Cellist Encounters Courage In The Night
My guess is the small white dog could not have known the cellist would come. I’m only guessing, though. Who knows why dogs do what they do? Their mystique is part of their act.
Anyway, the cellist, John Marshall, was returning home to Cheney from a Spokane Symphony performance. It was a murder mystery kind of night, quite late, black as a well, the road wet from an evening of rain and now shrouded in fog. We’re talking a Friday night, last October or November to the best of Marshall’s recollection. Yes, I learned of this long after the fact, but that’s the grapevine of the canine underground for you - spotty.
Marshall had just topped a little hill on the access road out by the Eastern Washington University football stadium. Just at the edge of his headlamp beams, he says:
“I could see something a little bit white in the road … I barely had time to avoid it. But I swerved out of the way … as I went by I noticed it was a white dog. In the road.”
By profession and nature, Marshall is a man of certain sensibilities. When he and pianist Kendall Feeney performed Messiaen’s “Praise for the Eternity of Jesus” in St. John’s Cathedral last February, critic Travis Rivers thought it was moving the way the two of them made the cathedral’s canyon-like spaces echo the music’s “meditative loneliness.”
Meditating on the loneliness of a white dog in a foggy night on a country road, Marshall backed up. That’s when he noticed that beside the small dog was a big black dog. The big dog was lying smack in the middle of Marshall’s lane. If the cellist hadn’t dodged the white dog, the black dog would have been run over for the second time that night. Marshall positioned his car to barricade the dogs.
You can understand why the several drivers who slowed down didn’t stop. You can imagine the eerie sight of a man in a black tie and tuxedo tails, waving his arms and yelling, looming up like a ghost in your headlights. No telling what you would have thought before locking your doors and stepping on the gas.
One of the big dog’s front legs was broken and he couldn’t move.
“What struck me,” says Marshall, “is that there’s no way I would have seen this black dog in the road. But his little friend just sat right in front of him and stared me down.”
The little dog appeared to have some basset in him. The big dog was the size of a lab but shaggier. Both dogs welcomed the comfort of a stranger.
“You could see in the black dog’s face that he knew that I was taking care of him now. He seemed so grateful.”
After a while, the basset got jealous that the cellist was paying more attention to the dog with the broken leg. Hey, thanks for stopping, the basset seemed to say, but enough is enough.
Eventually, Marshall’s yells for help attracted people in nearby apartments, who called police. The cellist and the officer who came loaded the dogs into the squad car and the officer took them to a Cheney vet.
Neither dog was wearing a collar, so it was impossible to locate the owner. Providing free care for stray dogs is one of the most effective known formulas for veterinary bankruptcy; the vet would have had no choice but to simply put a splint on the injured dog’s leg and take the animals to the pound if the owner(s) didn’t come in three days. Vets hate their work sometimes.
Don’t do that, the cellist told the vet. EWU’s music department, where Marshall is a professor, was going to take up a collection to pay the veterinary expense if no owner(s) materialized. Then Marshall was going to try some fancy talking with his apartment landlords to see if he could adopt the dogs. But the dogs, owned by the same person, were found in time.
My guess is the dogs would have thought the cellist was an angel if they’d ever got to hear him play. They probably thought so anyway.
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