Chapter 3: Brother Rat

Brother Rat

This is the one he told the most.

He told it with his hands — the lid going back on the kettle, the knife coming off the table — and he told it the same way every time, so that a man who had heard it once could feel the kettle coming and get up and go outside, and some of them did. In the last years, when there was nothing left in his day but talking, he told it in the evenings with his glass at his elbow. When he got to the end of it his voice gave out on him, and the men in the room looked at the floor.

I was not there. I want that understood before anything else in this part. It comes to me out of his own mouth, and out of two other people who had it from their fathers, so it is not testimony. It is the family’s story, and the family had a use for it.

“Two years,” I said, and let it go at that. I said the next part was Thirteen Mile, and it is not. There are two years in the way of it, and the middle of those years is what I have to tell now.

The business with the bride came out in the spring.

Maybe a woman from the church came to the door, and there was no wife in the house to come to it. Maybe it was the clerk at the dry goods store, who remembered a man paying four dollars for the figure out of the window. Either way it got out, and Amos Kerr heard it.

Amos Kerr was his mother’s brother, four miles out past the edge of town, a man with credit at the bank who had never liked the look of his nephew’s hand. He had cried in his own parlor over that marriage. He had ridden home in a livery rig telling his wife to put out the good plates for Sunday. And then the whole of it came to him at once: there was no wife and never had been one, and the thirty dollars he had put into his nephew’s hand had gone for a woman made of paper and wire, in his dead sister’s clothes. He went to his bed, and on the third day he died.

Elias Hollis killed the only man in that county who had ever put money in his hand, and he did it by accident, and there was nowhere to set it down.

The county shut on him like a door. Half of them were kin to him. Not one of them would lend him a dollar, and nobody would have him at their table to eat, and when he came down the street the women pulled the children off the road and stood with their hands on them until he was past. He told me that part without any feeling in it at all. He was not a man who wanted sympathy, and he never got any.

The one man in the family who did lend him anything that fall was a cousin, who got eight dollars of his twenty back and no more. The smelter gave him eleven weeks and then let him go.

By that winter there was one thing left in the house that anybody in that country would pay money for, and it was the chest his mother had brought west with her. Cedar, with the lock broken off it because the key had been gone since before he was born, and her good things long out of it and gone up in smoke in the yard. He had kept it through everything else, because it was the last of her that had not been worn or burned or sold.

He sold it for two silver dollars and carried them straight to the drugstore.

Two dollars bought a small bottle of his medicine. He was home with it before dark. He drank his dose and lay down on the bed, and the room went soft at the corners, and everything that had been said about him in that county was a long way off.

And there was something on the bed with him.

He thought it was a boot, or a shadow out of the window, and he lay a while looking at it. Then it moved.

It was a rat. Not one of the thin ones that run the alleys in town — a pack rat, the kind the old people in that country called a trade rat, and it was big, the size of a house cat, with the hair gone white around its face, which means it had been alive a long while and had been in a lot of other people’s houses.

Anybody who has pulled a pack rat’s nest out of a barn knows what comes out of one: a good spoon, a horseshoe nail, three buttons, and the brass off a set of harness. There was nothing in that nest worth a nickel to any living creature but a rat.

This one was not afraid of him. It sat on the corner of the bed and worked its face at the air, and Elias Hollis, who had two dollars’ worth of medicine in him and not one soul left in the world who would answer if he spoke, said the first friendly thing that had been said in that house in a year.

“You’ve got a taste for it too,” he said. “All right. That makes two of us.”

He drank his dose and left the last of it in the bottom of the spoon and set the spoon down on the quilt, and the rat came along the bed and licked it out of the spoon like a cat at a saucer. Then it went off by the stove where the floorboard had come loose and down through the gap. He lay there and laughed, which he had not done in some time.

It came back the next night, and the night after that. He took his dose and left the bottom of the spoon for it, and inside a week he was leaving more than that, and after that they took the spoon between them in the evening, one and then the other. Some nights it came late, and he would sit on the edge of the bed with the bottle in his hand and wait on it.

Then the bottle was down to the last of it, and there was nothing in the house to sell, and nobody in that county who would lend him the price of a cup of coffee.

He sat on the bed and told the rat about it, because there was nobody else to tell.

“Brother,” he said, “there’s nothing left in this house to turn into money. Not the stove, not the bed, not the boards off the wall. There’s two spoons of medicine in this bottle, and after that I’ve got nothing to give you and nothing to give myself.”

The rat sat and looked at him with its whiskers going and its eyes bright. Then it turned around and went down through the floor and out.

It was dark when it came back. It came up onto the bed and set something down on the pillow beside his head and was gone again, and he put his hand out and his fingers closed on a silver dollar.

He was up and dressed and out of the house. He walked into town and stood at the corner by the drugstore until they raised the shade in the morning. Then he bought his medicine and walked home, and the two of them spent the day and the evening with the spoon going back and forth until they had both had plenty.

The next day the rat brought three.

Elias Hollis sat on the bed and counted them twice. Then he got grand about it.

“There’s a thing in the Book,” he said. “You know the one. Jonathan and David. The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David. That is what you have done with me in my poverty, and I will say it back to you plain. You are the only friend I have got in this world, and if you will have it, we will call ourselves brothers.”

Then he said it out loud and made it a name — Brother Rat — and it was the name from then on.

He made it a bed out of the cotton pulled from the mattress ticking and set it up beside him, and after that the rat slept in the bed like a man. In the mornings he would wake and it would be down at the foot of him, like a dog that had been let in the house.

The money came in every day. One dollar, two, some days three, now and then five. Half a year of that and there was food in the house and medicine in the bottle and nothing owing to anybody in town, and Elias Hollis was getting rich sitting down, which no man in that county had ever managed.

The money was stolen. Every dollar of it, out of somebody’s drawer or somebody’s till or some coat left over a chair, one coin at a time. He never said that part out loud. I am saying it.

He said those months were the best of his life. He said it to the end of his life. People have laughed when it comes up. I never have.

A man who gets a little money finds out who has been watching him, and Elias Hollis found out.

Half-Shod Bill Ruddick. He had the name because he never in his life had a whole pair of anything at one time — not shoes, which is where it came from, and not pants, and not teeth — and his people had been poor clear back to a time nobody in that county could remember, which is a different thing from being broke for a season. He had stood across the street from the Hollis family his whole life. When they had money he called old Mr. Hollis sir, and did it through his teeth, and when the money went he did not have to. Elias Hollis had been the best-dressed boy in that town for twenty years, and then he was the thing Bill Ruddick stepped up on in the morning, and Bill Ruddick had come to like it the way a man likes a drink.

And now here was a man with no land, no trade, no kin who would speak to him, and a habit that costs money every day of the week, buying his medicine regular and eating supper. Bill Ruddick put it together the only way he knew how to put anything together, which was that Elias Hollis was stealing. And it seemed to him that a man who steals ought to be caught, and that it might as well be Bill Ruddick that caught him, and that whatever came with the catching was owed to him.

He watched a month. What he got for it was that Elias Hollis came out of that house twice a week and went to the store and the drugstore and came back, and was inside the rest of the time, and never had a living soul in. Something in that house was making money, and Bill Ruddick could not stand it.

One afternoon Elias went out for food. Bill Ruddick came over the fence and in through the back and went through the house — the boxes, the drawers, the stove, everything there was to open. There was nothing in any of it. He was in there working himself up over that when he turned around and there was the rat on the bed, asleep in its cotton with its face gone white.

Bill Ruddick stood and looked at it a while. Then he picked it up by the back of the neck, took the lid off the kettle on the stove, put the rat in the water and set the lid back down on it. Then he sat down at the table, because he had a joke going and he wanted to watch the end of it.

What he got was Elias Hollis in the door with the groceries in his arms, a good while sooner than he was supposed to be.

“You’re in my house,” Elias said.

“I’m in your house.” Bill Ruddick grinned at him. “You want to know what I’m doing in your house, Elias? I’m finding out what it is you do in here with the door shut. Because there’s money coming into this house and I know you never worked for a nickel of it.”

Elias Hollis looked at him and did not answer. Then he looked at the stove, because there was a smell in that room that had not been in it when he left, and the lid was down on the kettle.

He took the lid off.

There was the rat in the water, with the white gone off its face and its mouth open, and it had been dead some minutes.

“What did you do,” he said.

“It was in your bed.” Bill Ruddick spread his hands, palms out, the way a man does when he wants a minute. “Sleeping in the bed with you, in cotton, like it—“

“He was in the bed with me,” Elias said. “That’s right.”

“It’s a rat.”

Elias Hollis turned around, took the knife off the table behind him, and cut him.

He cut him a dozen times, on the arm and across the chest and once on the side of the neck, and he did not kill him, because a man who lives on medicine has the arm of a boy in him. Bill Ruddick got out of that house and down the road with his shirt red to the belt, and he ran the whole way to town, which was the fastest Bill Ruddick had moved in twenty years.

Before they came for him, Elias Hollis took the rat out of the kettle and laid it on the table on a cloth.

The county sheriff had a bottle and a glass on his desk and Harlan Deeds in the chair across from it.

Harlan Deeds owned what there was to own in that country. He owned the ore cars and the men who filled them, he owned the votes in two counties and the men who counted them, and every few years he owned a piece of the state government besides. He did all of it from a chair and without raising his voice. The sheriff was his man, and every soul in that county knew it, the sheriff along with everybody else.

Bill Ruddick came in bleeding and talked, and men went out and came back with Elias Hollis, and they had his hands tied behind him when they brought him in and put him in front of the desk.

The sheriff heard it out and said what a sheriff says. Then he looked at the man in the chair before he said anything else.

“You cut a man open in the daylight,” he said. “In my county. What have you got to say for yourself?”

Elias Hollis cried. He had lost everything he owned in the world twice over without crying in front of anybody, and he stood in that office with his hands tied and cried and told the whole of it — the rat that came up onto the bed, the dollar it left on the pillow, the two of them with the spoon between them in the evening.

“Nobody ever gave me anything,” he said. “That rat gave me a year of my life. He was in the bed with me because there was nobody else in the world who would have me. And I did not kill him. I never put a hand on him. He is dead because of me and nobody else.

“I cut Bill Ruddick, and I did it alone, and I will answer for it, and I will not say one word against whatever the sentence is. I am asking for one thing and then I am through asking. Let me go home and put him in the ground decent. Let me do that, and then you can take me out in the street and hang me, and I will go to it satisfied.”

Nobody said anything. Harlan Deeds put his glass down.

“You buried the old man Kerr,” he said.

“No sir. His wife’s people came and got him.”

“That’s right.” Harlan Deeds looked at him the way a man looks at a horse. “So the last funeral you stood over was a rat.”

“Yes sir.”

“And you want to go and do it proper.”

“Yes sir.”

Harlan Deeds sat back in the chair.

“I have got two hundred men on a payroll out there,” he said, “and every one of them has got a reason why this week is different from the rest. Not one of them would stand in front of a sheriff and cry over a rat. And I will tell you what that means, because it means something to me. It means there is not one of them I would stand back to back with.”

He picked up his glass again.

“A man who does not forget a kindness, and will not turn loose of a friend, is what I have got a use for,” he said. “Come up to the house in the morning and I will put you to work.”

Then he said, “Cut him loose. And Bill Ruddick — take your shirt off and stand by the wall.”

The sheriff said a sentence about the law in his county, so that it would be on the record that the law had said something, and everybody in the room heard it and nobody heard it, and then they went out and did what Harlan Deeds had said.

They turned Elias Hollis loose before dark.

He walked home. He made a box for the rat out of a pine crate and lined it with the cotton from the ticking, and he dug the grave in the bare place behind the house where nothing grew, and put the box down in it, and filled it in.

Then he sat in the dirt beside it and cried. It was most of the afternoon. And it was a rat, and he knew that as well as anybody in that county knew it, and he sat there anyway.

Then he got up and washed and walked into town to go to work for Harlan Deeds, and he was good at it from the first week and better at it after a month, and the pay was good, and it came on the day it was supposed to come.

They say hunger is the best sauce. A body that has been down long enough will take a bowl of soup off a stranger’s stove and carry the thanks of it the rest of his life.

They also say a good man will die of thirst before he will drink out of a thief’s well. That is the standard for saints. Elias Hollis was never a saint and never said he was. He was flat on his back in that county, and something came and brought him money, and he took it and said thank you.

I have heard it said that in a house where a man takes his medicine long enough, the flies get a taste for it and the rats get a taste for it. In my grandfather’s house there was one rat. It came to the bed on its own feet and asked him for it, and he gave it what he had.

Elias Hollis sells the last thing his mother brought west with her — a cedar chest, lock broken off, her good things long since burned — gets two silver dollars, and walks them straight to the drugstore. That’s the moment I can’t get around: he isn’t weighing right against wrong anymore. He’s past that and doesn’t know it yet.

But what stays with me is the one thing he asks for at the end. Not mercy, not a lighter sentence. A morning to put a rat in the ground properly.

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