Yesterday I cried over a dog that’s been gone twenty years. She was a pit bull named Evie, a fifty pound mass of muscle with cropped ears and a jaw like an alligator. Most people were afraid of my dog Evie and I liked it that way. She was my protector, my sidekick, and my best friend for a difficult season of my life. Just writing about her now, I get all weepy.

Evie was a Christmas present from my husband Scott the first year of our marriage. Actually, she wasn’t a pit bull. She was a blue-blooded American Staffordshire terrier that we paid six hundred dollars for and had her flown down from some zealous dog breeder in Idaho who insisted on cropping Evie’s ears before releasing her to us. The whole ear-cropping thing bothered me then, and still does. Why cut off half of a dog’s perfectly good ear? For months I used tampons and wine corks to train Evie’s sawed off ears to stand up right like they were supposed to. Wine corks in public and tampons in private. The tampons were softer and better for her tender ears said the dog breeder.

The most embarrassing moment of my first year of marriage came when Evie paraded into the living room with a string hanging out of her mouth in front of a roomful of guests. A few beers in already, Scott said, “What the #&%# does the dog have in her mouth?” That was back before we were Christians when my Army helicopter pilot husband cussed for a hobby. Scott is living proof that Jesus saves because he is now a Christian high school teacher who carries a Bible everywhere he goes. But after swearing back then, Scott jerked the string out of Evie’s mouth before I could stop him. Unfortunately it wasn’t one of Evie’s clean, private ear trainers. It was my tampon straight out of the garbage can.

The guests took it well. Everyone had a drink in their hand and were good at cussing too so the moment passed in swearing and laughter. I didn’t think it was funny. I marched Evie back to the bathroom and told her how badly she’d embarrassed me in front of company. Then to make my point, I took out Evie’s wine corks and stuck tampons in her ears. “See how that makes you feel in front of all those people, young lady,” I said gulping down my wine. I was twenty-two years old with freckles still on my face trying hard to appear grown up in the presence of older people.

Evie gave me that big jawed grin of hers, happily wagging her tail, then she bounced back out to the living room to show off her “private” ear trainers.

A few days ago I was missing Evie so bad because I’m back on bed rest with my current pregnancy and I was alone feeling a bit sorry for myself, staring at the walls in an unusually quiet house since I had to farm the boys out for awhile. Each of my pregnancies has brought bouts of bed rest. My first pregnancy may have been the hardest since it was so new and scary; except I had Evie and she stayed on the couch with me the whole time, giving me all her brown-eyed sympathy. When a pit bull gives you sympathy, you take it and you feel better. It’s not like a poodle’s sympathy.

Evie knew how it felt to be pregnant. She had her own litter of pups. The morning Evie gave birth, she followed me around whining until I sat down on the floor in our living room trying to figure out what was wrong with her. To my surprise, Evie quickly crawled onto my lap like a big, frightened chicken. I weighed about a hundred pounds in those days, Evie was half my size. I didn’t know Evie was in labor until a minute later when she dropped her first puppy on top of me. “Wait, stop, what are you doing crazy dog?” I screamed. I think both of us were horrified by what was happening.

Evie looked at me like, why are you freaking out? I’m the one in labor here. You just sit there and catch puppies crazy girl! I call myself a girl because, barely into my twenties, I still felt like a girl in those days, a very young girl facing bloody puppies in my lap.

Evie and I survived the shocking event. She had every puppy in my lap, and those puppies eventually made me a lot happier than they did Evie. By the time the puppies were three weeks old, I had to keep reminding Evie that they were her babies not mine. “Look,” I said one day pointing to all those hungry yappers in the laundry room. “You have to feed them, Evie. I do everything else. I can’t do that for you, too.”

Evie, looking like an old sow pig with her milk sack dragging the floor sat down in the kitchen and gave me that “I’ve had it” look.

“Sorry, girl,” I told her. “I clean up after the little poopers. Now you get in there and do your motherly duty.”

The day we gave all those hungry puppies away, Evie ran gleefully around the yard like a convict just released from the state pen. It was a sweltering hot day in Alabama where we lived in a cinder block house on a military post. Evie had gotten herself in trouble with my dad’s lab back in California before Mom and Dad shipped Evie out to join us because we had to get base housing before we could bring our dog and we’d been living in a studio apartment waiting for post housing to open up.

“You are going to bake your brain out there. If you have a brain left, Evie!” I yelled from the sliding glass door after the last family departed with their free puppy. Evie ignored me, dashing across the grass like a goofy clown.

Evie’s elation didn’t last long. About the same week we gave away the puppies, I discovered I was pregnant. Soon after that, I was too sick to get off the couch. I had to throw up in a bucket because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Evie took up watch on the couch with me, lying at her end looking sick too, and sometimes even jumping down to the floor to heave and gag until I stumbled up to open the sliding glass door so Evie could go throw up in the backyard. Patiently, Evie would sit at the door waiting for me to let her back in. Then, still looking ill, she would lie on the couch with me again. The first few times Evie did this, I cut out her table scraps thinking she was just over indulging in people food. When I realized Evie’s throwing up always corresponded with mine, I told her to get over it.

“Evie, I’m the pregnant one, not you,” I impatiently informed her. “Just because you had your puppies in my lap, doesn’t mean I need you to suffer along with me through this. You are a dog,” I explained. “I have never heard of a dog with morning sickness, especially when it is the master who is pregnant.”

Evie exasperated me sometimes. I really could write a book on Evie, but this is a blog so I better hurry along my story.

There were days I held on to Evie during that first pregnancy and cried my eyes out. Evie was probably thinking: See, now you know how I felt dumping those $&*#@ puppies in your lap! I think Evie was a cusser. She heard enough of it from my husband and his Army buddies.

I sobbed into Evie’s red and white fur the night I went to my second Lamaze class in a row without Scott because he was busy studying for his flight exams. Every other woman had a husband sitting behind her with his arms around his wife, practicing birthing while there I sat alone and afraid having my first baby clear across the country from my mom and practically every woman I knew.

“I’m done with Lamaze,” I tearfully told Evie after that second class by myself. I didn’t even know if Scott, a soldier during the first Gulf War, would be there for the birth so why bother practicing it with him? Around that same time, Scott was ordered to make out a last will and testament, while I attended a mandatory wives’ meeting preparing for the possibility our spouse could die in battle.

Evie licked my tears sympathetically, and if I could have read her mind (as I swear she could read mine), I know I would have probably heard that dog say, “Let me go to that Lamaze with you. My pit bull muscles are bigger than any of those silly men there holding their wives.”

Evie was always good at cheering me up when I was sad. She could make me mad as a hornet too, like the day she carried the kitchen garbage into our bedroom and ate leftover Chinese food on our white feather down comforter. Evie dragged the complete metal garbage can on top of the bed, and then emptied it there while I was out grocery shopping.

Sadly, the day I gave birth (I’m cutting this short again, because it’s a blog) Evie had to stay home with my mother-in-law while I went to the hospital alone. Scott met me there and we made it through a Lamaze type birth only because it was an Army hospital and they didn’t give epidurals or little else to ease the pain. A Special Forces field surgeon delivered our daughter with forceps and told me to quit whining while he pulled the baby out by her head with those salad tongs. The Special Forces doctor had just come from the war so he probably felt little sympathy for a woman giving birth when he’d just left an Iraqi battlefield.

When I returned home from the hospital, I found Evie chained in the backyard in the rain looking broken in spirit. My mother-in-law is not a dog lover.

I felt so bad for Evie. I brought her into the house, toweled her off, and showed her the baby. To my surprise, Evie was a lot happier to see my baby than her puppies. She immediately became our infant daughter’s bodyguard, curling up watchfully wherever baby Cami was placed.

I wish this story had a happy ending, but it does not. When Cami was four months old, we joined Scott in Germany for his tour there. Evie we left at my parents’ ranch. We thought that would be a better place for her. It wasn’t. One of my parents’ neighbors shot and killed Evie because she ventured onto his property. This happened the same week my favorite uncle committed suicide. My cousin had recently survived the Linda high school shooting of 1992 (the first school shooting I ever heard of) and the L.A. riots had taken place late that spring. By that summer when Evie and my uncle died, I thought the world had gone crazy. I also found myself pregnant again, and I cried myself limp over losing Evie.

At our Bible study the other night a friend asked with tears in her eyes if she would see her beloved pets in heaven. I answered, “I don’t know.” Another member of our group with extensive Bible knowledge said he didn’t think so. He said there would be animals in heaven, but not our old pets. If you have the time, please leave me a comment letting me know what you believe about pets going to heaven… Thanks for your thoughts and love.