Episode #4: The Neighborhood Watch
I live in a small town in the northeast corner of Connecticut with my wife, my two daughters, my wife’s mother and the newest member of our extended family, my granddaughter Neveah. We live on a narrow country road in a house that sits about 700 feet back on a rise surrounded by tall pines. We have three neighbors up here on the hill, all whom I know by name. There’s Paul & Gretchen, Dan & Natalie, and Nate & Melissa. They’re good neighbors.
Paul & Gretchen are a younger couple. They have a toddler, a girl named Courtney-Lynn. Paul rides his riding lawnmower, even when it looks like their lawn doesn’t need mowing. He also plays fetch with their golden retriever, Bailey. Gretchen hangs up laundry in the backyard, while little Courtney-Lynn plays in the grass.
Dan & Natalie are an older couple. They can be seen in their garden together. Usually, Dan is not wearing a shirt, his tanned skin and white chest hair on display for all to see. His hand is usually not without a tall plastic tumbler. I’ve talked to Dan when he’s been “working” outside. His eyes have a tendency to roll and he teeters when he stands. Thank God I don’t smoke, or else he’d probably go up in flames.
Nate & Melissa have two boys, Eli and Evan. When it’s really hot, Eli and Evan come over and ask to use our swimming pool. Melissa is taking courses online toward becoming a nurse. Nate collects old lawn tractors. In the winter he snow blows the long common drive, driveways included. We never asked him to. He just did it one day and hasn’t stopped. We try to give him money for gas, but he always refuses.
We have good neighbors, quiet neighbors. We have the kind of neighbors that, if there was an emergency, we’re confident they would be there to help. And vice versa.
All of that was a comfortable illusion, however, an illusion that ended the day of Neveah’s baptism when screams came through my bedroom window. Little girl screams. Accompanied by a hysterical woman’s voice shouting, “Shoot it! Shoot it!”
It was Sunday morning. It was still dressed in what I sleep in: loose swimming trunks and a t-shirt. I ran downstairs and bolted out the door.
By the time I’d located where the screams had come from, it was all over. Gretchen stood on the deck clutching little Courtney-Lynn in her arms, while Paul stalked the edge of the woods holding a rifle. “Bailey! Here boy!” The barks of their golden retriever sounded from beyond the first layer of trees and thick underbrush.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A fox!” said Gretchen. “It walked right up to Courtney-Lynn and tried to bite her…and it would have if Bailey hadn’t chased the damned thing away. Paul ran into the house to get his gun. He used to be a police officer.” Gretchen rocked Courtney-Lynn. Courtney-Lynn’s cheeks were streaked with tears. “Bad fox,” she mumbled.
“A fox? In broad daylight?” I said. “That’s not normal. It didn’t bite your dog, did it?”
“We don’t know.”
Seconds later, Bailey broke through the woods and came running. Paul joined us, rifle pointed down at his side. “There’s blood on his leg, but it doesn’t appear to be a bite. I should probably take him to the vet just to be on the safe side.”
“I’m calling the police,” Gretchen said. She turned and went inside.
At about that time, Dan came wandering over from his yard. “Did you get it?”
Paul shook his head. “Bailey chased it into the woods.”
Dan looked at me, his eyes lolling, his fine grey hair like Medusa’s snakes crawling atop his bald, well-tanned pate. Surprisingly, the tumbler in his grip never spilled its contents. “I couldn’t believe it. I heard the little girl scream. That’s when I saw the fox. It just kept coming right toward her. Never seen anything like it.” He turned to Paul. “That dog of yours is some dog. He flipped that fox two or three times in the air. But each time it landed it went right for the little girl again. I couldn’t believe it. That’s when I went and got my pistol.” He pulled a pistol from his back pocket. Both Paul and I jumped back a little. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve got a permit.”
Whether or not Dan had a permit was the least of my concerns. At this point I was hoping the fox didn’t come back for fear of something much deadlier: half-pickled Dan and his flying bullets.
“Is it gone!”
Dan’s wife, Natalie, stood by the front door of her house nervously eyeing the woods.
“Nope. It’s still out there. Get back inside.” Dan waved her back in. You would have thought a grizzly bear was marauding across the countryside.
So far, Nate and Melissa had yet to make an appearance. I almost expected Nate to drive up with a gas-powered Gatling gun.
It was good that little Courtney-Lynn hadn’t been bit, and I would have stood out there all morning shooting the bull, but I had my granddaughter’s baptism to get ready for. So I excused myself and headed back to the relative safety of my own home.
Later that morning there was a police cruiser parked in Paul and Gretchen’s driveway. After the cruiser left there came a knock at our door. It was Dan, still wearing no shirt. Perhaps he was unaware that he was half-naked.
“They got it,” he said, eyes bulging from their red-rimmed sockets. “They said they’d be back later to look for the den. There’s probably a whole family of them living out there.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said. I didn’t know if rabies could be passed from an infected mother fox to its kits, but I guess the police weren’t taking any chances. Either that or it was a slow day at the barracks. “Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. Now, you take care. Especially that little one,” said Dan. He then wove his way across our yard back home. We hadn’t had this much excitement up on the hill since cows got loose from a nearby farm and ate all of Natalie’s brussel sprouts.
#
Family and friends began arriving at noon, and as one o’clock approached we all headed over to the church.
I’m not a big churchgoer, and the few masses and ceremonies I’ve attended all seemed kind of foreign to me. I’d been to weddings where sometimes there’s a mass, sometimes not. Some christenings seemed to take longer than others. But of all the baptisms I’d been to, all have been multiple affairs, sometimes half a dozen babies at a time processed assembly line fashion. This time, however, it was just Neveah. Which was kind of nice.
Perhaps Father Ray (whom my mother-in-law works for as a housekeeper) did it as a special favor, considering Neveah had spent the first three weeks of her life in the childrens ICU. This baptism was an important milestone for her, and for the family, after all we’d been through.
Neveah was an angel throughout the ceremony. She sat in my daughter’s arms just gazing around at all the people. Father Ray’s low, monotone voice no doubt soothed her ears as it echoed inside the small stone cathedral. Neveah was still calm when her parents and godparents were called to the altar for the reading of the Rites of Baptism. She was only mildly alarmed when she was tilted back over the font and Father Ray applied the sign of the cross on her forehead with oil before pouring the holy water.
From where I sat, the light from a nearby votive candle must have reflected red, because instead of oil it looked as if blood had been smeared on my granddaughter’s forehead before the holy water washed it clean. It happened so fast, like a sleight-of-hand trick.
My mind backtracked to previous baptisms. I recalled that the application of the oil generally occurred after the dousing of holy water. Although sometimes there were two applications of oil, one before and one after, but there was always one after. I was confused.
I watched Father Ray’s fingers. He quickly wiped them on a cloth and set the cloth aside. He smiled as if nothing unusual had occurred.
I looked for the vile Father Ray had drawn the oil from, but it was missing. Another sleight-of-hand trick.
By now, family members and friends had gathered around Neveah, jockeying for pictures. My daughter thanked Father Ray. My wife thanked Father Ray and slipped him a donation. I shook Father Ray’s hand. I don’t normally go out of my way to shake a priest’s hand, but this time I needed to be sure.
There was a hint of red on the pad of his index finger. I looked up and he seemed to recognize that I had noticed. He broke contact then and announced he had another engagement to attend, and quickly left.
More pictures were taken. We moved outside to the parking lot. Neveah enjoyed the attention showered upon her. Several people remarked on how well she was behaving. “She’s not a fussy baby,” my wife said. I added, “She’s probably saving it all for her adolescence.” This brought a laugh. I couldn’t help but smile with grandfatherly pride.
That’s when I glanced across the parking lot and saw Father Ray standing near the rectory’s garage speaking to a grey-haired man. Dan? I thought. I’d never seen Dan fully dressed, and this man was wearing a golf cap on his head. I couldn’t see the man’s face, and they turned away out of sight before I could get a better look, so I couldn’t be sure.
My mother-in-law locked up the church, and the cars began filing out, heading back to our house for all the food my wife and mother-in-law had prepared the night before. But between the blood and Father Ray’s strange behavior, I just couldn’t let it go. There was creeping feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right.
“My cell phone — does anyone have it?”
To be honest, I had it, but I wanted to get back inside the church to look around.
After a quick search of pockets and pocketbooks, my mother-in-law gave me the key. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
Once inside the church, I went straight to the altar and searched for the vile. The vile was there, as was the cloth. I opened the vile. It contained only oil, a clear, viscous fluid. It smelled sweet. I examined the cloth. It was as white as new fallen snow. The life-size Christ that hovered behind me seemed to frown at my implication. At this point, I simply had to laugh. I let my imagination get the better of me. I wondered what Father Ray must have thought as I stared at him. I didn’t want to know. I felt foolish.
I locked up the church and headed for the car. The buzz of flies caught my ear.
A rusted metal trash barrel stood alongside the equipment shed. I walked over and peeked inside. The carcass of an animal lay at the bottom. Its body had been split open, gutted. It was the size of a large cat, only grey. It had a large bushy tail. My heart sank.
I wanted to drag my wife, my daughter, even my mother-in-law out of the car and show them what I had found, but I didn’t know for sure what it meant.
Was this the same fox the officer had killed this morning? I wondered. At least that’s what our neighbor Dan had claimed. None of us had heard gunshots.
“C’mon, let’s go…What are you doing? Did you find your cell phone?” The look on my wife’s face was one of frustration. I had held things up too long already. They wanted to get home to serve the guests.
I walked away from the trash barrel. The buzz of flies stayed in my ear as I drove home attempting to make sense of it all.
#
It’s now three months later. Neveah is still amazing us all with her development. Her physical therapist says she’s at or above the benchmarks for an infant her age. She’s begun to play piano. She sits in my lap and just pounds the keys, but she seems to show an actual interest in the mechanics of how it works. Her large blue eyes are constantly looking, searching, and, dare I say, analyzing her surroundings. Every noise, every movement, she takes it all in as if collecting the information for use one day. She seldom blinks.
The incident with the fox is just a memory. Our neighbors behave like they always have. Little Courtney-Lynn is growing by leaps and bounds. Paul still cuts his lawn even when it doesn’t need it. Dan and Natalie are harvesting the garden they worked on all summer long. Even Dan’s tumbler has grown in size to Big Gulp dimensions. In the evenings I can hear Nate tinkering in his shed, preparing the snow blower for winter, no doubt. Nothing has changed. But I look at them differently. My eyes no longer deceive me.
Lately, at night, I’ve witness things, shadows moving where shadows shouldn’t be. Now and then our dogs bark at nothing. They say dogs have acute hearing. They can recognize the sound of their owner’s car long before it appears in the driveway. I bet they can even hear shadows as they slide from one place to another through the night.
I want to run outside and cast light on these shadows, these watchers who stand sentry outside our home, but what would be the point? Neveah is still my granddaughter, even if she has the mark of blood on her forehead. A mark only I can see.
Perhaps it is something only I am meant to know.
Perhaps I, too, am watching.
#
Originally published in the Delirium Insider, February 2007.
