Meet Thelma

Good grief, I am a hoarder. There’s no way to deny it anymore. Right now, nine dogs live at the Farnival. Every time I tell someone, they look at me with astonishment, and it strikes me all over again how weird it seems to have that many animals under one roof.

It came about the Sunday before the week of the fundraiser, when two black labs showed up at the Antioch Baptist Church, a quarter-mile down the road, shadow images of each other, sitting at the top of the entrance’s concrete steps. From fifty feet away, they looked healthy, and I hoped they belonged to a hunter hunting for turkey or deer or whatever game is in season in Robertson County, Tennessee in early April.

A few days later they made their way to my neighbor Greg King’s house, camping out on his back porch on an old mattress he stores there, yapping at my pack every time we went on the deck. I dismissed the hope of the hunter and realized they had been ditched, but wondered if Greg, a fifty-something factory worker without a wife or kids, would keep them. They were good-looking labs, strikingly similar. A thin, uneven white stripe ran down their chests, which was longer on one than the other and the only way to tell them apart.

One night it stormed: a thunder-booming, lightning-striking spring Tennessee thunderstorm. My husband and I both thought the labs would be gone by morning. Instead, my neighbor had boarded up his porch with plywood, and the waterlogged dogs were living in the small patch of woods between our houses. Overnight one or both had snuck onto our front patio and stole my muddy hiking boots, which were strewn across the yard. When I picked them up, the dogs enthusiastically approached me, but I turned away and marched back to the house. “I don’t see you,” I said. If love could save animals, I would rescue them by the thousands, but what it all comes down to, at least for the Farnival and ICHBA, (ICK-Buh) is money and space.

Mason called Donna, ICHBA’s founder, and pleaded their case. Donna is a seventy-year-old animal activist that runs her non-profit agency with a full heart but a practical head. She’s thin and tall, probably five-eight, wears short hair, lipstick, and heeled sandals even when she’s slinging a fifty-two pound mutt in a crate.

“None of our dogs are moving. Our foster’s are full. We don’t even have room in a barn,” Donna said in a slow, southern drawl with a frankness that was at odds with her accent. “At some point, we have to say no.”

Later that day, through the glass door on the porch, I watched my husband, Mason, take two bowls of food to the edge of the tree line and crouch, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, baseball cap pulled low, cargo shorts hanging loose on his too-skinny legs, patiently waiting for the timid labs to approach him. It didn’t take long. They hunkered to the ground, rumps wagging as they did this odd crouching, swishing crawl towards Mason, who set the bowls down and left. They both stuck their snouts in the same one and gulped the food like they were never getting another.

They earned their names, Thelma and Louise, one afternoon when my friend Nancy stopped by to pick me up for our monthly trip to Clarksville, Tennessee, where we shop at Sam’s Club for essentials like toilet paper, detergent, and cocoa-coated almonds, then have lunch at Chipotle. Nancy is in her fifties, but her attitude is straight-up thirty-two.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the labs as she jumped out of her sporty, rugged Honda Element. She touched them, petting their heads, something I hadn’t done, and they wagged their long, pointy tails so hard that I thought their rotund rumps would fall off their tank-like flanks. They were big dogs, and I guessed they were over a year.

“Well, at least they’re friendly,” she said “Thelma and Louise.”

Thelma and Louise it was. They weren’t getting Soprano names, like all the rest of our foster dogs, because they wouldn’t be living under our roof anyway. At least that’s what I told myself.

No matter how much I didn’t want to care, watching how needy Thelma and Louise were for attention, even a pat on the head sent their behinds into a tailspin, touched me. I was already starting to cave, but for the next few days I managed to hold onto my resolve that eight dogs in one house was more than enough. In fact, it bordered on weird.

Apparently, Thelma and Louise didn’t give a damn about what qualifies a family as animal hoarders because they tore the bottom of our chain-link fence back far enough so they could crawl underneath, effectively moving into the Farnival, kind of like Harriet did, only more forcefully.

Mace zip-tied the bottom of the fence, put them back outside. It was hard for him to do, but he knew the risk of homeless un-vetted dogs carrying diseases, which could be spread to our own pack. We couldn’t risk an epidemic. The labs cried outside the gate, wearing pouty faces, big globs of drool hanging from their oversized folded jowls. I didn’t know then that they were only puppies, but their hyper-excited, overly affectionate personalities should have foreshadowed it. Their size deceived me.

Donna and I made calls and sent emails to local agencies, asking for help. Donna said if we got any responses, ICHBA would provide transport. At some point, while I was waiting to hear back from a shelter, I dug some flea and tick medicine out of my stash and asked Mason to apply it because I could see the off-whitish, bloated parasites sticking out of their short black fur.

One agency responded and asked for pictures, but once I sent them, we didn’t hear back.

Almost a week after I first saw the dogs at the church, Louise disappeared. Mace and I went to the movies, and when we got home, she was gone. We waited for one night, then two, by the third, I was pretty sure she wasn’t coming back.

During those nights, Thelma, devastated without her sister, cried outside the gate, like a screeching-cry. I couldn’t sleep worth a damn, listening to that dog whine, thinking about Louise’s abrupt disappearance, then my run-in a few weeks before with coyotes the size of German shepherds, both occasions mixing together in an ugly scenario, then plodding across my mind as slowly but erratically as a tiller in wet Tennessee clay. By midnight on the third night I broke down, put on my flip-flops, tromped downstairs, mostly awake and pissed off about it, and opened up the gate.

Thelma happily ran through, licking my hand and jumping, her barrel-like body strong enough to push around my one hundred and twenty-five pound frame. I left her a bowl of food in the yard, probably three cups, too tired to care how much I scooped, tramped back upstairs and slept in a coma. I remember a brief moment of anxiety, when I realized that I had just added another dog to our already crowded pack, but my sleepiness snuffed out any hang-ups about how many animals are too many.

When Mason woke up, and I told him what I had done, he smiled with both affection and smugness, like he knew all along it would happen. We tiptoed down the plank steps, which led to the cinderblock and concrete basement, but Mason motioned for me to stop before we reached the bottom, gesturing towards an old futon sitting at the base.

Besides the white strip on her chest, Thelma was as black as a moonless cloudy night, and at first, it was hard to pinpoint her silhouette in the un-windowed dimness, but then I heard her wheezing, slightly phlegmy breath. She had obviously learned how to use the doggie door because she had made it from the yard to the basement and snored on the frayed, wet-dog smelling futon. We crept back up the steps and let her sleep.