The old house in process of being torn down. They haven’t reached the portal to Hell yet.

“He’s dead. In the house. Call someone!” Crying, beating on our door, repeating, again and again. “He tore up the house, said there was a door to Hell. And now he’s dead.”

Our neighbor knocked on our door, over and over, until we were finally awakened out of the delicious dreams of an afternoon nap. She was crying; her four children were huddled in their beat-up truck, while their dog circled around, upsetting our dogs.

— — — -

About 8 years ago, there was a family who lived down the street named Martinez*. The man was from Mexico and his wife was from Columbia, Tennessee. They were in their mid-30's. They had four children, from about ages 13 down to 2. The man, named Rodrigo, spoke very broken English, but he was genial enough and offered us delicacies such as hot spicy crickets (I ate one…just one). Since he worked construction, we decided to ask him if he’d undertake to build a dog fence for us.

He and his eldest son built us a dog fence for the ages — well-anchored, taut, functional, everything we asked for. It is still in pretty good shape today. By the end of it, my husband and Rodrigo had hit it off. Rodrigo was a hard worker and exacting in his standards. My husband shared Topo Chico and coffee with him on his breaks, and they conversed as well as is possible with someone who speaks little English. His oldest son, however, was bilingual, so we usually had an on-site translator. The fence was done in about two weeks. We paid Rodrigo and he went on to his other job, a concrete laying job for the state.

Within the month, we began to see Rodrigo wandering up and down the street, muttering, saying he was looking for his wife, who had run off with a “man on a horse.” His wife, Jamie, had not run off at all. She sometimes drove their beat-up truck down to our place looking for him. One time, we peeped furtively out our windows as we watched Rodrigo circling our house, knife at the ready in his hand, an intense look on his face, crouching to look beneath our porch as if he were looking for something.

Jamie came to us one night, having lost track of Rodrigo once again. She said he had ripped up the upholstery on the couch “looking for the door to Hell.” Their house looked like a war zone. Tufts of couch stuffing strewn about, toys, mewling kittens, the children huddled in one room. We didn’t find Rodrigo that night, but the next day he found my husband and asked him to drive him to the nearest town to our north, as Jamie had the truck and he needed to meet a man for an appointment.

By this time, we realized that Rodrigo was abusing drugs, but we weren’t sure what kind. My husband drove Rodrigo along back roads while Rodrigo held a knife on him, still muttering about his wife running off and Hell in his living room, then all sorts of things in Spanish he couldn’t translate. He asked to be let out along a road that had no businesses, and the houses were in various states of disrepair.

My husband felt bad for him, but he was glad to get the ride over with. He had a hidden derringer in his sock in case Rodrigo got violent, but he really hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He gave Rodrigo a $20 bill and let him out.

That was a couple of weeks before Jamie came crying to our door, saying he was dead. We called 9–1–1 for her and let her use our phone to call the myriad relatives on both sides of the family, tearful explanations in English, then in Spanish, the gathering vehicles in our yard, children playing in our garden and delighted by our dogs, who seemed to be somewhat put out by the activity.

Nearly an hour later, the police and an ambulance arrived down the street at Jamie and Rodrigo’s house. He was lying in the kitchen and had been dead awhile. The ambulance took him away, and the police car drove to our place and asked us all about it. Everything began around midday; by 5 p.m., our yard held perhaps 25 people, relatives and friends, their children and a couple dogs (besides ours). It was like hosting someone else’s funeral at our house.

When I think back on Jamie and Rodrigo’s house, which was torn down about 2 years later, I remembered the occupants in series. First there had been a middle-aged couple who accused us of stealing from them when they pushed things on us to sell online that never sold. (We returned them, while they said we had “switched items”-nasty story). Second was a dysfunctional family that split up; the man kept the house but then moved suddenly, abandoning his pregnant boxer girl who became our dog and birthed Kamikaze (good luck for us!). Third was the unfortunate Martinez family.

By the time they had dragged poor dead Rodrigo out of the kitchen, it was clear the house was unredeemable. No inside water, a backed up septic system, termites, torn out walls (from Rodrigo’s search for the portal to Hell). It wouldn’t be a long stretch to posit that the house was cursed, would it? None of the families who lived there in my memory prospered. But then again, this is rural Tennessee, and I think 75% of the families around here are dysfunctional in one way or another.

Right now, a nice older couple lives on the property, but they had the sense to tear down the house and start anew. Their place is nicely kept up, with two (mostly) well-behaved dogs who look after maybe half a dozen goats. Unless there is something I don’t know about them, it seems that the portal to Hell may have been closed by removing the house. But really, that house needed tearing down anyway, portal to Hell or not.

We attended Rodrigo’s funeral in Lewisburg, Tennessee. He had been a nice person, a victim of drug addiction, and we were always grateful to him for helping us out. It was a solemn Catholic affair, but the attendees were all very pleasant and appropriately quiet. It seemed like an old-time funeral, less like the modern middle-class affairs where half the people are concerned about the buffet afterwards and the other half are angling for a bequest from the deceased. It was a sad but colorful chapter in our chronicles of life in rural backwater Tennessee.

*All names have been changed for this story.