Fiona Webster: Little Cruelties

Little Cruelties

I want to lead off with a long quotation that's been on my mind lately:

You take pity on a hedgehog out in the cold and put it in an old hatbox with some worms. This box with the hog inside you then place in a disused hutch wedging the door open for the poor creature to come and go at will. To go in search of food and having eaten to regaing the warmth and security of its box in the hutch. There then is the hedgehog in its box in the hutch with enough worms to tide it over. A last look to make sure all is as it should be before taking yourself off to look for something else to pass the time already heavy on your hands at that tender age. The glow at your good deed is slower than usual to cool and fade. You glowed readily in those days but seldom for long. Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praise from your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before. Even in those days. But not this day. It was on an autumn afternoon you found the hedgehog and took pity on it in the way described and you were still the better for it when your bedtime came. Kneeling at the bedside you included it the hedgehog in your detailed prayer to God to bless all you loved. And tossing in your warm bed waiting for sleep to come you were still faintly glowing at the thought of what a fortunate hedgehog it was to have crossed your path as it did. A narrow clay path edged with sere box edging. As you stood there wondering how best to pass the time till bedtime it parted the edging on the one side and was making straight for the edging on the other when you entered its life. Now the next morning not only was the glow spent but a great uneasiness had taken its place. A suspicion that all was perhaps not as it should be. That rather than do as you did you had perhaps better let good alone and the hedgehog pursue its way. Days if not weeks passed before you could bring yourself to return to the hutch. You have never forgotten what you found then. You are your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then. The mush. The stench.
—Samuel Beckett, Company

Such a common urge, especially in children, to attempt a clumsy gesture of sympathy toward a wild animal, and more often than not, it turns into a stark encounter with death. And that peculiar shame—what feels like a sin, to have presumed to exert control over another living creature. And even worse, the shame from having been so cocksure that you'd done a noble deed. I don't know about you, but Beckett really makes me wince at the child's private self-righteousness:

And tossing in your warm bed waiting for sleep to come you were still faintly glowing at the thought of what a fortunate hedgehog it was to have crossed your path as it did.

And then, as in every tale of death, the horror is no less acute for being inevitable:

Days if not weeks passed before you could bring yourself to return to the hutch. You have never forgotten what you found then. . . The mush. The stench.

It makes me think of Lloyd Henreid's rabbit—in Stephen King's The Stand. 'Remember how Lloyd thought about that rabbit when he was trapped in the prison cell? He was hoping against hope for release, but he feared that all the keys were in the hands of corpses.

"Oh no," Lloyd said. "Someone's gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket."
But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn't help it. . . .He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. But the trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn't thought of his rabbit in...well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

Stephen King tells us, of course, about the bloody paws, and the stench, and the maggots. But as in the Beckett passage, it's the memory that carries the real horror: "You have never forgotten what you found then."

Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked about him about the rabbit. . . but Lloyd had never forgotten.

When you're a kid, the isolation is part of the horror—that you're all alone with that secret shame.

Another line of thought: what actions we take in the aftermath. On such occasions, the ritual of burial becomes very significant—as if somehow, it can assuage the bite of that ugly memory. (Or cover up the shame with earth?) The first story I ever read by Steve Rasnic Tem— "Little Cruelties" in Etchison's Cutting Edge anthology—gives a bitter twist to that ritual. A boy begs his parents to let him have three of those yellow chicks that are sold at Eastertime. The father says, "No way—we live in the city," but the mother gives in and buys the chicks. The father is furious, and when the chicks (inevitably) sicken and begin to die, his fury is exacerbated by feeling responsible for their suffering. One night after the boy is asleep, he takes the box outside. The ground is hard from a late frost, so he doesn't bury them, he just tosses them over the icy hill at the back of the yard.

A cat, maybe a dog, would take care of them. On his way back into the house he thought about fraternity pranks he'd heard about in college. Pig embryos left in a sorority house. Dead dogs mailed to opposing football coaches. A snowball of frozen chicks. But he'd wanted to do the right thing.
It was ridiculous to think that the death of chicks might diminish him somehow.

He lies to his son. He tells him he buried the chicks. The next day he goes out at dawn to look for the corpses, but he can't find them.

I won't tell you all the steps in the further unfolding of the horror—only this next piece:

Two days after the thaw, he saw [his son] playing with the dessicated chick corpses in the backyard, passing them from hand to hand like lumps of gray modeling clay.

The last time I had to deal with a dead animal, I shied away from the full experience. A stray cat had kittens in the garden of our apartment complex; and even though the weather was warm, and the mother had milk, the kittens all died quickly (most likely a virus). For one long night I endured their eerie high-pitched screams. The next morning, I scooped them up in a plastic garbage bag, and tossed them in a nearby dumpster. I didn't feel responsible. The stray cat had been just one of many in the inner-city neighborhood where we lived. I had not encouraged her in any way. We already had cats of our own. Pampered, indoor cats.

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