I was preparing to leave a poolroom in Louisville, Kentucky, when I met a man who wanted to shoot pool. He introduced me to his wife, and in between games, we chatted. I told them that I was house sitting while my friend was on vacation. “The most important parts of the house are the two animals. When my friends return, I can be sitting in smoking ashes and still be good, as long as the dog and the cat are in my arms.”
My friend lives with her 17-year-old daughter in Southern Indiana. I have overseen the house and animals in the past; the current cat, Penny, does not know me as well as the Maltese, “The Great Dog Max.” (Sorry Pat Conroy.) Max was adopted from one of the Southern “A” states. Penny is a rescued calico that trusts me as far as the food bowl.
My friends live in Greenville, Indiana, in a large house that sits on a small hill at the top of a subdivision; the 1 1/2 acre property is backed by forest. Deer come out of the woods to the salt lick that has been placed at the edge of the yard. When I am reading on the back deck, I am so still that the deer cross the yard, unafraid until I glimpse them and raise my head. Ears flag up as they freeze, eyes on me. They bolt when I raise my cup to sip my coffee. I have seen rabbits creeping toward the break in the forest to sample the salt. A few years ago, I watched as a groundhog waddled out of the green and onto the mowed grass.
The backyard swing set bristles with bird feeders; a pileated woodpecker touched down on the swing set and rocketed toward the cedars. A bluebird flew to the top of the “apartment houses” and sang. A hairy woodpecker took a crack at the finch feeder, poking its bill into the small holes. Three kinds of finches visit that feeder, which is near the hummingbird feeder on the deck. Hummingbirds thrum by my ear, and the birds hum up toward my face to see if I am a danger. A large bush is beneath a section of the swing set, and one day produced a calico explosion as the little murderer tried to take down some yellow finches.
I helped another friend rid her house of spiders and their eggs and webs, and in a gross error, mistakenly ripped ivy from the front wall of her house. She forgave me, and when, in the course of trimming her yews, I looked at the mosquito settled on my arm, I hesitated a moment before I crushed it. That moment of hesitation was paid in blood.
In between hoeing and mowing and long bloody bouts of spidercide, I sat under the trees behind my other friend’s house. She wanted me to hear the chorus of birds that visit her Louisville home. While seated at her back table, she pointed out a mother cardinal, come to examine me for a threat assessment. The father was in the nearby tree, where a nest of babies chipped for food.
My friend and her daughter returned from their once-in-a-lifetime, three-week sojourn to Colorado, Arizona, Utah, South Dakota and California. She showed me pictures of elk, bison and bear while the Great Dog Max sat on my lap and the predacious Penny prowled the edges of the living room. While their owners trolled the West, I did my duty, caretaker for the beasts of the Southern Indiana wild.