The skinny old guy

     As a boy, I was fascinated by the old man who walked past our house towards the woods at the end of the road. He was tall and skinny with weathered skin and loose-fitting clothes. He reminded me of a tree in a strange sort of way. He never looked at me, or anybody for that matter, he hung his head low as if watching his feet walk. The talk around town was he once had a family but lost his wife to cancer and his only son was killed in a war far away. They say he kind of went crazy after that and just stuck to himself taking long walks deep into the woods.

     When I was twelve years old, we had a gang called the mighty men. All of us were hooked on comic books and were divided on the names Mighty Mouse and Superman, so we settled on mighty men. The woods were a favorite place for us to go exploring and have campouts. We would build campfires and cook hotdogs on sticks and tell ghost stories that sometimes got one or more of us running home half scared to death. More than once somebody would tell a story about the old skinny guy and how he grabbed up boys their age cutting them up with a huge knife and scattering the pieces all through the woods for the wild animals to eat.

     One late morning in October, our gang was getting ready for a campout. The nights were colder now, and we had to bring an ax to cut firewood. We packed up everything we thought we would need and headed out to the woods. We went deeper than we had ever gone before, into the darkest parts of the woods where daytime became twilight and night became a dark, black, scary place to be. We set up camp collecting branches for cooking our hotdogs and splitting small fallen trees for the fire. I had ventured quite a ways from camp looking for dead branches when I noticed something just ahead of me. I stopped dead in my tracks and watched as a figure of a man appeared out of the darkness of the woods and stood twenty feet in front of me. It was the old skinny guy who walked past my house.

     Neither of us moved or spoke, and it seemed like hours before he turned around and walked back into the darkness. I had dropped all of the branches I was holding and really didn’t care at that point as I turned and ran as fast as my wobbly legs would carry me. Out of breath and speaking really fast, I told the guys what I had seen. “What if he comes and kills us in the night” one said. “Let’s go follow him," said another. We decided, in the end, to have one guy stand watch as we slept, taking turns every two hours. There were no ghost stories that night, all we could think of was him. Morning came, and we laughed it off, well almost. We laughed at ourselves all the way home, but in the back of our minds, we were scared shitless and probably would have been forever if we hadn’t learned the truth about the skinny guy.

     You’ll remember I told you how he lost his family? Well, it seems that all those years ago when he and his wife were young, they would walk deep into the woods to be together and enjoy all that the woods had to offer. It was their favorite place in the world. Their son was conceived in the woods on a blanket of soft moss, under the thousands of stars on a chilly October night. The old skinny guy made a sort of shrine out there on the exact spot they had laid together so much in love and now so alone. He went there every day until his own death a few years past my fifteenth birthday. There was something about the old skinny guy that touched me in a way that's hard to explain, but I walked into those dark woods every day until I went off to college. I stopped about twenty feet from where I came upon him that cool October night way back then. I guess just to somehow let him know I understood. He wasn’t a scary old man who looked like a tree, he was a man who loved deeply and wept on a blanket of soft moss. 

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