Today we introduce a new contributor to WinCity Voices, Todd Garringer. Todd is a writer of both poetry and prose; we will be featuring more of his work in the near future. His introductory piece is this stark, chilling story of grit and determination in a desolate setting. We will be publishing the story in three weekly installments. Watch for part two next week.
The old man sat on a four-legged stool, the scarred edges of its round top making rubbing noises as he stomped the snow from his weather worn steel-toed boots. A cloud of snowflakes spun in eddies mixed with sawdust through what little light made it past the grime and frost which coated and obscured the nine panes of glass separated by rotted wood boarders in the antique window. The leather tie binding the door to the shack scarcely held it closed against the icy bluster outside, and the door clattered at the breath of the angry wind as the icy specter tried to find purchase in freezing the old man. The canvas of his overalls was worn through in patches at his knees, and there were holes in the thighs and at the backs of his legs where the wood of the stool or the wood of his work had worn through the threads leaving his skin exposed to the icy dew that clung to him upon his return from the forest. It was morning now, which he only knew because the light that made it into the cabin had the slightest tint of yellow from the sun rather than the cool blue of the moon. So little light made it through the forest’s canopy that time became soft, days and nights immaterial and irrelevant in his isolation. He took the old red shop-cloth from where it was unspinning itself in his back pocket, spit in it, then proceeded to carefully wipe the sawdust from the spindles of the empty wooden chair, abandoned from some other where’s kitchen, that sat beneath the window the arch of its back creating a border for the streams of light divided by the chair’s silhouette. When the chair was spotless, and the places that still had finish shined, he returned to his work.
He sorted the branches into two distinct piles. Fresh green limbs of mahogany, roughly two to three inches in diameter he arranged on his gnarled old work bench in order of descending diameter. Dead wood, collected from the forest floor he piled on the old stone hearth. He grabbed a bristle brush on a three-foot twisted iron handle and began sweeping ash from the bottom of the river stone fireplace making a kind of “arum-hum” noise with each stroke; not quite humming, more like the sound of half formed thoughts struggling to become words past the thick mucus of his dry throat. When he had finished shoveling the soot into the filthy grey tin bucket steeped with the debris of fires past, he trimmed the dead branches to size, arranged their shavings in a pile and made a teepee of sticks above them. He grabbed a match from the hearth, struck it on the toe of his boot where the abraded leather left the steel exposed then gently placed the new flame against the scraps of wood in several places.
“I’m sorry I let it get so cold in here”, he spoke to the pane of glass above the chair where the trickle of sunlight made the glass glow.
“I forgot… wasn’t thinking… sometimes I forget you’re here. I let it get cold because I don’t care. I hope the cold will kill me, but then I remember that you’re cold too. I’m sorry. The fire will be up in a minute. It’ll get warm fast. I have to go back out. None of these will do”, he puffed the sentence out in foggy breath while caressing the branches on his workbench with thin fingers that absorbed the detail.
The old man unwound the thin leather strap from its iron hook in the door-frame, walked through the opening, then braced his boot against the frame pulling the door as tightly closed as he could before wringing the leather cord around the post on the outside of the cabin. Wan sunlight filtered through the icy mist and frosted the tangled overgrowth of beard that hung down the front of his overalls as he set off down the path his footsteps had defined through the undergrowth. The snow had been very deep when they had arrived but an infinitude of foraging for wood had worn through the ice and created a trail of sorts in the frozen mud. Every few hundred feet there was a subsidiary path, a place where he’d decided on another direction because what he needed couldn’t be found on the path forward.
“How long have we been here?” The man wondered aloud.
“I don’t know”, she said. “I don’t even remember arriving”, came the little girl’s voice.
“I don’t remember when we left, or why we would come to this place.” He stopped at a particular tree whose branches were long, straight, and thick as a baby’s arm before they turned and twisted toward an apex, pulled the hatchet from its loop on his belt and prepared to swing.
“Not that one”, she said.
“Which one then?”
“Over there.”
The old man meandered sluggishly back to the center path and began forward again. When he had walked about twenty paces he looked to his left at an old-growth oak and ran deeply callused fingers along the highest branch he could reach.
“Not that one. Higher.”
He pulled himself up onto the lower branches with a grunt. Tucking his beard into the front of his shirt he reached as far forward as his balance would allow and examined another branch.
“Almost, but higher yet, and on the other side.”
He pulled himself up through another three branches. He was now at the midpoint of the tree. Unable to turn around, he arched his back over the thickest branch behind him and reached toward the pale grey sky finding another branch for tactile inspection.
“Not that one”, she implored. “It’s right there, just above you. Look straight up”, she insisted.
He saw it then. At the very top of the tree was a short branch. It was maybe two inches in diameter where a knot had formed creating a natural expansion that looked like a wrist and slightly further up the branch was a bend creating an elbow where the branch had made its way around another on its quest for the sun.
“I see it,” the man responded. He prepared to hoist himself higher when his beard, having loosed itself from his shirt-collar, caught in a bramble of twigs on the branch in front of him and tricked his balance. His feet, finding no purchase to counter the sway slipped from their perch and he came down hard on his right knee scraping a bloody hole of jagged denim around a deep gash on his kneecap. He caught a handhold of bark and branch, his chin landing severely against the rung in front of him, jarring his jaw in a cascade of salty copper mouthwash from where his teeth had punctured his tongue. A memory poked through the stars encircling his dizziness.
“I remember it was sunny once, and warm. Do you remember,” he asked.
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“Yes, it was sunny, bright… there were colors, lots of them, red and green and blue… and purple. There were all these tiny purple flowers… they were my favorites.”
“And the path was much wider… we could walk it much faster… the trees were blurry when we passed them, that’s how fast we could go on the path when it was wider… and flatter. It was flatter, too. No sticks and divots, no tangles of straw grass to trip us up,” he added.
“Everything smelled good! I remember. Everything smelled sweet and fresh. Sometimes it was so bright it hurt and I had to squint my eyes.”
“I remember,” he returned. “It doesn’t smell like anything here… but it does. It smells like mold… and wet dog. This whole place smells like wet dog. Where are we?”
The second installment in this story will appear next week.
