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Any
given day of the week, for the longest time, Fester McFieby could be
found dressed in an old choir robe, standing next to his pickup truck
parked near the statue of the Confederate soldier in front of the
courthouse, waving a Bible in one hand and occasionally raising a staff
(a hoe handle with a wooden pineapple-shaped finial screwed to one end)
above his head as he preached his interpretation of the Gospel. Yelling
angrily at saints and sinners alike one moment, then laughing
hysterically toward the sky the next with Camel cigarette and RC Cola
(mixed with Dr. Tichner’s Antiseptic) breaks in between. People
sometimes tossed coins to him like he was a street musician. He’d
usually, depending on his temperament, throw the coins and whatever else
was handy back at them. The sheriff eventually ended Fester’s street
preaching.
We
called Fester McFieby "The Dog Man." When I knew him, Mr.
McFieby was retired from working for the Commission at the county dump.
He had been the lone caretaker of the landfill for over 30 years,
directing trucks to where they should deposit their loads of garbage
then pushing it with his bulldozer into holes he had dug. Being alone at
work most of the time, Fester often got down from his machine to pick up
items of interest that caught his attention. Copper wire and aluminum
which he sold for scrap, fence posts, usable lumber, bricks, buckets,
doors and windows were some of the more reasonable items he had picked
up. Some of the less than ordinary things he collected over the years
were old artificial Christmas trees; car tires he stacked waist-high in
his yard then filled with dirt and used as mini vegetable and flower
gardens; barrels full of glass electricity pole insulators; and several
mannequins he had sitting in his house, on his front porch and one
female dummy with a Dolly Parton wig and bright pink dress who rode in
the passenger-side of his pickup with him.
He
also collected stray dogs. It was a cruel thing then, as it is now, to
drive an unwanted dog out into the country to somebody else’s house
and let it go in hopes it would find a new home. It was also cruel, as
they often were, for people to release dogs at the county dump in hopes
they would somehow survive on their own eating garbage. There was no
animal rescue or shelter back then so destroying the animal was the only
other choice.
If
Fester had anything, he had a big heart. And if he didn’t socialize
with his own species very much, he had many dog friends who seemed to
appreciate him for giving them a second chance. Toward the end of his
tenure as dump manager, people guessed he had at least 40 dogs that
lived in his house and surrounding fenced-in acre. When I knew him he
had a couple dozen, six of which rode in the back of the pickup with him
and the mannequin nearly everywhere they went. I was told much of Fester’s
retirement and Social Security checks went toward feeding and paying vet
bills for his furry companions and he’d have it no other way.
Fester
had no teeth and when you’d see him on the road, sometimes with one of
the dogs sitting between him and Dolly, he’d apparently be having a
joyful conversation with his riding companions, laughing and sometimes
singing, nodding his head up and down as if to be agreeing with
something one of them had just said. If he’d been rich, he’d have
been called eccentric, but he wasn’t, so most people wrote him off as
being someone a bean or two shy of a bushel.
My
friend actually knew The Dog Man and I accompanied him several times to
Fester’s dwelling that was, appropriately so, a dogtrot house
surrounded by a six-foot chain link fence. Where rain dripped from the
roof of the house, there were buckets to catch the water for the dogs.
The open hallway through the center of the house had been screened in at
both ends and was lined with old couch cushions he had collected at the
dump for the dogs to lie on. The walkway between the cushions was
covered with sycamore leaves to, according to Fester, keep the fleas
away. The front screen door opened outward to allow the dogs to push
their way out when need be and the back door swung inward where they
could let themselves back in.
While
the backyard’s grass was kept cut close to the ground by a milk cow,
the front was overgrown with tall grass only partially trampled down by
the dogs. An archway at the foot of the front steps made of gnarly, old
fence posts framed the entrance to the front yard. Twenty or so old
faded-out plastic Christmas trees were "planted" there and an
indefinite number of white, two-foot-tall wooden cemetery crosses in
neat rows several feet from each other pointed upward. The front fence
had no gate and the only way to the front yard, other than crawling on a
dog trail under the house, was through the house’s dogtrot.
My
buddy told me for years and years Fester had buried his dogs in that
yard, a place The Dog Man considered to be hallowed. I felt privileged
to be given a walk there on the brick paths that wandered between the
graves. Each little grave was lined with green, purple and clear
electricity pole insulators and, even though the house was in need of
repair and unpainted, the grave markers were freshly painted bright
white with names carefully painted on them in black paint…Charlie,
Freddy, Punkie, Rooster, Moses, Pookie, Ralph, Chicken, Grady, Monroe…all
his old friends he’d taken care of and who gave an old man a sense of
worth.
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