A Gift of Love
I was nine years old when I got the dog hunger. I wanted a dog with every fiber of my being. I would have traded Christmas presents for the next five years, maybe even longer, if I could just have my own dog. I don’t know whether a person is wired from day one to be a dog person or not, but if they are, I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of animals I could call pets there on the farm. We had calves and lambs we bottle-fed and a barn crawling with cats. I loved my wooly lambs and the kittens, but I wanted a dog. A tail wagging, furry, wet-nose-in-your-face dog.
We’d had a dog, a big old hound we called Pup. When I was about six, he got hung in a fence and never came home. We hunted for him, but it was months before we knew what happened to him. He was a nice enough dog, but he was never my dog. You dog lovers out there know what I mean. And maybe I didn’t have the dog hunger then.
I don’t know why we didn’t get another dog right away. Maybe my dad thought dogs were too much trouble, especially when they disappeared and made everybody sad. Anyway, I wasn’t making any headway asking him for a dog, but I didn’t quit asking. And praying. When I later wrote novels, one of my young characters says a dog prayer. That surely came straight from my heart and memory.
So after a few weeks of wishing and begging and praying, a dog showed up. Out of nowhere. A beautiful black cocker spaniel that was my dog at first sight. Only trouble was my dad couldn’t see that. He said cockers didn’t make good farm dogs and so we couldn’t keep him. But I loved that little dog so desperately that my aunt took pity on me and gave the little dog a home. I named him Inky. It fit and he fit in my heart. Perfectly. My aunt and granddad lived about a mile from us. Every day all through that summer, I took the shortcut through the fields over to their house to sit on the porch beside my granddad, who was going on ninety, and let Inky lay his head in my lap while I stroked his soft curly hair. I was in love. Inky was in love. My dog hunger was satisfied, and I was happy. Very happy.
Alas, the course of true love never runs smooth. One day in late summer, after Inky had been in my life for a couple of months, my aunt and I came home from town to find at least a dozen dead hens scattered around the yard. Inky was hiding in the woodshed under a bench. He knew he’d done a bad thing. I knew he’d done a bad thing. He was a chicken killer. That’s probably why somebody had dropped him out on the road in front of our farm to begin with.
My aunt loved me without reservation, but no farm woman could keep a chicken-killing dog. We needed eggs for breakfast. I didn’t care about the chickens or the eggs, but I understood that Inky’s days were numbered in my life. They didn’t shoot him. That was the best I could hope for. Instead my aunt tied him to the clothesline and found him a home with someone who didn’t own chickens. And I lost my first love.
But the story doesn’t end there. After Inky, my dad relented and let me have a dog. Ollie was part spitz and part collie, and I loved him as much as I’d loved Inky. Still, he wasn’t a cocker spaniel. Forever after Inky, cocker spaniels were my dream dogs. But cocker spaniels didn’t normally appear out of nowhere. They had to be bought. Something we never did when we wanted a dog. Something we couldn’t afford to do after I married and had three kids. There wasn’t money to buy a dog. When you wanted a dog, you found somebody trying to get rid of pups, and whatever kind they were, you took one and brought it home. But my husband knew how much I loved cocker spaniels. Because of how much he loved me, one year he sold his treasured high school class ring and bought me a cocker spaniel pup as a surprise for my birthday.
Three days before my birthday, my sister-in-law, Joy, was killed in a freak auto accident. A friend was driving her to the doctor since she was only days or perhaps hours from delivering her first baby boy. She and my husband’s brother had three daughters already. The tailgate broke off a cattle trailer and crashed through the windshield of a pickup truck, instantly killing the driver whose wife, I found out later, was also about ready to have their baby. That truck crossed over into the path of the truck Joy’s friend was driving. This was before seat belts were in common use, and Joy was thrown out of her seat and under the dashboard. The friend was not hurt, but Joy and her unborn baby boy died.
After that kind of tragedy, a birthday seems to be something to pass over, to not notice for this one year. How can you celebrate life when all you can think about is what death has stolen from your family? But my husband had already bought the puppy, and he brought him home to surprise me on my birthday in spite of the sadness that soaked clear through to my soul. Barely bigger than my hand, Jodie followed me everywhere I went and lay stretched across my foot whenever I was cooking or washing dishes. He was my dog at first sight.
The sadness and grief didn’t go away because I had a puppy. I missed Joy and mourned the lost promise of the baby boy who never had a chance to draw breath. I was sad for the daughters who would grow up without their mother’s loving presence. I grieved for Joy who would not see those girls become young women and marry and have babies of their own. But a puppy can lick away a lot of tears and make you smile in spite of your sorrows.
My husband didn’t know such sorrows were waiting in the wings when he sacrificed something he treasured to give me a wiggling, yipping, wet-nose-in-my-face puppy. He just wanted to give me a gift of love. And he did.
