We have been keeping our gun in the locked trunk of my moter-in-law's car, which is parked by our garage. Our babysitting co-op demands that guns be locked away when children come over, so when children are coming over we cart the rifle out to the trunk, and then we fetch it back into the house again if we want to drive the car somewhere. Eventually, my husband will have the chance to build a small cabinet for it, but in the meantime, it is a migrating gun. (And it is always locked, by the way. We wrap a gun lock, which looks like a miniature bicycle lock, through it to keep it from being loaded, and we sneakily hide the key.)
When the possum first showed up on the porch after the long cold spell, our gun was in the car. To fetch it, I had to walk right by the possum, which meandered down under the deck when it saw me coming. I lifted the long rifle from the trunk and balanced it in my hands as I walked purposefully across the driveway feeling as though I were living the life of someone I didn’t know. Once the gun was put away, I had to leave home to pick up my daughter. I felt relieved to have been given such a sensible reprieve.
My husband stayed overnight in the cities that night, as he often does to cut down on his commute, and I dreamed throughout the early morning that a pack of hunters was sneaking around the edges of my house, trying to kill the woman. Sometimes they would take a shot, or several shots, and I could feel the sounds reverberating in my skin. Sometimes I dreamed I was kneeling on my bed peeking out the window. I was wearing the same nightgown, it was dark, and I could hear the children breathing in their sleep, but if I waited long enough, I saw men with guns rounding the corner of our back porch. I was not sure that the front door had locked properly.
This is the type of nightmare that I had more often about 10 years ago, when my experience of witnessing a murder was fresh. Now my nightmares about murder usually involve ghosts and haunted stairways. I rarely hear gunshots anymore in my dreams.
Years ago, I would wake up from nights of bad dreams feeling as though my balance was unsteady, and any misstep might send me into a panic, but in the morning last week, I woke up strong. The children went off to school, and then my son came home for lunch. It was about 2:30 PM when I went to the bathroom and through the throom window, I saw the possum on the deck. I had left the cat food out on purpose, and he was eating it.
It took a long time to get the gun ready. I had to haul it out of the hiding space, rush to the other end of the house to find the key to unlock it, fiddle around with the lock, and then load it. Loading it was not easy. In the middle of it, Ian called to ask a question about our water softener, and I answered him, “How do you load this gun?” He talked me through it, told me to call him back as soon as I could, and then explained the situation to the three junior high students who were staying after school with him. The four of them waited for the phone to ring with news.
By the time the gun was loaded, the possum was gone. My son and I waited in the bathroom for a while, and then I decided that I would set out wet cat food to coax him back. As I opened the back door with the food, the possum greeted me, turned slowly, and hopped down under the deck again. My son and I settled back into the bathroom to wait. There are no screens on the bathroom windows, so I opened one of them, stuck a few inches of rifle out of it, and then got down to the business of trying to hush my excited kindergartner.
The possum’s head appeared above the deck. It’s closely-spaced eyes glittered, and it’s pink nose twitched. Cautiously, it crawled onto the deck and made its way over to the cat food. I have shot a gun only once before in my life, when my husband and I did target practice with a Rye Crisp box. I put the rifle to my shoulder, tipped my head down to look through its sites, and remembered that I had to aim a little low. The first bullet landed quietly at my feet. Apparently I had been too vigorous about undoing the safety mechanisms. The second rang out, but the possum just glanced up from its food.
The third bullet hit. At this point, all kinds of things seemed to be happening at once. My son ran out of the room, the possum flapped around on the deck, and I frantically tried to shoot it again and again because I did not want it to suffer. In retrospect, I think it did not suffer long. It’s back end was responsible for all the flapping, while its front crumpled. Still, it seemed like forever, and I ran out of bullets before the possum was still. In all my hurry, I think I only put five bullets in the gun.
The possum lay on the deck, its long fur blowing in the wind. A large red puddle of blood grew underneath it. Standing in the bathroom, I called Ian on the phone, and his students cheered. Still in the bathroom, I called my mother at her work, and she was speechless. My son joined me again in the bathroom, apparently cheerful. He said he had watched from the upstairs bathroom because the noise hurt his ears.
“What did you think of that,” I asked.
“It was disgusting,” he said, wrinkled his nose, and bopped around, I i me n E. good humor.
I finally went out to clean up the mess. There was a strong, musky smell out there, very much like the smell I remember from when my father shot two mink that were killing our chickens when I was a child. It was a powerful smell that filled our bathroom much of the evening, and the next morning it suddenly started emanating from me when I got warm teaching a Pilates class.
We thought it would be most respectful to eat the possum, but when I looked down at the deck, covered with blood and soft possum droppings, I decided it was just too much. My dad once showed me how to skin a raccoon, and I have watched an instructional video about how to dress a chicken, but when it came down to it, I got too overwhelmed. I want someone to show me how to dress and animal before I try it myself. I picked up that soft flexible body up by its hairless tail, put it in a trash bag, and kept it in our trash can. Ian later took it out to the woods, hoping that it would be more respectful to the possum if something had a chance to eat it.
Then I got down to the business of cleaning up the deck. There was enough bloody snow to fill a small bag, and then I poured bucket after bucket of water to rinse the crimson off our deck, right in front of the main door to the house. The cat dishes were spattered with blood, as was the shovel. “Nothing says ‘Welcome’ like pools of blood in front of your door!” I joked with myself, not because it was funny, but because I really wanted some kind of joke just then. It smelled like cleaning fish. That smell must be the scent of blood.
That and w and as the end of it.
A few days left later, I read that Meister Eckhart wrote that every creature is the word of God and a book about God. I believe that. I am not sure how that fits with what I did, but for now I feel peaceful living with that mystery for now.
A few days after that, when I went to pick up my son from his floor hockey practice, he picked up his hockey stick like a rifle. I scolded him, and told him not to point even pretend guns at people. His playing guns didn’t scare me as much as it sometimes has.
In some ways, this is a new world for me.
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