The Hole in the Fence

A child's unlikely friendship with an unseen neighbour transforms in isolation

- Adrian Van Young

ONE DAY, MY son befriends the nun. It starts with voices in the yard. Through the glass kitchen doors where I stand chopping onions, I hear Sebastian's voice and then a woman's. Sebastian, woman-back and forth. Sebastian is five, and when I come out to check on him, his face is pressed into the slats of the fence in the backyard.

This part of New Orleans is called Hollygrove-what Lil Wayne, who  grew up here, refers to as "the Holy Mecca." I've also heard it called Pigeon Town, Leonidas, or, in faintly ominous tones, "the fruit streets" a modest subset of what locals call Uptown, with its grand columned houses and clothing boutiques. It's working-class, mostly, with middle-class fringes: White, Black and Latinx.

We've lived here since the summer of 2014, a month before our son was born, when two friends and I unloaded a U-Haul while my wife, hugely pregnant, supervised in the heat.

Hard to say what Sebastian and the woman are discussing. Immersive to him, something else to the woman: Bemusing? Disarming? I really can't say. But I hear traces of it, whatever it is, in the gentle upspeak of the fencetalker's voice, the emphatic, reiterative questions she poses.

Beyond that fence reside the nuns a whole nun condo, two stories tall and eggshell blue. The nuns were there before we came. I had imagined uncanny habits with shadows inside them, but these are chill, back-to-the-land nuns. Sometimes I see their lights at night, the mellow, anonymous squares of their windows.

The woman says, "You wait right here; I'll be right back." I wait for Sebastian to turn, but he lingers, enraptured. I can see the tense shape of his young, restive body, the chicken wings flexing beneath his slight shoulders.

"Stand back," says the sister when she returns. There's a whirring. A circle in the wooden fence, roughly the size of a baseball, drops out of sight. The saw blade retreats from the circle.