This rat was not just eating the sugar. He was bathing in it, wallowing in
it, positively luxuriating in it, his flickering tail hanging over the side of
the bowl, flinging sugar across the table. When I saw him, I froze, then
backed out of the kitchen. I told Brian, and we opened the kitchen door
cautiously. The rat had climbed out of the sugar bowl and leaped up onto
the stove. We could see his teeth marks on the pile of potatoes, our
dinner, on a plate on the stove. Brian threw the cast-iron skillet at the rat.
It hit him and clanged on the floor, but instead of fleeing, the rat hissed
at us, as if we were the intruders. We ran out of the kitchen, slammed the
door, and stuffed rags in the gap beneath it.
That night Maureen, who was five, was too terrified to sleep. She kept on
saying that the rat was coming to get her. She could hear it creeping
nearer and nearer. I told her to stop being such a wuss.
"I really do hear the rat," she said. "I think he's close to me."
I told her she was letting fear get the best of her, and since this was one
of those times that we had electricity, I turned on the light to prove it.
There, crouched on Maureen's lavender blanket, a few inches away from
her face, was the rat. She screamed and pushed off her covers, and the rat
jumped to the floor. I got a broom and tried to hit the rat with the handle,
but it dodged me. Brian grabbed a baseball bat, and we maneuvered it,
hissing and snapping, into a corner.
Our dog, Tinkle, the part–Jack Russell terrier who had followed Brian
home one day, caught the rat in his jaws and banged it on the floor until
it was dead. When Mom ran into the room, Tinkle was strutting around,
all pumped up like the proud beast-slayer that he was. Mom said she felt
a little sorry for the rat. "Rats need to eat, too," she pointed out. Even
though it was dead, it deserved a name, she went on, so she christened it
Rufus. Brian, who had read that primitive warriors placed the body parts
of their victims on stakes to scare off their enemies, hung Rufus by the
tail from a poplar tree in front of our house the next morning. That