Kate DiCamillo: Because of Winn-Dixie

“Opal?” said the preacher. He was standing at the door to his bedroom, and his hair was all kind of wild on top of his head, and he was looking around like he wasn’t sure where he was. “Opal, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. But just then there was a huge crack of thunder, one so loud that it shook the whole trailer, and Winn-Dixie came shooting back out of my room and went running right past me and I screamed, “Daddy, watch out!”

But the preacher was still confused. He just stood there, and Winn-Dixie came barreling right toward him like he was a bowling ball and the preacher was the only pin left standing, and wham, they both fell to the ground.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Opal?” said the preacher. He was lying on his stomach, and Winn-Dixie was sitting on top of him, panting and whining.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Opal,” the preacher said again.

“Yes sir,” I said louder.

“Do you know what a pathological fear is?”

“No sir,” I told him.

The preacher raised a hand. He rubbed his nose. “Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s a fear that goes way beyond normal fears. It’s a fear you can’t be talked out of or reasoned out of.”

Just then there was another crack of thunder and Winn-Dixie rose straight up in the air like somebody had poked him with something hot. When he hit the floor, he started running. He ran back to my bedroom, and I didn’t even try to catch him; I just got out of his way.

The preacher lay there on the ground, rubbing his nose. Finally, he sat up. He said, “Opal, I believe Winn-Dixie has a pathological fear of thunderstorms.” And just when he finished his sentence, here came Winn-Dixie again, running to save his life. I got the preacher up off the floor and out of the way just in time.

There didn’t seem to be a thing we could do for Winn-Dixie to make him feel better, so we just sat there and watched him run back and forth, all terrorized and panting. And every time there was another crack of thunder, Winn-Dixie acted all over again like it was surely the end of the world.

“The storm won’t last long,” the preacher told me. “And when it’s over, the real Winn-Dixie will come back.”

After a while, the storm did end. The rain stopped. And there wasn’t any more lightning, and finally, the last rumble of thunder went away and Winn-Dixie quit running back and forth and came over to where me and the preacher were sitting and cocked his head, like he was saying, “What in the world are you two doing out of bed in the middle of the night?”

And then he crept up on the couch with us in this funny way he has, where he gets on the couch an inch at a time, kind of sliding himself onto it, looking off in a different direction, like it’s all happening by accident, like he doesn’t intend to get on the couch, but all of a sudden, there he is.

And so the three of us sat there. I rubbed Winn-Dixie’s head and scratched him behind the ears the way he liked. And the preacher said, “There are an awful lot of thunderstorms in Florida in the summertime.”

“Yes sir,” I said. I was afraid that maybe he would say we couldn’t keep a dog who went crazy with pathological fear every time there was a crack of thunder.

“We’ll have to keep an eye on him,” the preacher said. He put his arm around Winn-Dixie. “We’ll have to make sure he doesn’t get out during a storm. He might run away. We have to make sure we keep him safe.”

“Yes sir,” I said again. All of a sudden it was hard for me to talk. I loved the preacher so much. I loved him because he loved Winn-Dixie. I loved him because he was going to forgive Winn-Dixie for being afraid. But most of all, I loved him for putting his arm around Winn-Dixie like that, like he was already trying to keep him safe.

Me and Winn-Dixie got to Gertrude’s Pets so early for my first day of work that the CLOSED sign was still in the window. But when I pushed on the door, it swung open, and so we went on inside. I was about to call out to Otis that we were there, but then I heard music. It was the prettiest music I have ever heard in my life. I looked around to see where it was coming from, and that’s when I noticed that all the animals were out of their cages. There were rabbits and hamsters and gerbils and mice and birds and lizards and snakes, and they were all just sitting there on the floor like they had turned to stone, and Otis was standing in the middle of them. He was playing a guitar and he had on skinny pointy-toed cowboy boots and he was tapping them while he was playing the music. His eyes were closed and he was smiling.

Winn-Dixie got a dreamy kind of look on his face. He smiled really hard at Otis and then he sneezed and then his whiskers went all fuzzy, and then he sighed and kind of dropped to the floor with all the other animals. Just then, Gertrude caught sight of Winn-Dixie. “Dog,” she croaked, and flew over and landed on his head. Otis looked up at me. He stopped playing his guitar and the spell was broken. The rabbits started hopping and the birds started flying and the lizards started leaping and the snakes started slithering and Winn-Dixie started barking and chasing everything that was moving, and Otis shouted, “Help me!”

For what seemed like a long time, me and Otis ran around trying to catch mice and gerbils and hamsters and snakes and lizards. We kept on bumping into each other and tripping over the animals, and Gertrude kept screaming, “Dog! Dog!”

Every time I caught something, I put it back in the first cage I saw; I didn’t care if it was the right cage or not. I just put it in and slammed the door. And the whole time I was chasing things, I was thinking that Otis must be some kind of snake charmer, the way he could play his guitar and make all the animals turn to stone. And then I thought, “This is silly.” I shouted over Winn-Dixie barking and Gertrude yelling. I said, “Play some more music, Otis.”

He looked at me for a minute. Then he started playing his guitar, and in just a few seconds, everything was quiet. Winn-Dixie was lying on the floor, blinking his eyes and smiling to himself and sneezing every now and then, and the mice and the gerbils and the rabbits and the lizards and the snakes that we hadn’t caught yet got quiet and sat still, and I picked them up one by one and put them back in their cages.

When I was all done, Otis stopped playing. He looked down at his boots. “I was just playing them some music. It makes them happy.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Did they escape from their cages?”

“No,” Otis said. “I take them out. I feel sorry for them being locked up all the time. I know what it’s like, being locked up.”

“You do?” I said.

“I have been in jail,” Otis said. He looked up at me real quick and then looked back down at his boots.

“You have?” I said.

“Never mind,” said Otis. “Aren’t you here to sweep the floor?”

“Yes sir,” I told him.

He walked over to the counter and started digging through a pile of things, and finally, he came up with a broom.

“Here,” he said. “You should start sweeping.” Only he must have gotten confused. He was holding out his guitar to me, instead of the broom.

“With your guitar?” I asked.

He blushed and handed me the broom and I started to work. I am a good sweeper. I swept the whole store and then dusted some of the shelves. The whole time I worked, Winn-Dixie followed me, and Gertrude followed him, flying behind him and sitting on his head and his back and croaking real quiet to herself, “Dog, dog.”

When I was done, Otis thanked me. I left Gertrude’s Pets thinking about how the preacher probably wouldn’t like it very much that I was working for a criminal.