And the Rain Will Wash it Away

(A caution to my more sensitive readers: this story involves an injured animal, and a gun.)

The rain came back.

The heat wave ended– not in fire, not in ice, but in steam. The temperature dropped from ninety-five with a heat index in the three digits, to the high eighties and rainy every few hours. The rain made the earth simmer like a pot of rice. In between rains, Adrienne and I went outside. I pulled weeds, and she played with the cats.

The Dodgers did not come back, and they will not be coming back. I discovered that the mother fled the consequences of her actions, abandoning their last cat to starve until she came to me.  The Artful Dodger himself, the girls I’ve called The Sylph and The Mandrake, and that baby who sometimes wandered out of the house into my yard wearing nothing but a diaper, are gone. Eventually, I’ll forget to worry about what will happen to them. Eventually, my heart will stop racing every time I glance up at the derelict where they used to live.

I have two outdoor cats now: Charlie Chaplin, who is brash and feisty like The Sylph was, and Buster Keaton, formerly Sparkles, who is shy and gentle like The Mandrake. I don’t know what we’ll do in the winter, but they live on my porch for the moment.

There is a new family in town, who moved in a few houses down from the Dodgers last month. Their boy and girl are only a little younger than my Adrienne. They all hang out in the yard, in between rains, making messes, missing the eleven-year-old Artful Dodger who was part of the gang. Last night, they all walked to the little grocery store on another block together. They came back with snacks and cans of soda. When I came out to weed the garden, they were enjoying them while sitting on the garage roof of the haunted house, which is built into the hillside of that backyard, only about four feet off the ground.

Another rain storm was coming in, far off to the south moving north, instead of west to east as storms usually do. The teenagers watched the clouds, laughing and bantering with me as I pulled weeds. The guinea pig helped me tidy up the strawberry patch by nibbling the leaves under a laundry basket. Buster kept a curious eye on the pig, stalking her from between the tomato cages. Charlie prowled the yard, looking for something to chase.

I pulled up two potato vines that had died off– not the vines I planted intentionally, but the ones that had sprung out of the compost. To my delight, there were three new potatoes among the roots. I filled my pocket with potatoes and my other pocket with sugar snap peas. I went into the kitchen to unload the day’s harvest, smiling for the first time in days.

When I came out, to my shock, Charlie was playing with a bird– and the bird wasn’t dead.

Charlie is the most inept bird cat. In the whole time I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her make a successful pounce. She usually leaps into the air a good second and a half after the bird has taken flight. But this time, she’d got one. It was one of those big fat pigeons that ruin the gutters at our house and used to burst right through the ceiling at the Artful Dodgers’ house. The pigeon was severely wounded, fluttering both gray-green wings to get away, as Charlie pinned her down.

“No! Charlie!”

I hoped the pigeon would fly away when Charlie let go, but she didn’t. She just fluttered, helplessly, trying to catch the air at an odd sideways angle. The gash was a severe one, stretching from one shoulder to the other, and extending from the base of the neck far down the back. Yet it was shallow, and the bird was still alive, not resisting as I scooped her up.

“I don’t think there’s any way we can save it,” I heard myself say.

I never say things like that.

I can’t stand the thought of anything dying. I never give up on anything or anybody.  I saved the white oak tree when I was ten years old. I once saved a mudpuppy from my bad cousins. I rescue spiders from drowning in the lake. I re-plant dead plants to see if they’ll take root again. I take in abused cats. I have tried so hard to rescue so many people. The worst pain I have ever had is when I’ve failed to rescue something. But there was no possible way to rescue this pigeon.

I hoped against hope for the bird to die quickly in my hands– to take a few agonal breaths and go limp, so I’d know she wasn’t in pain anymore. But she didn’t. She struggled and fluttered to take to the air, but her wings wouldn’t work in tandem as I prayed. Please, please, live or die, but don’t do this. Please become a dead bird that gets scooped up with a shovel and thrown in the garbage, or else become an ordinary bird all covered in feathers, flying away from the cat unharmed. Don’t be the most terrible thing that could possibly be. Don’t be a living thing torn half to shreds, dying slow.

Eventually, she convulsed out of my hands, and landed in the shelter of one of those basement windows on the haunted house. Charlie tried to pounce again, but I stepped in her way.

“I wonder if there’s some way we could put her out of her misery.” Again, I heard myself say this as if my soul was several steps back from my physical body, hiding in the tall grass.

The boy on the roof hopped down at once. “I’ll get my gun.”

I wasn’t the least bit surprised he had a gun. Everyone in Northern Appalachia has a weapon or two in the house. Even Adrienne has a practice bow.  The people up and down the block go hunting twice a year to stock the freezer with venison; that’s how they get by. I wouldn’t have been more than a little surprised if the boy came back from across the alley with an actual hunting rifle. Instead, after a loud conference with his father in his own yard, he came back with a pellet gun.

“Make it a clean head shot!” cautioned the father.

“Don’t do it near the house!” my consciousness told my body to say. “You might break a window!”

The boy’s sister picked up the bird and carried her to the middle of the yard.

I moved around to the side of the house, to where I’d once hidden from the stalking neighbor— feeling as if my spirit was halfway across the world, piloting my body by remote control.

The coup de grâce was a single percussive burst of air.

And then, the boy said the worst three words I could imagine. “It’s still moving!”

“Shoot it again!” called the father.

“I only have one bullet!”

“Use the butt of the gun! Better ‘n suffering!”

I drifted another thousand miles away from Steubenville. My mind was somewhere in orbit, swimming towards the nearest planet that wasn’t earth. I desperately wanted to get to a sphere with no living things at all, because that was the only place where nothing could possibly suffer. The boiling hot sulfur clouds of Venus might be far enough, or the ice cap at the top of Mars. Anyplace safe, clean and sterile, where there’s no such thing as a dying bird.

I must have gone into the house after that, because I was running out of the house with a garbage bag. The boy was running back to his house on instructions from his father to wash the butt of the gun with bleach. I was calling to the boy and girl to wash their hands as well, can’t be too careful, use a lot of soap. The battered carcass went into the bag, and the bag went into the garbage can.

My mind returned, cautiously, still hovering a little ways over my head to see if it was safe.

“I’m a hunter. I hunted birds before with my dad,” said the boy, as he came back. “But it was always a clean shot. Never like THAT!”

I heard myself mutter something about pigeons being pest birds. If Charlie had killed a mouse or a rat, we wouldn’t have been so upset, and really this was all the same.

“I used to want to be a veterinarian when I grew up,” said the girl.

I heard myself say that I also wanted to be a veterinarian, or a zoo keeper, or a farmer. I didn’t say aloud that I realized I wouldn’t last in any of those professions. All of them have to put down an animal eventually, and I can’t do that.

“There’s blood on the grass,” said the girl.

“The rain will wash it away,” said Mary Pezzulo, who once lived in the neighborhood of LaBelle, in the town of Steubenville, on the spot where the Rust Belt collides with the Appalachian Mountains, on a traumatized bend of the Ohio river, when her country was falling into ruin, when the world was burning to death. I watched her say it from the atmosphere, where thunder was beginning to rumble.

And then there was another peal of thunder, louder this time, and the drops of rain began to fall again.

The children scurried around the yard, picking up drink cans and candy wrappers before the wind could blow them into the street. They took refuge in the new family’s garage, to watch the storm from the open door. The black cloud rolled in overhead, low in the sky where my soul was still circling like a vulture. And then the rain poured, hard, relentless, dropping a rippled silver curtain between my house and the whole of the earth. For the next few hours, nothing was real except the rain.

Both the cats came up to the porch for their supper, and I fed them.

I went to bed with my heart pounding in my ears.

I haven’t cried yet.

I want to cry, but I can’t.

I feel as if I’ll never cry again.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.