About Daddy (6)

I’m the son of a cat killer because Daddy killed cats. I guess he killed them all his life, including his boyhood, but I know from first-hand knowledge that he killed them commencing when I began to grow and began to ‘size things up’. He would wait until five or six cats collected in the backyard then take an iron bar and whack each one over the head. Then he’d go dig a hole and bury them. All that work! This happened every three or four months as I remember. It could have been a bit less often. There was always one cat he never killed and that was the current ‘family’ cat; at least, he never killed it till it got sick in some way. Then he would relieve it of its suffering. We’d then get another ‘family’ cat from one of the bunch that stayed around our house. We cleaned a lot of fish so there were always cats hanging around. My sister had cats named Winston and Salem. Daddy would cat sit for her now and then but he’d never touch Winston or Salem in a sinister manner out of love and respect for my sister. She must’ve known that or she wouldn’t have left the pets with him.
I suppose we kids got desensitized to the cat killing since we were familiar with this practice from childhood. Rabbits Daddy killed, too, but for food. They were fat and delicious; especially fried, I remember, but cleaning them was horrific, to say the least. The stench of the guts alone would send an unsuspecting bystander running ‘for miles’ in the opposite direction! When I reached adulthood and left home, I realized how horrible this practice of Daddy’s was, but what could I do about it? He would rarely listen when he disagreed with someone. That and argue. He loved arguing his points with someone. I rarely argued with Daddy about anything for I thought it a waste of time and breath and still do. Life’s too short, if you ask me. Today if there’s anyone I sort of look down upon it’s the hunter doing it for sport. The only hunting I can stomach today is that done for food, and even at that, I don’t like the idea of murdered deer.
So there you have it. This is not one of Daddy’s good sides, and he certainly had both good and bad (as I think we all have), but I want to be honest. And I want to write about both sides. A good trait is that Daddy could be highly generous with family, friends, workers, and relatives whenever he was economically capable of being so. He got many people out of a ‘bind’ at one time or another. I hope Daddy’s resting in peace now. He certainly needed to.