In Alabama: "a Coon Dog Indeed"

By Gregory Jaynes

After she had put the roses on the grave, Alda Sizemore commenced the story of how Old Red the coon dog got run over by a train. "It was just awful," she sighed, and then she said, "but let me go get my husband. He tells it so much better, and he was there, after all."

The woman went and fetched Ross Sizemore from under a sugar-maple tree, where he was quietly whittling a cedar stick. He was wearing a cap that said FUZZY'S FEEDS SINCE 1956.

"Train killed Old Red," Ross Sizemore said. On Sunday, Nov. 18, 1974, he had been keen to go coon hunting--"wanted to go so bad I couldn't stand it" was the way he put it--but there was something disrespectful about hunting on Sunday so he made himself wait until after midnight. At 3 a.m. Sizemore and Old Red were on a train trestle when a southbound freight roared onto the bridge.

! "I looked down, and it was a 20-ft. drop to solid rock. I figured a fall would butcher me up or kill me one. I just laid down on the side, right on the edge and just hung on. The train went on by, and I walked back to find my dog, and there he lay across that rail. It sure was a sad night for me."

"We've been bringing live roses here for ten years," Alda Sizemore said. "Ain't that terrible?"

"I was offered $1,000 for that dog just before he got killed," Ross Sizemore said in a sort of more's-the-pity way.

To the Sizemores, there was no question where Old Red's remains should rest: they put him in a sack and bore him to the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard, where the rich totemic significance of the breed has been celebrated since Sept. 4, 1937, the day Troop, a coon dog of towering integrity, breathed his last. Key Underwood, who owned Troop and loved him like a son, put the dog in a 6-ft.-long cotton-picker's sack and brought him out here to the piney woods in the northwestern corner of Alabama and buried him in a hole 3 ft. deep. Then he got a rock, and with a hammer and a screwdriver and cold chisel he etched out a cross and Troop's name and the date of his birth and the date of his death. Now 48 years later, 160 coon dogs are buried in the cemetery, and every year in September their owners come out to recall their handsome deeds and to eat barbecue. That is precisely what Mr. and Mrs. Sizemore were doing.

Key Underwood, who would be 83 years old on Sept. 11, was there too, and when people sought him out, asking if he was the Key Underwood, he would say, "What's left of him." Then they would ask him about Troop, and he would say, "Troop was just as humble as he could be. I never heard him growl at another dog. But when it come to Mr. Coon, that was something else. He'd walk around a coon until he saw an opening, and he'd move in there and grab him on those foreshoulders, and you could hear the bones pop. That was some dog."

A clot of listeners would form around Underwood as he talked, and every once in a while someone would offer encouragement in a most exuberant dialect. "At dogud tree!" What the man said was, "That dog could tree," meaning Troop had an unerring nose for raccoons.

"Fellow name of Files lived off in here," Underwood was saying. "He ran a whiskey still until the revenuers got him, and he pawned the dog off. Back in those days everyone carried an ax." Underwood then began to wonder aloud what axes had to do with Files and the whiskey still and the dog. "Sometimes I get started on this tale, and it drifts off on me," he said, picking up the trail of the story again. "Anyway, Troop was ten years old, and I bought him from Files' wife for $75. That was in 1932."

A man with a toy poodle on a leash, a dog not much bigger than the word dog, hollered, "Hey, Mr. Underwood, where you want me to bury this one?"

Underwood, who is built something along the lines of an unlit, unfiltered Camel, looked down at the little fur ball and somehow made himself appear bigger. "I don't want nothing looks like that buried near Old Troop," he said.

The poodle owner chucked his charge under the chin and said, "Princess, they don't like you, hon."

Meanwhile, a band swung into all the old sad songs about mamma, lost loves and the perils of strong drink. The crowd continued to swell. Every few minutes a car filled with a family would come coughing down the dirt road to the cemetery, preceding a rooster's tail of dust. The women would hug one another, and the men who were not teetotalers would find some reason to roam off together into the woods, returning in a short while flush faced and very happy. The day, a hot late- summer afternoon, just sort of hung still in that stop-time fashion one associates with grandmothers' kitchens--and conversations therein.

"I didn't hear she was dead till we were in the middle of supper. I got up and fried a chicken for her boys and rushed over to the funeral home."

"They tell me he went up to Memphis, and he ate a mess of fish, and he drank an ocean of whiskey, and he died, just keeled on over. Fish and whiskey. Who'd of thought it?"

". . . and they had to close the casket, poor thing."

". . . so he come in and said he'd been ahuntin'. I said ahuntin' what? He said deer. I said deer season ain't open. He said it is for bow and arrow. I said but you wasn't usin' no bow and arrow. What happens if you get caught? He says you can always stick a arrow in it."

" 'At dog had a sweeter disposition than my late wife, which is goin' aways."

"They tell me H.E. Files, the original owner of Old Troop, made whiskey so good he had offers from distilleries."

People milled around the graves, rearranging plastic flowers, recalling triumphs of the deceased. A lot of Old Blues went down into the ground here, as well as a lot of Old Reds. The headstone for Blue Kate said STRUCK BY CAR , WHILE RUNNING A RACCOON. IN SIX YEARS OF OWNERSHIP TREED MORE THAN 200. The stone for Rusty said A COON DOG INDEED with the qualifier underscored twice.

In a while they held a liars' contest. First prize was $10, second $7.50 and third $5. Ernie Thompson, wearing a Chevrolet cap and leaning on a cane, got started off all right but then got lost in the convolution of his story. "My lie starts back in the spring of '37. I was down here on Rock Creek fishing a pretty good-size little hole." He saw a squirrel on a stump and then a bear swallowed the squirrel. Before it was all over he had caught a fish, which weighed about half a pound, that had swallowed a coon, which weighed 22 lbs. Ernie took second place.

Jake Hayes took the top prize with a tale about a snake he killed and skinned to make a belt. It turned out the snake had swallowed 13 eggs, eleven chickens, nine guineas and a billy goat. For some reason, most of the stories seemed to be about things that had swallowed things. This line of thought seemed much appreciated, especially by children, who listened slack-jawed, accepting the fictional terrors of nature as gospel.

Key Underwood, favoring truth on the sidelines, took no part in the liars' competition. "I had to give up hunting two or three years ago," he explained. "Afraid I'd get hurt tramping around. I backed off a creek bank once. Don't know why I'm here to tell it today. My daddy was a country doctor from over in Franklin County. Did I just drift off again? Well, they tell me you get that way when you're 83."

They brought out the barbecue about 4 o'clock, and when people had had their fill of pig, they drove home to places called Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Cherokee. Key Underwood said he never dreamed the thing would get this big. "When Troop got down where he couldn't stand up, I couldn't stand his suffering, so I called the vet. Then after he was gone I called the boys, and they said if ever a dog deserved a decent burial, this one did. I was gonna take him out to the dump, but then I said we'd just come out here to the old hunting ground. We all loved these hills and hollers, men and dogs. Still do."