[ Login to reply ]

When I was still in elementary school my father bought me a big bag of green plastic army soldiers—little dolls for boys, really, though then I would have been shocked and embarrassed to hear them called dolls—with which my friend Jack and I played games of war in his sandbox, pretending to blow them up along with the small box turtles we purchased at the five and dime and heartlessly, mindlessly mistreated.

I don’t know why so many children are so thoughtless and so cruel to other creatures and so indifferent to their suffering. When I was still too young to leave our yard by myself I remember that as my mother worked in the garden I entertained myself by chasing butterflies and batting them out of the air with a board I swung like a paddle. When they fell stunned, crippled, or dead, I collected them in canning jars and thought nothing of it—until years later at Iowa State in my required course in Shakespeare I read this passage in Coriolanus and remembered my childhood:

I saw him run after a gilded butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; o, I warrant it, how he mammocked it!

To this day I can recall with disgust the repulsive, distinctive sour smell of the colorful corpses at the bottom of the canning jars I had forgotten to empty after my innocent morning amusement of a day or two earlier.

As far back as I can remember on my strolls to school or to the home of a friend I seldom failed to kick to dust and destroy any ant hill I might discover raised up from the crack between two slabs of concrete sidewalk and to mash with my sneaker any ants that tried to scurry away. Many years later, out for a summer walk with my grandchildren, just toddlers, no older than three or four, their soft, precious, tiny hands in mine, we’d stumble across a colony of ants just as I had. First, Dylan or Katy would hunker down, curious, and peer at them, then with a kind of scientific detachment they’d perhaps dare to touch one or two, maybe poke at them, and then finally with a shudder, real or pretended, they’d move to destroy them. Though I always tried, rarely could I deter them from doing just as I had done as a child.

“Ants can’t hurt you—just let them be.”

“No!”

One morning less than half a block from home on my way to school when I was just eight or nine years old I came across a fat squirrel stopped and alert six feet up the trunk of a huge tree maybe ten feet away from me. I stopped too. The squirrel and I looked at one another, silent and still. I decided to throw something at it, I don’t know why, and I looked around me for a suitable projectile.

Aha!

Right beside me, just off the sidewalk, lay a discarded, heavy, red paving brick. At best, I thought, I might startle the squirrel and scare it on up the tree. I could only heave the brick—with a grunt—from my shoulder as a shot putter might.

Thud.

To my complete astonishment the brick hit the squirrel flush in the back. It did not fall, it did not move—nor did I. Guilty now, sorry for what I had done, I just stood and watched to see what would happen. Stunned, hurt, perhaps seriously injured, the squirrel appeared to rest and to collect itself and then slowly, ever so slowly, it climbed, just one slow tentative step at a time up the tree and—contemplative, sad—I resumed my own slow stroll to school. In my classes I have told this story many times. When the paving brick struck my target, an indelible image of my own thoughtless cruelty was imprinted upon my memory, and for over fifty years, for almost sixty, every time the subject has come up I have told this story. Like D.H. Lawrence in his poem “Snake,” I have something to expiate.

A pettiness.

In the intervening years I’ve read and heard many anecdotes and tales much worse. Mike Parsons, a young student of mine at Upper Iowa College in the mid-70s, included one such short story in his collection of anecdotes about acts of violence he either witnessed or committed himself in his own nineteen years of life. Ten years old, because of trouble at home, Mike spent the summer on a friend’s farm. The first morning there he was up at 5:00 to help milk the cows, and his friend’s father told his son they had too many cats on the farm and that he’d have to get rid of the kittens again. Larry, Mike’s friend, gathered the kittens in a burlap bag he carried along with a baseball bat to the barnyard. Mike writes:

Larry took out one of the kittens, tossed it into the air, and smashed it with the bat. I heard bones snap, bouncing off the bat.

“Home run!” laughed Larry. “Want to get your licks in, Mike?”

I looked at the half-dead kitten pawing the dirt. I could not speak. I looked away. He pulled out another kitten and smashed it with the bat. He continued this slaughter until all of the kittens had been batted over the barnyard. A full-grown cat lurked around the corner. I asked Larry if it was the mother.

It was.

The mother cat sniffed at her tortured babies and seemed to look up at me.

“I want to go inside,” I told Larry.

Though it has been thirty years since Mike wrote down this story in his freshman English class with me, I still use it and others from his collection in my classes. It has caused young men to curse, young women to cry, several, disgusted, sickened, to excuse themselves and to leave the room. I no longer read this story aloud in class. Instead I make copies and warn readers that some previous students have found this particular anecdote intolerable. Yet from students who do read it the incident invariably evokes similar stories of cruelty to animals, a few even worse.

Together we remember, we tell, we listen, we confess, we groan, we laugh, yes, confused, nervous, feeling guilty, we laugh.

We think.