Rats!
Rats! A few years back David Bottoms, who looks for all the world like an Oklahoma-peanut-farmer-turned-hippie, came out with a collection of poems titled Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Won the Walt Whitman Award with it. Published by Morrow. Nominated for a Pulitzer. Bigtime stuff. I was rereading Shooting Rats one day and ran across Dave’s title poem, which describes how these good ol’ boys, loaded on whiskey and beer, would go out to the Bibb County dump (on the Georgia poetry circuit, I believe) and shine their car lights out over the mounds of refuse and unlimber their rifles on the rats too dumb to keep their eyes closed. See, young rats’ll stare with both eyes at a light every time; the older ones will use only one eye, and you don’t know whether it’s the right or left, so you can’t decide what side to shoot on. You shoot and you either miss completely, maybe clip an ear, or you hit them right between the eyes, but you can never be sure. Clever they are, old rats. That’s why they’re old. The young ones are dumber than frogs. They’ll stare at a light even on a moonlit night, while a frog won’t—and there’s another story. Dave describes how rats react to a head or gut shot. Not pretty stuff. But if you’re going to read a poem about shooting rats at the county dump, you’re not in a mindset for aesthetics. Rats and garbage dumps, taken together or separately, generally don’t make the Chamber of Commerce brochures. As a matter of fact, they seldom make poetry. Well, what I’m getting around to here—and you’re probably saying, “Finally, thank you, Jesus”—is my own rat shooting back in Mississippi when I was a boy. It was my earliest exposure to guns and hunting and high finance. At age twelve I was a professional hunter. I put that on a line by itself and italicized it to let the gravity of the message sink in. Rats! 101 When I was a boy we had rats. Lots and lots of rats. Big, burly, aggressive rats, the kind that could whip every cat in the neighborhood and most dogs and were known to eat calves and small children and sever power cables and gnaw through steel panels on a barn. Now, in the house the folks went high tech and dispatched them neatly enough with d-Con (probably on the way to being outlawed by now anyway if it hasn’t been already, thanks to the EPA and animal-rights people). They’d put out these little jar lids of greenish pellets in the kitchen and closets, the pellets would disappear, and in a couple of weeks the odors of the house would announce to all who entered that something in the walls or attic was with some reluctance returning to the dust from whence it came. That was fast-working, sure-fire poison in those days, so the rats (and mice) just didn’t last in the house. D-Con in the chicken house, though, was another matter. And that’s where we had the biggest problem: rats fattening on chicken feed. Sprinkle poison pellets out there, and you get dead chickens, not because chickens are too dumb to distinguish between their food and rat poison but because chickens are trusting. They never believe you’d give them anything that wasn’t good to eat. This is a distinguishing difference between chickens and most children—along with the feet, feathers, beaks, and eyes set in the sides of the head. We had a big, long chicken house with feed pans outside in the fencedin yard. The chickens got cracked corn every day, and Mother would now and then toss in some ground-up oyster shells “for their craw,” a mysterious organ that apparently only chickens have (though I heard my mother say on many occasions that she had had a crawful of me). The chickens, a couple of dozen or so, would descend in a great flurry, cluck whatever grace they were required to say—I determined by their talking in strange tongues that most of them were Assembly of God, like us, with a couple of haughty hens that acted like Catholics and one heathen rooster—and contentedly take their meal. But of course they never...
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