The Rat

The Rats
By Donald Jones
When I was five years old, It was at the ending weeks of July in 1950. A piercing cry of my two-week-old baby brother had roused me from sleep. I ran into the living room that also served as a bedroom for my mother. That morning, Mom was still in bed with the baby. By the time I got up, she usually had already made breakfast and started the washing. As I got closer to the bed, I noticed blood all over the bed sheets and pillow. There was a large bandage on my baby brother’s hand.

“You almost lost you brother last night. A rat got in bed and bit your brother between his fingers. He almost bled to death ” She said, “It must have smelled soured milk on his hands where he had burped in the night. I called your Uncle George to come and take us to the hospital. We just got back a little while ago.“

“Did you see it? How could a rat do that?” My little mind raced with awe and fear.

“It was a big rat. I killed it. It’s out by the back door. Your Uncle George is coming to set some traps today to catch the others. He thinks there might be more of them,.” ,she said

My dad was in the Navy, and it was not uncommon for him to be gone for long periods of time. He came home about every three to six months in those days, and Mom was in charge of taking care of most things. When she could not take care of something, she would call on my Uncle George.

“How did it get in Mom?” I asked.

“It came in from the kitchen around the sink from under the floor. But your uncle George thinks they came from out by the shed. He said he saw several big holes dug under the shed. He thinks they’re gopher rats.”

We lived in a modest house in the country. A dusty gravel road ran along side of our property about 75 feet from the house. Along with the outhouse, there was a small building out back of the main house, we called the shed. It was basically used as storage for hoes; push plows, racks, and the like. We had chickens, and a garden, so the shed served as a storage place for feed and potatoes. We did not have a cellar so we would cover the potatoes with hay so they would last through the winter. The shed had a tin roof that was slanted to the rear. Our house was not over 30 yards from the shed.

The house was a typical weather boarded house. It was painted white, as were most of the houses in 1950, and it had a covered porch on one end with two doors. The back porch was screened in. That’s where Mom did the washing and kept the dirty clothes. That was also the back door, but every one treated it like the front door. The milkman came to that door, as well as the Stanley Brush man. The mailman went to that door when he brought a package from the Sears Roebuck catalog company. If we needed it, Mom ordered it. She did not know how to drive, so she seldom went anywhere unless someone took her. The only thing we got local was from trading eggs from the peddler who came twice a week.

In those days, the houses did not have closed foundations. There were holes along the foundation so there was room to crawl under the floor and repair the pipes if they froze in the winter. Usually they were covered in the winter, but not in the summer, because it kept the house cool. This created a problem of critters getting under the floor from time to time. Our cat was forever going there to have kittens. If not our cat, it was the neighbor’s cat. On some occasions, a skunk would spend a night and we were grateful that it did not decide to stay longer. A foxhound once got separated from its hunting pack and found our crawl space ideal for a place to have a litter of pups.

Out by the side of the back door step I went to find the creature that had terrorized my mom and baby brother during the night. The rat was indeed a gopher rat. The kind I heard my uncle talk about that usually was found up in the alleys of New York. For me it was a rude awaking to the meaning of the sounds that go bump in the night.

The following night, we all lay awake, waiting to hear the steel trap go off. My uncle had brought several and set them under the sink. He had not yet blocked the holes around the sink pipes, because he wanted to be sure that if the assailant of the previous night had any friends, they would be met with a surprise. The trap was not like any mousetrap I had seen mom put behind the stove. The half moon steel jaws formed a circle with a round plate in the middle with a piece of meat wired to it. Anything that tried to take the meat would find itself caught in a set of steel jaws. My uncle had sternly warned me and my older brother not to come near it if we did not want our hand or fingers cut of. The warning was heeded with great wonder as to what would happen to the rat. We did not have to wait long. The light had not been out more then an hour when there was the sound of a slam of steel against something that gave out a loud squeal and a commotion of something bouncing around from under the sink. My uncle who had spent the night was up, as was the whole house. Everyone wanted to see the demon of the night that had inflicted such harm on my baby brother. My Uncle George opened the sink doors and there lay the biggest gopher he or any of us had ever seen. We wondered how it managed to get through the hole around the drainpipes. Uncle George speculated that it must have weighted three or four pounds.

That was the beginning of the end of the rat population around our house. There were five gopher rats that lived under the shed that we killed that year, plus more from the poison that was put out to get rid of any others that might have escaped my uncles steel traps.

My little brother fared well after that. He was so young that he had no memory of the event. Mom, however, never let my brother forget it. He took after my dad, a skinny bony little guy. My mom blamed every sickness my brother came down with on those rats.

As for me, to this day I tuck my covers under my feet at night and sleep with the covers over my ears and my faces. No rat ever got in my bed but I made a determined effort to thwart any attempt

Story ID:	2143
Written by:	Donald L. Jones (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Family Memories
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	McMinnville Tennessee USA
Year:	1950
Person:	Donald Jones