The House Where the Devil Lives

You can see him between the railings on the porch, beneath the aloe and hen-and-chick plants. A dark shadow. This is where he waits and when you walk by he thrusts his head through the railing and lets out an endless string of furious cries. He is pitch black–and when I say black, I mean BLACK. I used to think it was just a dog on the front porch, but now I know that this creature is something else–confined to his little front porch of a hell, he knows nothing but the railings and the world of freedom and movement that dangles outside, torturing him. His cries are not angry, but madness and despair.

My dog and I walk this street everyday, sometimes several times. Rooster is a great dog and I walk him without a leash. The neighborhood kids run out to pet him and say, “Hey Rooster!”. Charlie, a few houses over leaves bones and scraps in his yard and we always have stop for Rooster to nose through the grass and find the treats. But when we reach the fringe of the neighborhood something changes in my dog, and me. We get quieter and pick up our pace. When we go by the house, the fur along Rooster’s back lifts and his ears fold back, long before the Devil even knows we’re approaching. I wonder what Rooster thinks as we go by and he slinks away from the house as the Devil lashes out through the railings. I know that he thinks what I do: what a place of misery and unhappines. That poor Devil, who was once a dog, forever behind that prison of latticework and railings and aloe plants, never feeling grass or dirt, never trailing a scent, except his own shit and piss, his brain rotting from not being able to be the kind of creature that God intended him to be.

My neighborhood is one of the oldest in Baton Rouge (and Louisiana for that matter), designed by Captain Elias Toutant Beauregard who decided to use his land holdings in the late 1700′s to lay out a town designed on the Grand manner of european cities–a town with plazas, formal gardens and public buildings. The grid of the neighborhood is one of the few remaining examples of the Manor Style of urban design in the United States–the most famous one being Washington, DC. We walk this neighborhood in the afternoons, cris-crossing along the streets named after famous Europeans (Napoleon, St. Charles, Maximillian) that run east-west and those named after European territories (Spain, France, Louisiana) that run north-south. Once a place for upper-echelon whites, it became a mostly black neighborhood during the “white flight” that proceeded integration, but is now a “transitional” neighborhood in which young professionals are moving in and remodeling the homes, boosting property values. It’s the most wonderful mix of all types of people. It is a beautiful place, just blocks from the Mississippi River and, as you walk along the crumbling sidewalks, you can feel the very pulse of the North American continent as it drains down from Canada and the Ohio Valley. The streets are lined with crepe myrtles and this time of the year the delicate fucia petals pile up along the curbs and in the cracks in the sidewalks, and litter the hood of your car and bunch up on the windshield wipers. It’s funny how something so beautiful can also be so messy, I think.

The devil does not believe that Beauregard town is a beautiful place. Sometimes at night when I sit on my porch overlooking the neighborhood, I can hear his mad cries a few blocks away, barking at what I don’t know. Another dog? The moon? At the lattice and aloe demons that now must constitute his mind? I wonder what kind of person gets an animal as big and beautiful and intelligent as a dog and locks them in such a prison, only to throw some food and water their way and otherwise neglect them? For what, for protection? To guard the house?  What fury would be unleashed on the world should that lattice come down?