The Town’s New Animal Control Officer Took My Old Husky Off My Own Front Porch And Wrote Me A $350 Ticket For “Running Loose.” I Taught Him Eighth-Grade English In 1999, And At The Hearing I Brought One Photograph

My husky Tundra has slept on my front porch every afternoon for thirteen years. She is gray and white with pale blue eyes that make strangers stop on the sidewalk, and she lies on the painted boards between the two rocking chairs with her chin on the top step like a queen watching her subjects go by. She does not bark. Huskies mostly don’t. She talks, a kind of low “woo-woo” that sounds like an old man complaining about the weather, but she saves that for me.

The porch is on Garfield Avenue in the old part of Pocatello, Idaho, in a little white house with green trim that my husband Emory and I bought in 1981. Emory passed in 2016. Tundra was three then, and she lay across the foot of his hospice bed for his last week and would not move for anyone but me.

My name is Emmeline Gilchrist. I am seventy-one. I taught eighth-grade English at Franklin Middle School for thirty-four years. I have a long silver braid that my granddaughter says makes me look like a retired witch, and I have been called worse by thirteen-year-olds, many times, usually in writing, usually misspelled.

I tell you all this so you understand that when a man in a khaki uniform walked up onto my porch on a Wednesday afternoon in September and put a catch pole around my old dog’s neck, he was not removing a stray. He was removing part of the house.

Wednesday at 3:40

I was asleep. I am not ashamed to say it. I take a nap most afternoons now in Emory’s recliner by the front window, and on that Wednesday I dozed off at three with a book on my chest and the window open a crack for the breeze.

What woke me was a sound I had never heard Tundra make. A high, thin cry, almost a scream. By the time I got out of that recliner and to the door, which at my age takes longer than I would like, there was a white city truck at my curb with its back doors open, and a broad-shouldered man in a khaki uniform was lifting my thirteen-year-old dog into a metal box in the back.

“That’s my dog!” I said. “What are you doing? That’s my dog!”

He closed the box. He turned around with a clipboard. He was about forty, dark-haired, with a face I almost recognized and could not place. His name badge said R. KUHLMAN, ANIMAL SERVICES.

“Ma’am, your animal was running at large on Garfield Avenue,” he said. “That’s a violation of city code.”

“She was on the porch,” I said. “She was asleep on the porch. She’s thirteen. She doesn’t run anywhere.”

He wrote something on the clipboard. “Dog was observed in the public right-of-way unattended at 3:40 p.m.,” he said, reading it as he wrote it. “You can claim her at the county shelter tomorrow after nine. There’s a three-hundred-fifty-dollar citation and a forty-dollar-per-day boarding fee.” He tore off a pink copy and held it out.

I did not take it. He set it on the porch rail under one of my geraniums so it would not blow away. Then he looked at me for one long second, and something went across his face that I did not understand at the time. It looked a little like satisfaction.

“Have a good day, Mrs. Gilchrist,” he said.

I had not told him my name.

Rodney

I stood on that porch for a long time after the truck was gone. The pink ticket fluttered under the geranium. And somewhere around the second time I read his last name, something clicked over in my old teacher’s brain, the way a file drawer slides open.

Kuhlman. Rodney Kuhlman. Fourth period, eighth grade, 1999 to 2000. Back row by the radiator. Hood up. A boy who could make a whole class laugh with one look and could not, or would not, write a single paragraph. He turned in a total of three assignments the entire spring semester. One of them was a drawing of me as a dragon. It was, I will admit, a pretty good drawing.

I failed him. I had to. He had a twenty-two percent average in English, and the district said that meant summer school or repeat the grade. I remember telling his mother at the parent conference. She was a tired woman in a hospital cafeteria uniform who had come straight from a double shift. She did not cry. She just nodded, very slowly, and said, “I know. I know he can do it. He just won’t do it for anybody who’s telling him to.”

Rodney found out that afternoon in front of half the eighth grade, because somebody’s mother worked in the front office and somebody’s mother talks. I heard later that the boys called him “Summer School Rod” all the next year. I heard he never forgave me.

Twenty-five years later he was the new animal control officer for the city of Pocatello, and he had my dog in a box.

The County Shelter

My grandson Barnaby drove me to the shelter the next morning. He is twelve, so his mother drove, but Barnaby insisted on coming because he said Tundra would want to see somebody “who’s not old.” I let that go.

The shelter is a long concrete building out past the fairgrounds with a row of chain-link kennels down one side. The young woman at the desk was kind. She went into the back, and a minute later a door opened, and there came Tundra on a slip lead, walking slow, her tail low, looking every year of her age.

She saw me. Her tail came up. She pulled the young woman across the concrete floor and threw her whole weight against me, and I went right down on my knees on that cold floor in front of everybody and wrapped my arms around her. She licked my chin and my glasses and my braid and talked to me, woo-woo-woo, telling me exactly what she thought of the night she’d had.

And when I looked up, there was Rodney Kuhlman standing behind the desk with his clipboard, filling out paperwork, not looking at us.

“Four hundred and thirty dollars,” the young woman said gently. “That’s the citation, two days’ boarding and the impound fee. I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

Two days. He had counted the day he took her as a full day.

I paid it. I wrote a check right there and signed it in my best Palmer penmanship, and as I handed it over I said, “Rodney, she was on my porch.”

He looked up then. He did not pretend not to know me. “Mrs. Gilchrist,” he said, “rules are for everybody. You taught me that.”

The Second Time

I told myself it was an honest mistake. Maybe she had stepped down onto the sidewalk to sniff something and he happened to drive by. Maybe I was a vain old woman who wanted to believe a grudge was about her.

Then he came back.

Twelve days later I was sitting on the porch myself, in my rocking chair, with Tundra lying at my feet, when the white truck slowed down at my curb. Rodney did not get out. He just sat there with his window down and looked at us for a full minute. Then he wrote something on his clipboard and drove away. That afternoon there was a letter in my mailbox from the city. A warning notice. “Repeated complaints of an animal at large at this address. Further violations may result in the animal being declared a public nuisance.”

Repeated complaints. I went up and down Garfield Avenue that evening knocking on every door. Mrs. Rafferty next door, who has known Tundra since she was a puppy. The Delgado boys across the street. The young couple on the corner with the twins. Nobody had complained. Nobody had called anybody. Old Mr. Odell at the end of the block said, “Emmeline, that dog has been lying on that porch since Clinton was president. If she’s at large, so am I.”

A public nuisance. They can take a nuisance dog away for good.

Requesting a Hearing

I am a retired English teacher. When I am frightened, I write things down.

I filed a written request to contest the citation. It took me three drafts and I used a semicolon correctly in every one of them. The city scheduled a hearing before an administrative magistrate for the twenty-second of October at ten in the morning, in a little room on the second floor of City Hall.

Barnaby helped me organize what we had. Signed statements from six neighbors saying Tundra had never once been seen off the porch or the yard. A letter from her veterinarian saying she had arthritis in both hips and could not have “run at large” if she tried. Photographs of the porch, the steps, the sidewalk. Barnaby measured the distance from the porch to the public sidewalk with his father’s tape measure. Twenty-two feet. “She’d have to get up for that,” he said. “She doesn’t get up for bacon anymore.”

But I knew it might not matter. It would be my word against a city officer’s word. He would say he saw her in the street. The magistrate would believe the uniform. And then there would be another warning, and another, until one day Tundra did take one step off that porch the way any dog does, and he would be waiting.

So the night before the hearing, I went into the back bedroom closet where I keep Emory’s things, and I got down the shoebox.

Emory’s Summer

Here is something Rodney Kuhlman never knew.

In June of 2000, about a week after school let out, his mother called me at home. I do not know how she got the number. She said, “Mrs. Gilchrist, I’m not calling to yell at you. I know you did what you had to do. But he won’t go to summer school. He says he’ll drop out first. He’s thirteen and he says he’ll drop out, and I believe him, and I’m working sixty hours a week and I can’t make him do anything.”

I talked to Emory about it that night. Emory was a retired railroad mechanic with big hands and a slow voice and about as much patience as any man God ever made. He had taught himself to read at age eleven, behind his family’s barn in Blackfoot, out of the Sears catalog, because nobody had ever noticed that the letters jumped around on him. He said, “Em, that boy doesn’t want a teacher. Let me go fix a carburetor with him.”

So he did. All that summer, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Emory drove over to Rodney’s mother’s little rental on North Arthur Avenue in his old blue Ford with our husky Kodiak riding in the passenger seat. He told Rodney his name was Emory and that he needed help rebuilding an engine. He never once told him his last name, because Rodney would have known it, and he never once mentioned me. They took apart a lawnmower and two motorcycle engines and a carburetor out of a 1967 Mustang. And every time Emory handed Rodney a manual and said, “I can’t see these little words so good anymore, read me what it says,” Rodney read it to him. Slowly at first. Then not so slowly.

At the end of August, Rodney passed the summer school exam that Emory made him sign up for in July. Passed it with an eighty-four. His mother called me crying. I made her promise never to tell him where Emory came from. I said, “He’ll throw it away if he knows it was me.” I was probably right. Thirteen-year-old boys are like that. So are a lot of forty-year-old men.

In the shoebox there was a photograph Rodney’s mother had mailed to us that September. A skinny boy with his hood down for once, grinning, holding up a greasy carburetor in both hands. Beside him, a big gray-haired man in coveralls. And sitting between them, leaning on the boy’s leg with her pale blue eyes half closed, a gray-and-white husky named Kodiak.

Tundra’s grandmother.

Room 214

The hearing room had a table, four chairs and a flag. Magistrate Halsey was a small, brisk woman with reading glasses on a chain who looked like she had heard every excuse ever invented and been amused by about two of them.

Rodney gave his testimony first. He was polished. He read from his report. Animal observed in the public right-of-way at 3:40 p.m., no owner present, animal secured for public safety. He said there had been “multiple concerns” about the address. When the magistrate asked who had raised the concerns, he said they were “internal observations.”

Then it was my turn. I gave her the neighbors’ statements and the vet’s letter and Barnaby’s measurements. Magistrate Halsey read every word. She nodded at the vet’s letter. She lifted an eyebrow at “Since Clinton was president.”

“Is there anything else, Mrs. Gilchrist?” she asked.

“Just one photograph,” I said. “Not for you, Your Honor. For Officer Kuhlman.”

I slid it across the table to him, face up.

“That’s Emory”

I watched him look at it. I watched him look at it for a long time.

At first his face did nothing at all. Then his jaw loosened. He picked it up, carefully, by the edges, the way you pick up something you are afraid you might tear. He brought it close to his face.

“Where did you get this?” he said. His voice had gone up about an octave. “That’s Emory. That’s me and Emory. That’s his dog. Where did you get this?”

“Emory was my husband,” I said. “Emory Gilchrist. Forty-one years.”

He stared at me.

“Your mother called me the week after school let out,” I said. “She was afraid you’d quit. Emory said you didn’t need another English teacher, you needed somebody to hand you a wrench. So he went. Tuesdays and Thursdays. He never told you who sent him, because I asked him not to. I didn’t think you’d go if you knew.”

Rodney put the photograph down on the table. He put his hand flat on top of it. Magistrate Halsey had taken off her reading glasses and was watching him with great interest.

“He told me I wasn’t stupid,” Rodney said. He was not talking to me. He was not talking to anybody. “He told me my brain was just wired like his. He told me dogs don’t care if you can read. That’s why I took this job. Because of him and that dog. I looked for him after I got back from the Army. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew any Emory with a husky.”

“He died in 2016,” I said. “Tundra was three. She’s Kodiak’s granddaughter. She’s the dog you put in the box.”

The Magistrate’s Ruling

Magistrate Halsey let the silence go on for a while. Then she put her glasses back on, picked up her pen, and said, “Officer Kuhlman, do you wish to amend your testimony regarding where the animal was located at 3:40 p.m. on September tenth?”

He did not look up from the photograph. “She was on the porch,” he said quietly. “She was asleep on the porch, Your Honor. I knew whose house it was. I’d known since I started the route in August. I just wanted her to know what it felt like.”

“What what felt like?” the magistrate asked.

“Having somebody decide you’re a problem,” he said.

The citation was dismissed. The magistrate ordered the city to refund my four hundred and thirty dollars and withdraw the warning notice. She said, in a very dry voice, that she would be forwarding a copy of the hearing record to Animal Services “for whatever they consider appropriate.” Then she looked at me over her glasses and said, “Mrs. Gilchrist, I had Mr. Purcell for eighth-grade English. He failed me too. I’m grateful to him now. It took about thirty years.” And she adjourned.

Woo-Woo

Rodney did not lose his job. He was suspended for two weeks without pay and taken off my route, and I wrote a letter to his supervisor asking that it not go further than that. I said I believed people could learn, even at forty. I said I had built a whole career on believing it.

On the Saturday after his suspension ended, there was a knock on my front door. It was Rodney, in jeans and a sweatshirt, with his hood down. His mother was standing behind him on the sidewalk holding a pie. She was not a tired woman in a cafeteria uniform anymore. She was a retired woman with short gray curls and a pie, and she was crying a little, and she said, “Hello, Mrs. Gilchrist. I kept my promise as long as I could.”

Rodney stood on my porch with his hands in his pockets. Tundra was lying between the rocking chairs, where she always lies. She lifted her head and looked at him with those pale blue eyes. I held my breath. Huskies remember.

Then she got up, which she does not do for bacon anymore, and walked over to him on her stiff old hips, and leaned her whole weight against his leg, the exact way her grandmother does in that photograph.

Rodney sat down on my top step and put his face in her ruff and did not say anything for a long time. She talked to him the whole while, woo-woo-woo, telling him all about it.

He comes by on Thursdays now. Not on duty. He sits on the porch and drinks my bad coffee and reads the newspaper to Tundra out loud, because he says Emory told him that’s how you get faster. He reads pretty well. He still can’t spell “necessary.” I have stopped correcting him. Mostly.

The photograph is in a frame on my mantel now. A boy, a carburetor, a big man in coveralls and a gray-and-white husky. Rodney had a copy made for himself. He keeps it on the dashboard of the white city truck, right where he can see it, every time he drives down a street with an old dog sleeping on a porch.

If there is a teacher who failed you once, or a kid you gave up on, or a grudge you have carried a little too long, maybe think about who else was in the room that you never saw. And if this story moved you, please pass it along to someone who believes people can still change. Some of us need reminding.

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