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Rats are invoked in Arthur Baker’s conversation about burial as the animal presence that makes death materially unfinished. They are not encountered directly in the supplied scene; instead, they enter through Baker’s remembered knowledge of Louisiana bayou funerals, where the high water table encourages aboveground burial and creates a different danger: graveyard rats that can reach the corpse through a wooden coffin. Their decisive narrative function is to collapse the distance between the dead body and the living world, making the coffin less a final refuge than a temporary defense.

Burial Customs and the Material Threat

Baker explains that people in his home region often want to be buried in aboveground mausoleums because the water table is so high that underground burial is undesirable. The choice does not eliminate anxiety; it transfers it. Aboveground burial leaves the dead exposed to “Big Louisiana bayou rats,” which he also calls “Graveyard rats.” In his account, these animals could gnaw through a pine coffin rapidly, reducing what is supposed to be a protective enclosure to a penetrable object.

The contrast between underground and aboveground burial gives the rats a concrete ecological context. Damp ground threatens to preserve the dead too slowly, while an aboveground coffin introduces the danger of animal intrusion. Human attempts to control decomposition therefore produce no secure solution. The rat is part of a chain of physical conditions—water, wood, flesh, and hunger—that remains indifferent to the dignity assigned to burial.

The Coffin as an Incomplete Barrier

Baker’s description makes the coffin’s lead sleeve especially significant. Some people claim that a simple burial is sufficient, yet, according to his account, they ultimately purchase an elaborate coffin with lead protection if they can afford it; some even record its model number in their wills. The detail converts burial preparation into a technical effort to hold rats away from the body. The coffin is no longer merely ceremonial. It becomes equipment designed to resist a specific animal force.

When Baker says that the rats could worry a hole through the pine and then enlarge it until they could wriggle inside, the image stages protection failing step by step. The threat is not sudden or spectacular. It is patient, repetitive, and mechanical: gnawing creates an opening, enlargement turns the opening into access, and access makes the corpse available. The imagined sequence gives the rats an agency that is physical rather than moral, yet its effect on the living is intensely psychological.

Eyes, Consumption, and Transformation

Baker’s fear becomes most concentrated when he imagines the rats going directly for his eyes “like they was jujubes.” The comparison makes the body grotesquely edible while also giving the imagined feeding a childish, almost candy-like vocabulary. That tonal collision intensifies rather than relieves the horror. The eyes, normally associated with perception and personal identity, become soft food and then disappear into the animal that consumes them.

The final movement of Baker’s thought is not simply that the rats would eat him. He imagines that, after eating his eyes, they would make him part of the rat. This is a transformation of the boundary between human and animal: the corpse is not preserved as a stable human remainder but absorbed into another living body. Rats therefore function both as literal scavengers within Baker’s burial scenario and as the scene’s image of matter passing across species boundaries.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The conversation repeatedly returns to the question of what happens after death, and the rats give that abstract fear a local, bodily form. Garraty rejects the expense of paying to keep rats away after death, but Baker cannot dismiss the image. His response shows that the desire for a plain coffin and the desire for protection are not opposites; beneath the former lies the same fear of exposure, invasion, and loss of bodily integrity that produces the latter.

The rats also interrupt the consoling idea that death ends experience in a clean, sealed finality. Nothing in the scene grants the dead body complete privacy. Wood can be breached, flesh can be eaten, and the human form can become part of an animal. Because the rats are described through speech and imagination rather than given an independent viewpoint, they remain filtered through human terror; nevertheless, their material presence resists human-centered control. They are not decorative symbols detached from place, but agents in the physical environment whose existence makes burial customs, wealth, and the fantasy of postmortem dignity visibly precarious.