The women in the apartment next door want money to buy cigarettes. The matriarch is a hunched old grannie with a shrunken face and a bad leg, who toddles around in a walker.  She dresses in strange but colorful outfits compiled from cast-off clothing which she in turn abandons after wearing them until they reek.  She comes outside to sit and smoke in an old plastic chair in front of her door.  The door bears a sign, “No Smoking! Oxygen In Use.” She leaves her oxygen tank in the house.

  First she lived with one, but now two of her fat, middle-aged daughters, one of them completely toothless, as is Grannie, both with dyed hair resplendent with gray roots, both dressed in nasty old T-shirts and too tight pants.  The daughters have been married, but after losing their children through abuse, they now live with their mother in a dank, smelly apartment paid for by social security.  They have never spoken of their children to me.  I only know this from the gossip in the village.

            It is a large family, Grannie having birthed eleven children, and on any given night various and sundry members show up to sleep on the floor, only to slip away undetected if possible before daylight.  One of the daughters has a boyfriend, a skinny young fellow with a heart problem who borrows his mother’s car to visit.  He is the only member of the group with a driver’s license.   In spite of his pacemaker, he is a chain smoker.  He doesn’t work.  None of them work.

            They ask ME for the cigarette money. “Can I borrow four dollars?”  Mary Lou’s face is nervous with beads of sweat on her forehead.  She barely whispers the words.  She and I both know borrow is the wrong verb.  Behind her the door lays open to the darkness of their cluttered apartment.  A sour, moldy smell colors the air from within, so powerful I can’t walk by their door without covering my nose with my hand.  Everywhere they go they leave a cloud of trash, an ocean of cigarette butts and empty pop bottles.  Sometimes worse things, full black trash bags belching forth unspeakable maggoty refuse that they don’t seem to smell, left right outside the door.  The rancid stench of humanity.  No wonder they smoke.

            “Sorry,” I say, “I’ve got twenty bucks to my name and gas and food to buy.”  This is hard for me.  I want to be a good neighbor.  I want to help them.  I have given them gifts, food, furniture, blankets.  Ugly old beat up stuff.  My stuff.  The poor helping the poor.  They take it as if it is their due, not the sweat of my brow.

I don’t want to support their addictions.  I’ve fallen for that one before.  Four dollars for this, four dollars for that, but it’s really always four dollars for cigarettes, the true main staple of their existence, but an item food stamps won’t cover.  Sometimes they ask for less, when they are gathering cash as a group to buy tobacco, but they never ask for more.  The four is a dead giveaway.  One would think they would get smart and ask for five, just to throw me off the trail.  But they don’t.  It’s as if they are testing me.  I ask myself, is it any of my business to judge?  If they were starving would I part with my precious twenty?  “But they ARE starving,” I argue aloud with myself.  Their souls are bankrupt and poverty-stricken----or so it seems to me.  But how do I know?  Don’t we all have hopes and dreams?

            There is a thin strip of asphalt between the building and the parking lot where everyone stands outside to smoke.  Why that spot, I’ll never know.  There is no place to sit, no tree for shade, but it’s the spot and sooner or later everyone ends up there, be it summer, winter, day or night.  I’ve tried standing with them at night while they smoke.  I’ve even tried smoking with them, as if that would bridge our differences.  The talk is superficial with long silences.  I look at the stars.

            How do they see me?  I live in the apartment next door for God’s sake, one wall away.  Can I be much different than they?   Well okay, I work.  I have a car.  I live alone.  Do they feel sorry for me when they see me coming and going, working, struggling, always alone, while they stay home with each other? Living off someone else and laughing and crying together?  Do they pity me as much as I pity them?  Or do they only pity themselves and envy my low wage job, hate me because I have twenty dollars and won’t give them four for cigarettes?  I sigh and shake my head: Maybe there is no helping anyone.  Maybe everyone has to learn for themselves.  I thought education was the hope of the world, but what inspires a person to want to learn?  All I know is, after seven years on the fringes of Appalachia, I still don’t know how to help these people, these Appalachians.

            This is the second group that has lived in that apartment since I’ve been here.  The first group was already here when I came to the building several years ago looking for a cheap art studio in which to live and paint. .Of similar ilk to my present neighbors, the first group consisted of two young couples, and five children, all related.  Even husband and wife blood relation.  The children were slovenly and sad, living on bad food and television, what beauty and innocence they once had as merely being children gone completely by age seven or eight when they began to suffer from an unanswerable longing that they couldn’t understand or describe, just live.  As if it was their only way to communicate, three of the children began to hustle me every time we met.  They had more “stuff”, more clutter than their apartment could hold and yet they always wanted more.  Nothing satisfied for very long.  No creative play was visible.  They were always seeking immediate gratification.

            That family was constantly in crisis.  The fights, the passions, the addictions of the adults, created such chaos I’m sure school was a life apart for those children, for some a sanctuary, but for most a magnification of the fact that they would never belong anywhere.

When the adults would stand outside to smoke, I would try to stand with them, trying to get to know them, trying to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’.  But I couldn’t play their game very long.  Serious conversations were bitter ‘who done me wrong’ songs, and light ones were full of mean one-upmanship.  Their steely determination to self-destruct was impossible to dissuade.  They would wound themselves and each other vehemently.  Even their courtships seemed brutal to me.

Yet I heard their unspoken voice:  Junk food.  Cigarettes.  Alcohol.  Drugs.  Coffee.  T.V.----------Addiction. When life seems hopeless, nasty, brutish, and short, then why not go for the gusto?  Party on!  Forget nutrition, we’re all gonna have cancer anyway from the nuclear plant down river and the industrial and agricultural pollution in our drinking water!  It was a tune carried as if it all somehow made them closer to God than the rest of us.

If I tried to talk to them about changing that world, their reality, a blank wall would go up in their eyes, and suddenly I was not one of them.  I was from the outside.  Someone who didn’t understand.  Someone not to be trusted…”Could I borrow four dollars?”  These were not nice white liberals who could organize a farmer’s market, or even inner-city blacks with a block to call their own.  These were landless savages, some ancient tribe scattered like the lost tribe of Ishmael, hiding and running, proud and ashamed at the same time.

            Was it poverty that had made them so?  I had seen poverty all over the globe, the Amazon, Soweto, Lima, Peru where a sea of people lived in cardboard boxes and a plastic bag was a treasure; even Scotland where peasants lived in ancient humble cottages the size of a modern bathroom and lunch was ALWAYS cucumber sandwiches.  Yet none of those people seemed to think the world owed them a living, nor did they appear to be particularly unhappy.  What made the difference?  Cities?  Television?  Our bloated capitalistic society that robbed them of their self-respect, made being poor something of which they had to be ashamed?  Or was it the rape of the land itself, used, abused, and abandoned, that left the little people soulless, degraded, and angry?  I gave up trying to help them.  You cannot organize people on the run.  Put to the task of changing themselves, they simply disappear.

They had a dog once.  A wild-eyed cur chained out by the dumpster, who never, ever, got off his chain.  He was thin as a rail, his hair matted, dark brown and nasty, existing as he did on a handful of the cheapest dried dog food and a bowl of rain water he like as not had knocked over with his chain during the course of the day.  It was a heavy chain with three-inch links which was wrapped through the hole of a cement block which slid over a pole four feet tall and two and a half inches thick, cemented into the ground.  He had been on it his entire life.

Whenever I took trash to the dumpster the dog would go crazy, growling and barking ferociously.  Ten years previously I had been attacked by a Doberman and big snarling animals, even chained, still make me shake..  I avoided the dog as best I could until one day the neighbors took off somewhere and after a few days of their absence I realized the dog was starving.  No one ever came to tend to him, nor had anyone left even a pretense of food for him.  This was more than I could stand.  Somehow I knew I was breaking their rules, that I was indeed asking for trouble, but I hate injustice and so I did the only thing I knew to do.  I started to feed him.

At the time I was working at a restaurant and I found it easy to scrape the customer’s leftovers into a plastic bucket and take it home to Snoop.  He would eat anything.  Whole broiled potatoes would disappear in one chomp.  Pasta with tomato sauce, broccoli, things most dogs distain----But he wasn’t easy to feed.  He would snap so fast and furiously at the food, my hands and fingers were in danger.  I had tried throwing him the food, but it would land in the dirt or worse.  Finally, at the risk of losing the bucket all together, I learned to set the bucket on the ground and scoot it into his circle with a big stick, him straining and pulling wildly at the chain that anchored him.

He had a six foot circle and a thin plywood lean-to for shelter and he paced the circle all day as dogs are want to do, dragging his chain so that no grass could grow, leaving only dirt and a sea of mud when it rained.  In the winter my neighbors put some straw in his house, but he destroyed it, just as he did anything that came into his circle.  His toys were empty plastic soda bottles which would blow off the top of the overfilled dumpster and he would will them into his reach where he would chew them into mangled shreds.  The plastic food bucket shared the same fate.  I replaced it with a metal stewpot from my kitchen.  I kept feeding him.  Scraps of prime rib, fettuccine alfredo, chicken piccatta, cheesecake.  He started to get fatter.  He started to calm down.  He even looked handsome.  His fur became black and wolflike.

Then one day when I sat his food down, he didn’t immediately gobble it up.  Instead he looked up at me and gave my hand a little lick.  A tiny polite little lick.  A kiss.  My heart melted.

We started to play.  No longer ravenous when I came to feed him, he would make playful postures and dance around his circle.  We played peek a boo around the dumpster.  Day or night, he was always watching for my door to open and would sit up proudly with his ears straight up.  I brought my shovel and cleaned up his space.  He let me pet his head.  We were in love.

But this did not go unnoticed in the compound, for one day there was a knock on my door.  It was my landlord, an old Pakistani with a serious heart problem, a good man, a prayerful man, a bad landlord.  The buildings are old and dilapidated, his policy being no lease, and no repairs.  So here he was with a man on a bulldozer who had come to clear the rubble and underbrush from the back of the lot.  But no one could get near the dog.  He had spent all this money on the event…did I think I could move the dog?  There was something about this request that made me uncomfortable.  Where were the neighbors?  As usual, of late, nowhere to be found.

As I struggled with the heavy cement block, I should have been watching Snoop, because he was certainly watching me.  Literally the instant I got the block to the top of the pole, that dog took off like a bullet, raking the block and chain right across my ankle which slowed me down considerably in my attempt to go after him.

And what did that big bad ferocious beast do?  Did he take off for parts unknown and his freedom?  No. He merely ran around the compound, dragging the cement block as if it were nothing, sniffing all the corners of the yard, all the objects he had looked at day in and day out for however many eternities he had been chained there.  Finally he had a chance to smell them, examine them up close.  He wasn’t difficult to catch, but he sure was difficult to hold.  He was so strong and so determined to use his time to good advantage, he dragged me around like a team of wild horses.  It must have been very comical for the two men watching, but for me it was fast and furious.  Snoop would whip that chain around so even when I could grab the block, there was the danger of being caught in the chain.  Finally I anchored the block between the rungs of the bike rack and went inside to nurse my wounded ankle.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, the bulldozer plowed up Snoop’s space and crushed his house.  When I came back outside, I knew we were in trouble.  Snoop didn’t care.  He was delighted to be sitting in a new place, with a new view.  He made a bed in the leaves and ate his dinner.  This went on for several days until the neighbors came home.  They were a sorry sight to see.  One of the women had run off with the other ones husband and the children were about as homeless as the dog.

The woman left behind was twenty-five years old, weighed 300 pounds, not a tooth in her head, had already suffered a major heart attack, couldn’t read, or write, or drive a car.  She was angry and mean, even to her child.  The dog didn’t stand a chance.  We had a bit of a scene.

“He’s going to the pound!” she screeched at me.

:”No!  Please, please don’t----“  I was holding back tears.

“He’s going to the pound!”  She had arrived with a man in an old flatbed truck.

“At least give me a couple of days to try and find him a home…or at least let me call Pound Rescue…”

She didn’t flinch.  The dog belonged to her husband.  Her husband had run off with her sister-in-law, her best friend, and here I was feeding the dog.  Her husband’s dog.  Somehow it all seemed the same crime in her head.  She was gleeful about the possibility of hurting the husband by killing his dog.

They loaded Snoop in the back of the flatbed, cement block and all.  I can still see him.  He didn’t cower or cry.  He didn’t act crazy or stupid.  He sat up all proud and beautiful, like a king on his way to the guillotine, the wind blowing his fur as they drove him down the hill.

That night I couldn’t sleep.  I prayed someone would adopt him, but deep down I knew that would not happen.  He was big and untrained and probably a cat killer.  I thought he must be suffocating inside that awful building when he had always lived outside. I began to plot.  I had three days before they would kill him.  I didn’t have the sixty dollars to spring him out of jail, nor could I bring him back to the compound, to my tiny apartment with two cats.  Did I know anyone who would take him?  Or what if I could borrow the cash and then just let him go somewhere out in the country?  It was a fantasy.  I’ve never set out an animal in my life and even if I could, he would either get shot or worse yet would come right back to the hill.  To me.  To the only home he knew, where he had been chained his whole life.

I cried for three days.  I cried at home.  I cried at work, not just polite little sniffles where you blow your nose and that’s it, but huge irrational gut-wrenching sobs which frightened my co-workers and nearly got me fired.  I cried for the dog, for myself, and for the cruelty of life that had reduced my neighbors to such inhumanity.  In all their pain and suffering, they had hated my loving their dog.  How dare I shame them by making him happy and beautiful when they themselves were ugly and miserable.  He was their dog and they would have him dead.

The three days were up and I had failed.  Failed to find a solution.  Failed my friend.  A deep silence settled over me………

It was on a crisp fall morning, not long after, that I saw it.  I was outside by my car, alone in the parking lot, up early before anyone else was stirring.  The dog was perfectly white, beautiful and free, not one I recognized, certainly not one from the village where no dog ran free.  Aside from the color difference, it looked exactly like Snoop.   It walked gracefully through the compound, crossed Snoop’s old stomping ground, and sniffed the ground.  I felt it a message

My brother is a long distance trucker.  Years ago he owned a farm in a remote location back in the hills.  His faithful companion on the farm was a little hound dog  he called Nosey, who in spite of my brother’s long absences on the road, ran free to take care of herself, guarded the farmhouse and was always there to greet him on his return.  When it was her time to die she had plunged headfirst into the deepest part of the river and never came back up.  He had been fishing nearby and saw the whole thing.  When he told me about it, in a whisper least anyone else hear him, he said the strange thing was, that very day he had seen  a pair of big, perfectly white dogs pass through the woods and cross the river right  before Nosey took her dive.  They were a breed he had never seen.

He swore they were angel dogs that had come to take his Miss Nosey away.

.           I held my breath as I watched this white dog cross Snoop’s yard and disappear into the woods.  My friend was dead, but he had made it to the other side.  And he let me know.

            I’m very careful to tell my animals that they belong to themselves and not to me.  But they don’t get it.  Or they simply refuse.  Animals have a code of their own, like my Native American Grandmothers always said.  And a dog’s code is loyalty.  Snoop was not my dog.  He was the neighbor’s dog.  As much as he loved me, it was his sacred duty as a dog to be loyal to them no matter what they did to him.  They could kick him, starve him, even kill him and eat him.  He was their animal.  He would not complain.  He would die with dignity.  Ultimately I could not rescue him, because I could not rescue them.  He had to die, because they said so.  But the angel dog was there …  The stolen love Snoop and I shared had healed his soul.  He didn’t die abandoned or thrown away.  He died triumphant and beloved.   Snoop had made the grade.  Love is the redeemer.

 Love is all there is.

Carol Thompson is a writer living in Appalachian Ohio. 

She is currently working on a book of short stories. 

She can be reached via email at:

 gardens_heal@yahoo.com