I still had a week of Christmas vacation left before I had to start school over at Muir Junior High. I was glad for it: Gwendolyn looked like she was going to pop, and I wanted to be home when her babies were born. Mama said if hamsters were anything like mice, we had to get George out of the cage before the babies were born, or he’d kill them. We didn’t have another cage, so Mama took a shoebox that she said was sturdy enough that George probably wouldn’t chew his way out of it for awhile, and we put him in it, along with some shredded newspaper and a couple of mayonnaise jar lids we’d filled with water and food.
Two days later, I woke up to find Gwendolyn had had her babies during the night. There were seven of them, brownish-pink blobs without hair, moving around with slow jerks in the shaved wood. I loved these tiny things from the moment I first saw them, and spent most of my time watching them, poking at them as gently with my pinky finger just to feel thin soft skin. They never wandered more than a couple of inches away from Gwendolyn, who lay on her side like a little sow with her tiny pink teats showing through her white fur. Their eyes weren’t even slits yet, just raised, grayish-black spots, like two moles in the pink skin of their faces. They were blind. But somehow they always found their way back to Gwendolyn, latching onto her to suck, making sounds like tiny grunts.
All except one. He was smaller, and stayed in one spot, away from the others, moving his head slowly back and forth as if he didn’t know which way to go. I nudged him with my finger, pushed him over toward Gwendolyn, next to one of her teats. He lay there bobbing his tiny head. He didn’t seem to be getting it. Mama watched him with me for awhile, then told me he looked to her like a runt, that he wouldn’t live very long if he didn’t learn how to eat.
The next day, the runt still wasn’t eating, and he was moving around even less than before, if that was possible. Mama didn’t say anything, but she looked like she wanted to. I didn’t give her the chance. I would get him to eat, I told her. I asked her if she had an eyedropper, and she said there was one in the bottle of nose drops she had in the medicine cabinet. I got it and washed it out really good. Then I got some powdered milk Mama had mixed the day before, and I sat next to the cage and put droppers-full of milk up against the runt’s mouth. He wouldn’t take it. The milk dribbled off his chin and into the wood shavings. I tried again and again, until I was afraid to put any more on him. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. A drop of milk sat on its nose.
By the end of the day, Mama said to me we had to put the runt out of his misery. I’d seen this sort of thing on television; I didn’t have to ask her what that meant. She kept talking, as if she was trying to convince me this was the best thing to do. He was suffering, she said. He was dying. It was irresponsible for a pet owner to let his pet suffer this way. The kindest think you could do, she said, was flush him down the toilet. I told her, but he’ll drown! She looked at me with a sad smile and said, yes, Bill, that’s the point. He will die. But you’ll be helping him to die much more quickly. He won’t suffer as much this way.
I started crying, thinking of this. I watched the runt with his head flopping around, this living thing. To even consider drowning him was just too much. I couldn’t do it. Just give him one more day I told her. He’d eat. I knew he would. We couldn’t just kill him.
She thought for a moment, then said to me, okay, but if he doesn’t improve by tomorrow—. She didn’t finish. She told me goodnight, and then went to her room and closed the door.
When I awoke hopeful the next morning and checked on the hamsters, my chest ached to find the runt hadn’t moved at all from his spot, and the drop of milk on his nose had dried again to white powder. His skin had started to look shriveled. He moved his head once in awhile slowly from side to side, but most of the time he just lay still, except for his tiny belly, which heaved slightly with each breath. Gwendolyn didn’t even seem to notice this, one of her own children. And the babies weren’t aware of anything yet except drinking their milk.
Mama wasn’t up yet, and I didn’t want her telling me again what I had to do. I opened the cage door and reached in and scooped up the runt from his spot in the shavings. It lay there in my hand looking as if it didn’t even know it had been moved. Didn’t know where it was going, what was about to happen.
Even before I’d taken the first step toward the bathroom, my eyes filled with tears. So innocent! Not like so many other animals on the earth, who did bad things to one another. I thought then that maybe some creatures were too good to live long on this earth. They were too frail. You wanted them to be in a place that was happy. Where there was no pain, no suffering. No hunger. I tried to hold this thought in my head as I hurried sobbing into the bathroom and put up the toilet seat and lay the baby in the cold water. It floated there for a second, too weak, I figured, to fight. The ache in my chest spread to my face, my eyes, and I could barely see through the tears enough to reach up and flush the toilet. As soon as I did, the baby started to struggle. He dug his tiny feet into the swirling water, faster and faster, trying to hold his head up. The sudden realization that I hadn’t thought this through enough swept over me like a wave of freezing water. I hadn’t known he would struggle this way, that he could struggle this way. He hadn’t been dying after all—but now I WAS KILLING HIM!! My stomach tightened as if a huge fist had grabbed it and was squeezing. I stabbed my hand frantically into the water, trying to catch the baby, to save him. But he was moving too fast; I couldn’t get a hold of him. Finally, he slid down the dark hole of the toilet.
A wave of nausea overcame me, and I thought for a moment I might throw up. I was crying so hard I could barely breathe. I hunched over the toilet. The picture of the baby, the awful sucking noise as it went down the hole, ran over and over in my head. The more I saw and heard, the harder I sobbed.
Mama came out of her room. I could hear her behind me. She stood in the doorway to the bathroom, but didn’t say anything. I heard her take a long, deep breath and let it out. She touched my head, gently, and walked away. I heard her go into the kitchen, turn the water on in the sink, and take out a coffee cup from the cupboard.