Little Sheba, the Wandering Wonder Dog

This is a story from my 2023 memoir As I Die Laughing: Snapshots from a Southern Childhood, available on Amazon.

My mama loved the movies. Not just the movie stars. Everything about the movies. She was the first person I ever knew who paid attention to the credits to see who played who, who designed the costumes and who composed the music. For a long time, she was the only person I knew who paid attention to movie credits.

It wasn’t surprising then that she would name a dog that we got Sheba. She had loved the movie Come Back Little Sheba, with Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster, when it came to the Arabian theater in Laurel 1953.

 I long assumed that our dog Sheba looked like the dog in the movie, but then I found out years later that the movie dog is never actually seen, just called to, repeatedly and plaintively, because she’s missing. Mama just liked the name.

We didn’t actually “get” Sheba. She wasn’t the kind of dog you would pick out at the pound, much less buy. She was tubular and low to the ground -- not like a dachshund, though, more like a sack of Dixie Lilly flour with four short, stubby legs sewn on.

She was a kind of off-white color with random grey-black splotches – not spots, splotches -- on her body and her droopy ears. She reminded me of Mighty Manfred, the dog in the Tom Terrific cartoons on Captain Kangaroo, but I was not consulted on the naming.

If Sheba wasn’t what anybody would call pretty, she was friendly and gentle. In a Miss Mississippi competition, she would have won Miss Congeniality. The way she waddled and wagged her tail was endearing. When she showed up in our back yard that day, nobody chased her away, not even Tip, our big, surly guard dog, so she made herself at home. She just “took up” with us, a common-law canine.

Sheba would lay in the grass while Mama hung shirts and sheets on the clothes line or weeded beds of pansies or verbena, and she loved to be petted. Mama started fixing her special meals – grits cooked with bones the butcher at Mr. Stotts’ grocery store would give her for being a nice customer.

Sheba got even rounder. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t just Mama’s cooking. Just a few weeks after she joined our family, she birthed one of her own.

Daddy took us out to an old, broken-down utility shed where he had discovered Sheba flat her side on a croaker sack with a pile of squirming puppies vying for her teats. There were more of them than there were of her nipples, and they looked like they had three or four or different daddies. There were brown ones, white ones with dark spots, dark ones with white spots, even one that looked like a black Labrador.

Mama, naturally, was crazy about the puppies. But she soon started spreading the word at the bank where she worked and at church, looking ahead to where she could place them. It didn’t help that five of the nine were female. They were harder to find homes for because, well, they would eventually breed.

Most folks where I grew up, especially country folks, kept dogs for their usefulness – mainly to bark and growl when strangers came on their property. Dogs slept under your house, in a barn or out in the bushes, never inside. And folks didn’t take their dogs – or their cats – to the vet’s whenever the animal was feeling puny. If a dog died or got run over chasing cars, they got another one.

Likewise, taking a dog to get it “fixed’ was a rarity. More than a few litters of puppies or kittens wound up sinking to the bottom of a creek in a feed sack. My folks never did this, but I knew of people who did.

Mama saw to it that every puppy in Sheba’s litter found a home, even the girls. But not long after the last puppy placed, little Sheba popped out another batch, this time eight. She had very little utility beyond a sweet disposition – she barely barked when people drove up in our driveway and was about as threatening as a ground squirrel – but she was as fertile as the Delta.

Daddy was not happy about the new arrivals, and I suspect he might have made a trip to the Tallahoma Creek bridge about three-quarters of a mile from our farm if Mama had not said absolutely, positively no.

She went through the same process, sweet-talking and begging friends at work and church and at my elementary school to just come take a gander at the puppies, knowing she would get a taker at least half the time if she could just get them out to the barn to look.

Then it was Daddy’s turn to put his foot down. He said, “Lucile, we can’t keep doing this. If that dog keeps having puppies every four or five months, we’re gonna end with more dogs running around this place than we know what to do with.”

He said that as soon as soon as the last of the puppies – another Heinz 57 batch – was given away, he was taking Sheba for a drive.

This, too, was not uncommon in that time and place. Folks took unwanted dogs and cats somewhere miles away and turned them loose to fend for themselves. It was considered giving them a fighting chance.

Daddy did not exactly hide this from me and my little brother. We were told Sheba was going to a new home and given a chance to pet her goodbye. When we got up the next morning, Sheba was nowhere to be seen.

I eventually learned that Daddy had left for work early that morning with Sheba in the bed of his Ford pickup. He drove all the way to the other side of Laurel, to another rural community similar to ours, and left Sheba on the side of a gravel road.

Two days later, we were awakened by the sound of Tip, our sentinel dog, barking. When Mama went out to see what Tip was making a fuss about, there was Sheba, standing by the old cast iron skillet in which Mama fed her grits and bones, wagging her tail.

 Mama and Daddy had a discussion that night. Mama said maybe Sheba was intended to be with us. Her return was amazing, like something from a Lassie movie. Daddy stuck to his same guns, reminding her that we couldn’t afford to have Sheba producing offspring over and over.

A few days later, he took Sheba out in the pickup again. This time, he drove her all the way to a country road near Waynesboro, almost 30 miles from Laurel, and left her.

A week later, we were awakened by the sound of Tip barking up a storm. When Mama went out to see what was up, there was Sheba, standing by the old cast iron skillet, wagging her tail.

Daddy was exasperated, but also kind of in awe. Thirty miles! He had himself a tale to tell the men at the washhouse at the foundry where he worked. And Mama really pressed her point. It was a miracle, and we were being told that Sheba belonged on the Holston place. We had to keep her.

And so we did, even as our canine cast changed. Tip died of heart worms, and his replacement, Pepe – named by Mama for Pepe le Moko, Charles Boyer’s dashing character in the movie Algiers – got run over chasing a Buick.

Sheba, though we never saw her do the procreative deed with our male dogs or the neighbors’, gave birth to two more litters of mongrel pups over that time, and Mama inevitably found homes for each and every one.

And then one day, Sheba was gone. She disappeared as mysteriously and unceremoniously as she had arrived. Daddy swore he had nothing to do with, and I have no doubt he didn’t. Mama would never have allowed it, and she would have known.

We always wondered what happened to Sheba. It’s unlikely somebody stole her. Maybe she was bored with our neighborhood’s mating prospects. Maybe it was like that movie Mama loved with Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe, The Seven-Year Itch.

Anyway, little Sheba never came back.