The Story Of Jeremiah Pettibone

When we half-dozen neighborhood kids first met him, we did not know his name and called him Sir, because in those days, respect for adults was a matter that required no conscious thought, sort of like breathing.

As we stood in his “yard,” consisting of dirt and pine needles, milling about, as unsure 5th and 6th graders are wont to do in a completely unplanned situation, he came to the open door of his shack. He was dressed in overalls, with no shirt, and barefooted. The thing that caught our eyes immediately was his large necklace of huge teeth.

“You boys lost?”

We spoke in unison. “Yes sir!” “No sir!” “Sort of!” “Maybe!” “Sir?”

We had happened upon his place entirely by accident, following an old, narrow overgrown dirt road, barely recognizable as such, near our favorite haunt, The Canyon, the scene of many camping trips, blackbird hunts, bike races and dirt clod battles. That Autumn afternoon, we had decided to go explore the area on the other side of the long downhill gravel road that led to our beloved gravel pit. Perhaps we would find another Canyon. Perhaps even one loaded with gold. Or at least silver.

We could not discern his ethnicity or age. Of course, preteens cannot tell the difference between a 30-year-old and a 70-year-old. We just knew he had been around a while, but we weren’t interested in that stuff. It was the necklace!

Someone asked, “Sir, what’s that?” and pointed.

He grinned, showing a few gold teeth, took a seat in an old rocking chair on the dilapidated front porch, picked up a long thin stick from a pile of long thin sticks and started whittling.

“Them’s gator teeth,” he said, as if everybody should have known that.

“Gator? Like alligator?” We all moved up onto the porch to get a better look. “Where’d you buy that?”

“Buy?” he snorted, and we immediately knew that was an insult.

“Well, where’d you kill him?”

“Him?” He snorted again, and we knew we were in over our heads.

“Boy, I tooken a tooth outta most ever gator I ever kilt to make this heah necklace.”

Our little crowd gave an audible gasp, and Ducky even took a couple of steps back. We knew we were in the presence of unfathomable greatness.

“As t’ th’ matter o’ wheah,” he continued, “Most uv ‘em come from Black Creek Bayou. That’s on th’ utter end o’ Pontchatrain ‘bout fitty mile nawth o’ Nawlins.”

“Nawlins?” several of us asked.

The more intelligent of our group, Leon, who had not failed geography, said, “New Orleans.” When we all looked at Leon and remained silent, he raised his palms and eyes to the heavens and said, “Louisiana!” When still no one replied, he said, almost pitifully, “One of our southern states?” Several of us said, “Ohhhh, Louisiana,” as if we could have identified it on a map. Leon hung his head as if he were ashamed to be in our company.

“How many teeth are there, Sir?” someone asked.

The old man barely looked up and kept on whittling. He studied a moment and said, “Upards of a hunnert, I speck,” which elicited a murmur of awe from our little crowd.

“Sir, what did you do with the rest of the alligators? I mean, besides the teeth?”

He replied, “Fust of all, son, I ain’t used t’ bein’ sirred. Name’s Pettibone. Jeremiah Gustave Toutont Pettibone. And I sold ’em. Tha’s mostly whut I did fer a livin’ fore I re-tired. I got tired, then I got re-tired.”

He glanced up to see if we appreciated his little play on words. We didn’t. We were too stupid. He continued, “They was skint and sold to pro-cessors. Made some fine belts and purses and such from them hides. An’ the meat made some fine add-itions t’ jambalaya.”

“Mr. Pettibone, what’s jamaliar?”

He grinned… “Like a gumbo, son, but made with rice. My mamere made the bes’ jambalaya around.”

Ducky said, “Your who?”

Mr. Pettibone repeated, “Mamere. Tha’s who you would call yo’ granma-ma.”

Ducky countered, in only the way an uncouth, uncultured, 12-year-old could. “How come you talk so funny?”

Mr. Pettibone looked straight at Ducky and replied, “Lemme say dis bout dat.” He raised his eyebrows and continued,  “If’n we was on da bayou, you’d be da one talkin’ funny.”

Bubblehead, undaunted by, and probably oblivious to, the conversation about accents, asked, “What’s that you’re whittling, Mr. Pettibone?”

He replied, “This is gonna be a cage. I’m hopin’ t’ cotch me a Rougarou.”

I think everyone said simultaneously, “A what?”

He patiently replied, “A Rougarou. What you would call a werewolf.”

Never have eyes and open mouths been wider than were ours, standing on that porch in the presence of that strange man. That man with a hundred teeth from prehistoric animals hanging about his neck. That man whose language we could barely discern. That seemingly wise man who was, obviously sincerely, constructing a cage to trap a horrifying monster we had only seen at the movies.

After a short eternity, though my eyes were still wide enough to see my own ears, my mouth must have been the first to close, because I said,  probably too loudly, “Werewolf?”

“We calls ‘em Rougarou down home. Fer the past couple nights, I think I heared one down in th’ holla behin’ my house heah.”

Bubblehead fell off the porch. Fortunately, it was only a foot off the ground.

Mr. Pettibone said, “You awright, Cher?”

Bubblehead, from a prone position, replied, “I’m Bubblehead. I’m not Cher.”

“Na, na, son. Cher means dear one or little one.”

Leon said, “I don’t think he’s either one of those, Mr. Pettibone,” and the old man grinned.

While Bubblehead was righting his rotund self to regain his footing and his dignity, Ronnie asked, “Mr. Pettibone, Those sticks don’t look big enough to make a cage to hold a Rogoro.”

“Rougarou,” the singular old man corrected. “Na, the cage’ll hold th’ bait. I’ll put in some critter that’ll squeal and put up a fuss to attrack him, get him in gun range.”

Someone asked, “You going to use silver bullets?”

Mr. Pettibone grunted, “Son, if’n I had enough money to make bullets outta silver, I wouldn’t be livin’ heah.”

Someone else asked, “What kind of gun you going to use, Sir?”

He replied, “I’ll show you,” and he got up and waded through the knot of kids surrounding him and disappeared into the little house.

We didn’t follow. First, we weren’t invited in, and second, it was dark in there. He returned in a few moments with an ancient single shot, the likes of which we had never seen before. The barrel was as big as a water pipe. He was getting used to silence and wide eyes now, so he didn’t wait for the question.

“It’s a 8 gauge. They don’t make ’em no more. My Pap was one o’ dem commercial duck hunters. I use’ta go wit him when I was about the size of our retrievin’ dawg. He wait til the birds got lined up on the wata jes right.” At this point he raised the huge weapon to his shoulder and yelled “Kerblammy! He’d let her loose! An’ when the smoke cleared, they’d be 20 or 30 ducks layin’ out dar.”

Again, we were speechless, looking in the direction he had the shotgun pointed as if we could see a half acre of dead ducks.

Leon said, “He’s not going to need any silver bullets.”

It was getting late, and we had to get home. If you weren’t in your yard when the street light came on, you’d be better off in the woods with a rabid Rougarou.

I asked, “Mr. Pettibone, can we come back to see you?”

He frowned and studied a minute. “I reckon that’ll be awright,” and we smiled and scampered off down the trail.

We returned to the old man’s shack the next Saturday morning. He was sitting in the rocking chair drinking coffee. By his side was the completed cage and lo and behold, it held a live cottontail.

“Where did you get the rabbit, Mr. Pettibone?”

“Rabbits is easy to come by. Rougarous ain’t.”

“You going to set it out today?”

“Tonight, son, tonight.”

And we all had the same thought. Leon asked, “Can we watch?”

He took another sip of coffee and replied, “I don magine yo folks is gonna let you come down heah at night.”

We were way ahead of him. Camping trip.

We would tell our parents we were going to the Canyon, like always. We certainly weren’t going to say we were spending the night at a shack in the woods to watch a crazy man kill a werewolf with a cannon. That would be, shall we say, ill advised and would probably have resulted in immediate institutionalization or at least checked for a fever and sent to bed. Or whipped half to death for telling whoppers. You never knew what parents might do.

“We go camping all the time down near here, Mr. Pettibone. They don’t mind.”

We told him we would be back by dark and scampered off to tell our Moms and Dads of the ensuing trip and gather our camping gear. By the time we arrived back at the little cabin, the sun was getting low. Mr. Pettibone was not at his usual station on the porch, so a couple of us sidled up to the open door and peered into the darkening gloom. The one room was sparsely furnished with a single bedstead upon which lay a ratty bare mattress, a single small table with a tiny, barely lit kerosene lamp and oversized wash basin, a single chair, a pot-bellied stove, assorted pots and pans and clothing and a couple of huge rattlesnake hides hanging on the walls. He didn’t pay utility bills. Obviously the residence of a man of no means. And little care. We loved it.

As we were admiring his basic decor, he appeared in the back door. “You boys ready to git a Rougarou?”

“Yessir!”

“Jest you two?”

“Nosir! The rest are out front.”

“Tell ‘em to scoot round back.”

We jumped off of the front porch and told the guys to come on, and they dumped the camping  gear and followed us around the side of the shack. In the back was an old roofed high stone well with a bucket and a handled rope spindle, just like you might see on a greeting card. On the left about 30 feet away was an outhouse, complete with a quarter moon carved into the door. Same greeting card. Speaking of moons, an almost full one was rising over the woods in the clear sky behind the house.

The old man stood by the well with his huge shotgun facing the woods. We gathered around, and he said quietly, “I jest set th’ rabbit cage out down thar,” and he pointed. In the deepening twilight, we could make out the Rougarou trap about 30 yards away.

“Now listen,” he said… and we all strained to hear.

Leon whispered, “Perfect werewolf weather.”

I had never heard a rabbit make a sound before. But this one was intermittently squealing, almost pleading. I whispered, “What now, Mr. Pettibone?”

He whispered back, “We wait.”

And wait we did. I don’t know if you are aware, but it is an anthropologically confirmed fact, stated in several scholarly journals, that a 12-year-old cannot remain still or silent for more than 4 minutes. Yet we stood or squatted or sat like stone statues for approximately one hour and uttered nary a word nor made a sound. The moon was well up in the sky. And then it happened.

The hammer on the gun made an almost inaudible click. We strained mightily to see the cage in the moonlight. Movement! The little rabbit ceased his plaintiff cries. There was an unmistakable shuffling in the leaves near the cage. The old man raised his gun and “Whoom!!!”

It was like standing next to a turret of the U.S.S. Alabama. It rendered us almost incapable of hearing, and fire shot 10 feet out of the barrel, temporarily ruining our night vision. We were struck blind and deaf in a single moment. But even with the ringing in our ears, we could hear a prolonged and ungodly scream from the vicinity of the cage. And it certainly wasn’t the rabbit.

As the old man strode toward the banshee shrieks, reloading as he went, we terror stricken kids went to the four winds. Except yours truly of course. I was then and have been all my life subject to a predictable phenomenon involving the central nervous system. Most people, in times of extreme stress and release of adrenaline, experience the “fight or flight” syndrome, enabling them to either run away very fast or protect themselves ferociously. I just freeze in place, unable to react in any way, just standing there to be killed and eaten. However, this condition did allow me to witness the entire scene and observe the actions of everyone else.

Bubblehead tried to climb into the well. Fortunately, he was too short and chubby and did not fall to his death. Instead, he scrambled up and ran into the back door of the cabin. Bobby fainted dead away. He was not too bright anyway, and my theory is that he experienced a mental overload and simply shut down. He hit the ground like a sack of dropped potatoes. I spotted Leon on the roof of the shack. How he got there, I have no idea to this day and neither does he. He remembered standing by the well and he remembered being on the roof, but had no recollection of anything in between. Ducky ran into the outhouse and slammed the door behind him. In a matter of seconds, the door burst open again and he took a couple of steps out, put his hands on his knees and gagged. With the screams of the Rougarou still echoing, he made a dash for the front of the house.

Being immobile in place not only allowed me to watch all these things, but to philosophize for a moment. As I stood there, I remembered something I had thought of when I was 10 years old. It dawned on me at that time that I was going to live forever. But I was two years older now and in imminent danger of a terrifying death, and it occurred to me how stupid I was when I was young.

As my limbs began to work again and Bobby regained consciousness, Mr. Pettibone walked up, shotgun barrel still smoking and dumped a 20-lb. bobcat on the ground in front of us. The old man said, “I watched him for a minute or two. Rougarous is shapeshifters. I spected he might change into sumpin’ else. Maybe that ol’ conjur woman what lives down th’ road. But it weren’t to be. It’s jest a bobcat.”

It wasn’t just a bobcat. It was the biggest bobcat I had ever seen before or since.

Leon climbed down from the roof and we admired the trophy Mr. Pettibone had taken. Then we looked for Bubblehead and Ducky and Ricky. We found Bubblehead cowering behind the potbellied stove in the shack. He was covered in soot, indicating he had tried to climb into the thing before hiding behind it. We found Ducky in the front yard hiding under a bedsheet we used as a tent. It would have been a good place to hide from an enraged Rougarou except the sheet was quivering violently. We did not find Ricky. Unbeknownst to us, he had taken off down the road when the bobcat screamed and was home in bed by the time we were looking for him. Leon prognosticated such. It is amazing he knew what happened to Ricky, but did not know how he himself ended up on the roof.

Mr. Pettibone said he would skin the cat the next morning. Bobby asked what happened to the rabbit. Mr. Pettibone said he didn’t think the rabbit made it. Neither did the cage. You know, 8 gauge and all.

We erected our bedsheet tents in the front yard, politely refused the old man’s offer of supper (leftover fried possum stored in a burlap bag) and settled down for a completely sleepless night.

We came back the next weekend and saw the bobcat hide took up a large part of one wall inside the cabin. We visited the old man most weekends for the better part of the next three months. We often discussed the “Night of the Rougarou” and our individual perceptions of that event changed somewhat. Leon said he had climbed up on the roof to get a better view. Ricky said he had run home to get a skinning knife. Ducky said he was looking for a flashlight in the camping gear. Bubblehead said he was putting ash on his face for camouflage before going back outside to help Mr. Pettibone. I think I may have even bragged about my ability to stand my ground.

Mr. Pettibone never challenged any of our explanations. He did chuckle occasionally. And as fall began to turn to winter, he mentioned more and more often about how he missed Black Creek Bayou and the gators.

So, it should not have surprised us…

The last time we visited the shack, we knew something was different when we walked into the yard. The rocking chair was gone. We looked in the door. The stove and bedstead were there, but nothing else. The hides, clothes, pots, pans, lamp, washbasin, all gone. Along with the old man. Then we spotted it.

A note, written with a charcoal stick on a big piece of cardboard nailed to the back wall. It said, “Back to La. For my brave boys. J.G.T. Pettibone.”

We were puzzled, until Leon took the cardboard off the nail. And there hung the necklace.