by Joy Hewitt Mann

We lived on South Street and every morning at seven o'clock the old-man-of-the-woods staggered past our house.

Adults have a way of forgetting things, or of at least being selective in their memories, though all my boyhood memories echo behind me like footsteps. And I guess that explains the part of the old-man, of Delmund MacIntyre, that I couldn't understand: how it was he bore no grudge against the villagers and what they had had done to him, or what the doctors had done in that place they had sent him to; how he went on, day after day, checking the ditches and roads for stuff he could sell or trade; endless days, winter and summer, of foraging and picking things up, and getting his food who-knows-where, for I never saw anyone in the village show him the least kindness until the end. And in that summer of my eleventh year, I saw a lot of Delmund MacIntyre.

My father had a new job and no holidays until the fall, so summer for me was going to be as boring as hell, not that Hell wouldn't have been preferable with the voyeuristic delights of watching my classmates writhe under tortures too terrible to be imagined.

Julia Weston was going to Alberta. Todd McFadden said his parents might go to Toronto and maybe Wonderland. Everyone was going somewhere. We might go camping for a weekend, my Dad had said. Big hairy deal!

As far as my memory can step back from the age of eleven, the old-man is there. Summer and winter he roamed our village of three hundred and the surrounding countryside. He wore a heavy brown parka with ratty raccoon trim, fall, winter and spring, gradually shedding to a faded t-shirt, and eventually to his bare skin which browned and crisped under the sun. His heavy leather boots were sliced here and there to relieve, I imagined, the pressure of the gnarled flesh that writhed and twisted inside.

By the time I was nine I had often heard the story of how Delmund McIntyre had exhibited himself to eleven-year-old Dottie Clampton -- though when I was eleven, she was lumpy, thirtyish Dorothy MacIntosh. I had heard how on one rainy day in August she had run screaming to her parents, and Delmund, in his early teens and being raised alone by an under-educated, overworked mother, had been sent away.

Delmund. With his strange, agitated way of walking, and his one arm that always seemed to be tearing at the air, and a body that swayed when he stood still like a big wind was blowing.

A few weeks after school ended and the last of my friends had taken off on vacation, I decided to follow the old-man-of-the-woods. This was what everyone called him. He was a sort of fixture in the village; someone to point to when relatives visited, or friends from the city stopped in.

Nutty as a fruitcake, they'd say, but harmless. Lives somewhere in Limerick Woods.

I practiced saying something to him, not that I ever thought I would, but it gave me something to do while I first followed him around, and I was polite for a boy.

Hi, I said to myself. Hello, Delmund. Good morning, Mr. McIntyre. Morning, Delmund.

"Good morning," said a voice. Delmund was standing at the edge of the river that passed by our house, rocking back and forth as he stared into the water in that way that gave my parents such a fright.

My mother would say as they looked out the window, "One of these days he'll just tumble in."

"He hasn't yet," my father would say. "And if he does, don't think yours truly is going to dive in after him."

"I'm sure he can swim."

"In spring that water's liquid ice."

And I'd see them both shivering at the thought of diving in to save him, struggling as that great water-soaked parka of his pulled them down into the bitter cold.

I looked over at him, but he was not looking at me: still rocking, still staring into the water. Had I imagined his voice, clear and musical; had he been talking not to me at all, but to something he saw in the water, or to the water itself?

He was thinner than anyone I knew, but the muscles in his upper arms were well-defined. From behind, his spine crawled up his brown, leathery back like a pathway of stones under stretched canvas, and as he turned his head the skin at his neck and jaw accordioned and his Adam's apple pushed forward sharply. A mess of greying hair sat on his head like something that had fallen from a tree and made a home there.

The next day I followed him again, from a greater distance, but this time we by-passed the river and headed down Centre Street. Someone walked past me. Delmund turned around, and I saw Mr. MacIntosh, Dottie's husband, stop in front of him, while Delmund looked down at his split boots.

Mr. MacIntosh acted like he did when he met friends at the hotel or Well's Discount, but what he was saying I couldn't tell. I saw Delmund raise his head slowly, curling his lips as if he was going to say something mean, but then he slumped down again, red and ashamed looking. But in that split second when his head had risen and he seemed to become someone else, I had seen Mr. MacIntosh draw back, startled and a little afraid.

I wondered if I should be afraid and gave up following him for a few days. The worry dissipated like the moisture from the hot August soil. We all hoped for rain. I continued to fill my days with following Delmund as he scoured the ditches outside the village. He knew I was there, peering at him from the bushes, but he refused to turn around. He would only lour at me over his shoulder, sorting his findings into some symmetry only he understood. I don't know what he felt about my following but I didn't feel embarrassed or anything, though I suspected I should have. For a week I followed him everywhere, going home each day when my stomach growled for lunch.

The next day I determined to follow Delmund all the way to his home in Limerick Woods which meant taking my lunch with me. I discussed it with my mother while she made me a sandwich.

She said, "It's flying in the face of the Lord to live such a selfish, lonely life. Meaning, Hudson, don't get any foolish boys' ideas about cabins in the woods and living off the land. Delmund's crazy and you're not."

"What's with him, Mum?"

"Delmund? Not much to tell. He wasn't always like that, but what he was before was a long time ago. We all change, I suppose, but he more than most."

"Was he always . . . you know, crippled like that?"

"Palsied, dear. And no, that was the drugs they gave him. And all the electric shocks."

I suppose she saw the startled look on my face and added, "At the Brockville Psych. He's no harm to anyone, Hudson. Not any more."

Delmund's shack was not what I expected. It was more like a garden shed than a shack and there were flocked curtains pulled back in the one window, like the ones used in bathrooms. Through this window, on the opposite wall, I could see a section of rusted metal shelving, listing to one side, and filled with books. I remembered seeing shelves like that last summer, lying twisted in a ditch near the 4th Concession turn-off.

A bunch of wild flowers tangled themselves in an old mason jar in the middle of a small round table with light veneer raised and warped like drifts of sand. From somewhere a lamp lit the one room, shadowed even in the daytime because of the woods surrounding the shed.

Delmund was suddenly in the window staring back at me, then as suddenly gone. I ran several feet into the bush and stopped, chest tight, my heart pounding.

I had been startled by the look he gave me, rather than his sudden face; that first true look before suspicion then indifference thrust from his eyes. No grown-up had ever looked at me like that. Naked.

It began to rain, a slow patter that hardly touched me at first as I stood under the trees, but gradually I felt the drops hit and trickle down my face. I was about to turn for home when I heard the door of the shed open and saw Delmund step out into the rain, his face flushed with something like joy as he lifted it toward the sky.

He began to move slowly where he stood, jerkily, as if pulled by strings; his eyes glistened, catching the reflection of a sun that still moved through the first drops of summer rain. And then he began to dance.

At the roots of my hair a tingling sensation began and ran down the fine-haired surface of my skin. There was silence but for the rapid ping of raindrops on the oak leaves and the wind rustling the pine needles over Delmund's head.

There was something electric that arced from him as he danced, moving out from his one straight and one crooked arm and out through the spasm in his fingers, like giving lightning back to the sky. The rain drizzled down over him and the droplets sparked on his bronzed skin.

As I watched, his movements grew more fluid as if he had, in his joy, forgotten that he was a palsied loonie, an old-man-of-the-woods. The wizened lump inside the wet, holey jockey shorts that clung to his wiredrawn body, swelled and grew stiff, and pushed out at the cloth.

There was nothing obscene in it. I, a mere boy, found nothing obscene in this spontaneous erection.

And then his voice rose, a cawing more musical than a crow's, more triumphant than a rooster's at dawn. Like Peter Pan, I imagined; like that innocent devil-child Peter Pan crowing his joy. Never grow up. Never grow up.

Suddenly questions jumped into my head; the answers were not easy to accept. This had happened once before, years ago, with another child watching in the August rain, and the world had seen it differently than I did now; and the world -- my father, my mother, and all the other fathers and mothers just immersing themselves in the rigidity of adulthood -- had shut him away. And destroyed him.

I was like a baby opening its eyes for the first time and seeing what the world really was; seeing what I might become, full of prejudices and ignorance. Yet what could I do? Tell the adults they had been wrong? I was a baby. Just a kid.

I turned away and went home, knowing he still strutted behind me, turning in circles, arms spread; oblivious to my being, oblivious to all but the water cleansing him.

They found him two days later and brought his corpse in a pick-up truck to Brown's Funeral Home. A collection was taken throughout the village by Mr. MacIntosh. I remember my father gave five dollars.

"Had him as a Scout when I was the Trooper," he said. This was the first I had heard of it.

"What was he like then?" I asked.

"Much the same. Always did keep to himself. A nature lover. Of course, he was straight as a die then. Wasn't all twisted up. I remember your Mum thought he was a good-looking lad. All the young girls fancied him."

My mother gasped. "Alex!"

And so they raised enough money to bury the old-man-of-the-woods, though I guess he wasn't that old. The whole rural area came to say goodbye, driving up in Ford pick-ups and ten-year-old Chevy sedans: the men in dark suits smelling of mothballs, a strained look in their faces from the tie and tight collar, wetted-down hair threatening to spring up again; the women in somber printed dresses, hair pulled tight under their hats or done up in just as tight curls, a lacy hankie gripped in one hand under the strap of their black purses. Ones who knew him; the guilty; the curious.

I never wondered then, though I often did later, why he put up with me, how he kept up his scavenging, knowing I was following him, or why he let me near his shed, or allowed me to watch his rain-dance. And I never asked how he died.

The cemetery is well-groomed. They keep the grass short and the trees back. They pick up the broken, gnarled branches and throw them in the fire.

A sudden brightening of the window has made me look out. The street light has come on. I can see an old woman scuffling along the sidewalk, pulling an rusty wagon with one small box of groceries on it. A wobbly wheel threatens at intervals to put her off balance. It is cold outside and her breath puffs out in weak, wispy clouds.

This city is no place for old people, with the rest of us too busy to notice them.

The wheel on her cart suddenly collapses and she sways, one arm standing out stiffly from the handle, the other tearing at the air. I grab my coat and walk outside.

Joy Hewitt Mann is the author of Clinging to Water, a collection of short fiction (Boheme Press, 2000).

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada.