Seemed To Mock

The other morning, I kept watching the moon as I drove down the mountain to work. Waning in its phase, it hung in the air with just the bottom crescent illuminated. The image was like a photo negative of a smiley-face logo but with the eyes closed. The lunar face seemed to mock me as I stole glances at it. Looking back now from the vantage point of week’s end, the impression of mockery doesn’t seem so fantastical.

That same night, my wife and I were relaxing after an arduous day when she wrinkled her nose and turned to me. “Do you smell that?” she asked.

I took a breath. As a matter of fact, I did smell something. Something sickly sweet. Something…dead.

It seemed to be coming through the floor vent near my wife’s chair, even though we didn’t have the air conditioning or fan on. “Ugh,” said my wife. “Think it’s a mouse?”

This seemed a logical thought, because we’ve had this happen before. Sometimes in the spring or fall, little field mice will occasionally find their way into an air vent or the cellar and shuffle off their mortal coil, and for a very brief time one may detect their…presence.

A brief diversion, if I may. You’ll note that I referred to our “cellar,” even though everyone in this area refers to the subterranean space beneath a house as a “basement.” But the word is not appropriate; it won’t do. The area beneath this old farmhouse is unfinished. Stone pilings and brick columns supporting the structure, with crawlspaces and alcoves and nooks, and plenty of cobwebs and crawling things, pipes overhead and the dirt of American ages below. I don’t go down there any more frequently than I have to, and every time I do, I look around and wonder where the cask of Amontillado is, or who is bricked up in that particular oblong space, or whether I will hear the creak of a lid opening and the slow shuffle of feet behind me. It is no basement, that place. It is a cellar.

So, then.

We didn’t talk about the smell anymore before retiring for the evening, but at 1:30 in the morning, my wife sat straight up and said, “I can’t take that smell anymore. It’s gotten much worse.”

And so it had. But now it smelled different. It smelled acrid. Electrical. I went to the floor vent near our bed — very strong from there — and shined a flashlight across the vent. A thin twist of what looked like smoke was crawling up out of the vent, and I felt my skin go clammy. Fire? Time to check the basement and get ready to dial 911.

I took the flashlight and went outside to the cellar entrance and opened the door with great care. With great care because this is the very site where a black snake dropped out of the rafters onto my shoulders not too long ago, causing me to speak in strange languages and perform an impromptu St.Vitus dance. I descended the steps and turned on the light. No trace of the smell coming from down there. No sign of any smoke. I examined the ductwork and vents and furnace and caught no trace of the foul odor. I went back up and went inside.

My wife and I discussed the matter. We became convinced that our original thought — a dead animal of some sort — was the cause of the smell.  and I decided to stay home just in case there was after all something amiss in the electrical department. The plan was for me to call an HVAC man once normal business hours arrived. But as we opened windows and doors and waited for dawn, I did some research on the internet and learned that animal retrieval can cost two or three hundred dollars. Two or three hundred dollars. So I took a pair of tin snips, a drill, the flashlight, a mirror, and heavy work gloves down into the Roger Corman cellar again.

Hours later, after drilling and cutting and peering and muttering, I still hadn’t located any critters. In desperation, I took my dog down into the gloom. She immediately went to the furnace and started nosing around up high. I was convinced the smell was coming from a length of ductwork just to the side and tried one more cut & peer maneuver. Nothing. My wife said, “I think it’s time to call the man.” So I called the man.

In less than an hour, he was here. Mr. H was a big, towering fellow who would’ve been menacing if he weren’t so pleasant and kind. I described the situation as we walked to the cellar door. Once inside, Mr. H grimaced and said, “Yep. Dead animal. Any idea where it is?”

I described my futile efforts to locate the carcass and told him about my dog’s fixation on the furnace. He opened the front of it and disassembled the structure around the motor and blower, pulled out a few components, and jumped back.

“Ach. Ugh. Oogh. There it is.”

He pointed. A large rat was sprawled on the coils of the heating unit, staring at me with black, flat eyes. Quite dead and quite fragrant.

For all his size and physical presence, Mr. H was quite the delicate flower when it came to handling dead animals.

“Oh, I hope you can get him out. Can you get him out? I can’t touch him. I can’t touch dead things! Really..I can’t! If I touch him, I’ll lose it for shore! Can you get him out?” He also did an endearing little tippy-toe dance in his boots, which was quite fascinating given his size.

I assured Mr. H that I have a strong stomach. I asked him to wait while I went to fetch some latex gloves. When I came back, he was almost panting from the stress. “Ready?” he said, as if we were preparing to jump off a gorge together. Gorge is an apt word, because he fought a five-minute battle with his as it attempted to rise on him several times in the few minutes it took to extract the rat. If any of you have ever seen Foster Brooks do his classic drunk routine on television back in the Seventies, you have an idea of how Mr. H talked while we were trying to get the rat out of my furnace.

“Oh, don’t let it touch me…don’t drop it on my shoes….I’ll pyu…pyu—-PUKE if it touches me….can you get ahold of it?…..oh, God…..oh, don’t touch…..oh it’s aw…aw…AWFUL ….are you almost done? Did you drop any of it? Where…what….are you….can you hurry…?”

And he had good reason to be squeamish. When I reached in and took hold of the rat, I hoped that I would be able to remove him intact. But it was No Deal, Lucille. His head came off in my right hand, and I got some of his torso in my left, and the sound was precisely the sound one hears if one reaches into a bowl of oatmeal cookie batter and squishes it between one’s fingers. And the smell intensified to such a pitch that I feared that I would be replacing Mr. H in the starring role of Man Complaining About Something Splashing On His Shoes. I managed to get him out in less than ten portions, and I tossed him onto an A/C filter laying nearby. And while the squishing and spattering was going on, I made two vows. One, that I would rat-proof the cellar, and two, that I would abstain from chicken pot pie for several months. Because chicken pot pie wrapped in beige fur is exactly what was in a tidy pile at my feet.

When I was done, Mr. H reassembled the unit and I went upstairs and turned it on and we gave it a test run. Mr H then explained that the rodent detritus left on the heating coils would have to be “cooked off” before the smell would completely leave. “Turn on the heat, close all the vents except one, one that’s near a window, and put a fan near the vent and let it blow the stink out that window. Once all that crap cooks off the coils, you’ll be good as new. But you’ll have to spray deodorizer into the air exchanges because the stink is gonna wanna hang around. Hellfire, I ain’t gonna eat supper tonight.”

We left the cellar and walked up to the driveway where he’d parked. I said, “Come on in the house and I’ll write you a check.”

Mr. H waved me off. “Nope. I didn’t fix anything. All I did was help you find the problem. You did all the hard work.”

I pleaded with him several times while we walked to let me pay him for the service call, or at least to give him gas money for the trip out to the farm. But he was adamant. “Just write me a good review on Google Reviews,” he said, and got in his van.

I don’t know if Mr. H kept his word and skipped supper, but I do know that I didn’t eat any meat for a couple of days and that I could smell the dead rat in my nostrils even at work the next day. The smell of the rotting rat made my poor wife quite ill, and she still has not recovered fully. We ran the heater per Mr. H’s instructions, and it seems to have done the trick. On a 90 degree day, mind you.

If any of you think of it while you are at prayers, please pray for Mr. H. He shared a few things with me about his personal life while we chatted that day, and he is undergoing a deeply difficult trial these days. He is a kind and generous man with a very gentle spirit, and I grieve for the difficulties he’s experiencing. If you remember him while you pray, please ask our Heavenly Father to grant Mr. H a special measure of grace and strength in the coming days.

The moon seemed to mock me on that early morning last week. The persistent heat has tried my patience and my spirits. The reeking rat disturbed the harmony and cleanliness of my home. But I believe my Father cares for and is deeply interested in His children. This is a source of comfort and peace on a too-warm evening in late September.

~ S.K. Orr