…holding her clipboard against her chest and counting dogs out loud, one finger at a time, as though she were counting cattle at an auction. My mother stood in the middle of the metal barn in her church shoes, with a bucket of kibble in one hand and a long rope leash in the other, and thirty or more dogs were swirling around her knees, barking, leaping and tangling in her skirt. Every one of them was wagging. Every one of them wanted her. “Forty one,” my sister in law said. “Forty two. Ruth, you missed the little brown one in the corner.” Mama turned toward the sound of my voice, and her whole face lit up. “Heather! Look who is here!”
I waded through the dogs and took the bucket from her. The barn smelled of straw and ammonia, and the concrete floor was slick. Every kennel had a laminated card with a dog name and a date, and the handwriting on the cards was the neat looping script of my mother. “Mama, how many days have you been doing this?” I asked. “Since Friday morning,” she said. “Cheryl had a donor tour on Saturday. I wanted everything to look nice.” Cheryl came down off the hay bale with her clipboard. “Heather, you are early,” she said, in a tight voice. “Your mother loves the animals. You said it yourself. She is the dog whisperer of Taylor County.”
I looked around. On the wall beside the door hung a large banner that read, SECOND CHANCE RANCH. Under it, in smaller letters, MISS RUTHIE, OUR VOLUNTEER OF THE YEAR. A donation jar sat on the table with a photograph of my mother in a straw hat, holding a puppy. Taped to the jar was a handwritten sign. “Every dollar goes to the dogs.” I thought of the crooked porch steps and the garage full of boots she could not afford, and my stomach turned over. “Cheryl, does my mother get paid?” I asked. “She is a volunteer,” Cheryl said. “That is the point of a volunteer.”
A frayed rope dog leash hung on a barn door gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the choir loft in Abilene.
I set my terms on the barn floor, with my mother seated on an overturned bucket and a small dog in her lap. She would not be working a single hour more in that barn unless she was properly paid and covered by insurance. Dale and Cheryl would hire two kennel workers and a part time vet tech at a fair wage. The money they had raised using the picture of my mother, forty one thousand dollars over two years, would be accounted for in a written statement, open to the donors, with every receipt. And my mother would take home two of the dogs for fostering, if she chose, at the expense of the rescue.
Cheryl did not take it well at first. She started to talk about the tight margins of a nonprofit, the donors, the vet bills. Then she stopped, because my brother Dale had stepped through the barn door with his hat in his hands. He is fifty three, a quiet rancher with a bad shoulder, and I had never seen him look so lost. “Cheryl, is it true?” he asked. “Is Mama here every weekend with no pay?” Cheryl began to answer, but Dale held up a hand. “I thought she came because she wanted to,” he said. “I thought we were doing something good. I never asked her what she needed.” He looked at our mother. “Mama, I am so sorry.”
My mother put the little dog on the floor and stood up. She smoothed her skirt, a gesture I knew from forty years of Sunday mornings in the alto row. “Dale, I came because I love the animals,” she said, “and because I love you. Those are two different things, and sometimes I got them mixed up. Do not be ashamed. Just be better.” Dale crossed the floor in three strides and put his arms around her. A big brown dog leaned against his leg and whined. Cheryl stood at the back of the barn with her clipboard against her chest, and for the first time that day she did not say a word.
Dale spent the next three nights at the kitchen table with a spreadsheet and a calculator, going through every receipt for two years. He found a donation of five thousand dollars from a woman in Dallas, labeled for vet care, that had gone toward a new truck. He found the thousand dollar monthly fee paid to Cheryl for administrative work. He did not hide any of it. At the end of the third night, he printed the statement, made a copy for every donor and had a lawyer in Abilene review it. Then he drove to the house of our mother and handed her the first page.
The money consequences were clear and public. Dale and Cheryl paid back the truck money to the rescue and reduced her administrative fee by half. They hired two kennel workers from the local high school at a fair wage, and a retired vet tech who came in on Saturday mornings. The donors received the full accounting, and three of them, to the surprise of everyone, doubled their gifts. My mother took home two old, gray muzzled dogs named Biscuit and Sergeant, and she wrote a check for a modest sum to buy herself the pair of rubber boots she had never owned.
In the name of my mother, Ruth Ellen, and the forty years she sang alto in the choir of First Baptist, I started the Sunday Alto Fund. It pays for stipends, insurance and fair wages for older volunteers at animal rescues and charities in Taylor County who have been working for free for too long. In the first year, we supported thirty one volunteers. A retired schoolteacher of eighty one, in a pair of new canvas gloves, held up a puppy with a bandaged paw and said, “It turns out that I like being appreciated almost as much as I like being useful.”
On a bright Saturday in October, I sat on the porch steps of the house of my mother with a glass of tea. Biscuit and Sergeant were sprawled in the sun, panting, their old gray tails thumping. Mama came out in her new rubber boots, still stiff, and sat on the swing with a crossword. She hummed an alto line from the hymn, and the dogs lifted their heads. I put down my glass and, without thinking, sang the soprano above her. We did not finish the verse. We did not need to. The porch was warm, and the dogs went back to sleep.