Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Our Raccoon Year

THEY WERE LIKE hissing animals, blinded by the dark, thinking that no one knew. So we pretended we didn’t and hoped they’d stop. Then he’d say something, and she’d say something, and — Don’t say anything more, I thought, and held my breath — he’d say something sharp, and after a gasp and some crackling, their talk swished back and forth in furious whispers. Sometimes a thump, and a swelling silence that terrified Sam and me more than the hisses.

It was not a question of our being happy or sad, but a condition, worry without a payoff, as though the house was always the wrong temperature. Then one muddy March day Ma said she was going away, she didn’t say where. She looked at us with bright anxious eyes and swallowed whatever she was about to tell us. Soon she was gone, down the driveway, where someone was waiting, under the sky like a low ceiling.

“She’s where she wants to be,” Pa said. “With her friend.”

I did not know it at the time, but that was when our raccoon year started, the first feature of it, Pa stopping whatever he was doing to squint, and wrinkle his nose, with a listening tilt to his head.

“There’s this funny smell.”

He had been an attorney. “My partner Hoyt used to say, ‘I bite people on the neck for a living.’” He smiled. “That wasn’t me.” He had been the first man in our state to gain full custody of his children in a divorce settlement, his best-known case. It happens these days, but years ago it was unheard of, the divorced husband holding on to the house and the children. I was one of the children, my younger brother Sam the other child, both of us still at the Harry Wayne Wing Elementary School in town. Pa was now a financial counselor, working from home, handling investments.

“I’m a bottom feeder in the money business,” Pa said. “Just pawing through it like a scavenger.” But he was more than that: a reasonable cook, sometimes painted pictures, kept a boat on the creek in the summer. He gave us his wind-up Victrola and his collection of old 78 rpm records, which we often played—“South American Joe,” “One Meat Ball,” “Shanghai Lil,” Hawaiian tunes.

After Ma left, he would not hire a babysitter for Sam, or a cook for us, or a cleaner for the house. He waited with us for the school bus on the main road, and then — as he explained in the evening — he cleaned the house, did the laundry, and went grocery shopping. His office was at home, so he could easily combine housework with his business. He stopped sketching and sailing. He took up fancy cooking, the sort of cooking that makes a person bossy, using recipes out of books, talking about his sauces and his fresh ingredients. He used expressions like “my kitchen” and “my garlic press,” and of some dishes, he said, “Those beef tips pair nicely with a Merlot,” or “Anything with a mouth would eat that.”

But there was nothing he could do to fill the empty space that Ma had made by leaving. Watching him trying so hard made me sad. And so I ate the food he prepared with frowning attention, even when I was not hungry.

Our house sat on the brow of a hill, allowing us to see that we had no neighbors. But we had visitors. Just after Ma left, we began to find twists of scat like heaps of blackened sausages in corners of the porch, or we’d forget a plate of half-eaten food — it might be a leftover lump of risotto Milanese on the picnic table — and it would be gone in the morning, the plate licked clean. We found scratchings and evidence of prowlings, clawed earth, overturned buckets, but saw nothing of the perpetrators, as Pa called them. They were like phantoms. Even when he was wrinkling his nose, Pa praised them for being invisible, ripe-smelling ghosts that were about to arrive or had just left, content to live among themselves, never showing their faces, and shadowing us and living on our scraps.

“Probably doing us a favor, cleaning up after us.”

As well as the main house, where Pa slept and cooked and kept his library, we had two other houses: the office house where Pa worked, with a guest room downstairs, and another whole house at the far end of the swimming pool, which we called the Boys’ House. The pump and filter for the pool were in the basement, but the Boys’ House — just bedrooms and a bathroom, no kitchen — had been built for my brother and me. Pa had gotten the idea from his reading about the customs in various places. In parts of New Guinea and Africa, boys our age were housed separately from their parents and sisters in “bachelor houses.”

“Make all the noise you want,” Pa often said. “I don’t want to witness your excesses or your indiscretions.” He would then smile and say, “Nor do I wish you to witness mine.”

Yet there’d been a vibration from their marriage that was unmistakable to us, the way friction sends out a burning smell: we had heard him hissing upstairs with Ma when we were in the main house before meals.

With plenty of space for ourselves in the Boys’ House, and a guest room too, we played the Victrola, stayed up late, lit candles, sometimes smoked, and had our friends over. At mealtimes we gathered at the main house to eat, and after Ma left, to try Pa’s latest dish. “This is a reduction sauce,” and “Osso buco presented on a bed of polenta,” and, holding a forkful of sun-dried tomatoes, “Loaded with micronutrients.”

Later in that first year without Ma we got neighbors, one at the foot of the hill facing the sea, the other one on an adjoining piece of land. We hardly saw them the summer they were building; we only heard the hammering and the country music from the workmen’s radios. But when the leaves were blown from the trees in October, the neighbors’ houses were visible — white, large, and the more conspicuous for the way the owners had cleared their land. They’d cut down all their trees, and they’d already begun to set rolls of sod for muddy lawns. We seemed now to be on our own wooded five-acre island, because none of our trees had been cut.

It was then that we saw more evidence of the animals, more scat, more scratchings, and Pa sniffed and squinted. Driven off the neighbors’ property and robbed of their habitat, the creatures migrated to our land. How many we didn’t yet know: we had not so far seen even one of them.

“You don’t see them during the day,” Pa said, and he seemed to be quoting someone when he added, “They are chiefly a nocturnal animal.”

A few days after he said that, when we were sitting on the back porch, Pa paddled his hands, saying, “Shush.” I thought, and hoped, that he’d seen Ma. He crouched and pointed to a slow hairy shadow moving beneath low juniper boughs, and this big shadow dragging a cluster of shadows behind it, two small ones, her young.

Raccoons. Pa whispered that we were lucky to see them in daylight, the plump mother raccoon with a black eye mask, tottering a little and poking her snout along the edge of the brick apron of the pool, keeping out of the sun. It was as though we were seeing strange visitors. Yet they didn’t seem strange at all, more like self-possessed residents who knew their way around the property.

“There’s a real mother,” Pa said, and sounded tearful. He was still whispering into his hand.

Sam said, “Two kids?”

Pa hissed. “I said, two kits.”

As we watched, they poured their supple bodies beneath the side slats in the deck that served as a seating platform on the far end of the pool. And now we knew that when we were in the deck chairs we were sitting on top of a family of raccoons.

Pa still wore an amused and even tender expression, but soon he became rueful, with a faded smile, as though thinking about how Ma had gone off with her friend — the worst day of my life. Long after the raccoons had gone, Pa kept squinting at the spot they’d slipped from, as you do a sunset.

That night after dinner, Pa said he wanted to tell us a bedtime story. The Boys’ House was out of bounds to him, so we sat in the library and read from Old Mother West Wind. He put special emphasis on the character of Bobby Raccoon, giving Bobby the even, reasonable voice of a very good boy.

And for the next few days, he’d stop and peer at those slats in the deck from where he sat on the porch; or else, when we’d be eating outside, or playing cards at the picnic table, Pa would glance over, and I knew he was hoping to see them. Even in the shadow of the junipers, the mother had been a strong presence — large, healthy, busy, snouty, and deliberate in her crawl, with an air of belonging. The little ones were frisky, their coats were sleek, and they had a fat side-to-side noiseless way of gliding.

Not seeing them, Pa put out some leftovers for them, describing them in the way he served up food. “Chicken,” he said. “Bones from the stockpot. Some bruised kiwi fruit.”

The scraps were gone in the morning. “Must have been that mother. Or maybe Bobby. Like a pit bull on a pot roast.” I was sure that Pa was sorry he wasn’t able to stand over the raccoons and see them gnawing the bones, eating the chicken, doing a better job of finishing the food than Sam and I ever did, Pa saying to the raccoons, “Citrus chicken with a grapefruit salsa…”

They got into the garden and left symmetrical bite marks on the eggplants. They didn’t touch the overripe tomatoes on the vines. But by now, frosty October, the garden was over. They ate the mushrooms that sprang up overnight in the dampness near the pitch pines.

“Looks tidier without that dog-vomit fungus,” Pa said in the morning, seeing that they had cleared the yard of the growths that were like twisted pieces of dirty Styrofoam. “How do they know it’s not poisonous? Just smart, I guess.”

Halloween was costume time at the Harry Wayne Wing School. Pa bought us black eye masks and furry hats with tails. “Go as Bobby Raccoon.” But we refused and went as pirates.

We eventually found out how many raccoons there were. I was feeling sick and sleepless one night, and wanted some sympathy from Pa. I got out of bed — it was about two in the morning — and, without turning on the light, I opened the front door to our house. In the moonlight on the slightly raised deck in front of our Boys’ House I saw a number of lumpy plant-like shapes, big and small, each one in a different position, sitting, lying flat, creeping, in dark clusters, eight or ten of them — no, a dozen or more, very calm, a nighttime gathering that did not disperse as I watched. Most of them were still, like a whole collection of stuffed toys. Even when I stamped on the deck boards and clapped my hands they hesitated rather than fled, seeming bewildered to see a stranger on their territory. But when I made more noise, waking Sam, the raccoons tumbled away.

The sight of them startled me into health. I went back to bed. In the morning, breakfast in the main house, I told Pa. He just nodded in his preoccupied way, as though he was pretending to listen. It was around this time that Ma had called. I only heard Pa’s side of the conversation, but I knew it was Ma on the line because, between the miao miao at the other end, Pa was saying, “What do you want?… Haven’t you done enough?… We’re cozy, we’re a unit… Just fine,” and hung up.

But he had heard what I’d reported about the raccoons. He put out some leftovers — tomatoes from yesterday’s sauce — then set his alarm. At two in the morning he went out to see if what I’d said was true. He counted eighteen of them, big and small, and had watched for almost an hour.

“They act as if they own the place!” In a sour and disgusted voice he added, “Some of them standing on their hind legs. A few making babies.”

But what seemed to bother him most was that they hadn’t eaten the carefully cooked tomatoes he’d put out. “Those were heirlooms.” He was insulted that, instead, they’d chewed the cedar shingles on the side wall of his office.

Seeing so many of them made him believe that he could smell them everywhere on the property. “It’s a damp and dungy dead-dog stink that I can’t get out of my nose.”

He stopped the bedtime stories, and the talk about “little families” and “good mother,” and now and then went rigid and sniffed and said, “Coons.” And it got worse. Sam left the garage door open one evening after dumping some household trash. The next day we found the barrels we kept there overturned and the plastic bags torn open and picked through — clamshells, Parmesan cheese rind, kale stems, duck bones, and all the rest of the garbage that reminded me that the raccoons were pawing through Pa’s gourmet food, eating some of it but not touching the tomatoes.

“Get a broom, Sam,” Pa said to the garbage scattered on the floor without any emotion, which meant he was furious.

Out of the blue, at dinner that evening, he straightened his head and spoke to the window. “I hate the mindless punctuality of vermin. I hate it that they’re welfare-fussy.” Then loudly, “If those damn people down the hill hadn’t put up those ugly houses and cut down all the trees, we wouldn’t have this problem. I never minded our coons, but we have all their coons, too!”

Three wild turkeys often strutted in the underbrush during the day and roosted in the trees at night. The raccoons killed all three. They didn’t eat them; they clawed at their feathers and gashed their necks with bites.

“Mugged them,” Pa said. “Consider the spite of a fanatic.”

He bought a trap, which was built like a metal cage, and after a few tries — it was sprung without capturing anything — he caught a fat raccoon. In sunlight it was sleepy and pet-like and shy. Pa loaded it into the back of the van and released it at the marsh four miles down the road.

On the way home, he remembered that he needed an inspection sticker for the van. At the filling station, the mechanic asked about the empty trap. Pa told his story. The mechanic smiled and said, “It’ll find its way back. They’re not stupid.”

This was in the office of the filling station, Pa paying for the sticker. Overhearing him, a woman, also waiting, said, “I just hope it’s not a nursing mother.”

“She rescues raccoons,” the mechanic said, laughing.

“There’s too many of them,” Pa said.

“Too many people, you mean,” the woman said.

“They have diseases.”

“People have diseases!”

“Whose side are you on?” Pa said.

The woman had been sitting quietly, but now, blinking in anger, she looked insulted and hurt. She said, “I have a shelter for them. I care for them. They are living creatures. Killing them is cruel.”

Pa said, “Maybe it would be cruel if I were killing them without a reason.”

The woman had been reaching into her bag and stirring the contents. She took out a leaflet and gave it to Pa and left in a hurry. She said, “I know who you are”—probably because of the well-known child custody case. Pa opened the leaflet, a brochure for her animal shelter, where she was shown nursing a baby raccoon with a nipple bottle.

The raccoon he’d let go at the marsh returned to our house, as the garage man had predicted. Pa knew that because he caught it again in his trap. He said it was not a boar; it was the mother raccoon. He released it even farther away, on the far side of the highway. Then he went to the Town Hall with Sam and me, and talked to the wildlife control officer to ask for advice.

The man in Fish and Game wore a khaki shirt with epaulets, a brass badge on his pocket. He looked like a scoutmaster, his hair a buzz cut we called a wiffle. He said, “There’s a two-hundred-dollar fine for what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“You moved it. Against the law.”

“Oh, right. I’m illegal. They’ve got rights.”

“Section twenty. Relocation of wildlife. That’s an offense.”

“You’re protecting coons?”

“We’re too busy for that. Coyotes are the real problem,” the man said. “But raccoons out in the daytime might have rabies.”

“What if I catch a rabid one?”

“You could call us. Or you could deal with it the way we do. Which is destroy the animal. You employing a suitable trap?”

“Yes. A kind of cage trap.” Pa smiled unhappily. “Sometimes I bait it with squashed tomatoes. They don’t eat them. Fussy!”

“Omnivores. Eat anything that fits in their mouth. But the acid in tomatoes doesn’t agree with them. Use peanut butter on crackers.” The man stood to give himself room to explain with gestures. He pushed up his khaki sleeves and said, “Get yourself a barrel. Yay big. Fill it to the brim with water. Making sure the trap is well sprung, immerse the trap containing the animal in the filled barrel. Problem solved.”

The sight of a pop-eyed clawing raccoon fighting for its life, drowning at the top corner of a mostly sunken trap, was something Pa wanted us to see. What I saw was that it is a silent animal except in desperation, and the gagging sounds it made, of hissing and harsh gasping, baring its yellow dog-like teeth, terrified me. It clutched at the cage with hands like mine, black fingers hooked in the mesh.

“Bobby,” I said.

Pa scowled at me, then turned and watched with satisfaction, seeming to relax, as the animal died and sank in its own bubbles, and that night, much happier, Pa made one of his special meals, short ribs, serving the dark meat with, “It’s a delicacy.” But I couldn’t eat, and Sam hardly touched his. Pa said, “All the more for me.”

He reported what he’d done to the wildlife control officer, who said, “Could have had pinworm. Roundworm. You don’t want that. Your raccoon is a host to a lot of parasites.”

And he explained that anyone breathing the dust from the scat of an infected raccoon might die a horrible death from organ failure. Pa bought rubber gloves and a mask and acid, and he went after the scat, scouring it from the decks. After that, whenever someone questioned him for killing the raccoons, he showed his teeth and said, “Pinworm!”

We should have been glad that Pa had something to care about, to take his mind off Ma, but his mood got darker as the raccoons became harder to trap. Judging from the scat piles and the scratch marks, they were just as numerous. Infuriated, muttering “They don’t like tomatoes,” Pa would bait a trap with the remains of one of his meals — herb-crusted salmon, the pounded lobster shells he’d used for the bisque — and the raccoons would eat them without tripping the door latch of the trap, or worse, would trip it without being caught.

“In effect, by sheltering them and feeding them my own food I’ve made them lazier,” he said. “They think they belong. They are eating my house. They do no work. They are living off my labor.”

He put out poison in a dish. They ate it all — rat poison heaped like the pellets and crumble we had fed the wild turkeys. Within a week, the dungy dead-dog smell hung over the deck. We had to pry up the boards to locate the corpses of the raccoons that had hidden themselves under the deck to die.

The animals seemed to fight back. The ones that Pa had poisoned we buried in the garden, but they were dug up and eaten, torn apart by other raccoons. In the stink, the flies, Pa, flailing with his shovel, hissed, “Cannibals.”

We saw more of them in the daytime. “Rabid!” They climbed onto the roof and crept down the chimney. One rainy November day we saw across the yard some wet raccoons, their heads poked above the chimney of Pa’s office, staring down at us.

We didn’t tell Pa. In the past we would have alerted him, but now we knew that he’d stiffen and howl, he’d hurry the meal, burn the croutons, forget the sauce, collapse the soufflé, or else he’d serve us leftovers. Yesterday’s mac and cheese looks the same, but the leftovers of a gourmet meal are unrecognizable and garbage-like. If we objected, he’d insist that we were at war and demand that we help him. He wanted us to be like him. So: we saw evidence of raccoons all the time — scat, scratch marks, chewings — but we became secretive and didn’t say anything.

Sam said in the dark, “I miss Ma.”

I said, “She’s with her friend.”

One night, to cheer ourselves up, we played “Shanghai Lil” on the wind-up.

The door flew open and Pa came in and snatched the phonograph arm so hard he dragged the needle across the record.

“That’s enough of that!”

This was like an invasion: he’d never come into the Boys’ House before. He must have been crouched outside, listening in the dark. But at midnight?

Pa began fighting with the neighbors, and the talk became abusive. He got estimates for a perimeter fence. But when the salesman from the fence company heard what the fence was for, he said, “They’ll climb it. They’d get over it even if it were twenty feet high. They’ll tunnel under it. Hey, I want to sell you a fence, but no fence will keep them out. Fences are porous.”

Pa sent him away, and the next raccoon he caught he kept in the cage, starving it until it could barely move. Then he released it, and when it stumbled he killed it, hacking it with the blade of a shovel.

He bought a powerful air gun. He unpacked it and unfolded the leaflet of directions. “Cette arme n’est pas un jouet,” he read. “La supervision d’un adulte est requise. That’s me. All we need is a coon.” He tried out the gun on the next one he trapped, but the animal cringed, clutched itself, and buried its head in its fur. And didn’t die. Then Pa bought a.22 rifle and fired through the mesh of the trap until the animal was motionless and leaking.

But he knew he was losing. He had been so busy with the raccoons he neglected the usual chores. It was well into fall and he forgot to remove the screens from the sliders. The raccoons clawed and tore holes in them. When Pa got the bill for the repairs to the screens he lectured us loudly on loyalty and vigilance.

In the cold weather, climbing the tree next to the Boys’ House, raccoons got onto the back roof and clawed and chewed the shingles, trying to get into the attic. Pa cut down the tree and called a contractor to send some men over to reshingle the roof.

“And what do we have here?” he said, staring up at the roofers.

His eyes were dark in the daytime and yellowish at night, something I had never noticed before. They were black now as he spoke to someone on the phone: “You sent me Brazilians. I don’t want fruit pickers. I don’t want illegals!”

The frightened men crept away, carrying their ladder. Other workers came in white overalls. The roof cost seven thousand dollars to fix.

“And you want to protect them! You and that crazy old lady with the animal shelter!”

We said we didn’t, we were afraid, and his meals made us anxious. “Coq au vin,” our father said angrily. “Potatoes dauphinoise.” And in the same breath, “What if they get inside? They’ll crawl into your room and eat your face while you’re asleep. You’re a delicacy to a coon.”

Sam began to cry and said, “I hate them.”

“That’s more like it. That’s what I want to hear. Henry?”

He knew I was resisting him. And so, when he discovered that some raccoons had torn out a board from under the threshold of the side door and were living in the Boys’ House basement, he said, “Henry’ll take care of it.”

He set me to work emptying the basement of lawn chairs and chewed life vests and clawed-open cushions and piles of black scat, so much of it that I thought I’d come down with the pinworm disease. I stopped hating Pa for his cruelty and began hating the raccoons for making me do this filthy job.

Thanksgiving came and went. At Christmas, Pa said, “I was going to make herbed turkey again, with oysters. Savory yam purée soufflé. Stuffed mushrooms — breadcrumbs, cream cheese, and Parmesan. But I’m just roasting a bird and mashing some spuds. You can do the rest.”

The phone rang. We knew who it was.

“Let it ring.”

Emptying the trash that night in the garage, I felt the hot doggy stink of wet fur against my face. We had an old Jeep, Pa’s favorite vehicle, for summer rides. I saw that two raccoons were asleep under the back seat. I knew what he’d say. I opened the garage door and pushed the Jeep into the dark driveway.

Pa saw me from an upstairs window and was soon beside me, carrying his rifle. When he poked the animals with the barrel they shrank deeper under the seat.

I said, “They’ll go away if we leave them. After midnight.”

“You think that’s a solution. To let them sneak out of the Jeep. But they won’t go away. They never go away. They’ll stay and have babies. Where will that leave us?” He raised the rifle but didn’t fire it. “How can I? This vehicle is a classic.”

The next day, in sunlight, they were gone. Yet we knew there were too many of them to trap, that we’d never get rid of them. Knowing they were around made us fear Pa the more. Pa got pleasure out of killing them, even if he wasn’t winning. He said that he’d find ways of making them die slowly — poisoning them, dunking them in a three-quarters-full barrel of water and watching them exhaust themselves, starving them in the trap. “Know what? I’d like to crucify one.”

He had one subject only. He’d strike up conversations with strangers just to hear their views on raccoons. “Got any coons over your way?” Or, instead of “coons,” he’d say “vermin” or “bandits.” If they didn’t agree with him, he raged.

“Everything is sorcery,” he said one morning. His eyes were reddish. He hadn’t slept. He’d stayed awake at night to spy on the animals. He’d begun keeping raccoon hours. “Business. Law. Religion. All sorcery.” He took a deep breath. I thought he was going to cry. He said, “And all of this.”

Until now he’d kept Ma away — refused her calls or put the phone down. But one night after dinner, we heard him say, “You again,” in the whisper we recognized from before.

I signaled to Sam to duck down by the window. We couldn’t see him, but we could hear him clearly.

“You think I don’t know you’re back,” he said. “But I do. I could smell you before I saw you, and now you think you’re going to take over the house while I stand idly by.”

We became hopeful. Ma was home. He was talking with the bullying confidence of a lawyer, facing the darkness outside the screen door where a shadow was apparent.

“You think I’m just going to throw my hands up and surrender after all the work I’ve done,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. I warn you — I’m dangerous.”

Fearing for Ma, we crept around the house to the door, and it was then we saw the masked face and the snout and the greasy fur.

He made sketches for a complicated mobile trap that was built into our van, that would lure them inside, and once they were inside he’d poison them and drive them to the dump. “Efficiency.” He knew, as we did, that they were intelligent: they could smell a trap, and they were smarter in their way than Pa. And sometimes it seemed as though they knew that Pa was after them and they were deliberately targeting him as a result, out of pure spite — chewing his chairs, fouling his vehicle, clawing the weatherstripping at his office door.

They were a nuisance, but Pa called them evil, and in his frustration and fear he seemed worse. All that the raccoons knew was what raccoons knew, but Pa had the advantage of being a whole man, a once powerful attorney. He’d lost interest in investing, or maybe the investors had lost interest in him. Sam and I didn’t pity him anymore. He slept in his chair during the day and stayed up at night, monitoring his traps, and he’d stopped his gourmet cooking, or any cooking.

“I eat anything that fits into my mouth.”

He woke up after we got home from school. “You can fix yourselves something. Just don’t make a mess.” But the house was always messy, and the outside was booby-trapped. He did not repair the clawed shingles or bitten doorframes anymore. He wanted them as proof, he said, to justify his methods.

One of his cuff links went missing. “They like shiny things.” He believed that a raccoon had taken it, and his keys too, when he couldn’t find them.

I tried to recall our first sight of the raccoons, as furry masked cuddly creatures. But I couldn’t. I could only see them as vicious and bewildered and pathetic, like Pa.

Sam stumbled into a trap and sprung it and cut his leg on the sharp metal edge.

“Serves you right,” Pa said. “Now I have to set it again.”

One winter day Pa’s chair creaked as he sat up straight. He had been sleeping but heard something, a car in the driveway. He squinted as though a raccoon was approaching, and he eyed Ma slipping out of the car as if he had eyed an animal.

When she came inside the house, he said, “Where’s your friend?”

“Away,” she said. “For various reasons.” We hadn’t seen her for a year. She was wearing a warm fleece jacket that we recognized, and ski pants, and sturdy shoes. But her face was sad and pale, and she seemed uneasy. “What’s that funny smell?”

“They have scent glands in their armpits,” Pa said.

She hugged us, and when I felt her arms I could tell she was thinner. She pressed her head against us as if in prayer, then said, “Let’s go outside.”

The day was still and cold, ice crusts on the brown grass, frozen dewdrops on the dead leaves, an animal smell in the windless air.

“We’ve got raccoons.”

“I wish I could help,” she said, but she looked nervous.

Pa had followed us out to the gravel path. He said, “Everyone’s got raccoons. You’d just make it worse.”

Ma stared at him, surprised, as though seeing a stranger. That was not the sort of thing he’d ever said to her before. He was awarded custody because he was kind, reasonable, helpful, forgiving — nurturing, was how he put it to the judge. But he had a thin, mean face now, dimly lit and sunken eyes, unshaven cheeks, and discolored teeth. Normally he would not have been awake at this time. Ma had disturbed him.

She said, “I’ve missed you boys so much.”

We told her we’d missed her too, but in a low voice so that Pa wouldn’t hear.

“I’ve got a job now. I do counseling. I have a full caseload.” She shoved her cuff back from her wrist and looked at her watch. “I’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

Sam said, “Can we come with you?”

She saw that I had the same question on my face. She didn’t say anything. She looked up at Pa, who was standing like a sentry with his hands behind his back.

“Take them.” His eyes were weirdly lit, and he was pale and spiky-haired from sleeping all day. “What good are they here? They think it’s all a joke. They don’t realize how much is at stake.” He turned away. “I’ve got my hands full.”

Without another word, he crossed the lawn and headed back to the house, leaving the lights off, as he did these evenings, so that he was better able to see the animals. When I looked back, I saw him staring with yellow eyes at Ma leading us away from him.