The Old Man of the Woods

Some nights, you can hear him on the hilltops, laughing. I don’t really know how to describe him. He’s simple now. And wild the way a deer is. Once, he was a sulky and angry man. When the moon is full he howls at it like a wolf. I’ve seen him running through the pasture, patting the animals and shouting wordless praises at insects flitting by. Filthy with dirt and pollen he could only have picked up by rolling in the flowering wheat. He sleeps in a half-covered den just under the massive oak tree on the outer edge of our farm.

He wasn’t always like this. For most of his life in fact, he was very different. He had been a farmer, and he had been my father. He changed one night though, and I suppose you could say that it was my fault. Though my mother was offended when I told her I felt this way, instead preferring to take the responsibility herself. I couldn’t tell if she was proud, or ashamed, but she clearly didn’t want that burden to fall to her son. He had come home very late one night, like he often did, after spending the evening down at the pub. The house was small, two bedrooms, a kitchen that melded into a tiny parlor of sorts with a coffee table and a couch. Sounds travelled very well through these wooden walls, and it was easy to disturb the sleeping. I woke when he clamored in, slamming the front door. In mere seconds my mother was upon him and my little brother woke and crawled to my bed. He clung as I stood and walked to my door, opening it just slightly to see the scene play out.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” She hisses at him, her eyes wide with anger despite being so recently roused from sleep, “Do you have any idea what time it is, you worthless drunk?”

He walked past her, grumbling and opening the refrigerator. He drank directly out of a carton of orange juice. “You listen to me, you lout, I’m sick of you wandering in here in the middle of the night, making a mess of things, waking me and the children. I’ve had enough. You can’t do this to me, to us anymore. You have to leave.” He just looked at her for a moment. His face was old before its time. His receding hair was a disheveled mess. I wondered if he thought about hitting her. He used to more when I was smaller. Taking over the house during nights like these. But more and more lately, he’s grown docile and almost child-like in his drunkenness. He turned and put the juice back in the refrigerator. He stared into her face for a moment, then burped and laughed. She grabbed his collar, and keeping her hiss strong said, “The day is coming soon when the boy will be old enough and strong enough to carry what little weight you do around here, and when that  day comes I got half a mind to call my cousin and tell him you been beating me every night all these years.”

Now my father scoffed and responded, “Sheriff won’t do shit. I reckon he’s still afraid of me after our wedding.” My father was a large man. He still is, but he doesn’t lean on his size now, like he used to. He went on, “And I wouldn’t count on that boy getting to be as big as me. He’s fucked up. A runt, you know. I’ll bet that womb of yours did it to him. So toxic it crippled him. Hell I feel bad for the kid, having you as a mom.”

Mother started to cry now, but her tears were from anger rather than pain. She pounded on his chest with a small and ineffective fist, “Fuck you!” She yelled, enunciating each word between weak strikes and prompting a quick response from my father, “Ah, ah! Who’s waking everybody up now?”

“You are! They’re already up, I’ll put money on it. When you stumbled back in here, you woke everyone up!” She could never keep her temper with him. Perhaps she really did love him at one point, and seeing him like this hurt her more than I could know. But she was a closed woman, and never one to dwell in melancholy. “You’re hardly ever around, when you are you’re either drunk, or angry. I had to raise these kids all by myself!”

Her angry sobs stifle her voice for a minute. My brother wanted to go to her, “Mommy’s crying.” He whined in my ear. It was a better idea to just watch and wait, a lesson I had learned the hard way, a long time ago. If it got physical, I would have no choice, but this might still just be the normal nightly row. My brother was still little. He didn’t know.

My mother composed herself a bit, “You’re nothing but a burden to this family. You’ve failed us and you’ve failed as a man. I married a drunken coward. What was I even thinking?” Her words dripped with poison.

“I’m such a fucking burden, am I?” He leaned his head back, cartoonish doubt etched into the lines of his face. “A burden, eh?”

“Yes.” She nearly barked. “Yes! You’re useless, all you do is eat our food and drink our money away. I don’t even understand why it is you come back here every night. I know it sure ain’t for the kids. And I figured a long time ago it wasn’t for me. Believe me you ain’t crawling in my bed after this.”

He chuckled meanly, “Why would I want to? Your bed’s got you in it. Fuck this place.” He staggered out of the kitchen and made his way into the bedroom he irregularly shared with my mother, gathering a few random articles of clothing. They spoke there briefly, but I couldn’t make out what they said. When he staggered back to the main room, he was talking, “Why would I ever come back to this house? Not like I don’t live here or anything. Not like my children live here.”

“Your children hate you.” Mother replied flatly.

“Not the little one.”

“He’s only six. He doesn’t know any better yet.”

Father took a pause, looking at first pensive, then angry. He leaned close to my mother’s face, clutching a ragged flannel jacket in his hands. “You’re fucked without me.” He growled, “You need my connections in town.”

“Get out. That is some bold bullshit you’re trying to get me to buy. Go to the barn and sleep with the horses for all I care. Tomorrow you’re gonna pick up your garbage and get out. I’m done with you.” My mother had said this before. But her courage in kicking him out always faltered the next day. When my father was a boy, his father, my grandfather, was also a drunk who was eventually kicked out by his wife. Mother feared I’d turn out the same way as he did if she really got rid of him. I suppose, in a way, I should thank her for keeping him around as long as she did. At least I won’t have room in my head for glorified fantasies of my drunken father’s mysterious life. I guess it’s my brother we have to worry about, when he gets older. But her courage steadily increased, night by night. She could sense, as well as we could, father’s will to dominate being replaced with the desire to drink and sleep.

“You want me gone?” He asked in a mocking tone.

“Yes. Leave.” Mother said, turning. She strode confidently, though sniffling, into her bedroom and shut the door. The audible sound of a bolt, installed after one such night, confirming his banishment. He stumbled around aimlessly for a few moments, grumbling something to himself. I convinced my brother to get into bed and stay there with a promise of sweets and a mild threat of physical retribution. Father lurched noisily outside. He didn’t even shut the front door behind him. I followed him out the door as soon as I thought he no longer lingered by it, and watched as he bumbled into the darkness of our farm, his silhouette reappearing as a lantern came to life outside the stable. I followed him down the dirt path that leads to the place where the horses and many nights, my father, slept. We had two horses. One old and docile creature, another younger and jumpy. There was a third, empty stall in the stable that I think my father kept purposely empty for this exact purpose.

He left the door to the stable open too. I crept in and saw him patting the older horse in the dim light of an old, cheap lantern. I don’t know why I followed him that night. He would often come out to the barn to sleep off his stupor. Somehow, he would wake when the rooster crowed and he did his chores. Well one chore. He often only had the energy for one before slinking off somewhere for a long nap before restarting his drinking routine. But it was always a hard chore. Stacking hay bales, moving stored feed to the troths, sawing firewood, and moving manure from the byre… I remembered what he said about me being a runt and I could feel an anger brewing in me that hadn’t been present when he first said the words. Somehow it only then sunk in that he was really talking about me.

My father moved from one stall to another. He stroked the hind of the younger horse. It flinched to his touch and stirred from sleep, standing and neighing. He hushed it gently and kept stroking. Though it now stood, it seemed to relax and once more fall into sleep. In my building anger, one of my steps was misplaced, crunching a twig I had failed to see. My father swiveled away from the horse and took two steps away from the stall, “What was that?” He asked loudly. In the second of tense silence that followed, something came over me. I should have stayed hidden. He was a drunk that heard a noise in the barn in which he slept. He would have forgotten about the noise in an instant. And I almost did just that too, but the moment his attention slipped away from the mysterious noise, I stepped out of my cover in the little quarter-stall used for our buckets and our manure shovels and meant to confront the man who was my father. I think, in that moment, I wanted to fight him. To prove I was not runt. But before I could say anything to him, he saw me and jumped in surprise, giving a drunken, loud, “Hey,” an interjection that startled the half-sleeping horse behind him. Instinct yanked the creature out of sleep at the loud sound and it kicked its leg towards its origin, my father’s head.

The sound of the impact was like the slap of a baseball hurled into a catcher’s mitt. My father hit the ground before I was even sure what happened. There didn’t seem to be any blood, but I didn’t stay long to find out for sure. I dashed out of that barn and back to the house, where I roused my mother by pounding on her door. I told her what I saw and she called the sheriff, who in turn called an ambulance. The nearest hospital wasn’t particularly close, so he made his way to our home too, hoping to make every minute count. When he arrived (long before the ambulance), he had me lead him to the stable to see. My mother didn’t come with us and stayed inside with my brother.

When we arrived, however, he was gone. Not dead, just gone. Missing. The horses were still, sleeping soundly and hardly caring about the sheriff’s flashlight or booming voice calling out my father’s name. A search party was formed, but after 48 hours they called it off. There was no point looking for a drunk who didn’t want to be found. We all assumed he crawled off somewhere and died. My mother mourned in her own way. For the first time in my life, I saw her drunk. Her sorrow, however, didn’t last and eventually things returned to normal. About two weeks after he vanished, we saw him again. My brother and I were playing one evening at the edge of the woods where I had tied a rope to a tree. We heard a strange whistling and rustling come from the brush. When we stopped what we were doing and looked, we saw him. He was thinner and his clothes were ragged, but it was him. He stood there staring at us and whistling a tune we had never heard before. He howled like a dog. And then laughed. Then he plunged back into the forest. We tried to follow him, but he was like a deer, weaving through the grove as naturally as we navigate crowded markets.

From then on, we would see him from time to time. Mother didn’t believe us at first, but one night she saw him too. It was sunset and all three of us saw him at the top of a tree, singing into the sky. When we got to the tree, he was gone. My little brother leaves things on our doorstep for him. Little baubles he made in school, or small bags of chips and cookies. It seemed like my father appreciates it, since the gifts never stay the whole night on the doorstep. My brother and I found where he slept one day, at the edge of the woods, in a giant, gnarled oak tree. A small burrow was dug into its base. It was hard to imagine him sleeping here, knotted up in the roots of the tree like a badger, but this had to be the place. Scraps of food and cloth littered the area. Wrappers from the snacks my brother leaves out along with others pilfered from elsewhere, empty bottles of water and beer, and bits of fleece and wool were jammed into the corners and crevices of the burrow. I started keeping a little journal of the places and times I see him, along with what he’s doing.

My mother seems happier now. More relaxed, despite the increase in workload for her. It was her that convinced me not to tell people that we still see our father. According to her, things are better this way. She doted on my little brother after it all happened. I think she has the same worry that I do about his future and the legacy of my father and his father. The little boy was, after all, about the same age my father was when my grandfather left. My father seems happier too. The rare instances where I see him up close, he’s always smiling. I haven’t heard him say anything, but what noise he does make always seems merry. Singing, whistling, howling, and laughing seem to be his language now. Work here on the farm has gotten harder for me too. I’m not as strong as my father, but I still have a few years to grow. Ultimately though, I’m happier not having to wait up every night to see how far my parent’s fights will go. I still feel bad sometimes though. It was, in a way, my fault the horse kicked him. But maybe my worry is misplaced. He seems happier. And we seem happier. Perhaps we’re really better off now. And maybe, he is too.