2 of 4

The final days before Easter tried our patience and fanned our longing. At long last the time arrived, the day of Boots's emergence.

The Georgia sun had already coaxed spring into full bloom. Easter morning began with the obligatory church service, after which we were required to line up like prisoners beside the tulips and daffodils for family pictures. I endured the picture-taking with much squinting and complaining, then yanked off my tie and ran to liberate Boots.

She sniffed her first blade of grass that day, and batted at her first daffodil, and stalked her first butterfly, leaping high in the air and missing. She kept us exuberantly entertained until neighbor kids descended upon us for a prearranged Easter egg hunt.

But when our next-door playmates arrived, the unthinkable happened. Their pet Boston terrier, Pugs, following them into our yard, spied Boots, let out one growl, and charged. I screamed, and we all ran toward Boots. But already Pugs had the tiny kitten in her mouth and was shaking it like a sock. We kids stood in a circle around the scene of violence, shrieking and making threatening motions to scare Pugs off. Helpless, we watched a whirl of flashing teeth and flying tufts of fur. Finally, Pugs dropped the kitten on the grass and trotted off, nonchalantly.

Boots had not yet died. She was mewing softly, and her eyes held a look of terror. Blood oozed from many puncture wounds, and her shiny black coat was flecked with Pugs's saliva. I prayed desperately that she would survive, and we all begged our parents to rush her to a veterinarian. But a neighbor pointed to the odd way Boots's head was jerked sideways. "Broken neck," he pronounced. "She'll never make it."

The adults shooed us away, and for many years we did not learn what happened next: they placed Boots in a burlap bag and held her under water in the creek, putting her out of her misery.

I could not have articulated it at the time, but what I learned that Easter under the noonday sun was the ugly word irreversible. All afternoon I prayed for a miracle. No! It can't be! Tell me it's not true! Maybe Boots wouldn't really die. Or maybe she would die but come back—hadn't the Sunday-school teacher told such a story about Jesus?

Or maybe the whole morning could somehow be erased, rewound, and played over again minus that horrid scene. We could keep Boots on the screened porch forever, never allowing her outside. Or we could talk our neighbors into building a fence for Pugs. A thousand schemes ran through my mind over the next days, until the reality finally won over, and I accepted at last that Boots was dead. Irreversibly dead.

From then on, Easter Sundays in my childhood were stained by the memory of violence and death in the grass. And as the years increased I learned much more about the word irreversible. Once in the woods a friend and I lined up 17 box turtles beside the creek and proceeded to drop heavy boulders on them, laughing as their shells cracked and their insides spurted out. That act of cruelty, my own cruelty, shocked me beyond measure. It defied my deep love of animals, and I long lived under its shadow of shame and guilt. I yearned for some way to erase it, to reverse it.

There followed a whole succession of scenes I likewise wished to reverse: fights with bullies, broken arms, foolish comments in class, unexpected pop quizzes, the inevitable first automobile accident, and all the other minor jolts of growing up, each one underscoring the dreadful word irreversible.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44