by Virginia Leavell
The roof of my parents’ barn was incredibly high. To me as a small child, maybe seven years old, it was as tall as the white rafters of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where we were forced to put on a dress and sit quietly every Sunday morning. The barn was just as tall, but not nearly so miserable as the church. Up at the top of the barn, where the huge slanted beams met to make a point, lived thousands and thousands of bats.
I spent a lot of time in the barn with the bats. Their high pitch chirping was the soundtrack to the endless games my sister and I would invent in the tunnels and crevasses made by hay. Each year we would need to rediscover the tunnels, their existence depending on the random openings created by the imperfect stacking of hundreds of big yellow bales. Eventually the tops of the bales would become encrusted with guano, and together with the hay it smelled sweet.
When bats have their young, the little ones must hang on upside down next to the mother. Every so often a baby bat would fall from the incredibly high rafters. I would find it on the hay, lying and breathing. I loved them and imagined I could save them, and so I would collect them. One of them I kept as long as a week.
I picked up his little soft body. He chirped like all the rest of them up in the rafters, trying to communicate with a mother that had no power to save him once he had fallen. I knew even at that age that if I touched a baby animal that its mother would abandon it, but I also already knew that his mother couldn’t possibly retrieve him. I held him in the cup of my two hands. His ears folded over like a puppy. My mother would always adopt adult dogs left behind by the colleges students in summer, and I never had a dog small enough to have the cute folded ears of this baby bat.
In summer the hay bales would arrive in the barn. All spring the fields were green and then yellow with the tall grass. Then, In the heat of summer, when rain was nowhere in the forecast, my mother would half tell half sing to us that you had to make hay while the sun shines. It’s a turn of phrase, but also a directive. I would watch either my mother or father from the living room window. They drove the green tractor back and forth over two fields while the cattle grazed in the third. The pale hay, cut, covered the ground and we were instructed not to play in the fields that week. I remember my grandmother coming to our house one day during one of these rainless weeks. My mother’s mother came to our house not more than half a dozen times in my childhood, but only this time stood out. I remember learning that she didn’t like for my mother to drive the tractor. She also criticized my mother’s rugs. I was both confused with the tension and pleased that she drove the tractor in spite of my grandmother’s disapproval.
My parents did not disapprove of the bat hospice I set up on the porch. I filled the top of a plastic soda bottle cap with water and put picked grass and leaves at the base of the shoebox. These started out soft and I imagined it was an acceptable bed. The lizards and frogs I could capture ate bugs, but I didn’t imagine the baby bat would. Babies drank milk, and in my house we always had a gallon of watery skim milk in the refrigerator. We had skim milk because my mother fell prey to the American fat free diet fad of the 80’s, and the house was always full of tasteless products. Low fat peanut butter. Margarine. Pretzels and fat free snack packs. The baby bat did not drink the skim milk. Or the water. It chirped less and less over the week it was in my care.
I was sad for the dying bat, but I was also raised in a family that had a courser relationship to the death of animals. Perhaps this is true for children who grow up on farms. Perhaps that’s why I rebelled in my own way to become a vegetarian in second grade, a diet I kept up for almost twenty years. I remember around this time, getting into my mother’s car to go to school and being hit with the shock of the very loud gunshot of my father shooting our dying dog. My parents never explained to me the mercy of killing a wounded or suffering animal, but I think it was a lesson I picked up on my own through their actions. Decades later, when I had built an illegal chicken coop on the side of the house I had bought in Washington DC, I would complain to my mother of the rats and the raccoons that were hunting my chicks. “Can’t you just shoot the varmits?”, she asked. Not in DC, mom.
When the baby bat finally stopped moving, I was instructed to put it in the compost pile. The grass bed was very dry, and my bat’s little wings were no longer so velvety as before. The shoebox no longer seemed like a comfortable place to nurse a sick animal. If only he could have at least tried to drink the milk I put next to him. I walked into the woods behind the house and tipped the box over, dropping the little animal onto the pile. My father maintained a very large compost, filled mostly with leaves. He would turn it with the big green tractor every few months, and it steamed in the winter.
I don’t believe the compost pile is exactly the right place for a dead animal. There is the risk of maggots, for one, but also its designation as trash. Years later, when I was woken abruptly by my angry father, furious at me for forgetting to close the chicken coop the night before, I would put the resulting dead chickens into the compost pile as well. A neighbor’s dog, finding the coop open, had gone into a frenzy and killed 13 chickens. It didn’t eat them, which could fit into a vague circle-of-life summing up of the unfortunate event, but rather it had ripped off the heads and strewn their bodies all over the yard. The feathers were unending. The wind littered the surrounding acres with them. I was handed a shovel. Through the blurriness of my tears, I gathered and then covered the mess of the headless chickens with leaves and orange peels.
I remembered the reason I forgot to close the gate. My mother was out of town the night before, which is why I was instructed to mind the chickens in the first place. We all had chores, designated by a chore wheel made out of cereal boxes on the refrigerator. There were two circles, held together in the middle with a little brass pin. Every week it turned. Trash, compost, dishes. While feeding the chickens was an official chore, closing the chicken coop was not. My mother always walked up to the coop in the evening to shut the gate. That night she was gone, my dad and I had sat on the porch and had dinner together, but a storm moved in quickly, sending us inside. The thunder and rain were intense, and neither of us thought to leave the house, forgetting the chickens. The next day, when I was cleaning up the aftermath of the dog’s killing frenzy, I remember thinking that it was just as much my father’s fault as my own. My mother cried. I found the number for Southern States in the phone book and called them, asking if they had a dozen hens in stock that day.
The bat was not so traumatic as the chickens. I would go on to keep other bat hospices on my parents’ porch, hoping one of them might make it. They never did, of course. We played in the barn all year long, scratched up by the hay. The immense height of the summer bales would diminish over the winter, with fewer tunnels and hideaways to explore, until the next summer, when it would all be replaced again. I’m not sure why, but eventually the bats stopped making the barn their home. Maybe they found another barn. Maybe some other child was trying to save the little ones.
