“Dibs on that mouse!” said our mother. My sisters and I were negotiating with her over a new Christmas coloring book that her sister, Aunt Kathy, had sent to us all. Said mouse was snuggled under a huge quilt, fast asleep, wearing an old-fashioned nightcap. We girls colored a lot of the pages, but we didn’t get to touch that mouse.
Mice are kind of like bears in that we find them lovable and entertaining until we meet a real one, at which point a sizable subset of us will run screaming and later try to murder it. Consider the juxtaposition of kids watching Cinderella’s mice, or Tom and Jerry, while a deadly apparatus of steel springs and wood yawns open in the corner. It’s odd too that we make pets of the mouse’s close cousins, even while plotting his demise. With no sense of irony, my sisters and I brought a procession of gerbils, hamsters, and even a small white rat with pink eyes, into the house, even while taking care in the basement to avoid a painful encounter with a rat trap.
I remember seeing a “real” rat one time in the feed room of the chicken house, and it was entirely unlike any of my rodent pets. One chill-me-to-the-bone story my mother told me was one evening when Daddy was away at National Guard camp, and all three of us little girls were upstairs asleep. As she sat in the living room reading, she heard substantial footsteps coming up the basement stairs. She waited in silent terror as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, came through the basement door (directly behind her chair) and around in front of her. A very large rat stopped in the middle of the floor and regarded her with small black eyes. She sat frozen, with her feet up under her, until the rat shook its head, turned on its heel, and started back down the stairs. Mama said she waited without moving until the footsteps died away, and then jumped up, raced over, and slammed and locked the basement door. Surely there was some kind of coda the next day, involving poisons and giant traps, but I don’t remember that part.
As my mother got older, and, some might say, less well, she began to behave in a friendly manner towards the mice. She banned all poisons and killing traps, replacing them with live traps. When she would find a new tenant in one of these traps, she would take it down to the barn and give it half a peanut butter sandwich. We joked behind her back that the mice probably made it back to the house before she did.
After she died, my father felt that he simply had to do something about the mice. They had been getting more and more bold in recent years and he was starting to think it was them or him. He chose himself, and set some killing traps just a few days after her funeral.
The next day he came down and found all the traps were sprung, with no mice having been caught. I think we all believe in ghosts from time to time. For my father, that moment was one of those times.