Major

When I was seven, my mom brought home a puppy.  He was Border Collie and Blue Healer.  After rolling around several names, they decided on Major.  Major was a puppy when he got a piece of straw in his eye, which blinded him in that eye.  This made him very skittish.  Brushing up against him on his right side would likely get you bit. 

When I was nine, I was diagnosed with leukemia.  Major never left my side.  At one point, I got extremely sick from one of the blood transfusions.  I lost so much weight, that I lost all of my muscle tone.  I was so weak, I couldn’t even open my eyes, let alone walk.  I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but I was so weak I could not get back into bed.  I didn’t want to wake up Mom or Dad because they had not been getting any sleep.  I had never stayed a minute alone in the hospital, night or day.  And I had been in the hospital a lot.  So I curled up on the floor in front of the heater after pulling a blanket off the bed.  Major curled up next to me. 

I left home at the end of my junior year, and was homeless.  While I was gone, my parents had to put him to sleep.  I never got a chance to say good-bye.  About three years later, I had a dream.  I dreamt that I was on my way to a nursery to pick up some plants (I have always love plants).  I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and major was lying in the back seat.  I stopped the car, which was near a large field of wild flowers.  Major and I walked until sundown.  Then, we drove back to my house, where I had an old barn.  He said that he had just come back to say good-bye, but he had to go.  He said he loved me and would always be with me.  Then, he walked into the barn, and as the sun went down I heard a wolf howl.  I went into the barn and looked in one of the stalls.  There was a bunch of bones lying in the dirt. 

When I was a kid, Major would come check on everyone in the family, making rounds the entire night.  He would climb up on the bed and lay across my feet.  If I so much as moved a tiny bit, he would get off, so I always stayed as still as possible.  Occasionally, I feel that old familiar weight across my legs, especially during troubled times. 

God made all creatures and all creatures have souls.  God just made Major an extra special soul.  He provides me with great comfort when I need him most – God and Major. 

Screams in the Night

When I was nine, I stayed the summer with some friends of my parents.  The friends, who I will call Donna and Hank, had an 18 month old daughter, named Fawna.  They had recently moved into some quarters on Fort Irwin.  They told me that before they had moved in a husband and wife lived there.  He used to beat her a lot.  Rumor was that he would tie her long blond hair to doorknobs and beat her.  One night, he killed her.  Then, he walked out and killed himself.  He shot himself in the head in the yard.  When I went to stay with them, there was still traces of blood in the yard.  Once in a while we would find a blond hair on a door knob.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night we would hear screaming, and there was no one around.  I slept on the floor in the baby's room.  I was so scared, I huddled up in a ball n the corner of the room.  A couple of times, I even wet myself, because I was too afraid to get up and go to the bathroom.  Over the course of the summer, Hank seemed to become possessed.  He began to drink more and more.  He became increasingly violent.  Three days before I went home, Hank beat up his wife really badly, and went to the stockade.  My parents stopped talking to them after they came to get me, but I can still hear those shrill screams in the middle of the night sometimes.