“Good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side”

“Good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side” is a saying about coexistence in TR-90, but not a promise of equality or trust. Applied to The Street and repeated as a refrain around the town’s silences, it captures a community that can tolerate people sharing space while discouraging them from disturbing the buried conflicts beneath its peace.

The Street and the Local Rule

Max Devore invokes the saying while walking on The Street, which he describes as the local equivalent of a town common. Its principle is that the public way belongs to anyone who wants to use it, even when people who distrust or oppose one another must pass side by side. The image of good pups and vile dogs makes the rule deliberately broad: it allows moral difference into the same space rather than requiring neighbors to become friends.

The saying’s apparent openness has limits. In TR-90, physical access does not ensure social welcome, and the appearance of peaceful coexistence can mask intimidation, prejudice, and unequal power. The Street can be shared in principle even as the community’s informal expectations determine who is accepted, what may be said, and which conflicts should remain undisturbed.

Peace, Isolation, and Silence

The saying resonates with a local account of how people learn to live alongside one another: they pay their bills, keep to themselves, and do not take charity. The bargain is a miserly peace, maintained less by trust than by restraint and separation. “Good fences make good neighbors” supplies its complementary image: neighbors may remain adjacent so long as they do not press too closely into one another’s affairs.

That restraint also governs memory. Bill Dean explains that life on the TR resembles several people sharing a bed in winter: everyone can rest if no one becomes restless, but one person’s agitation keeps the others awake. He calls the narrator the restless one because of his interest in Mattie Devore and warns that antagonizing Max could make the wider community pay. The saying’s dogs are therefore more than a colorful emblem of difference; it evokes a local order in which potential antagonists are expected to coexist without forcing a reckoning.

Who Is Allowed to Walk

The history of Tidwell’s Meadow exposes the gap between the rule’s universal language and the community’s racial boundaries. At the turn of the century, more than forty Black settlers, many related and associated with Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops, bought the meadow and nearby lakeside land. Their arrival provoked a town protest against the newcomers, but they built neat cabins rather than the shanty settlement residents had anticipated. Their music group played across western Maine, and the local peace eventually took the guarded form of neighbors who kept their distance and did not seek charity.

The Street’s supposed common ground was not equally available in practice. The account of Sara Tidwell’s experience recounts that she was warned to stay off the road but continued to walk there, sometimes with her son, Kito. A later confrontation identifies the grievance behind the hostility: she behaved as though she had a right to use the street, while members of the white community were unwilling to grant her that ordinary public standing. The expression can thus sound hospitable while exposing the social conditions that make coexistence conditional.

A Repeated Refrain and Its Reversal

When the narrator later recalls the saying, it appears beside other phrases associated with the place, including the claim that everyone takes turns being the town drunk. The repeated formula gives the scene a communal, almost proverbial voice; its casual familiarity makes the town’s arrangements sound inevitable. Yet repetition also changes its force. What first sounds like an assurance that enemies can share a road becomes a description of a community that expects the vulnerable to endure exclusion and expects dissenters to accept its costs.

The expression’s central tension is therefore between public access and private power. TR-90’s ideal allows good and bad to walk together, but its history shows that the community does not apply that ideal evenly. The saying survives as a compact statement of the town’s self-image—and as an ironic measure of the silences and racial exclusions that self-image conceals.