was suddenly a of shouting and banging and noise, and I just sat on the bed holding tightly to my little brother. My mother came running back into the bedroom, flinging the door open and then slamming it shut. She got on the bed and held us both.
My dad had apparently been in the kitchen with the guys looking for the mouse, when he was confronted by a very nasty wharf rat, about a foot long, from what I was told later. He told us he grabbed a broom and jumped on top of a kitchen chair, as his stalwart supporters fell all over themselves trying to get out of the kitchen.
Once safely out of the kitchen, they suddenly recalled that they were supposed to be Guys and charged back in to do battle with the giant rat, trying to hit it with chairs, pots, pans, anything they could. They made a tremendous racket and finally killed it. I never asked how and my mom didn’t want to know. They carried it outdoors and called Rat Control, who came to take it away and set rat traps up all over our house.
They caught more huge rats as the weeks went by, ugly things with tails as long as their bodies. One was caught coming through a hole around the drainpipes under the sink. We were forbidden to open any cupboards, and Mom made my brother and me sleep in between her and Dad in their bed for a long, long time.
I had rat history, oh yes, I did.
So when we moved to Louisiana and I saw rats in the back yard, Husband should have believed me. Being a My Wife Overreacts Kind of Guy, he didn’t.
He had a new job, this was a new state, so we did the sensible thing and didn’t buy a house that first year, we rented one instead. It was in a nice neighborhood, we had nice neighbors and it was a decent little ranch style house. It had a beat up, but still standing, six foot tall wooden stockade fence around the whole back yard.
I put our gas barbecue grill on the long cement patio, which was right off the back door, bought chairs and a table at the Walmart and learned quickly that you can’t sit outside very often to eat in the summertime in Louisiana, due to the high heat, intense humidity and multiple king-sized bugs. The grill didn’t get used that first summer, and you’ll know why in a minute or two.
I am sitting out on the patio… determined to get the heck out of the house and away from the endless stacks of cardboard boxes still waiting to be unpacked… idly gazing out into the yard, looking at the strange, tropical trees I didn’t recognize… at the very large elephant ear plants growing next to the stockade fence… at the rats walking on top of those horizontal supports that are on the inside of the stockade fence panels.
Your brain just sort of registers these things as your eyes pass over them, it takes a second or two before it stops cold on the word, Then, it just reverberates itself into your consciousness a few more times.
Rats? Rats?! Yes indeedy-do, folks, , walking along the fence right in my rented back yard, three of them. Not in a hurry and obviously at home there, they proceed to make it to the end of the support beam and then skitter onto an oddly shaped tree growing in the corner of the yard, jammed against the fence.
I skittered right into the house and called Husband, who sighed elaborately and said I was most likely tired from the move and/or unpacking too long, and had probably seen chipmunks. “Did you have your glasses on?”
“Yes,” I answered through gritted teeth, safely on the inside of the glass patio door, “I had my glasses on, and these weren’t chipmunks, they were rats… brown rats.”
“Chipmunks,” he stated patiently, “are also brown, did you get a look at their tails?”
“Yes, naked, icky tails, because these were damn not chipmunks!”
I was informed that rats were nocturnal creatures and didn’t normally come out much in the daytime, so he had no idea what I had seen. Was I sure it wasn’t some sort of squirrel? And he had to go back to work now and couldn’t talk anymore.
His advice was to just not go out in the back yard right now. I didn’t go out in the back yard the rest of that afternoon. I kept watch through the kitchen window off and on all day, and dammit, they were Rats, I tell you, rats, walked back and forth on those fence supports all freaking day long. They ran up into that weird tree, they ran down the tree, they scruffled around in the undergrowth at the bottom of the tree. Husband didn’t come home until late at night, then stood out on the back porch and declared that he didn’t see anything. (no duhsweetheart)
This went on for a week. I made my two youngest sons sit out in the heat with me, to be my witnesses. “Do see the rats?” I would ask them.
“Sure,” they’d answer and point to whatever rat was visible at the moment in the yard or on the fence. They told me they had also seen them on the other side of the house, scuttling up and down onto the roof and running along the canopy which hung over the back patio. They helpfully pointed up at a spot which was directly over my head.
This is where you glance up so fast that you hurt your neck. Drag your boys indoors to once again, call Husband and demand that he He can’t do anything, he is at work and can’t do anything about some creature that he has never seen, he explains.
Husband makes it home early one night, and jokingly asks how many squirrels I saw today.
“Haha, you’re a scream, honey,” I answer.
He decides to barbecue. I follow him out onto the back patio, and watch as he takes the vinyl cover off of the barbecue (which hadn’t been used yet that summer) and opens the lid.
He leaps backwards with a shout as a good sized brown rat and a baby rat leap out from the depths of the barbecue and plop-plop furrily onto the patio, then scurry off into the twilight.
Meanwhile, I’ve screamed and flung myself back into the house, slammed and locked the patio door behind me.
I catch my breath as Husband stamps all over the barbecue cover, in case more fugitive rats are hiding in there, then stare at him through the glass door as he jiggles the locked handle trying to get back into the house.
“How many chipmunksthat, honey?” I ask him as sweetly-nastily as I can manage, as he stares at me through the glass, “Or were they squirrels, baby?”
I unlock the door and let him inside. He doesn’t say a word and goes to call an exterminator.
I tell him to throw out the grill. He says I am overreacting, but sensing that I am on the verge of some Emotional Thing that he doesn’t even want to consider dealing with, he wisely rolls the rat-tainted grill to the curb that very evening.
Now, a lot of the workmen type people in southwest Louisiana are Cajuns. It would take too long to explain exactly what a Cajun is, but a true bayou Cajun will eat an alligator for dinner that he has caught in the bayou his house is built over. Yes, like on stilts. You can call exterminating companies and get a pleasant receptionist on the phone, sure, but the guy coming to your house is probably going to be a gator eating Cajun. They speak in a Southern drawl with a French accent. Wonderfully nice people, but they’re a little… um… well, just read on.
The exterminator guy shows up in a white pickup truck. It has a cab section built over the truck bed with doors on the sides. He opens one of the doors and takes out a lot of cardboard tubes, with sticky stuff on the insides. He walks around to the back yard and over to where we’ve been seeing the rats, and starts to place the cardboard tubes along the support rails of the fence. These, he tells me, will mos’ likely catch the rat I saw.
“Rats,” I correct
