like Beautiful Joe, Paul Revere was a character I had met through childhood reading, at an age when the lines between fact and fiction are notoriously blurry. Somehow, I had not thought of Revere as someone who had actually lived--until I saw proof that he had actually died.
By the time the real-life Beautiful Joe passed on, just over a hundred years ago, Margaret Marshall Saunders' novel had already made him famous. But "Beautiful Joe Park" in Meaford has been known by that name only since the 1960s. It was the mid 1990s before a local heritage society formed to try to widen recognition of the park and sustain interest in a book already a century old. And it has been just in the last decade or so that a board really committed to that mission has been in place.
Next to the gates of "Beautiful Joe Park" is a small pink house where a family named Moore once lived. Joe came into that house pretty much as described in the 1893 novel by Margaret Saunders, an in-law who met him when she visited the Moores from the Maritimes. Mutilated as a young dog by a brutish owner, Joe was rescued and lived with the Moores until a ripe old age. The fenced gravestone that's now within park perimeter is where the family buried Joe in the early 1900s.
To look down at the grave and imagine those mouldered bones lying beneath that ground gives rise to feelings more complex, in their way, than the contemplation of the tombstone of Paul Revere--or, for that matter, William Shakespeare or Peter the Great or Tutankamen. Death reduces us all, of course, great and small. But because a dog is so comparatively inconsequential to begin with, Joe actually seems magnified by this unusual homage to his earthly remains.
Here he is, with a park named for him, a marked gravesite and--since 2006--a bronze sculpture of himself on a pedestal at the entrance. Joe makes his claim to fame not on the basis of what he did, but what was done to him--in his case, by the anonymous brute immortalized as "Jenkins the milkman" in Saunders' novel.
In its hey-day, Beautiful Joe became the first Canadian novel to sell more than a million copies. For years after, it continued to top children's book lists around the world. And what "Beautiful Joe Park" continues to affirm is the truth behind the tale. There once was such a dog abused in such a way, who was taken in by a family of animal-lovers, given a happy home, and christened "Beautiful" Joe because the mutilations to his body had left him so ugly. Even now, when people journey to the place where the dog is buried it is for the affirmation the story affords: A moment's terrible injury may be requited by an eternity of benefice; the reward of humble service may be lofty renown; what begins in brutality, and bitter, bitter silence may end in peace, amity and--at long last, the sweet repose of home.
--excerpted from The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships, by Erika Ritter. Published by Key Porter Books, February 2009.
(author's website: www.erikaritter.com)