Aloha Fridays: A rat, a soup can, and the clothes line

In 1977 my parents moved our family to American Samoa. Why they moved there is another story.  The stories of how they got themselves settled there are more interesting.  And this is one of them.

My parents moved into the house next door to my grandparents in the village of Auasi.  The house was of wood construction reinforced on the corners with cement.  Being as it was in the tropics, most of the outside wood construction had begun to rot away. 

If you were to open the bottom kitchen cabinets you would be able to look out into the backyard because the back wall had rotted away.  In the bathroom, the whole floor was gone and someone had laid a piece of plywood across it as a quick fix.  I remember being instructed to always ask mom or dad before using the bathroom as one of them would have to escort us safely across the unsteady plywood floor to the toilet or bathtub.

Needless to say, the local rodents had easy access to the house. This wasn't quite the home my mother had envisioned she would be moving into.  She had three young children under the age of five, with the youngest just learning to crawl.

One night, after a supper of chicken noodle soup, Mom had left the empty soup can on the counter with the lid still partially attached and tucked inside the can.  Later that night, when we were all tucked into bed and asleep, a rat had crawled into the soup can and cleaned out the leftovers.  Upon turning itself around to exit the can, it inadvertently dragged the lid with it and got it's tail stuck between the side of the can and the lid.  It panicked.  It leaped from the counter and crashed to the floor.  It then proceeded to bang around the kitchen trying to escape, but the hole it had come it could not accommodate the can it was dragging behind.  The noise woke my parents who could not identify what was making such a racket in the kitchen.

My father dashed to the kitchen, flipped on the light which temporarily stunned the creature.  Dad snatched the can up with the rat dangling by it's tail, and, not knowing what to do with it, brought it back to my mother to show her.

The rat curled in on itself to try to right itself (I imagine it did not much appreciate being hung upside down by its tail) as my father panicked, "What do I do with it?"

"Kill it!" my mother shouted. 

The idea had occurred to my father that he ought to kill it, but he wasn't sure how to do that with a large soup can attached to it. 

The only thing my father could think of to do, was to toss it out the kitchen door and hope some larger creature would put an end to the miserable thing.  So he flung it out the door where it landed on the clothes line; the rat on one side, the can on the other. 
Dad closed the door and went to bed. 

In the morning, Upolu, a neighbor, was passing through when he spied something curious on our clothes line. I'm sure he wondered how a rat with it's tail stuck in a soup can came to be hanging from a clothes line in our backyard.  He didn't wonder long, however,  as he lifted his large bush knife and with one whack, took care of the problem. 

But that wasn't the end of my parent's grief with rats, nor how they rose the ire of their neighbors with their rat extermination plans which didn't really get the rats at all.  But that is a story for next time.

Until then, tofa.