Angel in Disguise?

Angel in Disguise?

Over the course of the eight years my family lived as caretakers on Springcreek Christian Camp, toward Memorial Day Weekend we learned to watch for the summer volunteers who’d come shimmering down the lane in their RVs and Winnebagos like a caravan of exotic camels. The majority were wealthy retired couples who had nothing better to do with their time besides table tennis, tea drinking, and their version of volunteer work. On the camp, this did not change. The wives occupied themselves by sipping beverages beneath one another’s striped awnings and, in between ping pong sets, daintily plucking at the flower beds while wearing coordinating sun hats and gardening gloves. The husbands were no better. Their hands were pasty and soft like a vat of unattended yeast. Many of them wore gold chains around their sagging necks and starched Lacoste shirts tucked into kaki shorts.

Despite these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, the male volunteers approached manual labor with such eagerness my father wondered if they’d spent years in their high-rise, air conditioned offices yearning to be the guy outside the window scraping loose jelled bug and bird droppings. Father said it would’ve been safer for everyone involved if these male volunteers had just stayed inside their offices. Time and time again, Father would return from having spent hours on the camp with a longer list of things to repair than when he”d first went down: tools were lost; filed fingernails were smashed and bloodied; windows were shattered; the wrong color was painted on a cabin when the volunteers had been given the specific name and brand to purchase. When it was time for these volunteers to return to their condos in the Keys, my parents could barely conceal their sigh of relief as they shook the volunteers’ bandaged hands and watched their caravan leave in a cloud of dust.

It is no wonder Mother almost fainted when she found a note from the camp’s director, Jim Gentry, that a volunteer would be living in one of the cabins for an indeterminate amount of time. His name was Gerald Bear, and I’ve never met anyone whose last name fit him more. His body was coated with coarse black hair as if he’d been dipped in Karo syrup and rolled in a bear rug for 10 years. His social graces even resembled those of a bear. When Mother invited him for supper that first week, he barely communicated more than a guttural humph and a hand-shake that would’ve made Goliath tremble. During the meal, he hunched over his chili and sloshed it up to his mouth like the utensil was more shovel than spoon. When he couldn’t get everything from the bottom of the bowl, he stuck his round, furry face down into it and began slurping the sides. I smothered my laughter behind my hands until a stern look from Mother silenced me completely.

Soon after Gerald’s arrival, we noticed distinct patches of barrenness in the camp woods as if a toddler had shaved chunks out of his daddy’s hair while he’d been taking his Sunday nap. Endless twisting trails were being hacked out of the forest that led to nowhere. Rickety bridges began spanning wash-out streams that ran one month of the year. Billboard-sized scripture verses were nailed to plywood and punched into the earth on eight feet posts. Each letter of the verses was carefully cut out and nailed together from pieces of Father’s scrap lumber. (Gerald Bear must’ve gathered everything at night, for we never saw him during the day.)

Mother, though, was the one who suffered the most from Gerald’s awkward mannerisms and eccentricities. The 50-item, camp cleaning list became almost impossible to complete. Every time Mother cleaned something, she would go to check it off and see muddied boot tracks marring her freshly mopped floor. The bathhouse became a horror to behold: that man shed more hair than an angora bunny. From the detritus of cans on countertops and macaroni and cheese crusted in the bottom of pots, Mother guessed Gerald gobbled his meals straight from their cartons, and when something had to be cooked, left whatever he didn’t finish to mold on the stove. Mother was required to clean all cabins–even Gerald’s. His sheets were so dirty Mother couldn’t get out the ground-in grime even if she scrubbed them with Clorox until her hands cracked. She bought him a new set of sheets, but his grooming habits did not change. They were soon just as bad as the ones before.

Half a year after Gerald came to stay at the camp, my two-year-old brother Caleb disappeared. He’d been playing with a toy dump truck in the front yard while Mother sat on the porch steps, talking to Aunt Cheryl on the phone. Mother ran inside to grab a number from the address book, and when she returned, Caleb was gone. She hung up and dashed inside the house where she searched closets, cupboards, and beneath beds. She checked the backyard, under the porches, and inside the chicken coop. By the time 20 minutes had lapsed, she knew Caleb was truly lost. A heady concoction of panic and adrenaline coursed through her. Father didn’t have a cell phone, and he hadn’t left his job site’s number. Mother called Iola Copeland and asked if she could contact the neighbors to help search while she continued looking for her son.

Mother felt a churning in her gut when she realized the one place she hadn’t thought to look: the pond. Without wasting seconds to put shoes on her feet, Mother began running down the hill toward it. The water glistened and flashed through the trees like a shark slapping its tail on the surface of the sea. Gravel and shards of flint pierced her feet, but she continued. Once she hit the grassy lip surrounding the pond, she darted toward the dock and — grasping the beam a moment — peered over the edge. Nothing was in the water. Shuddering a sigh, she circled the water’s edge and crossed the wooden bridge and stone pathway toward the spring. But Caleb was nowhere to be found. Mother cut through the steep patch of woods behind the springhouse and soon entered our back yard. Six cars were already parked in the driveway, and three more spewed dust as they roared down the camp’s lane. An hour had almost passed, and all the camp’s buildings had been checked except for Gerald’s cabin.

David Alton Sr. took off his cap and brushed fingers through his thin hair. “It’s locked,” he said.

After weeks spent cleaning his cabin, Mother knew he’d never locked it before.

“We need to call 911,” Mother murmured.

The police came within 15 minutes. They combed the fields of the camp and farm while squawking instructions to one another in black walkie talkies. One police officer stayed behind to question Mother. Her responses were incoherent through her violent crying, but she continued to doggedly reply. At 1:00 p.m., one and a half hours since Caleb’s disappearance, my older brother Joshua returned from Shady Maple High. Driving up the lane and seeing the cops and neighbors searching the fields, he too began fearing the worst. When Joshua found Mother hunched on the porch steps while the police officer assailed her with questions, he threw the officer a look and wrenched her away.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

Her silence was his only answer.

“Where’s Caleb?”

Mother shrugged her shoulders and began to cry, biting her fist in her mouth. Joshua waited for no more information but began running down the hill toward the cabins in his ropers, his John Deere hat flying off with the intensity of his speed.

The chief of police had just made the call to bring in the helicopter and blood hounds when Gerald Bear came plodding over the field beside the camp’s lane, gently carrying Caleb in his arms. Our two dogs, Daisy and Duke, trailed behind them with loopy, drooling grins like they were part of some parade. As the police officers, neighbors, and my mother and brother surged around them, Caleb tugged on Gerald’s shirt and pointed. “Ook, Bear, ossifers!”

When the police interrogated Gerald about the incident, he was silent for a few minutes and then haltingly said, “I heard the b-oy was l–lost when they were outside my c-cabin. I tried to find him, and I d-id by following the do-gs.”

Caleb didn’t remember much about his two mile trek across the field, but sometimes he did ask, “Momma, where’s Bear?”

“I don’t know,” Mother replied, brushing a hand through Caleb’s white-blond hair while glancing at Father. “He’s gone.”

For the day Gerald Bear returned Caleb to us, we never saw or heard from him again. All he left behind was a ball of dirtied sheets, billboard-sized Bible verses, and twisting trails leading nowhere.

(Although the character of Gerald Bear is based on a person who came to stay on the camp where my family lived and worked as caretakers for eight years, and my then two-year-old brother, Caleb, did disappear one spring day and was found two miles away by a gentle giant of a neighbor man, the correlation between Gerald Bear and Caleb’s disappearance is entirely fictionalized.)