Part 2: A Dog Was Left Tied to the Front Gate of Our Rescue on a Sunday Morning in November With a Duffel Bag Beside Him. He Would Not Let Us Move the Bag. Three Weeks Later We Found Out Why.
Part 2
His name turned out to be Murphy.
We figured it out on the second day. He had a small brass tag on his collar that we had missed at first because it had slid around to the back of his neck. The tag had been worn smooth on one side. The other side, faintly, said MURPHY and a phone number with a 423 area code, which is east Tennessee.
I called the number on Monday morning.
It was disconnected.
I called it three more times that week from three different phones in case it was the carrier. It was disconnected from all three.
Murphy was about six years old, according to the vet who came out on Monday afternoon. She was a woman named Dr. Lin who has done our intake exams for nine years and who I trust with my own animals. She gave him a once-over in our intake room. He let her. He was healthy. He had been recently bathed. His coat was clean. His ears were clean. His nails had been clipped within the last two weeks. He was up to date on what looked like a Bordetella vaccine, based on the small worn-down spot on his neck where vets give those shots.
Somebody had taken care of him very recently.
Somebody had taken care of him for a long time.
Dr. Lin looked at him with that look she gets sometimes and she said: “Kara. Somebody loved this dog.”
I said, “I know.”
She said, “Why is he here, then?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
We tried, on Monday afternoon, to take the duffel bag.
We tried twice. We tried with treats. We tried with one of us distracting him at the kennel door while the other one tried to slide the bag out of his kennel.
He did not bite. He did not lunge. He did the same low, long, unbroken growl — down at the bag, not at us — and he placed his body between us and the bag and he stayed there.
The second time we tried, on Monday evening, Brenda — who has been doing this longer than I have, who is sixty-one years old and the most patient woman I have ever known — sat down on the concrete floor of the kennel and watched him for about ten minutes.
Then she stood up and she walked out and she said: “Kara. We’re not taking the bag.”
I said, “We have to take the bag eventually.”
She said, “Yes. But not yet. He’s not done with it.”
I did not understand what she meant.
I let her be in charge of him.
There was one other thing I noticed on the first day that I am going to write down now, because it matters at the end.
When we brought Murphy into his kennel on Sunday afternoon, with the duffel bag, he did not curl up on the bed we had laid out. He did not eat the food I put down. He walked to the back of the kennel. He set the duffel bag down against the back wall, very carefully. He lay down on top of the duffel bag with his chin on the leather handles.
He stayed there for the rest of the night.
He did not eat for two days.
Part 3
The first week was the hardest.
Murphy ate, eventually, on the third day. He drank water on the second. He let us walk him in the small fenced yard behind the kennel building twice a day. He came when called. He sat for treats. He did everything a well-trained, gentle, six-year-old Beagle mix is supposed to do.
The duffel bag stayed in his kennel.
He slept on it every night.
He carried it, by the leather handles, every time we let him out of the kennel. He would not walk in the yard without it. If we tried to close the kennel door behind him without the bag, he would not cross the threshold. He would stand at the door and wait. Then he would go back, pick the bag up by the handles, and carry it with him.
He could not carry it far. He was thirty pounds and the bag was probably twelve. He would walk about fifteen feet, set it down, rest, pick it up again, walk another fifteen feet.
The volunteers started carrying it for him.
He let them. He would watch them carry it. He would walk beside whichever volunteer had the bag, with his shoulder pressed against the volunteer’s calf, like a dog walking a child home from school.
By the fifth day, every volunteer knew Murphy and Murphy’s bag.
By the seventh day, Brenda had taught the morning shift to set the bag down beside Murphy whenever he stopped walking, so he could put one paw on it.
By the tenth day, I had stopped trying to figure out what was in the bag.
I should tell you about the phone number.
On the morning of the eighth day, a Monday, I tried the disconnected 423 number one more time. I do not know why. I had no expectation it would work. I had been calling it once a day for a week, the way you call any number you’ve been told is dead just in case it’s not.
It rang.
A woman picked up on the fourth ring.
She said, “Hello?”
I had not, in nine days, planned what I was going to say if anybody answered. I sat in my office chair with the phone against my ear and I said, very carefully, “Hi. My name is Kara Pendleton. I run the Mountain Laurel Animal Rescue in Boone, North Carolina.”
There was a pause.
She said, “Yes.”
I said, “I think I have your dog.”
There was a longer pause.
The woman on the other end of the phone said: “He’s not my dog.”
She said, “He was my brother’s dog.”
She said, “My brother died on November 14th.”
She said, “I don’t know how he got to North Carolina.”
She said, “I have been calling everywhere.”
She said, “Please don’t hang up.”
Part 4
Her name was Patricia Kowalski.
She lived in Johnson City, Tennessee, an hour and forty minutes northwest of Boone, on the other side of the state line. Her brother had been a sixty-one-year-old retired postal worker named Daniel Kowalski. He had lived in a small one-bedroom apartment off North Roan Street with Murphy, who he had adopted as a puppy in 2018 from a Beagle rescue in Kingsport.
Daniel had been sick for a year and a half.
He had not told anyone how sick.
He had told Patricia on a Friday afternoon in early November, over the phone, that he was not feeling great and he was going to “take a little trip” the next weekend to get some air. Patricia had not pressed him. She and Daniel had been close as children and had grown apart in their forties, the way some siblings do without anyone meaning for it to happen, and the past three years they had been working their way back. She told me, on the phone, that she had heard something in his voice that Friday and she had not pushed because she had thought she would have time.
Daniel had passed away in his apartment on the night of November 14th.
His landlord had found him on the morning of the 16th, after the rent check did not appear under the door, which was Daniel’s standing arrangement.
The landlord had called Patricia.
The landlord had said: There’s no dog here, ma’am. I don’t know where the dog is.
Patricia had driven down from Johnson City on the afternoon of the sixteenth. She had let herself into her brother’s apartment. The dog bowls were still on the kitchen floor. Murphy’s bed was at the foot of Daniel’s bed. There was a half-empty bag of dog food on the counter and a stack of paperwork on the kitchen table.
The duffel bag was gone.
She told me she had not, in that moment, understood what the duffel bag had to do with anything.
She had grown up with that duffel bag. It had been their father’s. Their father had been a Navy man. The duffel bag had been the bag he had packed when he came home from Subic Bay in 1969 and it had sat in the front closet of every house Daniel had ever lived in.
Patricia did not know what had been in it when Daniel left the apartment for the last time.
She told me, on the phone, that she had spent two days driving in widening circles around Johnson City looking for her brother’s dog. She had called every shelter from Bristol down to Asheville. She had not, until Monday morning, gotten to Boone.
She said: “Can I come get him?”
I said, “Of course. But there’s something you should know.”
I told her about the bag.
I told her Murphy had been guarding it for nine days.
I told her we had not opened it.
Patricia was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, very softly: “I think I know what’s in it.”
She said: “Don’t open it. Please. I want to be there when we open it.”
She said she would drive down on Wednesday.
Part 5
Patricia got to the rescue on Wednesday morning at ten oh-six.
She was a woman in her late fifties, with short gray hair and small wire-frame glasses and the kind of cardigan you wear when you have not been sleeping. She had a tissue in her hand when she got out of the car and another one balled up in her cardigan pocket and I could see, before she even said hello, that she had been crying off and on for nine days.
She did not come into the office.
She walked straight to the kennel building.
I led her down the row to kennel number six, where Murphy was. Brenda came with us. The duffel bag was against the back wall of the kennel. Murphy was lying on it with his chin on the leather handles.
Patricia stopped at the kennel door.
Murphy lifted his head.
He looked at her.
His tail did not wag. Not at first. He stood up, slowly, and he walked, slowly, to the front of the kennel. He sat down. He looked at her face for a long time.
Then he made a sound I had never heard a dog make.
It was not a bark. It was not a whine. It was a single, low, broken-off sound at the back of his throat, like a word he had been holding in for nine days.
Patricia opened the kennel door.
She did not kneel down. She had bad knees. She bent at the waist and she put both her hands on the sides of Murphy’s face and she said, in a voice I will not forget:
“Murphy. Oh, Murph. Oh, sweet boy. Oh, you good, good boy.”
Murphy leaned his entire weight against her legs.
He did not cry. Dogs don’t cry. But he made that sound again, the one that wasn’t a whine, and he stayed pressed against her, and Patricia bent farther down and she put her forehead against the top of his head and she stayed there for about a minute.
Then she straightened up.
She looked at the duffel bag at the back of the kennel.
She said, “All right, baby. Let’s see what your dad sent.”
She walked into the kennel. Murphy walked with her. She knelt down at the back wall — knees be damned — and she put her hand on the duffel bag.
Murphy did not growl.
He sat down beside her.
He put his chin on her knee.
Patricia unzipped the bag.
Part 6
Inside the duffel bag were three things.
The first thing was a folded gray wool blanket. It was the kind of blanket you’d get from an army surplus store in 1972. It was clean. It smelled, very faintly, like the soap aisle of a drugstore. Patricia took it out. She held it up.
She said: “This is the blanket he kept on the back of his couch.”
She set it on the concrete floor beside her.
The second thing was a manila envelope.
It was sealed with packing tape. It had a single word written on the front of it in black Sharpie, in handwriting Patricia recognized.
The word was: KAREN.
She held the envelope in her hands for a long time. Then she said, in a smaller voice: “Karen is my daughter. His niece. She’s twenty-six. She lives in Knoxville.”
She turned the envelope over. On the back, in the same Sharpie, was a second line:
If you found this and you don’t know who Karen is, please mail this to: Karen Lovell, 414 Asbury Avenue, Apt 3B, Knoxville TN 37919.
The third thing was at the bottom of the bag.
It was wrapped in a faded blue dish towel. Patricia lifted it out. She unwrapped it on her lap.
It was a wooden cigar box. The lid was carved with the letters DK — Daniel Kowalski. Inside the cigar box was Daniel’s wallet, his wedding ring (Daniel had been a widower for eleven years; his wife Bridget had died in 2013), a small key on a brass keyring, a folded square of paper, and a Polaroid photograph.
The Polaroid was of Daniel sitting on a couch in his apartment. He was holding a Beagle puppy in his lap. He was smiling. The puppy was looking up at the camera. On the back of the Polaroid, in pencil, Daniel had written: Me and the new boy. Day one. November 9, 2018.
The folded square of paper was a note.
Patricia opened it. She read it. Her shoulders moved up once. She did not make a sound. She handed the paper to me.
The note was written in the same black Sharpie. It was four sentences long.
It said:
Whoever finds this dog. His name is Murphy. He is six years old. He is the best thing that ever happened to me and he does not deserve what is in this bag, so I am sending him with it because I cannot send him without it. Please find him a home that will be patient with him. He will not let go of this bag for a while. He is carrying me.
Below that, in the same handwriting:
— Dan K.
There was one more line at the bottom of the note. Smaller. Underlined.
It said: Please look in the lining.
Patricia ran her fingers along the inside of the duffel bag. The lining was a thin cotton flap stitched along the bottom seam. Three of the stitches had been cut and re-tied with a different color thread. She slipped two fingers in.
She pulled out a folded piece of paper.
The paper was a hand-drawn map.
It was a map of an apartment.
Each room of the apartment had been labeled in Daniel’s handwriting. Front door. Kitchen. Bedroom. Couch. In each room, a small X had been drawn, with a note next to it. X by the front door — this is where Murphy sits when he hears my keys. X by the kitchen — Murphy’s bowl, second cabinet from the left. X by the couch — Murphy’s favorite end. X by the bedroom — Murphy’s bed, foot of the bed on the right side.
The map was an instruction sheet.
It was an instruction sheet for how to be Murphy’s person.
Daniel Kowalski had drawn his Beagle a map of the apartment, so that whoever opened the bag — whoever ended up with him — would know where Murphy expected things to be.
Part 7
Murphy went home with Patricia that afternoon.
He let her carry the duffel bag out of the kennel. He walked beside her to the parking lot. He stood next to her at the open passenger door of her Toyota Camry while she set the duffel bag on the floor of the passenger seat. He looked at the duffel bag. Then he looked at her. Then he climbed into the seat and lay down on top of the bag with his chin on the leather handles.
She drove him home to Johnson City.
She has been keeping in touch.
She has sent me four pictures since the end of November.
The first one was of Murphy lying in his bed at the foot of her bed, on the right side, exactly where Daniel’s map said. The duffel bag was beside the bed.
The second one was of Murphy sitting at the front door of her house. The duffel bag was at his feet.
The third one was of Karen Lovell — Patricia’s daughter, Daniel’s niece — sitting on Patricia’s living room couch in Johnson City on Thanksgiving, with Murphy in her lap and the manila envelope, opened, in her hands. Patricia did not tell me what was in the envelope. I did not ask.
The fourth one was just before Christmas. It was a picture of the duffel bag. The bag was in the front closet of Patricia’s house, on the top shelf, where Daniel had kept it for thirty years. Murphy was sitting on the floor beneath the closet door, looking up at the closet, with his chin lifted.
Patricia had written in the text: He still checks on it every night. He doesn’t carry it anymore. He just checks.
Part 8
It has been four months.
We get dogs at our gate every week. We have gotten three more since Murphy. None of them came with a duffel bag.
I have started doing something I did not used to do.
When somebody leaves a dog at our gate now, before I take the dog into intake — before I do anything — I sit down on the gravel next to the dog and I look at whatever the dog has with him. The leash. The bowl. The blanket. The torn corner of a sweatshirt. The chewed-up tennis ball.
I look at it. I do not move it. Not for the first hour.
I let the dog tell me what he is carrying.
Daniel Kowalski lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on North Roan Street in Johnson City, Tennessee. He had been a postal worker for thirty-six years. He had been a widower for eleven. He had owned a Beagle named Murphy for six years and four days when he died.
He had sat down at his kitchen table on the second weekend of November and he had drawn a map.
Murphy is on Patricia’s couch right now.
The bag is on the closet shelf.
Daniel.
He is carrying you home.
Follow this page for more stories about the dogs who arrive carrying everything we left behind.
