Bleeding Out
“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”
—Wendell Barry, Jayber Crow
Lately fearing apocalypse, fearing that it will huddle us together like a nest of newborn dying mice, fearing that our mistakes have caught up with us, I pick my way through the dry leaves and fallen saplings in the few acres of woods that we still own on a small ridge above the village we call home.
Walking through the woods just beyond the cabin that is no longer ours, I find a nest of baby mice a color blue I’d never seen before. I would not have noticed them otherwise, so very tip-of-pinky-finger tiny. Theirs was a blue deep and grayed. Not of fruit. Not of sky. I would have liked a silk shirt in this blue. Bright enough to be noticed through a tidy pile of leaves arranged in the armpit of a fallen tree. Not exactly the color of death, although it was. The color of death. Detailed in my memory are whiskers smaller than a single point parenthesis.
My dog, displeased that I stopped and could not go on, bounced and growled.
We have infestations in our pantry in the house below — bags ripped open, mouse shit ruins the risotto mix. High on the pantry shelves I placed blocks of Coumadin infused poison that look like granola bars and closed the door tight so the dog couldn’t get at them. If you don’t know Coumadin, maybe your grandmother did. Maybe it’s the blood thinner that staved off her next stroke for a few months or a decade.
But what if the dog escaped to the woods and ate the dead mice? Maybe the mother of those tiny mice had carried back a chunk of what she thought was a breakfast treat from our pantry — what a find — and fed it to her perfect babies and turned them blue, blood and lymph seeping into the leaves beneath them. What did I think would happen? How long can a nest survive before the seepage kills us?
I leash the dog. Hold him tight against the danger of snacking on those tiny toxified bodies. The next day and the next.
And now it is many years later. When I think of it I look for white bone the diameter of thread in the decay of rotting tree limbs after the snow melts, in the spot that I think might be where the baby mice died, but usually rejoice instead finding trilliums sprouting and watching the dog still bounding along the pathways.
My husband has driven our sick neighbor to the airport in another city where he will meet his son who will take him south to die. The neighbor’s woods touch our woods and that is the most we have ever had in common. The neighbor’s house will fall to the raccoons and mice, but the little cabin built from trees that survived decades on our old property will stand long past us.
In the car on the way to the airport our neighbor tells my husband a secret about the mice. In the cabin he set a pulley system, a trap where the mice would run up a pine board set with a suspended bag of seeds or other indulgences. Like a see-saw their weight would topple them into a pail of blue antifreeze, and every now and again our neighbor would walk up the rise behind his house, up to the cabin beyond the stone wall, and dump them out. “It’s not a big deal,” he said when my husband didn’t respond. “I was the executioner in my family. Once I had to shoot fourteen sick horses.”
“See,” my husband says when he returns, happy for this news. “Nothing is your fault.”
I look around us and know that is not true.
Nina Gaby is a writer, visual artist, and psychiatric nurse practitioner who is currently hunkering down with her husband, dog, and two cats in her 1790’s home and studio across from the longest floating bridge east of the Mississippi.