The McGuire Place Tradition

I had never had the poor fortune of spending the night in the old McGuire place. I arrived in Carrolton the summer of my seventh-grade year, dragged to this new house by my father’s promotion and the rising cost of living in the town we left behind. After hearing the tales from the gang on May Street though, I have often felt gratitude that I arrived one year too late to take part in that childhood ritual.

Stevie, Roger, and Will accepted me so easily into their fold from the start. Even from our initial meeting in the woods behind our neighborhood, they never once made me feel as if I was the new guy in town. At the time I wrote it off as small-town friendliness, but I have often thought back and wondered if it was more out of a need to fill the missing hole in their foursome.

Whatever the reason, I enjoyed many warm summer nights of baseball in the park, riding bicycles to town events, and of course, our (as we liked to call them), “expeditions” into the strip of pine barrens dividing our row of homes from the industrial area that made up the edge of Carrolton. It was also for this reason that I was so much less reluctant to begin the seventh-grade then when I had first stepped off the moving truck.

I look back on that summer with fond memories, with the exception of one key night.

***

The last Friday night before school began, the boys and I were laughing in a tent in Roger’s backyard, one of those large domed monstrosities that is too heavy and too poorly constructed to take on any real camping trip, but makes for the perfect hideaway for four pre-teens on a warm August night. Stevie was reenacting Will’s unfortunate miss of a fly ball earlier in the day, a miss that had resulted in a pretty impressive shiner around Will’s left eye.

The laughing had just subsided when Roger spoke. “Noah had a shiner that summer,” he said simply, pointing at his left eye. A silence fell over the group, some social contract broken as Will fidgeted nervously and Stevie examined his fingernails with a sense of false purpose.

This was not the first time I had heard Noah’s name. It would come up on occasion, one of the boys telling a story or making a comment such as Roger’s. No one had ever explained Noah’s absence and I had never asked, having the good sense (even at 13 years old), to occasionally keep my mouth shut at the right time. I assumed he had simply moved away, or even that the group had a falling out, the kind that tore friends apart for the long term.

“His dad gave it to him,” Stevie finally replied. This piqued my interest. Never had a discussion about Noah continued; I assumed he was too much missed for the boys to give him more real estate in the conversation than a brief mention or two.

“I didn’t know that,” said Will. Tears in his eyes reflected the light from our battery-powered Coleman lantern in the center of the tent.

“Yeah. He said it wasn’t the first time his old man had hit him, but it was the first time it was in the face.”

The boys fell silent again, interrupted by only the occasional brief rustling of a sleeping bag. I waited for more, but it seemed the conversation had come to an end. I had just started to drift off, exhausted from another day of vacation adventures, when I heard one of the boys sit up.

“Noah was our friend,” said Stevie, breaking through the first tendrils of sleep. “We grew up together.” There was a pause. “He went missing last summer.”

I sat up as well. “Missing?” I asked. “Like he got kidnapped?”

Stevie shook his head. Roger pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. “Not by like, a guy in a white van or anything. He got taken by something else.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Will whispered so quietly from the confines of his bag, I almost missed it.

“What?”

“Ghosts. He wants to know if you believe in ghosts,” said Roger.

I worried this was some sort of May Street initiation ritual, that the boys were setting up to tease little Andy who sees spooky ghosts.

The serious look on their faces convinced me this was no joke.

“Sure, I guess. I mean, I’ve never seen one. But who knows?”

Roger and Stevie looked at one another, and Roger nodded. Stevie leaned forward to turn the lantern between us a little brighter.

“Have you seen the old McGuire place, the one down on the corner?” I nodded. It was hard to miss. The house, obviously abandoned years before, sat a short way back from the road, a chain-link fence blocking off access to the driveway and the sidewalk that led up to the porch and two yellowed French doors.

Once, the house may have been white, but the paint had flaked and yellowed with time, strips of it curling down the sides like a little girl’s ringlet. If there were any windows left unbroken, I hadn’t seen them; the house was a notorious target for any teen with a rock in the greater Carrolton area. The one curious thing I had noticed was the lack of spray paint; although the fence and gate was tagged, the house itself lay unmolested, as if whoever targeted it had no interest in an act of vandalism that required stepping closer than the double chained metal gates.

“Kids say it’s haunted,” continued Steve. “There’s a tradition here, the summer before your sixth-grade year, you’re supposed to spend the night in the house.”

My young brain could imagine few things worse than merely entering that house at night, let alone staying there long past the witching hour. I could all too well picture the silence of the house, an occasional wooden creaking emanating from somewhere deep within.

Sitting there for hours just waiting, watching for something to appear out of the darkest corner or come sidling down the stairs.

“Do kids really do that?” I asked.

“They say they did, but no one we ever knew.”

“Not till Noah,” Will added quietly.

“Noah got teased pretty bad in school,” said Stevie. “His family didn’t have much money, his dad drank a lot. His clothes were old. He just looked, y’know…” Stevie shrugged at me. I did know. I could picture my last school’s Noah, his older brother’s hand-me-downs hanging too loose on his skinny frame, his eyes shifting wildly like a frightened rabbit. The kind of kid that gives off a scent a bully can smell from a mile away.

“Noah got it into his head that if we spent the night in the house, we’d be kings next year. No one could touch us.”

“So you spent the night?”

“We did. We lied and told our parents we were camping out in Noah’s backyard. He lived a few streets over, so they wouldn’t be able to check up on us as easily. We pitched the tent, but we snuck out to the house after dark.”

Roger moved next to Will, who was openly sniffling now, his red sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders and pulled tight to his chest. Roger slung an arm over him, giving him a squeeze as Will tried to stop his crying.

“It wasn’t… right in there,” Roger said.

“Wasn’t right how?”

“Like it was too quiet,” said Stevie. “You should have been able to hear noise from Bracken, there’s always traffic at night from people going to and from the Fisher Inn.” I had seen the Fisher Inn while running errands with my father; the small dive bar sat on the outskirts of town, a local establishment where the cops waited outside for the first eventual bar fight of the evening.

“And it was too dark,” said Will, rubbing an arm under his nose. “Remember the flashlights? They didn’t go anywhere.”

“No light,” Roger agreed. “The flashlights barely worked, there were no headlights from cars outside. Nothing. Just dark and quiet.” The boys looked lost in thought, revisiting memories from that night.

“So did you see one?”

“A ghost?” asked Stevie. I nodded. “We didn’t see anything. We didn’t even remember going to bed. One minute, we were looking through the house together. The next, it was morning, and I was on the lawn outside,” he said.

“What? Where was everyone else?”

“I was on the front porch,” said Roger. “Will was…”

“I was in the basement.” Will sobbed now, his small body shaking with the force of it. Roger pulled him closer.

“There was some kind of cellar, like the kind people hide from tornadoes in. We heard him banging and got him out.”

“There was something in there,” said Will. “I could hear it crawling around behind me in the dark.”

“A racoon or something? Maybe a stray cat?”

“Could have been. We didn’t stay to find out.”

“If you guys woke up outside, where did Noah wake up?” I asked, looking from one boy’s face to another.

“Nowhere. We never found him.”

“We tried,” said Roger, his voice stressed in concern that I might think they were cowards. “We went back in and we looked, we did. He wasn’t in there, just his sleeping bag and his flashlight.”

“I didn’t go back in,” said Will.

“We never found him. Just his flashlight, still on and pointed down the hall,” said Stevie.

We never spoke of Noah again.

***

The next day, I walked Skip, the family beagle, up the road and stood outside the McGuire place. Windows boarded up, dead grass sporadically found throughout the dirt yard, the house seemed less scary and more sad to me in the daytime. At some point, this was someone’s dream, something they were proud of. Now it had become little more than a town joke, a disheveled heap of rotten wood on the corner of May and Bracken.

I turned to head back with Skip, hurrying down the sidewalk and heading inside my house and up the stairs to my bedroom. That night I would eat dinner, I would pack my bag for school, and I would join the rest of the children at Carrolton Middle School tomorrow. In a few years, I would move on to the high school, then graduate and continue on to college, losing touch with Will and Stevie but exchanging Christmas cards and birthday phone calls with Roger. I would live a long and happy live.

But there was one thing I would never do. I would never, ever tell anyone about the little boy I saw on that bright August afternoon, staring at me with a left shiner in the window of the McGuire house.

Occasionally, I know how to keep my mouth shut.