The Old House by the Highway, pt. 2

A few weeks later I came home early from work to find Monica in the garden. She'd been working at it steadily, turning up the dirt in patches and planting a little at a time. First carrots, then cabbage and onions, then some string beans and squash. Being so close to the river, she told me, the soil was exceptionally rich. Dark and soft and full of moisture, as if it had been fertilized for years. Monica was bound to have a full harvest this fall, and she could hardly be more excited. She'd always wanted a garden in lieu of the pets we could never keep because of my allergies. She needed something to care for, something to divert her maternal instincts for the time being. We'd started trying for a baby almost the moment we bought the house, but had had no luck yet.

I loved coming home and seeing her out there - no floppy hat, but sometimes a bandana or baseball cap. She’d be all dirty and sweaty and beaming with pride in her work. So satisfied and confident. The woman I’d married years ago, sweated away the hot city nights with in our cramped apartment, dreaming of one day when we’d have space and grass and a garden. Here she was, on her knees in the middle of our success, and I thought then that I hadn’t loved her this much since the moment we said our vowels. But the wait had been worth it. She was beautiful. She was on her knees facing away from me, with her trowel in her left hand, sitting still as if examining something or deep in thought.

She didn’t move beyond cocking her head from one side to the other as I walked up the hill toward her, and she started violently when I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her face up at me, a puzzled expression revealed in the late afternoon light. “Look what I found,” she said thoughtfully, stretching her hand up to me and dropping something hard into it.

It was small, hard and smooth, not as heavy as a rock, but harder than wood, covered with dirt. It was small enough to fit in my hand easily, rounded but with a split down the center, with one side flat and the other rounding off irregularly in a protrusion of a slightly different, harder material. “What is it?” I asked. “A root or something? Like a tuber?”

She shook her head, looking as confused as I felt. “I don’t know. I dug it up trying to plant pumpkins. It wasn’t too far down, but it doesn’t look like any plant I know of. Look at that stuff on the top,” she pointed to the pock-marked, harder material above the split section. “It looks like… well, like bone. I think it’s a part of an animal!”

I stopped turning it in my hand, looking more closely. “But what part? I mean, what bone looks like this?” I pointed at the split section, knocking my fingernails against it gently.

She shook her head. “No idea. Let’s take it inside.”

I didn’t really want to bring a random animal part in the house, but my curiosity was piqued, so we brought it in and did an extensive internet search on animal bones. It took us some time, since we ended up at a lot of university websites with unintelligible biology jargon, but we eventually identified it as part of a hoof belonging to a cloven-hoofed animal of medium stature. Probably a sheep or a goat. Monica was a little unsettled by it at first, but we both realized that the basic structure of the house was over a hundred years old, and the people who’d lived here back then were sure to have some animals. Hell, a butcher had built the place. Finding bones made sense, even if it was a little creepy.

Having gotten past my initial hesitation, I convinced her that we should keep it on the mantel in the living room as a reminder of our house’s past. We washed it a few times and when it dried out, it was actually kind of beautiful.

* * *
The next weekend Monica and I made our first outing to the local bar, "The Almanac." We hadn't had a chance yet to meet many of our neighbors and didn't know what to expect, so we were a little nervous that we’d find ourselves surrounded by rednecks. But most of the people there were friendly while they weren’t exactly rednecks, they were certainly the salt of the earth. It was refreshing to meet people who could give Monica gardening hints, and provide home improvement advice for me; in the city we'd have been met with confused looks and suggestions of who was the best person to hire. And they knew how to be hospitable, and how to drink.

We ended up being there much longer than expected, listening to stories about the area and how it had been changing over recent years. There were still farms around, they said, but not like there used to be. Most of the old farmers had passed away or been shut down by the bigger operations. Most of the area was now suburbanites and gentlemen farmers who liked dealing with crops or animals, but who made there real money elsewhere. We were a little to drunk to feel guilty about our gentleman-farmerly ways at that point, and when we finally got home late we passed out sprawled across our new bed.

I woke up sometime in the night to feel Monica smacking me in the back. Groggy and still inebriated, I grunted a few times and swatted her hand away, but she was persistent. Eventually the fog in my head cleared enough to hear her. She was whispering urgently, almost hissing: "Ed, Ed, wake up! There is someone in the house! There is someone in the house, wake up! Oh Jesus!"

My heart stopped. Those are words I hadn’t wanted to hear. I sat up slowly and put finger to my lips to quiet her. But I heard nothing. Monica was sitting up straight, the covers pulled up high, her eyes so wide they reflected the moonlight off the river. "I don't hear anything," I mouthed.

She shook her head. "I heard something downstairs. Someone walking. I swear I heard it. Go check!"

I started to argue with her, my head spinning a little with fumes form the booze, but just then there was a creak from the staircase, and a loud thud. I sobered up. Monica seemed to get smaller beneath the blanket, her eyes opening wider as she nodded frantically at me. The thudding continued, certainly but unsteadily making its way up the stairs. It sounded like at least two people in heavy boots. As I slipped out of bed and moved toward the sound, I vaguely wondered why burglars wouldn't take pains to stay quieter as they approached the bedroom in a sleeping house. They were being ridiculously loud. Then I realized that maybe they didn't intend to sneak through the house and rob us. Maybe they meant to hurt us, even kill us.

My heart stopped when this thought occurred to me, and I forced myself to keep moving toward my dresser. I opened the top drawer and withdrew my handgun from beneath the socks. I heard Monica draw a quick breath behind me, but I was focused on the noise outside. The slow, faltering clatter of feet on the stairs. The growing certainty that those footsteps were aimed toward my wife with ill intentions. I tried to block out the mental images that sprang up of Monica, bloodied and broken... I cocked the gun.

Monica had argued against me buying it, but ownership of our new house had sparked a protective instinct in me. I was glad now that I had the cool metal in my hand, the surprising weight of the weapon reassuring in the dark night. I glided silently across the bedroom floor to stand behind the door, every sense piqued. The intruders were near the top of the staircase now, their loud, clumsy footsteps obviously intent on reaching the landing just outside my door. I tensed, waiting for the perfect moment to spring, one hand resting lightly on the doorknob, the gun heavy in the other, every muscle tensed and every hair on end. I could hear Monica trying to breathe quietly but trembling on the bed behind me.

The footsteps reached the landing and stopped. Letting my mind go blank for a split second, I exploded through the door, yelling something out of a police drama. I don’t know what I said exactly, but I found myself on the landing, gun straight out in front of me in both hands and aimed at where I expected the chest of the intruder to be. It took a few seconds for the adrenaline to clear enough for me to notice that there was no chest in front of the gun. No person in front of the gun at all. My over-stimulated brain stopped working for a moment, confused.

I lowered the gun and looked down. It was a goat. A big, stupid-looking, black and white goat with small horns and big floppy ears. It looked at me for a moment, uninterestedly chewing on something. I stared back at it, stunned. The adrenaline was still buzzing in my ears, but my embarrassment at having gotten so worked up over the animal buzzed louder. I shook my head at it. The goat made a small bleating noise and shook its head, too, then clopped away from me and into the spare bedroom we’d been using for still-packed boxes. I gaped after it. A goat. No way.

I scratched my head, the alcohol swimming back into focus as my brain tried to wrap itself around what had just happened. My brain, detached, informed me that the four hooves on the stairs explained why I’d thought it was two loud, evil-intentioned men. I found myself nodding in assent. But wait. Hold on. How in God’s name had that thing gotten in? I tried to remember if I had locked the door – hell, if I had even closed the door – when we’d come home. I had been drunk, but definitely not drunk enough to have forgotten something as simple as that. I didn’t have a clear memory of it, but there was a possibility I’d left it unlocked. Maybe it just hadn’t been closed the whole way and the goat had head-butted its way in. I’d heard goats did the head-butting thing.

Just then I heard a clatter from the spare room, as the goat sounded like it ran into something large and wooden. I realized I’d better get it out before it started head-butting our possessions; never mind how it got in. I tiptoed over to the door and peeked into the room. No sign of the animal, but the room itself was eerie in the moonlight, stacks of boxes piled higher than my head and vaguely shaped furniture covered in sheets. No sign of the goat. I felt a cold shudder pass through my body as I realized I was apprehensive about facing the goat. Its mysterious presence in the house made it seem almost as formidable an enemy as the human intruder I’d expected. And anyway, I knew nothing about goats or their habits. The thing could rush at me, horns lowered, and gouge me to death, or somehow get into the master bedroom and do the same thing to Monica. I heard a soft sound from the corner, maybe its furry side rubbing up against a box. The sound sent chills through me.

I crept into the room, senses running high as the leftover adrenaline from earlier kicked into action. I set the gun down on a box nearby as quietly as possible and stood perfectly still. From across the room I could hear an almost steady succession of noises from the animal, the clatter of its hooves on the wood floor as it moved about, a constant chewing noise as it chomped on something (probably our dish towels, the bastard!), a subdued snuffling. I came around an old wardrobe we’d been pondering selling and saw its tail disappear behind a stack of boxes just ahead. I tiptoed forward, ready to spring, and crouched down to prepare myself. When I peered around the boxes I found myself face to face with the beast – it had turned around and, rather than sneaking up behind it, I was now starting into its strange eyes, both of us frozen in surprise. I’d never looked at a goat’s eyes before; they were yellow and vacant, with large, square pupils that contracted into rectangles as it stepped toward me, snuffling at my shorts around a large chunk of something in its mouth. As it got closer I remembered my intention and hunkered down to lunge at it, coming almost even with its mouth, and suddenly stifled a yelp as I leaped backward.

It was chewing on a piece of flesh! It wasn’t meat, exactly – it didn’t look like muscle, but it was certainly part of an animal. It was blloody and dripping, bits of hair falling in clotted chunks as the goat gnawed it lazily. The animal’s jaw was covered in blood, its bizarre rectangular eyes focusing on me as I found myself backing slowly away, horrified.

I turned the corner away from the goat and ran for the door, which I slammed shut behind me. I stood still, re-evaluating the situation at hand. How was I going to grab the goat without getting myself all bloody? For that matter, how was I going to get it down the stairs? I hadn’t even thought about it before, but the thing was pretty large, its head above my waist by a good six inches, and it would probably flail and bleat and kick and head-butt if I tried to pick it up. And, even if it didn’t put up a fight, the simple mechanics of getting a hundred-pound, hoofed animal down a flight of slippery wooden stairs in my socks was daunting. I had to rethink my strategy.

And, shit, I mean, a carnivorous goat? I’d always heard that goats would eat anything, but I had thought their diet was restricted to bizarre household objects and plants, and anyway, where had it gotten a bloody piece of hairy meat? Had it run down a neighbor’s dog? Grabbed a bite of roadkill from the highway? Wherever it had come from, I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with this bloodthirsty animal just now, particularly after the nonchalant way it had stared at me, unflinching, gnawing on some other furry animal’s hide!

Several moments of unproductive thought later, I shook my head and turned toward the bedroom. I’d have to get Monica to help; there was no way around it. I’d just have to hope she didn’t freak out about the blood.