Creatures, the Creeps, and a Boy Named Jerky

There seems no end to the discoveries we're making at our new homestead. We moved ten minutes east and it's a whole new world over here. Here are some of the highlights.

Living on the edge of a small town (with a population of about 430) is almost like living in the country. We lived here about five years ago, for almost a year, but I don't recall this town smelling so much. Maybe it's because of our location? With a gas station a block south and right on a highway, there are always livestock semis driving by or stopping close by. Many mornings this summer I sat outside to enjoy my coffee in the peaceful fresh morning air--only to find there was no fresh air. It smelled like a cattle farm (or hog confinement) was next door.

Along with not being fresh, there was no peace either! Among the mooing and squealing of the terrified, likely death-bound livestock, semis' jake brakes thundered as truckers complied with the town's speed limit; semi upon semi rolled on by just a block away. Work trucks followed, carrying crews of construction workers from the multitude of those kind of businesses in the area. This may be a small town, but it sure is a busy, hardworking town. What can you expect in the heart of farm country? And commercial farm country to boot. I now enjoy my coffee by an open window (when weather allows) at the back of the house where there's considerable less noise.

***

The first night we stayed here we made the mistake of leaving the garage door open. We discovered several toads complacently hopping around the garage floor. We were surrounded by a knot of toads, with lines of them coming up the driveway. Did you know toads form knots? I had to Google what "swarms" of toads were even called. If it had been frogs it would've been an army or a colony.

***

I was sitting on the "patio" (also known as the extra parking spot on the other side of the garage) one evening and was disturbed to hear a loud rustling and cracking of branches in the trees by the creek. I walked down there to see what I could see, and a massive black something-or-other flew into the tops of the trees where I couldn't see it. It was then completely silent, as if it was trying to be invisible. It was either an intelligent crow or an escaped monkey. I've encountered this thing several times since, and I still haven't solved the mystery of its identity.

***

Another night I was startled out of my seat (in the same place) by an awful screeching sound, and a massive flying creature hitting the tree right over my head. (We have trees everywhere.) I looked up to see an owl staring at me from no more than twenty feet above me. Another owl came along and swooped it, and they both flew off into the sunset. These owls frequent the creek trees, our pine trees, everywhere. Walking down the upstairs hall one evening I saw one perch on the roof of our mud room.

***

We hadn't been here more than a month, when one night Gavin and Liam slammed through my bedroom door, breathless and shaking.

"MOM! THERE'S A BAT IN OUR ROOM!"

My nemesis. I flew out of bed and slammed the door. What to do? Eli was at work again. Aidan came wandering in a few seconds later, complacently asking what was going on.

"SHUT THE DOOR!"

I assessed then that no one had come into contact with the bat. Lights. We needed lights on in the hall so it wouldn't come out of the bedroom. I asked Aidan if he was scared of bats, and he shrugged. "Not really."

I am ashamed to admit that I, o cowardly mother, sent my 9 year old son into a war zone I was afraid to enter. I watched through the crack in the doorway as he flipped the hall light switch on. A flash of light, and a pop, and the hallway was plunged back into darkness. The light had burned out. "Get back in here!" I hissed through the crack. Now what?!

I'm not sure how long it took me to work up the courage to open that door again, four boys piled on my bed staring at me expectantly. I finally had to ask myself if a soldier would be that cowardly in the face of an enemy (and one that's not really even an enemy).

I crawled down the hallway (bats nest in people's hair, haven't you heard?) and risked a peek into the little boys room. Flitting shadows. He was still in there. I pulled the door shut tight and ran downstairs for the masking tape. I taped shut every crack in and around that door--even cracks a bat couldn't possibly squeeze through. I also taped the closet door shut in the big boys' room, since the rooms' closets connect. I left Eli a message about the emergency and sent the big boys back to their room. The little boys hunkered down with me for the night.

The next morning Eli woke me up wearing gloves and wielding a grill spatula. "The bat's gone," he proclaimed. "I looked under and behind everything and he's no where. Maybe he crawled back out?" What were the chances?

That day I decided to face my fear and work on unpacking boxes of the boys' books, stacking them into the bookcase in their room. I was on my knees working when I lost my balance and leaned against the bookcase for support. It tipped backward against the wall for a second. And the world stood still as an ugly little pig-faced rat peeked it's head over the back of the bookcase. I screamed...grabbed Ian who was playing with blocks on the floor behind me, and backed out of there as fast as I could manage. The bat had ducked back behind the bookcase again but I could see the claw-like hooks on his wings still hanging onto the top of the bookcase.

Eli was up for the day by then, thankfully. The bat was removed, and will never ever return. And now I leave all the lights on upstairs from twilight until we go to bed, hoping to discourage any more bats from coming in. The boys were too scarred to sleep in that room for a week, and I can't go into a room at night without pausing at the door, searching for flitting shadows first.

***

With toads, owls, and crows (oh my!) and bats aplenty in our corner of the world, something seemed a little witchy around here. One morning Eli joined me on the "patio", where this is our view:

Eli said he was just waiting for a face to peek out of a window. A pale, half-starved, ghostly face. The house is abandoned, and we're told used only for storage. Though a few mornings ago Eli noticed a light on in the house when he was leaving for work. It's the kind of house my brothers and I used to call haunted houses, and would break into when we were young to investigate. (I imagine it's only a matter of time before my own sons attempt this.) I now only glance at the brown house quickly in passing. I don't need my imagination to supply where reality fails it. Thank you, dear. I have plans to plant a row of the tall thin arborvitae trees along our property line to improve the view. I've also considered asking the owner if I can paint a mural over the side of the house that faces ours...something bright and cheery...but who has the time and money for that?

***

We had been living here all of ten days when this story happened. I was in the middle of ripping out carpet and there were boxes and piles everywhere. I ran outside to throw something in the dumpster when a vehicle slowed down and stopped at the end of our sidewalk. Oh boy, Jehovah's Witnesses, I thought.

Three elderly people exited the vehicle and slowly made their way to the front door. They appeared to be discussing the outside of the house, pointing and commenting as they went. They were not dressed like Jehovah's Witnessess.

"Did you just buy this house?" one lady asked. When I affirmed that, she explained they had seen it go up for sale, and that their grandparents had built the house in 1901. She asked if they could come in and look around. While I was hesitant, they didn't appear to be the homicidal geriatric type. I let them in.

The designated speaker said that their grandparents, Renata and Otto, had built this house for their young family. A great uncle of theirs had lived in the brown house next door, and he owned a lumber mill. They used lumber from there for this house, and at the time it cost $600 to build it. She described to me how our living room had been the parlor and our dining room the living room. They explained where "grandpa's chair" had sat, and the fun they had running around the big house. There was a German Lutheran church across the street from here a long time ago that they went to when they stayed here. She said the foundation of a shop that sits there now is all that's left of the church. Our kitchen had once been two rooms: the kitchen was in the back part where the fridge, washer/dryer, and oven are now, and the area where our kitchen table sits was the dining room. She described the kitchen as having no cabinets, but the wall between the kitchen and dining room was a large built-in China hutch. Oh how I wish I had seen this! I asked if there were photos. The brother replied that they probably didn't have a camera just to take a photo of a room in a house. Puts my thousands-of-photos-overloaded-smart-phone into perspective. I need to do more research. I have not yet found old photos of this house or any of the former occupants.

***

Meeting neighbors has been another eye-opening experience. In a town this size almost everyone is your neighbor. No one bats an eye about stopping by to ask who you are, or would you like us to load up those branches for you and haul them to the burn pile north of town?

One neighbor to the west of us has been hiring Aidan to do yard work for him on Saturdays. Aidan has been picking up sticks, running a leafblower, and clearing out weeds. He makes a little money in the process and gets to work for someone other than his family.

Almost as familiar now as landmarks are the early morning walkers. There is a group of older ladies I see every morning heading down the street, talking animatedly as they go. I referred to them once as the Golden Girls, and it stuck for us.

There is an old gentleman who also walks the same street. He has a quirky way of walking, stepping stiffly on one leg, that suggests some kind of injury. My mind wanders at times, pondering all the stories we'll never hear.

The older man in the trailer across the street is Bill, and we're told he is some degree of cousin to Eli. He has a whole fence line of concord grapes that he never uses, and a shop where he gets together with "the guys" to have a beer and discuss life. He was one of the neighbors who so generously hauled off loads of carpet to "the pile" that I had ripped out of the house. Thank you, Bill!

I observed from the kitchen window one afternoon three of my boys marching across the street to Bill's shed like they owned the place. When they were called back home and asked what in the world they thought they were doing, I was told matter-of-factly that they were going to get a deck of playing cards from Bill. Bill, of course, laughed and said they were more than welcome to his cards.

The other older man in the trailer next to Bill's is rumored to be the richest man in this town. He made his money in cattle, but lives like he's poor, driving an old rundown car and truck.

***

Shortly after the original owner's grandchildren stopped by, we met the neighbors directly to the east of us. I didn't even know there was a little white house beyond the brown house and machine shed when we first moved in. This newly-met neighbor was chatting with Eli when he mentioned the cage in our attic. He said that many years ago there was an insane person who used to bark at people who they kept locked in there.

Eli relayed this story to me, and I shook my head. "There's no cage in our attic!" Eli reminded me of a wired off corner of the attic we had seen when we first walked through the house. I asked him to show it to me that night. (I don't recommend going into an attic at night, unless it's pretty and full of light and familiar to you, by the way.)

I inspected the "cage" with horror, imagining a poor tortured soul going raving mad up there while lightening burned through the sky and thunder shook the rafters just at his back. There was some sort of small pan hanging in the center of the cage, about a foot from the floor. "A candle holder?" Eli suggested.

I went to bed that night, thoroughly creeped out, saying Hail Mary's and wishing desperately that our house had been blessed already. I slept horribly, though the creepy feeling wore off a bit the next day. I posted a photo of the cage on social media, and was comforted by the comment that keeping a mentally ill family member at home rather than sending them to a mental hospital back in those days was merciful. Mental healthcare in the first half of the 20th century was awful. They didn't have the modern medications that we have now, only experimental procedures: crude partial lobotomies, restraints, and more cages.

On the initial walk-through of the house, the "cage" reminded me of a fly coop, and I assumed some time in years past maybe they had started baby chicks up there. Or, maybe an eccentric former occupant had kept pigeons up there. My Grandpa Mahoney would've loved that.

I started looking at the cage more logically. It would take our boys all of five seconds to break out of it. There's no way a mad-man would have been contained in it for long. The story of our mad-man's cage had spread though, and it became the highlight of our house tour when people came to see our new home. Recently, an uncle and aunt from out of state came to visit, and it was during their visit that we realized what the "hanging thing" in the middle of the cage was. It's tiny scale, very old, and very very neat.

It almost completely disproves the mad-man theory as well. The most likely story for the cage is that it was once used to store plants: herbs, seeds, and whatever else they wanted to dry. The wire walls were probably meant to discourage mice from getting into the goods. The scales may have been used to measure things before they were packaged. While the mad-man story is much more exciting, I chose to believe the more comforting "dry goods store" theory. And I now have the overwhelming urge to paint every square inch of the attic white. 

***

I have not yet met one lady who lives on our street. She lives at the very end of the street, two houses down, to be exact. I had the perfect chance about a month ago, but nothing came of it.

We gave the boys permission to ride their bikes down the street as far as this lady's driveway. Any farther and the street becomes indistinguishable from the parking lot of a concrete business. The last house on the street, her house is small with a deck on the front, a wheelchair ramp up one side, and a set of stairs on the other. 

I was standing at the kitchen sink early one morning when I saw Gavin limping toward the house, whimpering. I ran outside to see what had happened. All I got out of him was that he had crashed his bike. Liam, tagging along behind him, said, "Stairs!!! He fell down stairs, Mom!" 

I sent them in the house and marched down the street, looking for Gavin's bike. I got to the end of the street, and there it was: upside down on the lady's deck stairs. It was apparent that Gavin had pedaled his bike up the wheelchair ramp and then not so successfully down the steps. Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door, quickly trying to think of an appropriate apology and wondering if we should offer her something for the trouble. It was very early...early enough that she may have been woken by a boy somersaulting down her steps on a mountain bike. Her van was in the driveway, but she never answered the door. I assumed that she either slept through everything, or was too angry or confused to open the door. I may never know.

***

Along with being limited in how far they can bike down our dirt-road street, the boys were forbidden to climb "The Lego Blocks". The Lego blocks are massive concrete blocks that make up a retaining wall on the back side of the concrete business. They have two knobs at the top of each that make them look just like Legos. However, when you get a group of little boys together, especially one that includes the mischievous neighbor boy who's back yard connects ours with the Lego Blocks, all sense of danger disappears. I've been informed that the Lego Blocks were climbed regardless.

* * *

Which brings us to Jerky.

The fact has been established that things around here are often not as they seem. It's no different with this boy. 

Gavin came running into the house one day back in July while Aidan was still at camp, saying he had a new friend. "His name is Jerky! He is 8 years old! He lives next to us and he can ride his bike with me on the street!"

I warned Gavin that "Jerky" was probably not the boy's real name. While he insisted it was, I told him to ask the boy again, just to make sure. At the end of the day when he came inside he again said the name was "Jerky", and I left it at that.

By the time I met "Jerky", "Jerky" was his official name among the boys. Aidan had arrived home from camp, and agreed that "Jerky" was now his friend, too.

When Jerky came striding into our house I had to ask what his name was. He said, "Cherokee. I'm part Indian. My one sister is Cheyenne and my other sister is Kiowa." This boy reminds me of Opie Taylor, but instead of the red hair he has a thick mop of dark brown hair. Try as I might to get the boys to say his name properly, some version of "Jerky" always comes out. Cherokee just shrugs his shoulders and says, "I don't mind if they call me 'Jerky'."

Boys will be boys, and one of their favorite play places is down by our creek. Rather, it was, until Gavin came in one afternoon saying that Jerky said it was sewer water. But then he told Gavin it was clean enough to drink, and both of them proved it by gulping water out of the stream. I ran to the file cabinet to find a copy of our abstract. Sure enough, "sewer easement" was added to the property description in 1974. (This is something else that was denied in the sellers disclosure.) Oh boys. Raising you is not for the faint of heart.

Cherokee always comes ready with a host of tall-tales. Our boys have never really been around anyone who stretched the truth without letting them know they were joking at some point. I can't count the number of times one of them has run in the house with some outlandish story. 

"Mom! Jerky said there are snakes all over the creek and they launch themselves out of holes and wrap themselves around helicopters! And king snakes can swallow people whole. One even ate a helicopter!" 

"MOM! Jerky said a wolf bit him and swallowed his shoulder blade and then he shot the wolf!"  

"Mom! Jerky shot a crossbow but he added gas and fire to it and it BLEW UP!" 

"Mom! Did you know there's a car inside that brown house? Jerky's Dad crashed his car into the house and the house fell down around the car so they just built the house back up around the car!" 

"Jerky said he drank gas and it tasted like juice!"

"Jerky said there are clowns headed to our town to kill people! He said we have to make sure we have a big stick or bats to protect us when they get here!"

"Guess what, Mom! There was a tornado here and it ripped the door off that brown house while Jerky was in it!"

"Mom, Jerky doesn't have an older sister anymore. He said she climbed up to our roof and jumped off and died." 

"Mom, Jerky said his mom told him if he was naughty she was going to lock him in the cage in our attic."

"Jerky said there's a bee called a ground bee that's huge and it stuck it's stinger all the way through a man!!!" 

I warned the boys that most of the things he said were probably just stories, (and some even deadly if they tried) but I could see the desire in their eyes to believe these crazy, movie-like phenomenons. Until the day Cherokee began telling another story about his sister--the supposedly dead one--and Aidan realized that something didn't add up. "Wait! You told me she died!"

"I was only teasing!"

"That's a horrible thing to joke about!"

On a few occasions I happened to be outside while a tale was being created, and with a raise of my eye-brows Cherokee gave up, "Haha! Got you guys!" The boys laugh and shake their heads now. I think they enjoy the stories whether they're real or not.