Nicholas Trandahl's Blog

DYMPHNA WOODS

a poem by Nicholas Trandahl

In the last cold days of November,

right on the doorstep of winter,

I stride quickly into the high country

miles from the nearest dirt road,

as though I can simply flee

my sorrow, my stagnation,

and my army of fears.

In my thick green sweater

and a scarf I bought in El Paso,

my booted steps crunch

into the snow of the trail as I

follow elk prints higher and higher.

Sweating and breathless

in the cold mountain air,

I reach a shattered forest —

aspens and pines all broken

and fallen in the same direction.

Was there ever a place that

more matched my spirit?

I imagine Saint Dymphna

wandering toward me in that

broken wild place.

Her long hair as red as apples.

Her youthful freckled face

alive with ageless sympathy

and wisdom.

She wears a white blouse and a

long green skirt of homespun

that reaches to her muddy boots,

and she carries a book in one hand

and a bouquet of white lilies

in her other.

But she isn’t real.

I am alone —

as I always am

when I shouldn’t be.

I look around me —

take in that primal sylvan ruin.

I mumble a prayer to her then.

I plead with her.

Saint Dymphna, fill my heart

with gladness.

Help me to be courageous.

Heal my broken spirit.

Silence.

Cold windswept silence

in that shattered forest.

The silence that only comes

after a desperate prayer to

something said to be divine.

There is no silence more crushing.

I hope for a sign or revelation

in the hard miles I’ve yet to walk,

or on the granite summit

where I rest on the stones

and the rust colored undergrowth

to eat the food in my knapsack

and contemplate on an empty page

in my long-quiet poetry journal —

pen perched at the ready and

ink drying in the cold breeze.

I look down on the shattered forest

where I prayed fruitlessly to the

patron saint of those of us

that are overwhelmed with sorrow

and riddled with anxious fears.

If she’s real, she didn’t hear me —

just as nobody heard me when

my private treasury of

fears and sorrows were born

when I darkly toiled in the

harsh reality of the Middle East.

There on the mountaintop,

if I could just climb a little higher,

perhaps the saints could hear me.

But I’m on the summit —

the pinnacle.

There’s nowhere left to climb.

This is it.

The milky full moon that

shines through the pale dusk

is a reminder of the things

I will never obtain.

It races across the stars,

across their burgeoning tapestry

of ancient myths and symbols —

things older and angrier

than saints.

The neon orange horizon

is a symbol of the places

I will never travel to.

The western brim of the world

throbs with that brilliant promise,

but I am just so far from it

as I sit heavy and alone

on that cold wintry mountaintop.

My body is sore and my

clothes are damp with sweat,

but there is no purification.

This is no crucible

to forge a better man.

There is no peace on the mountain

or in the quiet solitude of the

shattered forest.

There are no favors or blessings

from gods or saints —

no encouragement.

Even the old gods in the stars

flicker with cold silence

in the lavender wash of twilight.

There are only mumbled words

that fade too quickly in

the silence.

There are only wishes

set loose into the cold wind.

They tumble like autumn leaves

for a while, but then they

settle somewhere to rot and

become lost beneath the snow.

In the gathering dark,

I make the journey home,

but my burdens are not lighter.

I am cold and sore.

Saint Dymphna is as silent

as she’s ever been.

I am not a better man.

God, I hear you completely. When I posted a poem or a bit of prose, it would maybe get 40 or 50 likes while a selfie or something would garner a couple hundred. I’m just so wary of selling myself. The writing/publishing world is killing something important in writing for me.

Feel free to email and stay in touch, Heather!

LIVING

My author pages have always had an adequate following on social media. Several thousand followers on my Facebook page and over a thousand on my Instagram. It took work to get it that way — inviting folks to follow, advertising through my pages each time I manage to get a new book published or have a poem appear in a publication, and the continual race to post good content and updates to grow and keep my readership, as well as to develop my author aesthetic and brand.

And, ladies and gentlemen, all of it makes me want to vomit.

The notion that I need an author brand and to continually share content to sell and market my work is almost too much to bear anymore. I have my books, available worldwide in paperback and ebook, and if someone wants to buy them they can. I tire of trying to sell myself to sell my words. What’s the point?

I’m tired of presenting the world my outdoorsy, pipesmoking, old soul aesthetic. I will be outdoorsy, smoke my pipes, and be an old soul on my own time. I don’t need to share it with anyone.

Facebook was the first to slide for me. This contentious and bitter election and the overwhelming flood of misinformation and vitriol swelled on Facebook to terrifying levels before I decided to uninstall the app from my phone. I had been spending most of my time on Instagram anyway, sharing photos of my life and perusing the photos of others. But I found myself on Instagram an uncomfortable amount, and posting too much for my liking. I hadn’t read a book in far too long and my writers block was growing and growing. My free time was comprised of Instagram. I couldn’t even enjoy hiking or fishing throughout this autumn because I was always hunting for photos to post. In hunting for the perfect sunset, still-life, or selfie, I was missing out on the things right in front of me. Seeing a sunset through a lens is a vastly different experience than just simply standing and viewing a sunset, with no thought of sharing it.

Additionally, I think that social media (despite the good it has done) has handicapped at least two generations and done more to disconnect us than grant us the connection it was supposed to provide. Through social media, nothing is sacred, nobody is accountable for their words or what they share. It’s a lawless hellscape. On social media I was connected to strangers but disconnected from my family within my household.

So I uninstalled Instagram from my phone last week.

And what’s happened since then? I finished reading three books and am well on my way to finishing another. My month-long writer’s block has begun to give way, as I’ve been writing a haiku each morning on my typewriter after I wake up, pray my rosary, and make a cup of hot tea. It feels like a massive weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as I don’t have to worry about sharing content and sharing my life.

I’ve been enjoying spending time with my wife and children more than I had been. I’ve been paying attention and savoring experiences, learning another language, and enjoying music, my pipe tobacco, books, and food much more than I had been. The idea that I can simply enjoy a drink or a meal without agonizing about catching the perfect photo of it before the ice melts or the food cools is a liberating idea.

I’ve barely been touching my phone, already a longtime cause of anxiety for me. So that’s an added blessing.

I feel more awake. My days are richer and more full.

I know my writing will never make me a rich or well-known man, and it’s very freeing to be okay with that. Even if I never publish another book, I’ve somehow come to terms with that. I don’t enjoy having to market myself and my work anyway. I write for myself. I always have. Getting my work published was just an added bonus to the precious exercise of writing.

If you enjoyed keeping up with me on social media, my email is nrtrandahl@gmail.com. Drop me a line sometime.

My poetry collections and my novel are out there and my work continues to be featured in other publications. If you stumble across one, buy a copy, enjoy it, and review it!

Meanwhile, I’ll be out there in the world living. Not living to post about it and share it, but living to get the most out of this life I’ve been blessed with.

Be well, friends.

Most of my writing lately has been for my day job as a journalist. It’s a completely different sort of beast than the poems I’m known for and the upcoming novel that has consumed the last two years of my life.

The writing you do for a newspaper is bare bones, unadorned, and unbiased— just a presentation of facts and quotes. Writing for a newspaper for a decade has really honed my writing down from what it was early in my writing career, made it more accessible, clear, and authentic. It was a path Hemingway also walked early on, that of a newspaperman, and he was thankful for those years writing for the Kansas City Star and credited them with creating his clear declarative prose.

Lately, I’ve been carrying my trusty old poetry journal and a pen with me wherever I go, just in case a muse whispers to me and some lines come. So far nothing really, just a smattering of sentences with as much substance or impact as mist. I’ve been working on previously written and unpublished poems like “The Chapel”, which was published in it’s original form by The Dewdrop. But I’ve been struggling to create anything new.

I’ve been in these creative lulls before and they typically take hold when I’ve finished drafting, editing, revising, and proofing a manuscript with my publisher. With my upcoming novel with Winter Goose Publishing, Good Brave People, its no different. It’s like I’ve given my all into a writing project, emptied my literary well so you speak, and now I have to let the well refill. I do this by copious amounts of reading, hiking, camping, fishing, travel, cooking, and eating.

So, this weekend I’m going on a ten mile wander by myself in the backcountry, and in a couple weeks my wife and I are going on a roadtrip so I can show her the majesty of the Tetons (she’s never seen them).

I’m cautiously optimistic that these little adventures will help refill my well so I can open my poetry journal and get the hell back to work.

Stay tuned!

By Nicholas Trandahl

Jack was full and a little drunk from dinner. He’d just eaten at a little restaurant on Duval Street, and his meal had been a couple big conch tacos and a few bottles of citrus beer from a brewery right there in the Keys, up north in Islamorada. His dinner done, Jack strolled through the nighttime crowds along Duval.

The smiling faces that passed by on the sidewalk were fresh college-aged faces, withered old faces, and middle-aged faces like Jack’s own. The nocturnal people of Key West seemed to be made up of every sort of character, and all these characters made their way to the southernmost point in the United States, the terminus of U.S. Route 1, to lose themselves … or to find themselves.

Key West was, in a way, the furthest fringe of American civilization, and despite the island’s grand hotels, expensive food, and idyllic tropical climate, it kept the gritty essence of a rough frontier town. It was a bikini-clad backwoods paradise that swarmed with iguanas, chickens, burn-outs, Cubans, and East Coast upper class tourists. Jack had no idea where exactly he fit in among the Key West set, but he nonetheless found himself there on vacation.

Jack was down on the island for the same reason as most — the sun, the sea, the nightlife, and the anonymity. His recent divorce, his second, had stripped his bank account of pretty much everything. Jack had taken most of what was left to fly to Key West for a little vacation and rent out someone’s little bungalow for five days. It was nerve-wracking for Jack to be in such a financial situation in his mid-forties, but he thought, Screw it. I’ll just start over from square one when I get back home.

I’ll learn how to live again.

As he sauntered down the crowded sidewalk in the warm night air, Jack stopped to buy a slice of Key lime pie from a Cuban that sold them from a wheeled cart. A few cars crept down the brightly lit streets that swarmed with pedestrians, but most of the traffic consisted of bicycle-borne rickshaws or old-fashioned pastel-colored cruiser bikes that tourists could rent. The bikes even had baskets on the handlebars.

Jack stood on the sidewalk near the pie cart. As he devoured the frosty slice of tart pie, he watched the people and the bikes. When he finished his slice of pie, he tossed the small paper plate and plastic fork it had been served with into an overloaded public trash can that was chained to a light pole. Before he wandered off into the night, Jack took out a cigarette. He put it between his lips, which were still cool from the cold slice of Key lime pie, and he lit it with his lighter.

“Wanna get a picture with me, buddy?”

Jack turned towards the gravelly voice and saw a stocky older man in black leather vest, cargo shorts, and sandals. A shabby purple bandana covered the man’s head. His white-whiskered face and tattooed arms were deeply tanned by the south Florida sun. The man, a pirate reenactor, obviously plied his trade among the intoxicated upper class tourists and vacationing college students in downtown Key West, taking a fee for tourists to take a photo with him so that back home they could show their stuffy friends how they’d met a real-life pirate in the Keys.

Jack thought the man looked like a subpar or inauthentic pirate reenactor with his modern shorts and sandals. However, these shortfalls were made up for by an actual living parrot that perched massively on the man’s shoulder. The big tropical bird was blue, but its feathers were grizzled and dirty. It looked like the avian version of its owner.

Jack smirked around his cigarette and answered, “No thanks, matey. Nice bird though.”

“Nah, she’s an asshole,” returned the pirate. “She can be one mean bitch.”

“Sounds like my ex-wife,” Jack returned with a grin.

“Mine too.”

They shared a laugh, and Jack continued to smoke his cigarette. The pirate hovered nearby and watched the crowds. The parrot gnawed on the unkempt feathers of its own blue back.

“Could I bum a smoke?” the pirate finally inquired in his ragged voice.

It sounded to Jack like the last thing the pirate reenactor needed was another cigarette, but it was a free country. Any man was free to offer himself up as a sacrifice to his vices. “Sure,” Jack answered.

He handed the pirate a cigarette and lit it for him. The man with the parrot drew deeply from the cigarette. The ember shone hot and orange in the night, and it crackled softly as the man sucked on it. The pirate sighed out a big mouthful of smoke, bloodshot eyes closed with contentment.

No mercy is ever too simple, thought Jack as he watched the man savor the cigarette. No mercy is ever too small.

They stood smoking in silence, the strange pair, as the nocturnal horde of tourists moved by. Finally, the pirate asked in his rough voice, “Where are you from? I can tell you’re a tourist.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yeah,” the pirate laughed.

“I’m from north of here,” Jack quipped with a slight grin that the other man’s weary eyes barely noticed. Since Key West was the southernmost point in the United States, anywhere else in the country was considered north of there.

The grizzled pirate reenactor snorted through his crooked nose. The parrot made a hissing noise. Then the man asked, “Have you went to the Hemingway House yet? It’s closed now, but you should check it out if you haven’t gone yet.”

“I haven’t. I’ll have a look around tomorrow. I haven’t read any of his work in a long time.”

The pirate explained, “Well, it’s just over on Whitehead Street. I love his stories, especially To Have and Have Not. It takes place here in Key West, you know. He wrote most of his work when he lived here. You can buy one of his books at the gift shop.”

“Will do, buddy. Hey, I’m going to take off. You have yourself a good one,” said Jack.

“You too. Be good. Thanks for the smoke.”

Jack continued down the sidewalk along Duval Street. The weathered pirate reenactor and his rough-looking blue parrot were left behind. He had nowhere specific to go, and he certainly wasn’t ready to head back to the little bungalow he was renting during his vacation. So, Jack ducked into a busy bar.

The noise and the jostling bodies of the clientele were oppressive to him, and his loneliness and isolation became clearer. However, he wasn’t depressed about it. He cloaked himself in his facelessness and solitude. He listened to the barely discernable sound of the Beach Boys over the cacophony of conversation, shouts, and laughter. Jack imagined that he was the only person in the bar at that hour that listened to the music.

Smiling to himself, Jack quickly downed two tumblers of dark spiced rum. The rich liquor hit him quickly, and he was profoundly drunk when he walked uneasily out of the bar a little later. He hadn’t spoken to another soul besides the bartender the entire time he’d been in the bar, and he’d spoken with the bartender only to order his rum.

Jack had a faint awareness that he was grinning drunkenly as he continued his saunter down Duval. He knew he’d be an easy mark for a thief, but he didn’t really care at that point. A carefree realization had settled on him. He had nothing left for someone to take. He had nothing to worry about. What further damage could a thief do to him that his ex-wife’s divorce attorney hadn’t done?

Jack turned left and walked down Olivia Street. After walking for a block, he took another left and found himself on Whitehead Street. Whitehead was much less busy than Duval and, to Jack, there even seemed to be less streetlights. In his intoxicated numbness, he hadn’t meant to go to Whitehead Street, but he also didn’t feel like the hands of the universe or God had taken him there. Jack didn’t believe in fate, especially after true love had turned to bitterness and animosity twice in his life. He believed in chance, and he drunkenly chalked it up to chance that he’d staggered onto Whitehead Street.

The Hemingway House wasn’t hard to find. It was on the corner of Olivia and Whitehead, the highest spot of the crowded island and across the street from the towering white edifice that was the Key West Lighthouse. Jack found himself right next the dark brick wall that encircled the Hemingway property. The big square house and the palm trees around it loomed dark beyond the wall in the dim ghostly light of the crescent moon. Jack reached out his hand as he walked and trailed his fingers along the coarse bricks.

He followed the wall along the front of property, along Whitehead Street, until he neared the closed entrance of the Hemingway House. He sighed and leaned his back against the wall, and he slid down so that he sat on the sidewalk. Jack’s head swam, and his world tilted precariously. He passed out, but only for a moment.

Jack snorted through his nose and jolted awake. The white crescent moon was still suspended in the clear night sky above. He glanced in both directions down Whitehead Street, and he was confused to see the street suddenly emptied of any nocturnal pedestrians or revelers. The streetlights that lined the sidewalks seemed somehow dimmer and fewer in number than they had been moments before.

Then Jack thought of Ernest Hemingway. He didn’t think he’d ever thought about the prolific 20th century American author. Jack wasn’t a writer himself and he was no great reader. He had never been interested in Hemingway, but he had read somewhere that the author had been married several times before he killed himself.

Jack asked out loud, “Ernest, why do we do it? We do we keep tying ourselves to people that destroy us?”

There was no answer other than the muffled nighttime sounds of Key West — the distant shouts, the wind in the palm fronds, and the cries of the unseen gulls that rode the darkness like seaborne devils. Suddenly, the sounds of the island stopped. They didn’t fade away; they simply ceased. The only sound Jack could hear was the beating of his own heart in his ears.

Jack hadn’t expected an answer, but then there was one. It came from the darkness behind the wall, and even further than that. It was as though it came to Jack from a very great distance, an incomprehensible distance. The man’s voice was peculiar, and it wasn’t a deep voice. It was a voice he’d never heard, but its words were true and sure.

The voice answered, “We do it because we are all destroyed in the end, in one way or another. It is better to love what destroys us — who destroys us.”

Jack sat on the sidewalk, his back against the brick wall. He was silent, confused, and frightened. He’d heard somewhere that Key West used to be an open air graveyard for the indigenous people that lived in the Keys before Europeans came centuries ago. When the first Spaniards landed on what was then known as Cayo Hueso, they discovered the island shrouded in the bones of the dead. After hearing that bit of history, Jack imagined the spirits on Key West were not so far away from the living. The disembodied voice that spoke in the warm quiet night made the hair on Jack’s neck and forearms stand on end.

“Are you …,” Jack began, but he found it difficult to say the name, to utter the absurd impossibility.

“I am,” the voice answered. “That is … I was.”

Jack was silent again. His head swam, both from the alcohol and from the bewildering conversation he’d suddenly found himself in. “How am I talking to you?” he asked anxiously.

The voice answered, “Does it matter? Our time is limited. Do you want to waste that time on questions that won’t matter in the end?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jack desperately confessed. Tears rushed unbidden from his eyes. “This second divorce has ruined me. I loved her. I swear I loved her. But now I’m completely destroyed.”

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” the voice replied.

The quote sounded familiar to Jack. He was sure he’d heard or read it somewhere, but he’d forgotten where. The words and the voice that spoke them gave Jack a sort of strength. He wiped the tears from his eyes.

The voice beyond the wall continued, “I had three divorces, and each one of them broke me to pieces. But the world breaks everyone, kid. I am no different than you or from anyone else. We all suffer for love.”

Jack was dizzy. The bricks were hard against Jack’s back, and the sidewalk was hard against his bottom. His legs were sprawled out in front of him, his feet close to the gutter. Whitehead Street was still empty except for two souls, Jack and the voice on the other side of the wall.

“What now?” Jack finally asked into the night. “What in the hell do I do now?”

Jack didn’t recall an answer from the voice beyond the wall, but he heard a different voice from beyond a strange sleepy fog. It said, “Wake up.”

A hand was on Jack’s shoulder, and it shook him into wakefulness. “Hey, buddy, wake up,” the voice, clearer and closer, continued in its gravelly and vaguely familiar character.

Jack’s heavy eyes fluttered open, and in the dim grey light just prior to dawn, he saw the shadowed face of the pirate reenactor from Duval Street. The silhouette of the man’s grizzled parrot was perched on a dark shoulder. His hand still on Jack, the man said, “I had a feeling I’d find you here. You’re lucky a cop didn’t see you passed out here on the sidewalk. Come on, buddy. Get up.”

The night was fading, and the crescent moon had fallen beyond the horizon. Jack knew that several hours had passed since he’d wandered onto Whitehead Street. Jack had fallen asleep on the sidewalk, his back against the brick wall and his legs stretched out. The realization that the voice beyond the wall was most likely just a dream settled suddenly and bitterly on Jack.

The pirate helped Jack to his unsteady feet as the parrot flapped its wings with irritation and squawked loudly. “Can you get back to your place alright, buddy?” the man inquired in his rough voice.

Jack nodded and answered, “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for getting me up.”

“Drank too much, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jack answered in a thick sleepy voice. He still felt only partially present. A part of him still spoke to the voice beyond the wall, under the silver shard of moon that had vanished somewhere as morning neared. It had all gone by so quickly, and that distant voice still echoed around in his skull.

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” Jack mumbled groggily.

“What’s that, buddy? I couldn’t hear you.”

“Oh, nothing,” Jack replied. “Thanks again.”

Jack marched off down the sidewalk. The pirate reenactor yawned as he stood there and watched Jack sway and brace himself occasionally on the brick wall that encircled the Hemingway House. It was obvious that the vacationer was still drunk.

“Goddamn tourist,” muttered the pirate as Jack made his way down Whitehead Street. The parrot on his shoulder fluffed up its dingy blue feathers.

Beyond the streetlights and the shadowed palms, the grey sky took on a slight blush of pink and yellow. A new day was about to dawn.

By Nicholas Trandahl

Illinois Territory

November 1810

It was afternoon. The birch woods were white against the rust-colored landscape of fallen leaves of dead undergrowth. The few brown leaves left in the trees shivered against the cold overcast sky. A one-room cabin stood on a hill above a dark creek, and a stone chimney seeped a ribbon of woodsmoke into the chilled autumn air.

A figure which could have been mistaken for an Indian of the Fox tribe, or perhaps a bear walking on two legs, lumbered along the creek and turned to climb the hill towards the small cabin. Shrouded in weathered hide clothing and a shaggy black bear skin, its head worn as a hood, the figure held a musket in its gloved hands, and on its broad back was a stuffed leather pack and rolled blanket. An unruly grey beard spilled from the shadows of the hood.

When he reached the cabin, the fur-clad traveler rapped the door of the structure with the stock of the musket. “Oliver Applesworth,” growled the man. “Are you at home?”

An antlered deer skull, still pink, hung by a leather cord from a nail in the center of the door. The animal’s light brown hide was stretched and nailed to the wall of the cabin to the left of the door. The traveler rapped the door again with his musket, and it opened a moment later.

At the threshold, the man that opened the door wore a wide-collared linen shirt, tan trousers, and thick wool socks. His golden-brown hair was shoulder-length and unkempt, and his strong chin and jaw sported a copper beard. Dark circles framed his weary hazel-colored eyes, and he held his hand gingerly to the side of his whiskered jaw.

“Clement, please come in,” the man, Oliver, muttered quietly, in obvious pain or distress. He stepped to the side to allow the bulky frame of the traveler entry into the cabin.

The single chamber that made up the cabin’s interior housed a stone hearth set into the north wall, directly across from the door. A cast iron cooking pot was set directly on the smoldering embers and the aroma of some sort of stew emanated from the vessel. On the east wall was a small window, and beneath it was a worktable scattered with a clutter of papers, books, dried herbs, jars, a white clay pipe with a darkened rim, and a leather tobacco pouch that spoke of Indian craftsmanship. Additionally, a bottle of whiskey that was about two-thirds full stood atop the table. In front of the table was a stool.

Against the west wall, opposite the window, a narrow bed was placed parallel to the wall’s rough horizontal timbers. A tangle of dirty quilts, furs, and linens were piled atop it. A musket and powder horn were mounted on the wall above the bed, and a wood-framed banjo that Oliver had brought with him from Virginia all those years ago leaned upright against the wall in a corner of the cabin.

The trapper, Clement, stretched his arms out to his sides with a deep sigh, and he pulled the bearskin hood back off his head. Above his unkempt ash-colored beard, Clement’s face was dirty and soot-streaked, especially along the deep lines that crisscrossed his face. His eyes, however, were bright and pale blue, the color of winter ice. The nostrils flared on the trapper’s round nose as he breathed in the aroma of the stew that cooked in the hearth.

“Venison stew?” inquired Clement in his gravelly voice, worn from decades of harsh winters, woodsmoke, whiskey, tobacco, and violence.

Oliver nodded. “Aye.”

“Would you care to share a plate with a weary traveler?”

“Of course, my friend,” answered the owner of the cabin. “In fact, I’m quite happy you’ve come.”

“That eager to part with your stew then?” guffawed the trapper, and he slapped the younger frontiersman’s strong arm.

Oliver, his jaw still in his hand, grimly explained, “No, friend, listen. I have a bad tooth. Everyone in this part of the Territory knows your skill with medicine. I need you to extract it.”

Clement squinted his eyes and stared at the younger man. It was only then that he noticed Oliver’s obvious pain. The big trapper moved closer to inspect the tooth. As Oliver fell into his shadow, he could smell Clement’s ripe odor of sweat, woodsmoke, and earth. “You know that I am no surgeon. I am no practitioner of regular medicine. I only am versed in the sort of frontier medicine to help those of us out here in the backcountry,” Clement explained. “But, let’s have a look at it nonetheless, and we shall see what can be done for you.”

Clement closed an eye and moved the other quite close to Oliver’s open mouth. “Ah,” growled the trapper. “There it is, the bugger. It’s rotted through. You will get sick if we don’t remove it right away. I knew a fellow during the war that died from a bad tooth.”

The burly older man stepped back and motioned towards the bed. “Have a seat, lad. We will have it out soon enough. Where do you keep your whiskey?”

Oliver dropped into a seated position on the side of his bed and motioned to his worktable with the hand that didn’t cradle his pained jaw. The trapper lumbered over the table and retrieved the glass bottle of amber whiskey. In the dim silver light that came in through the window, the fiery liquid harbored a resinous glow.

“Now, you take a long pull of this whiskey, lad. It will help with the pain and clean out your mouth.”

Oliver took the bottle, pulled the cork out, and took a long greedy swallow. When he was done, his eyes watered from the pain of the whiskey that washed over the rotted tooth and from the burn of the spirit as it made its way down his throat. He looked up into the weatherworn face of the old grizzled trapper that stood before him and nodded grimly.

Clement pulled a knife from a doeskin sheath at his hip. The blade was dark in the gloom of the cabin and covered with notches and scratches from decades of use. “Alright, lad. Open up now.”

Oliver had fainted when the tooth was twisted and cut from his gums. Clement laid the frontiersman belly-down on the bed, with his face over the side so that blood could drip onto the dirty wooden planks of the floor instead of the bedding. The trapper poured some more whiskey into the open mouth of the unconscious younger man. He watched as it ran out of Oliver’s mouth, mixed with blood, and splattered on the wooden planks of the floor.

Clement stood straight with a groan. He took a pull from the bottle. “Good,” he uttered to himself. “Good whiskey.”

He set the bottle back on the worktable, and he carried the stool over to the hearth so that he could check on the contents of the pot. He stirred the stew with a ladle, and his mouth watered at the sight of the browned pieces of venison, translucent white onions, carrots, and potato chunks that filled the broth, thickened with flour. The aroma of pepper and other herbs wafted up into Clement’s face as he stirred. He removed a doeskin glove, dipped a dirty finger into the hot broth, and tasted it approvingly.

“It’s done,” he grumbled to himself, and he removed a tin plate and a spoon from the wooden crate beside the hearth.

Clement ladled a generous amount of the stew onto his plate and carried it and the stool back to the worktable. He sat down and tucked into the meal. Occasionally he looked up from his plate into the darkening November afternoon through the window. The wind had picked up and more overcast clouds were drawn across the sky above the birch woods like a thick quilt. The little cabin on the hilltop groaned and rattled in the cold autumnal gales.

His plate licked clean, a groan and a whimper came from the deep shadows behind Clement, from the bed against the west wall of the room. The trapper wiped the broth from his beard and turned around. One the bed, Oliver had rolled onto his back, and he held his face in his hands.

“How are you feeling?” inquired Clement.

Oliver was quiet for moment, but then he answered in a feeble voice, “By God, there is still pain. But it’s a different sort of pain, sharper. Not that damned throbbing.”

“It will be much better in the morning, lad. It will pass. Come drink some cold water from your waterskin there and have a little of your stew. You need to keep up your strength. After you eat, drink some more whiskey to clean your mouth out so your wound doesn’t go bad.”

Oliver listened to Clement’s sound advice, and asked afterward, “Did you already eat?”

“Aye. I did.”

“Good. You were wasting away.”

Clement chuckled at Oliver’s dry joke and slapped his round belly. “That won’t be happening anytime soon. I’ve got reserves in me to see me through the coming winter,” the trapper joked, and he laughed heartily at his own words.

When he was done laughing, Clement rose and walked over to the bedside. “Come on, lad,” he said as he helped the copper-bearded frontiersman to his feet and sat him on the stool, still warm from the trapper.

The old man took the plate he’d used and ladled a couple spoonsful of stew onto it. He set the plate of stew in front of Oliver along with the spoon that he’d used to eat. The pained man leaned on his elbows on the tabletop, his face in his hands.

“You use my plate and spoon. There is not a lick of sense in dirtying more of your dishes,” remarked Clement. “Go on now, lad. Eat.”

Oliver turned his head and spit a mouthful of blood and whiskey onto the floor. Then, slowly and carefully, he began to take small bites of stew. To chew, he used the side of his mouth opposite where the rotted tooth had been extracted.

“That’s it, lad. That’s it.”

Night had fully fallen, and it was cold outside. A bitter wind continued to howl. Torrents of dead birch leaves were carried through the naked rattling trees, and occasional flurries of snow were also borne on the icy gusts.

The cooking pot had been removed from the hearth, empty of stew thanks to several more helpings by Oliver’s visitor, and a bright fire roared like a gateway to Hell itself. Orange radiance spilled out of the fireplace, illuminating the darkness of the room. Additionally, a candle had been lit on the table, and its wavering light danced in the shadows.

Oliver sat on the stool before the fireplace, his lit clay pipe in one hand, and he nursed the whiskey bottle, its contents nearly gone. He wasn’t concerned if he drank the rest of the bottle that night. His mouth still hurt something fierce, and there were a couple more unopened bottles of the potent liquor under his bed that he’d bought last time he was down south at Prairie du Chien to get supplies. He avoided town as much as he could, preferring to trade with the local Fox Indians instead, but sometimes it was unavoidable when staples were needed.

Though that settlement and the surrounding northern reaches of the Illinois Territory were considered American soil following the War of American Independence a generation ago, Red Coats had been slow to leave the area and still openly controlled the fur trade in that part of the frontier. Prairie du Chien, in fact, was made up of as many loyalists to the Crown as there were loyalists to America.

He placed the straight stem of his white clay pipe between his clenched teeth. The black cavendish tobacco in the bowl of the pipe smoldered red-orange as he drew in a mouthful of sweet pipe smoke and exhaled it in a blue-grey ribbon. The frontiersman watched as the banner of aromatic smoke drifted upward into the shadows of the ceiling.

Clement’s slumbering massive bulk was stretched out on the floor, boots close to the flames. His bearskin cloak served as a mattress of sorts. The trapper had drifted into a deep sleep, travelworn and weary due to his journey north from trading furs at Prairie du Chien. He snored loudly.

As Oliver gazed down sleepily at the old man and the rise and fall of his protruding belly, at the well-worn musket at his side and the knife sheathed at his hip, he thought of the Red Coats that Clement had killed in the war. He knew that three decades ago, the old man had marched on Kaskaskia and Vincennes. He also knew Clement’s toes still suffered numbness from the winter march back to Vincennes again to retake it from the British.

With all the Crown loyalists and Red Coats still in northern American territory all these years later, Oliver hoped that Clement wouldn’t have to take up his musket again in defense of his country. Things between America and the British Empire had grown tense again over the last few years, after the attack of the American frigate Chesapeake by a British vessel not far off American shores. The tension was strongest in the frontier, among the proud and independent Americans that settled there, especially since the Red Coats still openly patrolled the northern backcountry near Canada. It was also said that the British had begun to urge the local Fox tribe to menace American settlers and frontiersmen. That is what Oliver feared most, because he counted many members of the Fox Indians as his friends and trading partners.

Oliver rubbed his sore jaw. Then he took the clay pipe from his mouth and blew another cloud of pipe smoke into the shadows and firelight that danced in the cabin. He lifted the whiskey bottle to his lips and took a long drink, finishing it off.

Then the frontiersman spit a mouthful of whiskey and blood into the fireplace. There was a sudden flare of light as the liquor met the flickering flames. The firelight reflected from Oliver’s narrowed eyes in the darkness.

By Nicholas Trandahl

The snow fell in big ponderous flakes over the pine-cloaked mountains. Mabel watched the falling snow from the front porch of her small cabin. She took careful sips of hot black teas from a hardwood mug that had been carved by her late husband, John.

Before he passed two winters before, Mabel and her husband had liked to spend mornings together on the porch of their cabin. She would drink her hot tea, and he would take painful swallows of his scalding black coffee with sugar. He inevitably burnt his mouth each and every time.

Mabel didn’t drink coffee herself, only tea, but she hadn’t stopped buying coffee grounds at the store since John died. And she hadn’t stopped brewing a pot each morning, even though she’d pour it into the sink each evening, cold and untouched. The aroma of the coffee reminded her of her late husband. It made her feel less alone, as though he’d come walking out of their bedroom in fresh clothes, hair still damp from his morning shower and face clean-shaven.

They had been married for thirty years, and Mabel couldn’t fathom day-to-day life without traces of John, receding echoes of him that she knew would in time fade to nothing. Their children, grown now with their own kids, wanted Mabel to move out of the mountains and into town. She had worked in real estate during her twenties and thirties but had since been a housewife. Her children were afraid of her being alone up there in the woods and silence. John had been capable and self-sufficient before his heart attack, and their children didn’t think for a moment that their mother may have also come to acquire some grit and aptitude over the decades. They meant well, and Mabel loved them very much. But they weren’t giving her enough credit. The mountains, death, and solitude had given her enough fortitude to see her through what was left of the ensuing decades of her own life.

Mabel took another drink of hot tea and watched the snowfall descend over the forested mountainside. The wooden cup was warm in her hands. No flakes fell on her, but the shingled porch awning she stood beneath supported a heap of heavy white snow.

The mountain was quiet and still. The dark pines were laden with a thickening shroud of snow. Up the mountainside behind the cabin, the slope and pines were lost in heavy low clouds. Down the mountainside, the narrow dirt driveway that meandered through the pinewoods down to the gravel county road was choked in deepening snow. Just barely discernable down that winding path, Mabel could make out the still silhouette of her truck through the heavy snowfall.

Just before the snowstorm had swept in over the mountains the day before, Mabel had driven the truck down into town to get supplies and groceries. The snow had fallen fast, and the truck had gotten stuck in the slow crawl up the driveway. She would call one of her generous rustic neighbors on the mountain to help her get it out and up to her cabin once the storm had ended.

It had been dark and very cold in the snowy pinewoods when her truck got stuck on the way up the driveway to her home. As she had trudged uphill through the deep snow, her arms laden with bags of groceries, she’d heard the howls of distant wolves through the blowing snow and swaying pines. She knew the wolves were far off, on some other mountain or in some secluded valley that held a frozen lake, but it was the first time in a great many years when Mabel had felt truly frightened and alone. Perhaps she’d never felt that way before.

By the time she had reached her cabin with her groceries, cold and out of breath, she had been in tears. She’d dreamt of John then, during the blizzardy night. He had been walking away from her, into the deep darkness of the pines. The wolves that howled in her dream were much closer than they had been after her truck got stuck in the driveway. In the dream, Mabel had been unable to move, unable to chase after her husband. He hadn’t turned around, even as she cried out his name. She had woken up exceedingly early in the morning, before the day had brightened the storm at all, and she had sat up in bed, held her face in her hands, and wept piteously. Mabel knew she’d keep the dream to herself, especially from her overly concerned children.

It was mid-morning, hours after her dream had awoken her in tears. Mabel finished her cup of tea on the porch. The world was soft, white, and cold, and she acknowledged that it was beautiful despite its sterility and silence. She could smell the woodsmoke that threaded out of her cabin’s little stone chimney in the snowfall.

She had started a good fire in the fireplace with the last of her chopped wood after she’d gotten out of bed. It had been well before sunrise, and in the darkness outside the window, Mabel had just barely been able to make out the big clumps of falling snow and the thick blue heaps of fresh powder that had blanketed the mountainside. The cabin had been cold and dark when she rose from her big empty bed, handmade by her crafty late husband, and it had been made colder and darker because of her dream about John walking away from her, ignoring her as he was lost in the shadows of the wild where she couldn’t follow.

Mabel knew she’d need to chop some more firewood to last through the rest of the winter snowstorm and the isolation that would follow until the county and state plowed the roads. She set her empty wooden cup on the porch’s rail. The cup’s smooth interior was colored with a rusty brown patina given it by years of tea.

Mabel withdrew her gloves from her winter coat’s pockets and slipped her hands into them. The gloves were thick navy-blue wool with leather padding on the palms and undersides of the fingers for grip. She pulled the hood of her coat over her head, hiding the single brown and grey braid she’d put her hair in the day before.

The widow took up the well-used wood axe that leaned against the outer wall of the log cabin, on the porch directly beside the front door. She trudged down the porch stars, axe in hand, into the silent snowfall and hiked through the deep snow in her clunky snow boots. The woodpile was around the side of the cabin, and it was made up of blocks of cut pine. The woodpile grew each autumn, due in part to Mabel’s own diligence and also to the generosity of some of her neighbors on the mountain, particularly Raymond, the hardy widower down the county road that she intended to call in the next couple days to help her get her truck out of the snow and up to her cabin.

Raymond had been a godsend for Mabel since John’s passing. Mabel and John hadn’t gotten to meet Raymond’s late wife, Annie. They’d moved up to the cabin several years after Annie had passed away from cervical cancer.

Raymond seemed to always be in a decent mood, except when talking about the government, and he was always concerned about and generous with the folks he knew. He and John had become as thick as thieves. They had both been in their mid-sixties, about a decade older than Mabel. Both retired and spending the rest of their peaceful years in the mountainous quietude of the backcountry, the two men in their flannel shirts spent many days together fishing, cutting firewood, hunting, or conversing for hours on the porch in an aromatic haze of pipe smoke. John had taken to smoking pipe tobacco because of Raymond’s rustic influence, but he’d never been able to stand growing a beard like their widower neighbor. John had preferred to shave his face each morning.

Mabel had friends of her own, many of them women in town her age that shared her fondness for recipes, literature, and country living, but she also counted Raymond as one of her friends. She had John were both quite close with their neighbor. They’d had him over for dinner countless times, and Raymond had also had them over to his cabin when he cooked wild game or trout he’d harvested.

However, in the two years since John’s death, Raymond had stopped coming over for dinners. Mabel figured that he thought it would be improper, himself a widower, spending time alone with the widow of a recently deceased friend. He still came over now and again to replenish Mabel’s woodpile, to make repairs around her cabin, to sharpen her wood axe and kitchen knives, or to bring her venison, trout, elk, or other wild game he’d caught or hunted when in season, but she missed Raymond’s companionable presence, pipe smoke aroma, and his long conversations. She missed going with him to trout streams or out into wilderness to hunt. Mabel had been surprised to discover that she missed those things about Raymond as much as she missed things about her late husband. It made her feel guilty to think so, but Mabel knew that she had come to miss Raymond as much as she missed John.

The widow grunted as she heaved a sizable chunk of pine onto the broad stump she used as a chopping block. Its surface was scored by innumerable axe cuts. She brushed the snow off the piece of pine and lifted the wood axe from where she’d leaned it against the chopping block, its sharpened steel head wet from being buried in the deepening snow for the moment it took her to retrieve the piece of pine she was going to split into firewood.

She eyed the wood she intended to chop and positioned her gloved hands along the axe’s maple handle, worn smooth and glossy from years of use. Her eyes narrowed, and she grunted as she brought the axe blade down into the pine.

Raymond’s eyes opened early in the morning. He’d taken in the darkness and the cold and the faint sound of the waning wind and falling snow outside the cabin. Then the outdoorsman, a retired game warden, closed his eyes and promptly slept in a couple more hours.

When he awoke later that morning, Raymond saw feeble silvery light through his bedroom window. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked through the window a while longer from the warmth of his bed, and he watched the dense snowfall drift slowly down. The flakes were big and clumped together. The freezing wind from the night before, when the storm had first blown in over the mountains, had blessedly vanished with the dark, and what was left behind was a low heavy sky and an impenetrable winterscape of drifting snow. The silence was crystalline.

Raymond wasn’t in a hurry to get out of bed to get a fire going in the woodstove and start coffee and breakfast. His large prone form remained for some time bundled beneath blankets and an old handmade quilt. The quilt had been a wedding gift from his late wife’s mother when he and Annie were married about forty years prior. They had been young, poor, and in love, hopeful for a lifetime of adventure together.

They’d made it about thirty years before cancer took Annie. Their marriage never produced children. Raymond, in his ten lonely years since Annie’s death, missed her each day, but he was thankful for the many years they’d had together. He’d let go of her and had accepted his quiet solitary life up in the mountains.

John and Mabel, Raymond’s closest neighbors on the mountain, had eased his loneliness for several years, but when John had suffered a fatal heart attack a couple years before, the loneliness had crept back like an old familiar enemy, a looming shadow peering down from up the mountain and stalking closer every day. Raymond was aware that his loneliness was self-imposed in a way. There was the opportunity for friendship and companionship. Mabel was a widow and just as lonely as Raymond — probably lonelier with John’s passing still somewhat fresh in life.

Raymond stopped in on Mabel at her cabin now and again to lend a hand where he could. She had refused to move to town or to be closer to her children since John died. Mabel refused to leave the cabin behind, because she knew that would also be leaving behind the memories that she and John had forged there in the happy wild years before he passed. Raymond respected the widow’s decision because he felt the same way about his own life and his own loss.

Bundled up in bed on that snowy morning, Raymond began to think about Mabel, to daydream about her. He thought of her fondly many mornings and evenings. Raymond had always thought of Mabel after he’d met her, even before John’s passing, and those thoughts had always come laden with a burden of shame and guilt for the widower. The anxiety of that burden imposed a rift between the widower and the widow. It was a rift that Raymond had wordlessly levied between Mabel and himself out of respect for his late friend and out of respect for his own beloved Annie, ten years gone.

However, Raymond yearned for a continuation of his friendship with Mabel. They’d both lost everything, and so why not lean on one another? He missed her. He missed her one hell of a lot.

With a mighty groan, Raymond threw off his blankets and quilt, and he stood up out of bed. He scratched his scalp beneath his short, unruly, grey hair, which was still thick in his late sixties. His beard matched in hue and density. Raymond was a tall broad-shouldered man, solidly built and powerful, even at his age. Years of rural hard-living and a healthy avoidance of beer had kept him that way. On the rare occasion when he did drink, Raymond preferred a little bit of maple whiskey, though it took him at least six months to finish a bottle. His old friend, John, had helped him to finish a bottle of whiskey much quicker. So had Mabel.

But drinking whiskey alone was dangerous business. Raymond knew that. He’d seen it kill more than one lonely sad man.

Raymond fastened the buttons on the front of a thick flannel shirt of green and gold plaid, and he slipped into a pair of worn-out jeans. Then he sat on the side of his bed and sheathed his big white feet in warm wool socks. He remained there in the morning gloom of his bedroom for a moment, sitting on the edge of the mattress, his hands splayed over his knees. Then Raymond stood up with a rumbling groan and strode from his bedroom.

A tall continually replenished stack of firewood was kept in the rustic living room, against a wall near the cast iron wood stove which was set at an angle in the corner of the room. Raymond took an armful of the dry cut pine from the stack and piled it in the wood stove, and he started a fire. The flames took to the dry wood quickly, and in moments heat and the spice of smoldering pine began to spread throughout the shadowed rooms his small cabin.

He went into his kitchen to make a pot of coffee, and as it brewed, Raymond watched the heavy snow come down in the dim morning light beyond the kitchen window. He thought of Mabel again. He thought of her alone in her cabin, up there on that lonely mountain in the deepening snow. Raymond was worried about her.

The older man decided then that he was going to snowshoe over to her place after a quick cup of coffee and a little breakfast. He’d bring her some supplies and food in case she ended up being stuck at home until the mountain roads were plowed out long after the storm. “Mabel, I hope you had sense enough to not drive last night in that storm,” Raymond muttered to himself as he gazed out of the kitchen window, his heavy brows suddenly tightened with concern for the widow that he had such fondness for.

He took his cast iron skillet from a kitchen cupboard and heated it on the stovetop. He dropped a cool chunk of yellow butter into the skillet, and it sizzled and slid around on the scalding black surface. Raymond broke three eggs and emptied their viscous contents into the sputtering cast iron one at a time. They cooked quickly in the hot skillet, and when the whites were opaque with crisped edges and the orange yolks were just barely still a liquid, he slid the eggs from the cast iron onto a plate. Lastly, he sprinkled some ground black pepper and salt on his breakfast.

The coffee was brewed by the time his eggs were done cooking, and he poured himself a mug. Raymond stood at the polished pine countertop and ate the eggs quickly, gulping down his hot coffee between bites and numbing his tongue from the scalding heat. In a couple minutes, he’d finished his eggs and coffee and put his dishes in the sink.

With a grunt, Raymond took his battered leather rucksack from the top of the coat closet. He emptied it of the assorted sportsman supplies and old food wrappers left in there from a prior hunting excursion, and he put in some spare batteries and a flashlight in case Mabel lost power to her cabin, as well a couple rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of drinking water. He kept several gallons on hand beneath his kitchen sink. Raymond’s cabin still had power and he presumed Mabel’s did as well, but he couldn’t guarantee it if the snow continued to deepen throughout the rest of the day and into the next day.

Next, Raymond filled the rucksack with several different foodstuffs from his fridge and cupboard for Mabel in case she hadn’t been into town for groceries before the storm hit. He put in a package of thick-cut smoked bacon, a couple sticks of butter, half a box of buckwheat pancake mix that just needed water added to it for flapjacks, and a couple ruby red sirloins that were still wrapped in the white paper that the butcher in town had put them in. Then he put in what was left of a block of sharp cheddar cheese, four or five big potatoes, a couple yellow onions, and a few pomegranates that Raymond had bought on a whim from the grocery store in town. He’d read something in a magazine at his doctor’s office about how nutritious pomegranates were.

Lastly, almost as an afterthought, Raymond took his bottle of maple whiskey from the cupboard and put it snuggly in the stuffed rucksack. The bottle was only about a third full of the sweet brown liquor, but to Raymond that was a generous portion, especially when considering the ponderous way he nursed the bottle throughout many months. He surmised that Mabel would appreciate a drink in this wintry weather.

Raymond placed the full heavy rucksack near his front door, next to his well-made and well-used pair of snowshoes that waited there. The man took his .38 revolver in its aged leather holster from his nightstand and fastened it to his belt. The pistol had belonged to his father, and Raymond had always worn it when he was out in the woods and mountains. He’d seen enough mountain lions in his life to be wary of the wild.

On his other hip, Raymond fastened his fixed blade knife in its leather sheath. A detailed image of a howling wolf was embossed into the tea-colored leather. The handle of the knife was elk antler and wrapped tightly in worn leather.

Before setting off to Mabel’s cabin, Raymond put on his heavy deep brown canvas coat. It was lined in thick soft shearling. He also put on a black stocking cap and a warm pair of gloves. The final acts before departing his cabin were to put on his hiking boots and snow shoes and to grab his sharp wood axe that leaned against the wall by his wood stove. Raymond figured that Mabel could use some help cutting pine for her fireplace.

Grunting beneath the burden of his rucksack, Raymond rested the head of his axe on his shoulder and opened the front door. The world beyond was quiet, cold, and white. He trudged out into it and closed the door of the cabin behind him.

It was still rather early in the morning when Raymond set off cross-country from his home, in the direction of Mabel’s cabin. The snow was deep and untouched, even beneath the dense cover of the pines. The flakes continued their slow fall through the still winter air.

Raymond’s snowshoes vanished deep into the snow as he hiked through the white wintry woods, as high as his knee at some points and as high as his hip at others. His direct route across the forested mountain slope cut a messy furrow across the pristine milk-white of the snow, but already the edges of his passage softened with the new fallen snow that continued to come soundlessly down from the low clouds. Snow gathered on his stocking cap, his broad shoulders, and the distended rucksack on his back. His grey beard quickly gathered a frosty adornment of clinging snow.

Raymond knew the cross-country route to his closest neighbor’s cabin well, even when the way was obfuscated by a pale winterscape. He hiked across the wooded face of the steep mountain slope. Far below him, the county road cut somewhere through the pines, but it was lost to the incline, the dense woods, and the heavy snowfall.

His snowshoes found purchase in the deep fresh snow, but Raymond still leaned to the left as he hiked, away from the steep slope that plunged away to his right. It wasn’t a cliff, but a tumble down that slope had a high probability to leave the older man broken and buried beneath the snow, a spring feast for roving wolves, coyotes, buzzards, mountain lions, or hungry bears fresh from hibernation. It was best to be cautious in the terrible majesty of the wild.

Suddenly Raymond heard the rare snap of a broken pine, the sound of a weakened tree giving way beneath the heavy piled snow that had so quickly fallen overnight and throughout the morning. He shot a quick glance uphill and was started to see the movement and closeness of the fallen pine. The yellow of the splintered wood contrasted the darkness of the bark and needles as the tree tumbled down the slope towards him in a churning wave of snow and ice.

As the heavy bulk of the broken pine and the miniature avalanche that carried it rushed towards the outdoorsman, he had only a second or two to react before he would be struck, thrown down the mountainside, and buried more or less alive. Raymond took a single broad step forward in his cumbersome snowshoes, and he swung the wood axe from his shoulder, into a quick extended chop at the limits of his reach and strength. The sharp axe blade bit deep into the pine trunk nearest him, an old and thick tree that had weathered winters and snowstorms much worse than the current one that was burying the mountains.

Just before the tumbling pine and the tide of snow smashed into him, Raymond used his strong grip on the axe to pull himself to safety behind the sheltering girth of the old tree. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he leaned heavily against the bark of the tall pine.

In a cacophony of breaking branches and hissing snow, the broken pine and the avalanche rushed by, right where Raymond had been standing. The pines that stood down the slope stood strong against the onslaught of heavy timber and rushing snow. The tumbling log broke itself against the stronger solidly-rooted pines, and the avalanche carried the shattered columns of wood and shivering pine boughs further down the mountain, likely to the flat gravel road that was hidden down there, cut into the steep slope and buried beneath the snow.

Raymond’s heart raced and his breath came hard and fast as he watched the chaos and destruction below him, down the slope. A slower torrent of snow, pine needles, and small branches still slid across the path where he’d been standing. He watched it until it had grown quiet again and had all but settled except for the whisper of loosened snow that fell from the boughs of the surrounding pines.

“Well, goddamn!” Raymond yelled.

Chuckling softly, the outdoorsman got himself together and stood, brushing snow and flecks of bark from his outerwear. He jerked the wood axe from the flesh of the pine, and the steel squeaked against the wood as it came free. He returned the axe to his shoulder and patted the bark of the big pine he’d hid behind. He said with a kind smile, “Thank you kindly, old friend.”

Raymond continued through the snowy woods on the mountainside, towards Mabel’s cabin.

In the falling snow, Mabel had chopped up several chunks of pine. She wanted a decent supply of firewood inside, so she intended to shop wood until lunchtime. The yellow flesh of the pine she’d already split was muted beneath a fresh sheet of snow. Her arms burned, and her hands were wet with sweat in her thick woolen gloves.

She chopped another chunk of pine into firewood and left the axe embedded in the chopping block. She stood straight and rolled some pain and stiffness from her joints. As she did so, movement through the falling snow caught her eye. She squinted into the evergreens.

It was Raymond.

Mabel could tell it was him by his height, his broad stride, and, when he got closer, the rough good looks of his bearded face that hadn’t diminished as his sixties dwindled. One of his gloved hands held the shaft of a wood axe that rested on his shoulder, and the other hand lifted in a slow wave.

“Look at what the storm blew in!” Mabel shouted as Raymond trudged towards her from the trees in his snowshoes.

His cheeks were red, his beard was locked in snow and frost, and his outerwear and rucksack were covered in snow. He came up to the widow and glanced down at the work she’d done chopping firewood. “Mabel,” he said simply in greeting.

“What in the hell brought you over here in this weather?”

“This weather is what brought me over,” he said with a smirk, looking up into the heavy snowfall. “I wasn’t sure if you’d been into town for groceries or anything before the storm hit. I was worried about you.”

Mabel felt warmth in her belly and in her ribs at the notion of Raymond’s concern for her wellbeing. She smiled at him and was thankful that the cold had already colored the apples of her cheeks so the blush that came over her wasn’t as obvious. She pointed down the narrow driveway that went down from her cabin to the county road and to the snowed-in hulk of her truck that was stuck there at the limit of her view.

“I was in town yesterday,” she explained. “I made it back during the storm, but my truck couldn’t make it up the drive. The snow was already too deep.”

“Still there?” Raymond asked, squinting down the driveway in the dense snowfall.

“Yep.”

“Well, damn. We’ll get it out once they get the road down there plowed out and I can get my truck up here,” he offered.

“Thanks, Ray.”

“You bet.”

Raymond looked back down to the chopping block and the firewood and at her axe that was buried in the pine. “Would you like a hand?” he asked with a nod toward her work.

“Well, I’d like some help,” Mabel answered with a smirk, “but I don’t need it.”

Raymond chuckled and lowered his rucksack from his shoulders. He set it onto the soft snow. “Oh, I know you don’t need help, Mabel. I know.”

The widow and the widower made short work of chopping a sizeable supply of firewood, enough for at least a week of constant burning in the fireplace. They each carried load after load of firewood in the cabin and stacked them next to the fireplace. It was nearly noon by the time they were finished.

Mabel and Raymond left their wood axes on the porch, leaning side-by-side against the log wall next to the front door of the cabin. Inside, Raymond hung up his coat and set his stocking cap, gloves, and leather rucksack on the hardwood floor beside the door. He took off his snow-caked snowshoes and boots and set them on a rubber mat where Mabel kept her own wet boots.

She went into the kitchen to start whipping up some homemade biscuits, and Raymond sat heavily in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. He knocked on the table with his knuckles and admired its craftsmanship. John was one hell of a woodworker, Raymond thought to himself. Then he looked up from the table and watched Mabel gather the ingredients for biscuits from the cupboards and the fridge. When she got started mixing the biscuit batter, Raymond glanced into the living room at the yellow and orange flames that consumed the pine in the fireplace.

“The place looks great, Mabel,” he said as he looked back to the woman working in the kitchen, her pretty face still reddened from the cold and her long brown and grey hair gathered into a thick tousled braid on the back of her head.

“Thanks,” she answered, her bright blue eyes flashing up at Raymond from her culinary work. “I manage.”

Mabel wanted to say more, to tell him that he should come around more often. She wanted to tell him that she was lonely without John and that the cabin was too damn quiet. She wanted to tell Raymond that she missed him as much as she missed her late husband, and that it was ridiculous that he was alone in his cabin and she was alone in hers. Mabel didn’t say these things, however. Instead she asked, “How’s biscuits and orange marmalade sound for lunch?”

Raymond smiled and nodded. “Sounds perfect. I’ll cut up some pomegranates too.”

He went to his rucksack and took out the pomegranates he’d brought over form his cabin. He sat back at the table with them, unsheathed his knife from his hip, and began to cut into the fruit. Dark purple-red juice dripped from his blade and fingers.

“Hold on now. Do it over this,” Mabel scolded as she brought over an old dishtowel and laid it on the table beneath his big hands that held the fruit and the knife. “What else did you brink with you?” she inquired as she went back behind the kitchen counter.

Raymond answered as he cut, “Well, let’s see. Some bacon, steaks, potatoes, onions, cheese, butter, buckwheat, these pomegranates, a gallon of water, toilet paper, some batteries, and a flashlight in case the power goes out. I think that’s everything. Oh, and a little bit of maple whiskey I had left.”

The mention of the maple whiskey suddenly filled Mabel with emotion. Choking up, she turned from the counter to look out the window over the sink so Raymond couldn’t see the tears that quivered in her eyes. She’d missed Raymond’s visit very much, missed him bringing over his bottles of maple whiskey for long chats because he couldn’t ever finish a bottle himself. He hadn’t come over for one of those visits since John’s death, and it felt overwhelmingly good and nostalgic in that moment when she discovered that he’d brought his whiskey. She hoped that it would be a good long visit, like they had been years ago when John was alive.

Instead of voicing her thoughts, Mabel cleared her throat and said, “It’s a good thing you brought some extra food, because that snow’s really coming down and doesn’t show any sign of letting up. It looks like the wind’s picking up to.”

“Yeah,” he replied, nodding as he carefully cut up the pomegranates over the dishtowel, so their dark staining juice didn’t get on the table that John had built. “It seemed like the wind was going to kick itself up into a blizzard again. It was nice this morning, as the snow just came down slowly and quietly. That wind can be brutal.”

Mabel slid the biscuits into the oven, washed her hands at the sink, and said to Raymond as she dried them, “I’d sure feel better if you stayed her until it clears up, Ray. I wouldn’t want you getting turned around and lost out there.”

Raymond sighed and smiled. He knew that he would never get lost on the mountain, even if he was blindfolded, and he knew that Mabel was aware of his aptitude with overland navigation as well. He didn’t say anything though. He didn’t resist the offer. He realized then, in fact, that he’d been hoping for such an offer from his friend. All he said was, “Yeah, probably best to stay.”

Mabel warmed up the pot of undrinked coffee from earlier that morning, and she made herself another cup of hot black tea. The two lonely souls sat at the table together and ate a lunch of warm biscuits fresh from the oven, orange marmalade, and deep ruby-colored wedges of glistening pomegranate seeds. They talked throughout the meal and took their time. It wasn’t until sometime in the afternoon when they’d put their dishes into the sink.

Their friendship was restored in the coziness of the winter cabin as the blizzard outside conspired to keep the pair indoors and focused on one another. Any guilt and shame from their mutual fondness for one another vanished in the ease of their talk, which often turned to Annie and John, their deceased spouses. There was a freshness in the air of the cabin, as if ghosts could finally rest. With contentment and acceptance, life could move on.

As evening chased away whatever feeble light struggled through the clouds and the windborne snow outside the cabin, Raymond put the sirloins in a buttered copper pan on the stovetop. Mabel chopped up some potatoes and an onion to make a hash in a different buttered pan. They turned the burners’ heat on low, so they could head out to the porch with the bottle of maple whiskey and watch the snowstorm.

The blizzard blew across the face of the mountain. The sheltered space of the porch was protected from the icy wind and the snow, but the cold nonetheless bit deep into them as they stood there. Raymond went out first, without a coat or boots, and gazed out into the fury of the winter storm. He unscrewed the cap off the bottle of maple whiskey and took a drink. Behind him, from the open door of the cabin, a warm yellow glow spilled out onto the grey planks of the porch. The aroma of melted butter and seared meat emanated from within.

Mabel pulled a heavy sweater over her cotton shirt, and she went outside to stand on the porch beside the outdoorsman. Raymond passed the bottle to her, and she took a hearty swig. She held the cold neck of the bottle in one hand, and she placed her free hand on the small of Raymond’s back and left it there. He put one of his strong arms around Mabel and pulled her close against him.

They held one another on the porch of the cabin and looked out into the cold winter dark.

By Nicholas Trandahl

The old man had lived a long life, and he had done and seen much in it. He had written about what he’d seen, and his books were read by many people, though they had become less popular in the last couple decades. He no longer wrote, however.

In the summer, the old man looked forward to growing a variety of tomatoes. In the autumn, he looked forward to the leaves changing and raking the little bit of fallen leaves in his yard into piles. In the winter, he looked forward to reading the Russians and smoking pipe tobacco in front of his fireplace, his big feet enveloped in thick wool socks. In the spring, he looked forward to the rain, and he used to look forward to the dandelions he let grow thick and golden in his grass.

The little yellow blossoms were beautiful to the bees and to the old man. He did not consider them weeds. In fact, he was biased against anyone he knew that considered dandelions weeds.

Oh, how he hated to pay the neighborhood boy to cut all the dandelions down. He didn’t hate to pay the boy. The boy was kind and respectful, and the old man had enough money. No, he hated to see all the beautiful dandelions cut down in their prime, like a brigade of young men losing their innocence in some foreign jungle the way he had all those decades ago. The dandelions seemed to grow back slower then, after being cut that first time in late spring. They still sprouted from the lawn, but it seemed as though they did so with trepidation or wariness.

He wouldn’t ever cut the dandelions from his front lawn or pay the neighborhood boy to cut them if it hadn’t been for the town’s damn weed ordinance. When the police officer had come to give the old man a verbal warning about his front lawn, the old man had tried to explain how the dandelions weren’t actually weeds but were very beneficial to the environment. The police officer hadn’t cared, and the old man relented and began to pay the neighborhood boy to cut the grass of his front lawn throughout the late spring and the summer.

The old man had a small backyard with a tall wooden fence around it. The yard was filled with rows of tomato plants. The old man loved his tomatoes very much, and he tended and cared for them as though they were his children. He never had any children of his own, but he imagined children would be much more work than his tomatoes were each summer. The old man had been married twice, but there had never been children. He didn’t think about his ex-wives often anymore, no more than he thought of anyone else that was a part of his past. The life he inhabited was a new life — a quiet life with few cares anymore.

The old man grew misshapen heirloom tomatoes in different shades of red, green, and violet, and he grew juicy Roma tomatoes as well as bright red cherry tomatoes on the vine. He also grew golden yellow pear tomatoes, and those were his favorite. When he ate pear tomatoes one at a time with his supper, they were rich and full of garden flavor, like a robust pasta sauce.

The old man liked to eat his garden tomatoes for lunch, on a salad of baby greens with cucumber slices, ground pepper, sea salt, and ranch dressing. He also liked them sliced and drizzled with aged balsamic. For dinner, the old man liked to cut the yellow pear tomatoes and the red cherry tomatoes in half and sauté them in butter for a few moments before stirring them into a steaming pot of strained angel hair pasta. In addition, he would stir pressed garlic and freshly squeezed lemon juice into the angel hair. Over the years, that pasta dish had become his favorite thing to eat for supper, especially since it was easy to eat with the old man’s unfortunate lack of teeth.

In his late seventies, the old man no longer had quite the appetite he’d had when he was younger. However, his tomato garden was more plentiful than it had ever been, and the old man had more tomatoes than he knew what to do with. He thought it would be better to give them away than to have them go bad.

It was an afternoon in late August. It had been a mild summer. The air was hot, but not uncomfortably so, as the old man toiled in his garden. On his bald head was a straw hat with a brim to protect his delicate skin from the sun, and a stubby corn cob pipe protruded from the depths of his enormous white beard. A sinuous rope of nutty pipe smoke drifted from the pipe as the old man worked.

With quick trained strokes of his trusty big pocketknife that he always carried on him, the old man cut the diverse types of tomatoes from their vines. He piled the fruit in a dented tin pail as he cut them loose. The rusted handle of the pail creaked as audibly as the old man’s knees when he stood and lifted the pail and moved on to a different part of his tomato garden.

When the pail was full, the old man walked toward the back door of his house. The glossy tomatoes gleamed in the afternoon sunshine, but then they darkened as he went into the stale shadows of his old quiet home. A haze of pipe smoke followed the old man into the kitchen, where feeble golden-yellow light shone through a small unwashed window. The old man removed a couple handfuls of tomatoes from the pail, most of which were the flavorful yellow pear tomatoes, though he was sure to keep a few of each variety.

The old man was tall and gaunt, and his hands were large and knobby with arthritis and a little shaky as he took out the small amount of tomatoes he wanted to keep for himself. He was still strong, but certainly not as strong as he had been. However, aging didn’t bother the old man. He bore the burdens of time with nobility and quietude. He had earned those late peaceful years, and the old man enjoyed his calm waning life.

With a trail of pipe smoke behind him, the old man carried the pail of tomatoes out to the sidewalk in front of his house. The pail was still nearly full of fruit, despite the small amount he’d kept for himself. In the still summer afternoon air, the full branches of the large cottonwoods along the sidewalk were motionless, and they left ample shadows on the ground. The old man was thankful for the shade He tilted his straw hat back on his head, puffed on his pipe, and ambled down the quiet sidewalk of the quiet residential neighborhood. Many of the homes in the neighborhood were empty, after residents were forced to move elsewhere when the mill went out of business. The town, like the old man was also in its twilight years.

He walked toward to home of the neighborhood boy that cut his front lawn. The boy lived in the home with his mother. The pair had moved into the neighborhood and rented the house after the mother had went through a nasty divorce in a different town, leaving behind the boy’s abusive father. The old man didn’t take up with gossip, but he’d heard others speak about the woman and her boy when he was shopping for groceries at the neighborhood market. He figured the boy and his mother could use the tomatoes. It appeared to the old man that they could use a little generosity.

The old man had lived in the neighborhood for many decades, and he had seen many families come and go, especially after the mill’s closure. He’d didn’t really know anyone in the neighborhood very well anymore. It was as though his neighbors were all ghosts. The boy that cut his front lawn was the only familiar person to the old man.

The boy and his mother lived at the end of the block, in a small pale pink house. It was a worn-out and tired house. However, the small flowerbed beneath the front window was full of marigolds and zinnias. The flowerbed shone in yellow, gold, orange, rust, and scarlet hues, and the fragrance of the hardy blossoms was detectable by the long beak-like nose of the old man, even over the nutty aroma of his American burley pipe tobacco.

The boy answered the door and smiled up at the old man. He was a good boy, responsible and healthy. “Hi,” the boy said.

“Hello,” returned the old man in a quiet voice, gravelly with age and smoke. “Is your mother home?”

“Yep,” answered the boy, and he turned and yelled into the house, “Mom, Mister Raleigh wants to talk to you!”

The old man was amused at the boy’s loudness and he smirked in the depths of his beard. Pipe smoke drifted from the flared nostrils of his long crooked nose. He shifted the painful metal handle of the pail of tomatoes in his gaunt hand.

The boy’s mother seemed to manifest from the shadows of the home like a ghost or an angel as she approached the front door. She was young and fresh in her short-sleeved floral sundress. However, the young woman already looked weary from life’s burdens and troubles, weary beyond her years.

The boy, a head shorter than his mother, maneuvered behind the woman. She smiled nervously at the intrusion, and her face was inquisitive as she studied the tall mysterious old man at her front door with a smoking pipe, a straw hat, and a pail of tomatoes. The old man would’ve felt embarrassed if he’d been a young man. He admitted to himself that he’d most likely be smitten with the young single mother, but the time had long since passed in the old man’s life when such things mattered.

“What could I help you with?” she asked in her sweet honey voice.

“Oh, I was just curious if you could make use of these tomatoes?” the old man asked as he lifted the pail towards her. “I grow far too many in my garden these days, and it’s just me over there.”

“Are you sure, Mister Raleigh? Can I pay you for them?” the boy’s mother asked as the old man handed the pail of tomatoes to her.

“No, dear. Of course not. They would just go to waste if I kept them, and then they’d be no good to anyone, would they?”

The boy’s mother smiled brightly, truly thankful for the gift of fresh produce. “No,” she answered. “I suppose they wouldn’t. Well, thank you very much, Mister Raleigh. We really do appreciate it. We’ll enjoy them. They look delicious.”

“Good,” he replied, and he tipped the brim of his straw hat to the young woman with a smile.

As he turned to leave, she said, “Don’t forget your pail, Mister Raleigh. If you give me moment, I’ll put the tomatoes in a bowl in the kitchen, and you can take your pail back home with you.”

The old man half turned towards the boy’s mother as he waved away her concern. “Oh, it’s no trouble, dear. Just have your boy run it on down the block when it’s empty. It’s no rush at all.”

“That sounds just fine, Mister Raleigh. You’re too kind. Thanks again!”

He continued on his way, back down the sidewalk towards his own house at the other end of the block. A faint ribbon of pipe smoke followed the old man as he shuffled away from the pink home of the young woman and her son. They watched him for a moment from their doorway, and then they went inside, closing the door behind them.

Two weeks later, on a Friday, the old man returned with more tomatoes to the pink house that the young woman and her son rented. They were not alone. An old black Ford was parked in the salt-eaten concrete of the driveway. The belligerent shouts of an angry man sounded from within the little old house.

The old man stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house, corn cob pipe protruding from his white beard and the pail of tomatoes heavy in his hand. He assumed it was the woman’s ex-husband raising some hell. The old man listened to the shouting and fighting and thought about turning around and heading back to his own home — back to his own business and his own quiet life.

“It’s none of my business,” the old man grumbled to himself. He blew pipe smoke from his nostrils and stared at the little pink house. “I should just go right back home,” he said, and he was trying to talk himself into following his own advice.

The boy’s mother raised her voice against her ex-husband’s verbal assault, and the old man could hear the fear and desperation in her tone. The old man could clearly hear the man’s words as he roared back at her, “Woman, you know I’m not afraid to beat the hell out of you! I don’t give a shit about that worthless restraining order you got against me! I’m here, ain’t I?”

The old man squeezed his eyes shut, drew deeply from his pipe, and let out one long smoky sigh. He knew he couldn’t ignore the situation and go home. He’d never forgive himself if he left.

The old man walked to the door.

When he knocked, the voices in the house grew silent. The old man set the pail of tomatoes on the step at his feet. He knocked again. “Young lady, it’s Mister Raleigh,” he said loudly.

“No, Kyle! Don’t!” whimpered the boy’s mother form within just before the door swung open. The man that stood there was skinny and unkempt with a shaggy head of black hair and a narrow face dark with whiskers. His bloodshot eyes blazed with fury, and he reeked of cheap beer and cigarettes.

“What the hell do you want, old timer?” the man asked, accusation in his voice and his dark features.

Pipe still in his mouth, the old man replied, “Who are you?”

“It’s none of your damn business who I am, you old coot!” shouted the man. “I asked you what the hell you want. Why are you on my wife’s doorstep?”

“Ex-wife, Kyle,” corrected the boy’s mother from the shadows behind her ex-husband.

The man half turned towards her and barked, “You want to get smacked again, bitch? You seem to forget who’s in charge.”

The old man had heard quite enough. He said sternly, “It’s time for you to get out of here.”

The ex-husband turned slowly back to the old man. His disheveled whiskered face wavered between unbridled rage and disbelief.

The boy’s mother pleaded, “We’re fine, Mister Raleigh. Please don’t get involved.”

The old man knew she was afraid for him.

“What the hell did you say to me?” the ex-husband growled at the old man.

“I said you need to leave,” he reiterated, his hard eyes never leaving those of the younger belligerent man. The old man felt angry now, and he felt protective of the boy and his mother that had fled to his neighborhood to escape the violent intruder before him. “Go on, boy. Get out of here, or I’ll call the police.”

The ex-husband stared dumbly at the old man for a moment or two. He wasn’t used to folks that stood up to him. Then, too suddenly for the old man to try to dodge or protect himself, the young man gritted his yellow teeth and smacked the old man across the face as hard as he could. It was the hardest the old man had been hit since he was a young man.

There was a white-hot explosion of pain at the smack, and the old man was rattled senseless as his corn cob pipe flew from his mouth and he staggered backward. The old man’s large boot stepped on the edge of the pail of tomatoes, and he tripped and fell.

The tomatoes bounced and rolled down the steps and sidewalk as they spilled from the pail, but the old man couldn’t see them through the temporary white blindness the slap had given him. However, as he fell, the old man could smell the fragrant zinnias and marigolds that were planted in front of the pink house. He could smell the blossoms in the sweet summer air.

The old man’s head hit the concrete, and everything went black.

Moments later, the old man groggily awoke on his back with the various tomatoes that were in the pail scattered around him. The pail, bent and misshapen, was near him on its side. The man that had struck him was gone, and the black Ford wasn’t in the driveway.

The boy and his mother crouched next to the prone old man. The boy’s bottom lip was split, and tears streamed down his ruddy face. The boy’s mother had a bruise and some swelling coming up under her right eye, but she wasn’t crying. The old man figured she had no tears left after the hell her ex-husband had put her through for so long.

The old man’s face throbbed, and his head ached unbearably. The pains in his body hadn’t made themselves known yet, but he knew they’d be there soon. The terrified boy and his mother helped the old man to his feet, and he felt wobbly and unsteady in his big boots. As they helped him up, the boy’s mother said, “I’m so sorry, Mister Raleigh. I’m so sorry. He’s terrible. That’s why I left him. He’s nothing but a beast.”

As he stood there, the old man’s ribs and hip throbbed with sharp pains. The boy and his mother held him, and the old man tried to breathe through the pain. A big heirloom tomato was squished under one of his boots, and its juice slowly spread on the concrete at his feet.

When the old man still hadn’t said anything, the woman continued in a quick nervous voice, “I would get the police involved, Mister Raleigh, but I’m afraid of what he’d do to us. He’s already promised worse when I threatened to call the cops before. That’s what set him off, you see — when you threatened to call the police. Kyle hates the cops. I’m so sorry. I just don’t know what to do. I thought we’d escaped him.”

“It’s just fine, dear,” the old man finally said weakly. “I won’t call law enforcement if you don’t want me to.”

The boy’s mother breathed a sigh of relief, and despite his own pain, the old man felt more pain for the boy and his mother because of the fear they lived under. He felt pain for them because of the violent rage of the young woman’s ex-husband. The old man’s eyes, pale grey and bright, looked into the eyes of the boy’s mother, and he said solemnly, “It will be alright, dear.”

At those words, maybe because she actually heard the truth in them, the glitter of tears rushed unbidden into her eyes, and she put a hand over her face. Her chin quivered as she silently sobbed. The old man put a large gaunt hand on the woman’s slender shoulder, and he repeated, “It will be alright.”

The boy helped the old man down the block to his house. The man limped along and breathed heavily. The boy’s mother had stayed behind to gather all the spilled garden tomatoes, and she’d had her son make sure the old man made it home safely and had whatever he needed.

“It will be alright,” he told the boy as they made their way slowly down the sidewalk, echoing what he’d told the boy’s mother.

The boy didn’t respond at first. They just kept walking toward the old man’s house. The injured old man was surprised to find the boy such a solid support. The shoulder that the old man held was strong and round. Finally, the boy answered, “It’ll be alright only when that son of bitch is dead.”

Though the words came from a child’s mouth, the cold seriousness of them startled the old man. The boy meant what he’d said, and the old man knew that the boy would kill his own father if he could.

“Do you know where he lives?” asked the old man.

“Yeah, he still lives in our old trailer in Edwardsburg.”

“Do you remember the address?”

The boy nodded and answered, “Yep.”

The old man stopped limping down the sidewalk. He pulled the boy to a stop with him, and he looked down at the child. The boy looked up into the stern bearded face of his elder. “Tell me, boy,” spoke the old man. “Tell me the address.”

It was early Saturday morning. The summer dawn was lit with rose and peach. In his old nondescript pickup, the old man sat silently and comfortably.

The truck was turned off, and the grey shadows of the trailer court were dim and sleepy. The old man had stayed up all night thinking, and then he’d driven from his town to Edwardsburg in the early pre-dawn dark. The boy had told the old man that his abusive father liked to fish at Fox Creek on Saturday mornings.

The cab of the truck was thick with a haze of pipe smoke, blue-grey in the growing dawn. The old man drew deeply from his corn cob pipe and exhaled the smoke from the nutty smoldering burley leaf through his nostrils. A murder of crows chattered in the splayed limbs of the cottonwood overhead, its leaves dark and grim in the weak light.

At the end of the dim street, the boy’s father left his singlewide trailer. He slammed the door behind him, and his black-whiskered face was already mean. He carried a spin rod and heavy tacklebox, and when he made his way to his old black Ford parked next the trailer, he tossed the rod and tacklebox in on the seat. Then he slid in and slammed the heavy truck door behind him before he started the loud vehicle.

The black truck made its way down the street, towards where the old man was parked beneath the tall cottonwood. The old man looked down as the truck passed, his bruised and bearded face lost in shadows and a wreath of pipe smoke. The truck made its way to the end of the street and turned to leave the trailer court.

The old man started his own truck. He turned it around in the quiet street and followed the boy’s father out of the trailer court and down the paved county road. He kept at a far enough distance to avoid drawing any suspicion from the other driver.

The sun finally rose in the east, in a swell of yellow and orange. The cloudless sky brightened to pale blue. It would be a lovely day. If the old man were younger, it would’ve been a wonderful day to fish all day himself and to write about it that evening at his writing desk. Ever since he’d stopped writing, the surface of his writing desk had become just another dusty surface to collect piles of things, which in turn collected more dust. Parts of the old man had long been passing away.

In the black truck, the boy’s father slowed down and turned from the county road and onto a narrow dirt road edged in tall green grass. The dirt road ran down into a grove of oaks, willows, and cottonwoods. The trees were green and full. Fox Creek, the old man knew, swept through those trees, and the water would be cool and deep and full of fish.

The old man didn’t follow the boy’s father down the dirt road into the trees, but instead he pulled over slowly onto the shoulder of the paved county road. He looked in the mirror and saw no vehicles coming down the road behind him. There were none coming from ahead either. He set his corn cob pipe on the seat of the truck and opened the door.

The old man groaned from stiffness and the pain the riddled his tall skinny frame as he stepped from his truck and stood on the rocks and sand of the road shoulder. His hip and ribs throbbed with what he assumed were bruised bones, if not fractures. His head pounded from the concussion he’d gotten when he fell and hit it on the sidewalk. The swollen bruise on the side of his face was the least of his injuries, though it outwardly looked the worst.

He pushed the door of his truck closed quietly, and he began to limp through the tall green grass between the road and the woods. The meadow was low and muddy between the road and the trees, and his boots squelched in the shallow standing water and soft earth as he walked. Mosquitoes and fat grasshoppers were scattered from the blades of grass with each step, and the old man thought again how fine of a morning it would be to fish.

Fox Creek was between the old man’s nearby town and Edwardsburg, and he’d fished it many times. He knew every bend of the stream, and he remembered the best spots to find big trout from the days when it used to be easy for him to go fishing. Those days had passed, along with his writing days. Nonetheless, if the boy’s father was any sort of fisherman, the old man knew the closest spot he would go to.

At the edge of the trees, the old man took off his muddy boots, and he limped silently through the detritus and loam of the forest floor. The new light of the sunrise had yet to penetrate the darkness of the woods. He reached out and balanced himself on the rough bark of the trees as he staggered past them. The old man’s white beard shone ghostly and almost luminous in the dim shadows of the trees, and his bruised face was grey and solemn. His eyes were bright and hard like the blade of a knife.

The old man could hear the creek. Barefoot, he continued his painful and silent walk until eventually he could see the water through the woods. There was a break in the trees over the creek, and the citrusy morning light shone over the water and the grassy banks. The boy’s father fished on the near bank. At his feet was the tacklebox, and the old man could see that it was primarily full of cheap cans of beer. An open can of beer stood in the grass next to the tacklebox.

Seeing the boy’s father fishing in the good morning light, the sounds of the water and the summer leaves the only noise to be heard, the old man hesitated. Then he remembered the bruised and frightened faces of the neighborhood boy and the boys’ mother. He remembered the man’s fury and violence the prior afternoon. The old man’s shaggy white brows lowered over his pale grey eyes in focus and anger.

From his pocket, the old man gently pulled out his trusty pocketknife that he used to cut the tomatoes from the vines in his garden. He unfolded its large sharp blade and took silent steps forward, toward the fisherman.

“Did you see him when he came in?” a young police officer asked an older one.

The older officer, with his thick salt and pepper mustache, shaved head, and big belly, sat at his desk, and he drafted a report. The younger officer that had walked up and spoken leaned against the older officer’s desk and sipped a Styrofoam cup of coffee with nonchalance. “Did I see who?” inquired the older officer, his small eyes not looking up from his report.

“What do you mean ‘who’? The old man!”

The older officer sighed. “His name’s Raleigh. I know him. He’s in the hospital now. He had a lot of injuries on him. He’s a Vietnam vet, and he was a famous writer once.”

“He was?”

“You bet. But these days he’s just a quiet old-timer. He’s never caused anyone around here any grief.”

The young officer snorted in derision and sipped his coffee. Then he said, “Well, he sure as hell did now, didn’t he? He caused a lot of grief for that fella in Edwardsburg.”

“Allegedly,” corrected the older officer.

“Allegedly? Shit, I heard that when he turned himself in this morning, he was covered in that fella’s blood. I heard that when he opened that poor bastard’s throat with his pocketknife, he just pushed his corpse into the creek, walked back to his truck, and cruised back to town. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. They still haven’t found the body.”

“Oh, he cared what he did. He drove right back to town to turn himself in here. And they’ll find that fella’s body. Fox Creek ain’t that big,” explained the older officer. He finally looked up from his report and into the freckled face of the younger officer.

“Did he say why he did it?” asked the younger officer before he took another sip of coffee.

The older officer sighed and smoothed his mustache. The new generation of police officers sure got under his skin. He thought they were less professional, nosy, and craved action and confrontation too much. He answered, “That guy from Edwardsburg that Raleigh allegedly attacked supposedly is the one that gave old Raleigh all those injuries. He says he was trying to protect the ex-wife and son of that fella. The mother and son live on Raleigh’s block. He says that fella from Edwardsburg was in town yesterday causing some hell at his ex-wife’s house, laying hands on her and their boy. Raleigh was there, and he tried to protect them. That fella gave old Raleigh one hell of a beating.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. That fella had a history of domestic violence — a lot of charges. Most of them were dropped by his ex-wife.”

The younger officer sipped his coffee and was quiet, lost in thought. The other officer returned to his report. Then the younger officer asked, “What kind of criminal history does that old-timer have? Any history of violence?”

Without looking up from his report, the older officer answered, “Not at all. The only encounter we’ve had with Raleigh before today was a warning about letting his grass grow too tall. That’s it in thirty years or so. That’s all.”

“Just a warning for the damn weed ordinance?”

“That’s it,” returned the older officer. “But he’d been keeping it cut good this summer, keeping it trimmed.”

The younger officer nodded and sipped his coffee.

The shotgun belonged
to my grandfather.

When he died, it passed
on to me.

The other night, I had
a dream about it.

I dreamt that I was
loading it with shells,
but my hands were still
the hands of a child.

We’ll never be as big as
our grandfathers were.

A windy, cold, autumn dusk

between the Snowy Range and the

Laramie Range.

The bright lights of the stadium

shine over a writhing sea of

brown and gold.

It’s been a long time since I’ve

felt like I was a part of something —

a community optimistic for a

common purpose.

We stand with the crowd —

our own roars and applause

lost in the cacophony of

blessings and curses.

In the twilight, we are warmed

by brats, hot cocoa, and victory.