“That’s not true!” People laugh when I tell the story of my seventh Christmas. They just don’t believe me.
My family lived on the outskirts of Greensburg in a run-down farmhouse built just after the Civil War. Running water and an indoor toilet were newly added comforts when Mom and Dad moved in. The house had a simple floor plan – living room, kitchen (and bathroom) on the ground floor. Stairs that separated the two downstairs rooms accessed the three bedrooms on the second floor. At the top of these stairs was a small storage room that was off-limits due to its decrepitude. Renovations were ongoing as funds allowed, but with a dirt cellar and less-than-airtight floors and ceilings, vermin intruders were common.
In December 1965, none of that mattered to two small children in the throes of holiday happiness. School would soon be out. Christmas was just days away. But at breakfast one cold morning, Mom was not in a good mood.
“Your father’s cigars are missing,” Mom said with that edge to her voice.
I looked across the table at my younger brother, David. Milk dribbled down his chin as he tried to slurp Frosted Flakes with two front bottom teeth missing. He tilted his head to one side and shrugged a shoulder, not bothering to look up from the cereal bowl.
“They were the cigars your uncle gave him for his birthday,” my mother continued. “The whole package is missing from the cupboard.”
Her gaze landed on me. I was only seven years old, but by standing on a kitchen chair I could just reach the top shelf of the cupboard where all the forbidden items were kept. The cigars, packs of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, and the deck of playing cards illustrated with pictures of naked ladies were among the things on that shelf. Curiosity had driven me to make this inventory, but I never would have taken anything. I had aspirations of living to see my eighth birthday.
“Really, Mom,” I said earnestly, “why would we take Dad’s cigars?”
“Hmmm,” she frowned. “Why, indeed. Especially with Christmas just around the corner. I guess I should have asked Santa for his report. Do you think he’d have something else to say on this subject?”
David snapped to attention. Any invocation of Santa’s name and David was all ears.
“You can ask him, Mom,” David chimed in. “He’ll vouch for us.”
We must have passed the Santa test. “If I ever find out otherwise, you know what will happen.”
We really didn’t know, but we could imagine enough punishment scenarios to keep our little minds busy for a while. I wondered why Dad even kept the cigars. He rarely smoked them, preferring unfiltered Pall Malls or the hand-rolled cigarettes he and Grandpap crafted by the score every weekend.
The next day, Mom was sitting at the table when we got home from school.
“My good scissors are missing,” she stated flatly.
This was more horrible than losing the cigars. No one touched Mom’s good scissors without risking limb loss. She kept them extra sharp for her sewing and nearly had a stroke when she caught Dad trimming his nails with them one day.
“Ask Santa,” David piped up right away. “I never touched them.” He turned to me expectantly. “Did you?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
She didn’t buy the straightforward admission of innocence.
“You both sit on these chairs until your father comes home,” she said ominously.
Dad came home. We proclaimed our innocence once more, even under threat of a Santa-less holiday. Our parents relented to some degree, but we went to bed under a shroud of suspicion. This was not a good way to start Christmas vacation.
Over the next few days, things continued to get lost in the shuffle. A pack of cigarettes off the kitchen table, spoons from the sink, and Mom’s half-eaten Mounds bar (coconut — yuck!) from the living-room end table.
Christmas morning arrived, and in spite of veiled threats to the contrary, Santa was very generous. David got an assemble-it-yourself tin barn and all the plastic creatures needed to populate the farm. He and Dad spent time fitting the pieces of tin together, lining up the tiny tabs with the proper slits, and pinching them down to secure the sides and the roof.
My favorite present was a kid-sized candy store. It was a colorful, canopied cardboard cart. Along with a toy cash register, it had paper bags and little metal scoops to serve customers from the bins full of jellybeans, hardtack, caramels, and gumdrops. I had a ready-made business. That day, I sold small bags of candy to the amusement of visiting relatives, who readily handed me nickels and pennies. I went to bed that night with plans to sell the rest of my stock.
After breakfast the next morning, I went to the living room to take inventory. I gazed in horror at empty bins. Everything was gone except the gumdrops.
“David! How could you?!” I began to rant.
Mom came into the living room. “Your brother’s still in bed. What are you carrying on about?” she asked.
I pointed to my candy store. She stiffened and her face turned a grim shade of gray.
“Danny,” she bellowed, “Get down here.”
My dad came flying down the steps. No one messed around when she used that tone.
“What?” Dad demanded. His gaze followed Mom’s pointing finger. “Did she eat all that candy already?”
“None of us ate that candy,” Mom intoned, a quiver sneaking into her voice. She gritted her teeth and spat out a bone-chilling pronouncement: “It’s got to be – a rat.”
In those halcyon days before well-meaning animal activists convinced everyone how benign and misunderstood these long-nosed, skin-tailed, disease-carrying beasts are, my mother was a knickers-up, broom-wielding madwoman whenever she saw any evidence of their presence in her spick-and-span home. There was nothing she feared or despised more than rodents. Mice were the spoilers of hard-earned foodstuffs. Squirrels carried rabies and befouled our attic. Rats were known to chew the fingers and toes off of babies. (Well, that’s what I overheard once, and I still have to tuck in all my blankets at night so they can’t get mine.) Anyway, this meant war.
Mom took my candy store outside to our garbage dump and set it on fire. I cried. Not only was my candy store gone, but so were all the potential profits. My entrepreneurial spirit was devastated. David offered to share one of his gifts so I would shut up.
Mom and Dad called it a pack rat because of the variety of things it was taking, including inedible objects. Since the rat had a sweet tooth, Dad smeared peanut butter on the spring plates of assorted traps and set them in open places around the living room. He prepared to sit up all night, armed with the good flashlight and a small spade. A whack with the spade would be far more final than a swat with the broom, he reasoned. David and I were bundled off to bed early that night and told to stay upstairs no matter what happened.
Sure.
I can’t describe the noise that woke us sometime during that night. I only know that when the lights came on and we followed the last of the snarled expletives to its source, we found our father in the bathroom shining the flashlight up into a crack between the wall and the ceiling directly above a lamp that hung over the toilet.
“It was big as a cat!” he was yelling. “It jumped on the toilet, grabbed hold of the lamp cord, balanced on the lampshade, and pulled itself up through that crack!” Dad spotlighted each step with the flashlight’s beam. “It must have a nest in the upstairs cubbyhole.”
“What was it?” Mom demanded.
“Well, it had to be a rat. But it’s the biggest damn rat I ever saw!” Dad was shaking from the thrill of the chase. “He was fast! I got one swing at him when I first saw him on the coffee table. I think I broke something in the living room.”
I wondered if Mom would burn the coffee table. I wasn’t happy thinking about how the critter routinely spied on us from the crack above the toilet and danced, at will, upon the toilet seat.
Dad began poking the blade of the spade into the crack. All was silent above in that unfinished storage closet at the top of the stairs between our bedrooms.
“I’ll fix his wagon,” Dad said with teeth clenched tight. “We’ll starve him out. I need some tin.”
Dad unhinged the pieces of the toy barn in less time than it had taken to put it together. David cried. The house vibrated with the sound of tin being hammered into impregnable seams along the crack in the wall above the toilet and at the bottom of the door to the storage room.
We waited. I lay in bed at night listening in case the thing decided to chew its way into my bedroom. But no sound came from the storage room. There were no sprung traps, no missing objects. Candy left in plain view went untouched.
After two weeks, Dad decided to confront the beast head on, no matter what. While Mom clung to us downstairs, Dad ripped the tin barn roof and silo from the bottom of the storage room door. Armed with his spade and the flashlight, he trod cautiously into the cobwebby, open-beamed room and whacked at the debris he found in the floor beams. Soon a faint whistle floated down the stairwell, and we heard Dad step out onto the landing at the top of the stairs.
“I got it!” he called. “Want to see?”
He came down the steps and into the kitchen as David and I pulled away from Mom to get a look. It was as big as a cat. As big as a starved cat, that is. Apparently it had run out of candy.
“Get it out! Get it out of my house!” Mom screamed, shaking with disgust.
“Your scissors are up there,” Dad said as he headed outside. “And a bunch of other stuff.”
David and I ran to the living room window to watch Dad give the rat a “burial at sea.” (He always threw the dead rats in the creek that ran behind the house.) Mom outfitted herself with Playtex gloves and Dad’s old steel-toed boots and headed upstairs with an arsenal of cleaning supplies.
After all that, we never did use that cubbyhole for anything. Now the house is long gone, and people think I made up this story. (But I still have the deck of playing cards.)
Rebecca E. “Rebe” Dunn, a member of the Greensburg and Ligonier Valley Writers, directs Ligonier Valley Writers’ interactive mystery dinner theatre fundraisers. This story is the first in a series of holiday reminiscences dedicated with gratitude to the family that inspires her.
