Page 25 - WTP Vol. XII #2

As for me and Eddie, 65 years back or so we would simply have ascribed the strangers’ deaths and suffering to tough luck. We knew little about the conflicted world, and all we did know about ill fortune was paltry: flat tires on our bikes, birthday parties missed because of sickness, week- end games of pickup baseball squelched by rain, and so on.
Eddie, my best friend, was the son of the hired man on my uncle’s farm. He and I used to shoot down the rats that gathered high in the cow barn’s ivy when the sun dropped off. One of us shone the light, the other fired. Not that for one nanosecond I liken those desperate asylum-seekers to rodents. Soon enough, I’d come to learn more about poverty, oppression, violence –political or criminal or both– and to recognize that we boys were a thousand times blessed compared to a numberless population of the truly wretched.
It was only tough luck that made one nasty moment for Eddie. The incident could well have come my way, but this time I happened to be the one with the gun while he focused the beam at a crackle in the foliage above.
Both of us were partly motivated by smug and ignorant righteousness: rats killed chicks, sucked eggs, and so on. It’s not that I came to love rats in my maturity but that looking back,
I marvel at the joy we took in slaughter, not only of them but also, say, of crows, which we misjudged as enemies of the farm. They cleaned up carrion, and they killed rats too, a fact we ignored if we were ever aware of it. We’d been told by adults that crows were guilty of steal- ing seed corn, pulling shoots from the vegetable garden, and assorted other offenses. The crows were far too smart for us to make much of a dent in their numbers; if we did manage to bag one or two, though, how satisfying to be told that our bloodthirstiness was a service to my uncle’s property.
But back to Eddie’s misadventure. I managed to shoot one big rat, which clung momentarily to the ivy, fell from wall to ground– and scooted up inside one of his pantlegs! Before the poor animal dropped out, which must have seemed an hour to my buddy, I could see by moonlight that his eyes were a welter of fears, that his face had turned ghastly.
And there I stood, wanting to help, but what could I do? As for that, what can I?
Why connect today’s brutal headlines about events on the banks of the Rio Grande to that night when Eddie aimed the light and I killed that frantic rat? Yes, the wounded animal scrabbled for shelter and so you could accurately call it a refugee; but any effort to forge a whole here, to connect our slaughter with the horrors facing human refugees, is laborious and, worse, fatuous.
Eddie and I made no efforts at analogizing the local and the general, not back when things were easier, when justice seemed so clear to two barely adolescent boys, when a victim’s anguish was a matter we never considered. If calamity struck someone, it was only a random thing.
Tough luck.
A former Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published 24 books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical es- says, and 16 poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). His sixth book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, published this year, along withhis second novel, Now Look.
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