BRCMD #13 - Bucket Full of Kittens (Patreon)

This is sad, so warning.

Bucket Full of Kittens

It was obvious after the Santa Claus incident that I was a skeptic. Well, we lived in Missouri, a state that prides itself on the skepticism of its inhabitants.

Back to the kittens. David had told me that cats always land on their feet, and Robert and Kay had agreed that this was so. I'd tried to be sure of this with our cat at home but Mama Puss was too big for me to lift off the ground, she just hung in my arms with her back feet on the ground, longer than I was tall.

But at Aunt Lizzie's, I had access to kittens, small enough to pick up and drop from waist high, then head high then as high as I could reach. And sure enough, they always landed on their feet and walked or ran away. I tried climbing up on a tree stump and dropping one from there and again, no problem for the little cats.

But Robert had said a cat could land on its feet, even if it fell off of a housetop. And David had agreed, cats were amazing at walking away from any sort of fall.

My next trial in my scientific enquiry was to hold Momcat in my lap while I pumped myself on the swing. But I couldn't manage to hold onto her and pump the swing at the same time. She easily slipped out of my grasp and leaped down from a height of no more than three feet or so, hardly a fair test of the hypothesis at all.

Nor would she grant my proposal to try again; she very firmly refused to have anything more to do with me and watched the rest of the proceedings from a perch in the nearest black walnut tree.

So I tried it a few times with a kitten. I still couldn't pump myself up very high but anything up to five feet or so, the kittens landed easily on the grass near the swing.

I debated trying to climb the walnut tree with a kitten under my arm but decided that I would not be able to do that. For one thing, I was expressly forbidden to climb any trees without an adult watching and for another, the kitten would likely get scared and scratch me, besides the difficulty of climbing with only one hand.

There were some milk crates in the courtyard near the house. I dragged two of them onto the grass and stood on one to try dropping a kitten. The kitten landed on its feet and walked away. I was ready to accept the claim that cats always land on their feet as being proven when something occurred to me.

I dragged one of the boxes over to the teeter-totter and propped up one end of the beam so it sat about level. I dragged the other box to near the other end. Then I went and put a kitten on the propped up end. Then I climbed the other box and jumped on the teeter-totter's free end.

The kitten disappeared. I looked and looked and could not find it anywhere. I'd taken my eye off it at the crucial moment of the experiment, to be sure I landed on the teeter-totter and the little experimental animal had disappeared. Perhaps it had left the dished out seat of the teeter-totter and fallen to the ground to simply walk away, I thought.

This was the spring before my fourth birthday in summer. I had the determination of a small child. I was proud of the fact that the adults were leaving me alone to amuse myself and I was determined to prove -- or disprove -- the claims of my older cousins. I knew David and Robert were capable of telling some outrageous fibs and I had not forgotten about Santa Claus.

I put another kitten on the seat of the teeter-totter. I need a soundtrack here, something by Wagner perhaps or the music from one of the old Gene Autry serials. Except those always had a happy ending, after Gene got the snot beat out of him, he always saved the day..

I climbed the milk crate and jumped on the free end of the teeter-totter again, my twenty pounds or so versus the kitten's half pound in a demonstration of leverage and the transfer of momentum. This time I kept my eye on the little ball of fluff instead of watching where my feet landed.

The kitten flew up and back. I had expected it to fly over my head into the deeper yard where grass grew and butterflies sipped at flowers. Instead it flew the other way, toward the flagstone court.

Horrified, I ran to see what had happened.

And there they were. Two kittens, one gray and one orange about eight feet apart on the stones, dead.

I screamed. I was a farm kid, I knew what dead was.

I ran to Aunt Lizzie's back door, screaming as if it had been my heart that had burst. My parents and Aunt Lizzie and A.J. tried to find out what had happened but I couldn't talk for crying. I knew I had killed those kittens.

Momma thought for sure I must be hurt and examined me all over but the wound was in my soul and didn't show. They tried to give me treats to stop my crying but I didn't want candy or cookies, I wanted to confess my crime.

Slowly, I got the hiccoughs and weeping under control and they got the story out of me. I took them outside and showed them the teeter-totter and the tiny corpses. "Kittens don't," I said.

A.J. commented, "Not when you fling 'em higher than a house, they don't."

Only my father understood what I was talking about and why I was upset. "You think about what you're doing next time," he said. "Before you hurt something."

I nodded. "Do I get a whuppin'?" I asked. I'd only ever had one, for running away and crossing the road without a grown-up to watch me.

Daddy shook his head. "No. You didn't mean to hurt them and knowing that you did is worse than a whuppin'."

He was right, I would rather have had a whipping, a punishment that was soon over. But what happened next was even worse.

Aunt Lizzie took a galvanized bucket and put the little kitten bodies in it. She hugged me up and said. "Don't worry about it, punkin. I was gonna have A.J. drown them kittens in the river after you left anyhow."

I don't think she understood why I started crying again and this time I did not stop until I passed out, exhausted.