THE KILLING BOARD
Years ago, when we lived in rural El Dorado County, my wife and I argued constantly about the disposal of dead bodies. It began one day when I discovered a terrifying-looking creature lying dead on the back porch. I stepped into the kitchen and called for Julie.
“Honey,” I said. “Can you come here? I need you.”
Julie, who had been relaxing on the living room sofa with a cup of coffee, came shuffling reluctantly into the kitchen. “You rang?” she said.
“Hon, I need you to get a broom and a trash bag or something. There’s a dead thing on the back porch.”
“A dead thing?” I saw her eyes widen in alarm.
“I don’t know what it is. I stepped out back to use the bathroom and I saw it lying on the porch as I was coming back into the house.”
“What does it look like?” she asked me.
“It’s just this disgusting thing. Like a cross between a moth and a bat. Perhaps some prehistoric missing link between the two. It’s an anisect, or maybe an insenimal. Half animal, half insect.” I gave an involuntary shudder at the thought of such a creature.
Her pinched face relaxed a little. “Why didn’t you just throw it in the garbage?”
“Because it’s terrifying, like an irradiated monster from one of those 1950s sci-fi flicks. It looks as if it could attach itself to your face and suck out your brains.”
Her expression flattened. “Are you sure it didn’t?”
“Hon, please, I can’t rest easy until I know it’s gone.”
“But you said it was dead. That’s as gone as you can get.”
“It looks dead. But who knows what dead really means in the insenimal kingdom. It could just be in some sort of chrysalis state. Or maybe it’s hibernating.”
“I don’t think moths or bats hibernate. But even if they do, they wouldn’t do it lying down on someone’s back porch.”
“Maybe it was hanging from the ceiling and lost its grip.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But why do I have to be the one to get rid of it?”
Here’s where the tricky part of the argument commenced.
“As I see it, hon, this is a gardening issue.”
Her eyes became all squinty and dubious.
“A dead moth on the back porch is a gardening issue?”
I nodded assertively. “That’s right. And we have a very precise division of labor in this household. You do all the gardening and I take care of the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping.”
Julie put her hands on her hips. “I’m aware of the division of labor, but I still don’t see how a dead moth on the back porch is a gardening issue.”
“Think about it,” I said. “It flew onto the back porch of our house. Our house is completely surrounded by your garden. The creature had to have passed over the garden to get to the back porch. Ergo, this is a gardening issue.”
But Julie wasn’t so easily swayed. “The groceries have to pass through the yard in order to reach the kitchen, but that doesn’t mean it’s my responsibility to cook them once they are in the house, does it?”
I could see that some additional finesse would be required.
“Hon,” I said, in my most patient tone of voice. “This poor departed creature is a product of nature, a child of the great outdoors. He lived his entire life outside, very probably in your garden. It’s likely he helped to fertilize your plants. Perhaps he dined on bugs that would have destroyed your prized roses had he not been around. As the recipient of so much largesse from this creature, don’t you think you owe him a decent burial? Isn’t that part of your moral obligation as a gardener, to see to the proper disposal of your many natural assistants?”
Julie had her mouth partly open, ready to parry this latest thrust, when I saw resignation sweep over her like a wave. Flimsy as my argument was, she could see that I planned to defend it tenaciously.
“Wimp,” she said as she headed towards the back porch.
I am repulsed by dead things at the low end of the food chain: insects, lizards, birds. I have less difficulty dealing with the corpses of my fellow mammals: gophers, moles, possums, etc. Julie is sentimentally disposed towards furry creatures and can’t bear to deal with their remains. Thus, after much debate, we decided that she would dispose of any dead thing that had once been capable of flight. This meant that I would never have to face another moth-bat. Unfortunately, it left a great deal of the animal kingdom in my jurisdiction. Skunks, possums, and squirrels were forever being squashed on the roadway out front of our house. These generally needed to be removed and buried in a hurry to prevent the stench from infiltrating our home. These duties did not greatly disconcert me. Should a squirrel on the roadway turn out to be not dead but merely unconscious, the consequences seemed less terrifying to me than the prospect of rousing some unconscious flying object that might suddenly waken and spring at my face. I could probably outrun a wounded squirrel or possum, but a bat, a buzzard, some enormous member of the hornet family – this I couldn’t bear to contemplate.
Alas, I entered into our agreement before our troubles with the gophers began. It took few months, but our city cats gradually adjusted to country life. They learned that if they waited patiently alongside one of the little dirt mounds that dotted the landscape, a gopher would eventually pop out of it. And cats are nothing if not patient. They liked to catch the poor gopher, toy with it sadistically, release it briefly, only to chase it down again before it could reach the safety of its hole. Julie didn’t like this. She wanted the gophers killed before they could damage her flowers and trees and vegetables, but she didn’t want them tortured for hours on end.
One day, she asked me to go outside and dispatch the latest half-dead gopher by smacking it with a shovel. I argued that killing animals wasn’t a part of our bargain. Our agreement covered only the removal of those creatures believed to be already dead.
“When a cat gets hold of a gopher, it’s pretty much as good as dead,” Julie said. “But if the suffering of some poor defenseless creature doesn’t bother you, well, that’s between you and your conscience.”
Because a live gopher is less frightening to me than a dead moth-bat, I reluctantly agreed to take on the unpleasant duty of administering the coup de grace. But being squeamish, I closed my eyes just before delivering what I hoped would be the deathblow. As a result, the blow was misaimed, and the poor animal’s death was not nearly as quick or merciful as it should have been. I was sick to my stomach by the time the gopher finally stopped twitching. I handed my wife the shovel and announced my retirement as the family’s official varmint executioner.
“It’s not a matter of conscience,” I told Julie. “I just don’t have the stomach for it.”
She didn’t even bother to argue. “Thanks for trying,” she said. “I’ll handle the chore from now on.”
But as it happened, she was no more proficient with the shovel than I was. It usually took her four or five whacks to finish off a gopher. Gophers look a little like Alvin the Chipmunk. It’s hard to kill a creature beloved by millions of children, a friend of your youth. This instilled a timidity in Julie that caused her to unconsciously soften the blows of the shovel. Sometimes she actually closed her eyes as she swung the shovel. This caused her to misaim her blows and it wasn’t unusual for gopher body parts to be sheered off in the killing process, prolonging the suffering of the poor animal.
The solution to her problem turned out to be a simple plywood board. I looked through the kitchen window into the backyard one day and saw Julie stomping up and down on a board roughly the size of a bathmat. She was leaping as high as she could and coming down hard with both feet. She looked like a large child throwing a cartoon tantrum. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing. I saw her lift the board cautiously and peek underneath it. After a brief inspection of the ground beneath the board, she scooped up something with the shovel and carried it to the burn pile. Curious, I went outside and investigated. I discovered a two-dimensional gopher lying atop the stack of pruned tree limbs and dried out lawn clippings. He was the first victim of Julie’s killing board. Many others followed. Not just gophers, but injured mice, moles, lizards, and birds. The killing board made it possible for Julie to snuff out the lives of small animals without having to watch their faces or their death throes.
Personally, I considered her solution to the gopher problem far from perfect. It gave me the willies whenever I saw the killing board leaning up against the gardening shed. The sight of the shovel never bothered me much because it had many other useful purposes besides ending the lives of pesky creatures. But the killing board, like a guillotine, has only one raison d’etre. And whenever I ventured into the backyard to enjoy a little relaxation in my hammock or read a book, I found myself unsettled by that ominous piece of plywood.
“Can’t you keep it inside the shed?” I asked Julie one day, as I lay in the shade and watched her trim the roses.
She shook her head. “I need it where I can grab it in a hurry. You never know how long a dying animal will keep still.”
“But it’s such a blot on the backyard ambience, don’t you think?”
“It’s just a matter of semantics,” she said. “Try thinking of it as a mercy board and you won’t be bothered by it at all.”
I did my best to follow this advice. But just to be safe, I went ahead and relocated the hammock to another part of the yard.