As soon as he cleared the tent, Tancredi went straight for the fountain. Even as he hit the water, he could feel his body temperature plummet. Instantly, he felt better.
I’m going to live, he thought. I’ve succeeded in the mission, and I’m going to live!
Inhaling a deep breath, he let himself sink to the bottom, where he lay motionless for several moments, reveling in the wet, cool depths of the concrete pool.
Once again, Tancredi was a happy puppy. Remaining underwater, he pushed himself forward into a slow somersault, and then another, and still another. He walked along the bottom on his front paws, his hind legs reaching up toward the surface. He swam from side to side, counting pennies and empty pop cans resting on the fountain floor.
Eventually, out of air, he returned to the surface, where he heard a child shout out, “Look, mommy, a seal!”
Fond of children of all species and always willing to oblige, Tancredi rolled over onto his back, and splashed, and barked, and clapped his feet together. So entertaining was he that the child leapt into the pool herself, and there the two of them, human and dog-sometime-seal, swam about and played, splashing each other, splashing everyone else, and just plain splashing.
Finally, after some minutes, Tancredi, with the child on his back, dog-paddled to the side, and climbed out of the water. As he jumped from the fountain’s edge, the two of them landed together on the pavement next to the little girl’s mother, and there, drenched with water, the dog vigorously shook himself once, twice, three times, showering everyone and everything in range. Next, he licked the child’s face, at which the youngster squealed to her mother, “He likes me, mommy, the seal likes me!” Then, exhausted from play but fully recovered from the heat, Tancredi turned to walk back to the Wensleydales.
“Where have you been?” Anna shouted to Tancredi, when she spotted the dog coming across the street toward them. “We’re packed, and ready to go home.”
“Anna won, Tancredi!” Peter exclaimed, waving in the dog’s face a chromed statuette of an artist holding a palette in one hand and a brush in the other that had been presented to Anna by the Mayor of Harper along with a handsome certificate declaring her triumph in a neat, but not too neat, handwriting. “Anna won the competition!”
“Well done, Anna!” Tancredi said, beaming with pleasure. “I was certain you would win this year. And no one deserves it more. You’re a wonderful artist.”
“Why, thank you, Tancredi,” Anna said, visibly moved by his enthusiasm. “I don’t know what to say.” She leaned over, and kissed the top of his head.
“I’m only sorry I missed the ceremony,” the dog added.
“There wasn’t any ceremony to miss,” Anna assured him. “In this heat, everyone agreed it was best to forgo the formalities.”
On the way home, Pilikia, her vitality recovered as the movement of the car created a cooling airflow around her, apologized to Tancredi for failing him.
“The condition I was in,” she whispered, “I’d have only been a burden, so it’s probably just as well.”
Tancredi licked her face. “Forget it,” he said.
Some miles out of Harper, as the occupants of the car were all talking about, and celebrating, Anna’s good fortune, Peter noticed a bit of foreign matter stuck in Tancredi’s mouth, between his upper lip and teeth.
“What’s that you’ve got caught in there?” Peter asked, reaching a finger in to extract it.
Before Tancredi could pull himself loose, Peter had the object in hand.
“What is it?” asked Anna, who was driving the car.
“It’s a piece of paper,” Peter replied. Then, unraveling it, he added, “With writing on it.”
In the back seat, Pilikia stared at Tancredi in horror. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” the cat whispered. The dog shrugged. “We’ve had it,” Pilikia said.
“What’s it say?” Anna asked.
“Well,” Peter replied, “It’s pretty chewed up, but it seems to be another award certificate, from the art show competition.”
“Another certificate?” Anna said. “How can there be another one? Whose name is on it?”
“Let’s see,” Peter answered, “it says …”
During this inquiry, the two animals had barely moved a muscle, even to breathe, and they did not do so now. As they awaited the inevitable disaster ahead, Tancredi’s mind raced in search of an explanation he knew was about to be demanded of him, and Pilikia’s thoughts centered on whether a cat could survive a leap from the window of a moving car.
“… it says,” Peter said, reading from the sheet of paper in his hand, “Anna Wensleydale. But then, what else would it say? This must have been a first draft or a smudged copy that was thrown in the trash, which, of course, the four-legged one in the back seat just had to put into his mouth.”
“Did you hear that?” Pilikia shouted to Tancredi, as she drew breath. “The certificate says that Anna Wensleydale won. She actually won!”
Tancredi’s face broke into a huge grin. “She won! Anna won! Hooray for Anna, you won!”
In the front seat, Peter and Anna exchanged a confused look. “What’s with those two,” they wondered.
As soon as Anna braked Simone to a stop in the Wensleydale’s driveway, Tancredi rushed off to see Beatrice Marlowe the schoolteacher.
“Anna won!” he proclaimed, panting from the run over.
“Of course she won,” Beatrice said. “We knew she would, didn’t we?”
“You don’t understand,” Tancredi insisted. “Anna really won. She didn’t need us to fix the competition. She would have won anyway.”
“Naturally,” replied Beatrice.
Tancredi settled slowly into the rug on the living room floor. He did not speak. He looked into the woman’s eyes, even as she stared into his. Sitting there in quiet, the dog thought back to the day he had asked Beatrice Marlowe the schoolteacher to join in their scheme, and how she had considered her reply carefully, in her own way.
“I remember now,” he said to her, finally. “You sat right here, in the middle of this very room, and you laughed. You knew then, didn’t you? You knew that it was all for nothing.”
Beatrice Marlowe the schoolteacher dropped herself down on the floor next to Tancredi.
“Not for nothing, Tancredi,” she said, sternly. “You and the others were motivated by love, your love for Anna,” she reminded him, as she pulled the dog gently to her with one hand, while the other stroked a parrot who had flown to her lap from a rafter overhead, “and action taken out of love is never for nothing.”
“The Cranberry Tales” is
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