I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to Between The Covers.

Rick Bragg will make you cry and he'll make you laugh out loud and he can do this in the very same book.

And that is great writing.

As he has shared in his writing previously he started life dirt poor in rural Alabama and from most young men that probably meant a job at the cotton mill.

Instead he became a Pulitzer Prize Winner an author of 12 books including the best selling "Ava's Man" and "All Over But the Shoutin", his latest book is about spec a half stray dog.

And in his words, a terrible boy.

Like his other books it's a Southern story at its heart and the words are like pure magic.

Please welcome the author of the "Speckled Beauty" Rick Bragg, hi Rick.

Oh, thank you.

That was awful nice I appreciate that.

I just, before we even get into the book can we just say that even though there are parts of this book that made me cry the dog does not die in this book, okay?

Well, you know I said before I even got started on this, I was not gonna do a book where the dog dies in the end.

Because there's that awful arc the short arc of the dog's life and the longer arc its owners life, usually not, not all of us.

And I just don't think I could have, I could stand there.

I just didn't think I could stand doing that kind of book.

So spec had to survive now I'll admit we kept a pretty close watch on him as the book got near its end.

'Cause I spent about three years on that story, whereas trying to ride his story On the cover of the book and there's this gorgeous Australian shepherd and this is not what the dog looked like when you rescued him.

You've gotta tell us how he came into your life.

Well, I'm a little bit ashamed of how long it took me to, I guess you'd say rescue the dog.

But he had had been running with a pack of you could call them wild dogs.

You call them stray dogs out here in the country.

They live in the pine barrens and in the ditches and they eat out of the garbage cans and they kinda live on gopher snakes and rats and egg shells.

And we have saved many of them over the years, dozens of them over the years, but you can't save them all.

And so they kind of become invisible after a while.

And I had seen this dog fighting he was appeared to be the leader of this pack of dogs.

And then one day I didn't see him and some time went by and I, when he reappeared he was up on the ridge line behind the farm and he was cut up and chewed up and starve down to nothing.

I mean, he should weigh between 60 and 70 pounds.

And he weighed nothing and my conscience got the better of me.

I went up the hill and sat down and he licked my hand and well that's about all it took I guess.

I carried him back down the hill, over the years have had many chances to regret that.

But I think he had gone up there to die.

He went up there to make a place and it was heartbreaking because from where he was on the ridge line he could see the other dogs in our yard.

We had two more at the time and he could see my mother bring out food for them and he could see her feed the two terrible cats and he could see the livestock in the pasture, all things.

And he could see the people come and go.

Things that would've been normal to a dog if that dog had not been discarded had not been thrown away.

Rick, I wanna pivot it to your mother for a minute if I could, because you talked about your mother your mother is this, what is the word?

Remarkable woman and one of your previous memoirs, you talk about her.

I think she went 18 years without buying a new dress because she had to cloth you and your brothers.

Well, she's really prominent in this story.

This story about Spec.

There is some, there is this relationship that Spec has with your mother through food.

And this is a beautifully written passage.

And it just made me smile if you would indulge us and just read that, please.

Sure he would walk over my dead body to get to a biscuit.

Here's a little explanation of all went.

"For a week or so, the new dog rescued, healed and ate everything my mother put in front of him.

He ate leftover beef, roast, bacon hog gel and pork chops with the bone cut out.

He ate short ribs and hamburger.

He could eat six hot and whine for more but he also ate butter beans, English peas and baked sweet potatoes and cold biscuits.

As fast as we could throw them into his mouth.

He ate pounds of cornbread, catfish, potato salad and Pinto beans.

He ate collared grains, stewed squash, and fried okra.

My mother picked roast chicken off the bone for him and cooked him scrambled eggs.

She fed him sausage biscuits and a plate of deviled eggs.

I'd had my eye on all day.

He laughed up milk and buttermilk and chicken noodle soup.

I told her that this much people food was probably not good for the dog for any of us, most likely.

And she lied and said she wouldn't do it anymore.

I watched him chew on a ham bone the size of a ball that fits, till it just disappeared.

He was not a fond of onions unless battered in fried or cucumbers or pickles of any kind, unless in a cheeseburger.

But that was the litany of things he would not consume.

He wore chili in his whiskers and hush puppies on his breath.

You could almost see him heal like some kind of time lapse photography.

By the week he was ranging a little stiff legged around the farm.

One day in his second week he lamed over to watch the donkeys Buck and Nemmy and the great black mule Bella as they ate from the trough by the upper pasture gate he seemed fascinated about it lifestyle.

It was like he knew they had something to do with him somehow, if he could just remember what that used to be.

He eventually left his place in the garage and lay instead, just outside the gate.

So he could see them better as if he were on some kind of mission, but he never bothered them.

Just seemed to study them.

I surprised myself those days at how much of my time that dog soaked up always worked in manic spurts.

And lately I had worked 20 hour days, seven days a week.

I didn't have, have time to fool with a dog.

A lifetime ago, I'd been one of those little boys who would run around all day with a broken bird in a shoebox, expecting a miracle.

Then when all hope was lost I buried it in the yard with a table spoon.

Not much useful a boy like that for such a long, long time.

Now, every time I walked through the door he was waiting for me and made every step I made.

He was gentle with my mother never jumping on her, begging for food.

Even if she had bacon in her hands it was as if the dog that ran and fall and the ditches had washed away on that ridge line.

Why, he's just a big baby?

My mother said rubbing his head, his tail wagged so hard.

It moved his whole backbone.

Let me see, she said, if I can find you some bologna."

Yeah, I, that was your mother's blog.

I'm telling you also in this book, these are your words.

You say, spec is not a good boy.

He is a terrible boy.

So I think for people that haven't read the book yet do you wanna give us glimpse into how terrible he was?

Yeah, I guess the worst thing he does is, and he can't help it, I guess, but he's a herding dog, but cause of the bad eye, he tends to herd in a circle.

So he will just start a stamped biting at the legs of the animals and then herd them in this never ending circle.

I think in the book, I said like a drunk teenager doing donuts in a parking lot and it's never ending.

They don't know where they started and they don't know where they've been and they don't know where they're going to and they just run and he runs them until they are out of breath and about to collapse.

He attacks the UPS driver and he attacks the FedEx man and he doesn't bite him.

He just terrorizes him and he ate an entire set of bed clothes.

And he bites me when I try to take him to the vet, he doesn't hurt me.

He just does it to show me that he doesn't wanna go to the vet.

So Ann we could go on we could finish up this century talking about the things that dog does wrong.

Rick, the book is dedicated to your older brother Sam and my condolences we have all people, all of us who who read you have come to know him through your stories.

In this book, he, Sam didn't really like the dog.

He didn't want the dog.

So how did that turn out?

Well, it was we were talking about how dog books can be so sad cause the dog parishes and it's just the way that that life will do you.

My brother, Sam two years ago got sick with pancreatic cancer.

He had been the most indestructible human I'd ever known.

He was the last real Southern man.

But before he got sick, he was just disapproving Spec.

He believed that dogs, he raised hunting dogs and he believed that dogs should work for a living.

Dogs should have some purpose.

They should not come in the house.

They should not get on the couch.

They should work.

And he would like, even he I don't think he meant anything evil by it but he'd even spit on Specs, head with a big chew of tobacco if Spec got too close to him and I'd tell him not to.

And we'd almost get in a fist fight grown men out in the parking lot.

And then he got sick and he got weak and he would sit for a long, long hours in the yard.

And I guess I shouldn't have been surprised but dogs, good dogs know when someone is hurting and Spec just would go sit beside my brother.

And at first they would just sit there together just kind of in this chilly dayton.

And eventually my brother's hand would creep closer and closer.

And then one day I looked outside and he was sitting there with his hand on head.

And that was the beginning of him saying things like, Spec wound up running off some coyotes.

And that was the moment where Spec all of a sudden had value to my big brother.

And I remember Sam saying they won't come around here no more.

You've got a real dog now.

And yeah it the last thing in the world I expected to do when I started a book on a dog, was to have to write about what my brother didn't see.

And Rick it was truly an important part of this book.

This book is so honest and Sam wasn't the only one you are very honest in this book about yourself.

You had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma which led to chemo, brain and depression.

And at the very beginning of the book you tell that you have moved home 'cause you need to be you need to help your mother.

You are this best selling author.

Who's now living in his mother's basement.

And as you put it, your 11 steps from the bed to your office, this was a difficult time.

So who rescued who?

Did you rescue spec or was it the other way around?

Well I think a lot of people say that the dog rescued me, I think a lot of people and they're tough, and they're just because a thing kind of becomes a cliche doesn't mean it it's not true.

And I think spec definitely I came home for a lot of reasons.

I have an old house in far hope, Alabama that a stones throw from the Florida line but I don't really get to go.

I don't get to go down there.

I love to fish.

I love the golf.

I love being down there but I don't really get to go.

I am where I need to be.

And as I say, and because southerners love to be we love to be Gothic and speak in Gothic language.

And I remember saying more than once I.

It's not that I don't love where I'm from, but I always I got this, see a lot of this world I got to see Central Asia.

I got to see the Middle East.

I got to see Africa.

I've, seen Haiti in times of unrest.

And I've seen a lot of this world, but I guess I always kind of knew that I'd never get out of this red dirt alive and there's nothing wrong with that.

This is one of the most beautiful places on earth but you can still feel a little trapped.

You can still feel that inertia and this dog this stupid dog this nasty, smelly badly behaved, dog changes all that.

McMurtry, Larry McMurtry one of my favorite writers who passed just a year or so ago said that some men, some people are just born beside a river of melan and they never no matter where they go or what they do, they never get away from that river.

They can always hear that river kinda rushing by.

And if you are trapped beside a river like that I think a lot of us feel that way sometimes then you need a bad dog.

A good dog is a great thing to have on a good day.

A a good dog is a great thing to have on an easy day when your mind is easy, but man, on an empty day or a bad day you need a bad dog.

You need a dog that will rip part of.

A bad dog, during the pandemic a lot of us adopted dogs, including me.

Mine, I have to dare say was a lot cleaner and more well behaved than yours, but would you hope that one takeaway from the book is perhaps that people would open their doors open their hearts and give a dog a chance?

Just think if all of us went and picked up one bad dog just one bad dog, not only do you rescue the dog there wouldn't be any running in the ditches soon.

There is something about Southern storytellers.

And I can say this because I was born and raised in the south.

There's a quote that I found.

And it's from a philosopher, William James who said common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing.

Moving at different speeds.

A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

And when I read that I thought isn't this Southern storytelling.

I think it has to be.

Yeah, I think maybe we're just not right in the head.

So Southern writers love to pretend to be a little bit old but the the older I get, the more I realize that there seems very little potential in it.

I'm just not quite all there anymore.

I'm not sure I'm gonna buy that.

And in just the little bit of time that we have now true or false and this is coming outta left field has nothing to do with this book.

But is it true that a Haitian voodoo priest tried to turn you into a goat?

Yeah, but they tried to do many other terrible things.

I was there when the military backed by some of the richer folks in Haiti kicked president a SteveAdlai Steve out of the country.

And then I went by when the U.S. military came in to reinstall Adlai Steve as the president and they came down the case of good guys and bad guys to me and the bad guys hired the voodoo priests to its kind of psychological warfare, a kind of intimidation.

And they would do hexes and things on the side walks and one of them seeing my notebook and kept shaking this thing at me that appeared to be like a chicken foot with some beads on it.

And my, one of my, the folks with me said I think he's to turn you into a goat.

And it, as far as we can tell it is not successful.

I'm gonna leave it at that.

It may just be taken a while.

This book is a love story.

It is "The Speckled Beauty, A Dog and His People" Rick brag.

This has been a pleasure, thank you.

No, it's, it's been my pleasure and pet Jack for me.

I will.

I'm Ann Bocock please connect with us.

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