Owens at Home

I am sad to report that Scabbers the Rat departed this life at 9:33 this evening after a brief illness.

We’re not exactly sure what killed her, but Abby (who is pre-nursing) has diagnosed it as a respiratory complaint. We buried her in a handkerchief in the front yard and I spoke a few words over her grave: how I never respected the species of rats till I met old Scabbers. She was cunning and social; loving and yet a little creepy. She was (now that I think of it) like a lot of writers I know, but that’s neither here nor there. She’s gone to her reward and Isabel’s chief solace, voiced as we walked back to the house, was that at least the cats didn’t get her. She escaped that indignity and died in her own little bed of what appeared to be a runny nose, surrounded by her loved ones.

It sounds mawkish, but I can truly say that I won’t forget her.

Upon finding myself without reading material last week, picked up a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman in the library and thought I’d give it a go. Though Sherman has larger fame from his March Through Georgia, he figures in our family history primarily as the opposing general that three of my gggrandfathers fought at the Battle of Atlanta: Hortenscious Rudd, Mama’s ggrandfather, who was captured; and Burrell Altman, on Daddy’s side, who was killed dead as a hammer, and last but not least, my beloved Grannie Rice’s grandfather, Jack Roberts, who was also captured and sent to Rock Island, IL, where the grossest punishment he endured was having to walk back to Alabama when the war was done. Of the three, he came closest to Sherman himself, as Jack had been sent to scout out Sherman’s headquarters when he was detected and captured and sent to Illinois. If you take the trail up Kennesaw Mountain outside of Atlanta at the federal park, you can look down and see where Sherman’s tent was pitched, and pretty much figure where he was captured in early summer, 1864 – an unusually fortunate twist of fate, for if he’d lived to see Peachtree Creek later that month, he’d have probably been killed there; would have been sent back to Alabama in a body bag like old Burrell.

Which is all to say that Sherman has never been what you might call a family favorite, but being a romantic at heart, I had tender hopes that this bio would shed a kindlier light on the old boy: show him as a ruthless warrior but a nice enough guy; one who was fierce to enemies, but had mercy on orphans and kitties. At least that was my hope, but if this biographer is correct, then old Sherman was not only a butcher in the Florida Indian Wars, but had an unending contempt for the South; was a bound racist, an adulterer and yet a severe moralist; an egomaniac who never let an observation on his own personal superiority go unmentioned. As I read his life story, I found myself rejoicing in his every defeat and short-coming. When his wife Ellen refused to leave her father’s house and live with him out West after their marriage, I could only snicker, and in the long years after the war, when he was diminished by his own fame and estranged from his wife and children, I smirked and complimented them on their good taste.

I cannot help but compare his end with that of great-great-Granddaddy Jack, who lived a long and happy life after the war; would often tell his adoring grandchildren about his war escapades; would buy them candy with his pension -- including my matchless grandmother, of whom Sherman was not worthy to kiss her feet (and even he, in his better moments, would agree.) I can only hope that at whatever post-mortal perch he landed after he died (he was virulently anti-religious and would scoff at the idea of heaven) that he, of the rigid morals and high Victorian reticence, can look down on me every evening as I read his post-modern bio, that is shamelessly revealing, full of cunning Freudian interpretations of his relationship with his mother; with his mistresses faces happily affixed in the photograph section – and listen carefully. And the sound he will hear is my laughter.