Good Lord, I have become one of the weird people.
My last column about walking in late at night to find an opossum in my kitchen down in New Orleans won me lots of great stories about people with opossums and other creatures one doesn’t always think to look for inside a regular home. One friend told me about his grandmother who kept a pet opossum and about all her little opossum grandbabies who followed her around the house all day. Oddly enough, her baby opossums never got eaten by his grandmother’s other beloved indoor pet, a huge owl that she kept satisfied with live mice she bought at the pet store.
Any number of people, it turns out, keep goats at home — in their homes around here, anyway — though they don’t hold a flicker against Ashfield’s own “Pop” Reidy, who used to live in a nice, large house here on Main Street. Mr. Reidy’s herd of cows lived in the house with him. Pop Reidy bought himself a van large enough to drive his big old buddies around with him, too — not the whole herd all at once, but he took as many as he could at a time with him.
Why?
Well, no one really knows. The west end of the house had once been the house’s barn, and thus it returned, though by then it was a proper part of the house. When Mr. Reidy died, and the house needed to be spruced up to be ready for the next owners, Ashfield carpenters had to be brought in to install new floors, so hoof-pocked were they by then.
At the beginning of June I motored back home to quiet old Ashfield, and a few nights ago I was getting ready to retire for the night when I heard what sounded like a baby laughing or crying. I couldn’t tell which. All I knew was, I had no baby. I checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t accidentally logged on to some baby-friendly YouTube channel, and found nothing. But then I heard it again.
I looked outside my kitchen door and saw what appeared to be two foxes playing. One was on the ground, and the other was ricocheting back and forth over the first one, nipping at him. I turned on the outside light and discovered that was no fox lying on the ground, but a tiny fawn, and it was wailing like a baby.
No fox is gonna abuse a baby fawn on my watch, so I opened the door and jumped out, hoping to scare the fox. It worked and he ran off — first toward the back of the house, and then off to the street.
What do you do with a baby fawn? A baby fawn splayed on the grass, scarred up by a fox, with no parental deer in sight? Again, at 10 o’clock at night, and in the rain? Well, you wonder if inviting the little guy into your house to live with you would be a good idea. Whether such a move would be sanctioned by those who make the rules in the deer population, I don’t know, but I thought hard about it.
Would you like a cage, little deer? Or just a fenced off area? What would you like to sleep on? What would you eat? Would you be happy in my house? And um, how big would you ultimately get? Would you grow antlers to pock-mark the walls as well as the floors? Would I walk you every day? On a leash? Or would you just want to go back to your people after a few days? Would your people accept you after you had lived in my house? Or would they see you as too big for your britches, thinking you’re somebody you ain’t, living inside with people like that, and thus, reject you?
The little fawn wobbled to his feet, maybe 30 inches tall, quivering after his abuse. All the maternal instinct I never imagined myself having flowed out to that little baby deer shivering in the rain, and I wanted to do nothing less than pick him up like Jesus picked up all those lambs in all the paintings, and bring him inside. I resisted that, though I couldn’t resist petting his little head, and bless his heart, he trembled like a tiny, frightened child.
Would you rather sleep in the living room or my room? I could make a little bed for you out of pillows…
Finally, he staggered over to a grove of tall ferns and disappeared inside to the place where, I hoped, his mama would find him before any more foxes did.
And then I came on back inside, drenched, cold and filled with a tender understanding of ol’ Pop Reidy and his vanload of pet moo cows.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.