First Draft

Non-fiction, a memory of a traumatic event from my childhood

I must have been about four years old at the time �" old enough to remember fairly well, old enough to reason, but not quite old enough to be in school.  I was out in the barn with my Daddy, helping him do farm chores.  I don’t even remember what particular chore we were doing that day, but we were in the room where we kept the ground feed for the cows, and we startled a mouse, which ran away.  She left behind this tangled mass of debris, and my Daddy picked it up and showed it to me.  He said it was a mouse nest, and he pulled it apart, fairly gently, and sure enough, there in the center of it, tucked in mouse fur, were a whole bunch of baby mice.  They were newborns, tiny and cute and pink and warm and hairless, kind of quivering with life, but not really able to move yet. 

Daddy told me that the mother mouse would not come back for them because we had moved them and torn the nest open.  She would abandon them and they would die.  He said that we should feed them to the cat, since they were doomed anyway.  I could see the logic in that, since they were bound to starve to death without their mother anyway, but then he gave me the nest of baby mice and said that it would be my responsibility to feed them to the cat.  I hadn’t quite bargained for that, but I was a game little kid and compliant, too.  He went on to tell me that I had a choice in the matter of their disposal.  The cat, he said, would not care whether the baby mice were living or dead, and would eat them happily in either state.  It was therefore my choice whether I wanted to just feed the living baby mice to the cat or if I wanted to kill them first.  He said that I could pinch them gently at the base of their skull, right where their head attached to their neck, and this would kill them and then I would know that the cat wasn’t eating them alive. 

Well really, when you think about it, he was insinuating that it wasn’t very humane to let them starve or to let the cat eat them alive, wasn’t he?  I understood that, and so I did the right thing.  I remember the first one, lifting it out of its cozy, warm nest, and grasping it with my thumb and first finger, right where he had described, wondering if I really had the right place and how hard I had to pinch it.  Firmly, it turned out, but not really hard.  I felt it go from that quivery, living state to a limp, dead state.  That’s when I started to cry.  I was four years old, and I had been told that I could let the cat do the murdering and know that I had condemned babies to being eaten alive, or I could murder them myself.  I hated feeling them die.  I kind of hated myself.  I would have hated myself more if I had given them to the cat while they were still alive.  I understood, too that it would be a selfish thing to abandon them to starvation, and just as certain a fate.

The cat was very happy to be hand-fed fresh, tender, succulent baby mouse, though.  It was my best friend!  It rubbed against my legs and purred and lavished appreciation on me.  Somehow, that made the whole situation worse.  Meanwhile I stood there and killed those baby mice and bawled and fed them to that cat.  By the time I was done, I was crying so hard that I could barely see, but at least I finished the job.  Then I threw away the remains of the nest, and wiped the tears off my face and went to find my Daddy.  He pretended not to notice that I’d been crying, and I pretended that I hadn’t been.  He did tell me how brave I was to have not taken the easy way out.