The Old Man

We were ten years old, when my best friend Ron and I schemed a plan to prove the rumors about the old man were true. In our minds, it would be the adventure of a lifetime. If the rumors about him are true, our mission could be dangerous. We were giddy with excitement.

Once a month my parents had neighbors over to play Rook. I always sat close by, listening to the gossip. I knew they’d get around to talking about the old man. The adult’s in our neighborhood always gossiped about the old man who lived in the oak grove, ‘he’s a wicked old man,’ mom had said during one of their Rook parties. Dad and some other fathers disagreed. Two mother’s stuck-up for mom.

“Mom had said he’s wicked,” I told Ron that proved it true. We needed firsthand evidence to convince everyone else. The idea filled us with excited adventure. We began planning our investigation and gathering items we’d need,

“I can get garlic from the pantry,” I told Ron.

“Yeah, he could be a vampire!” Ron exclaimed. “We better take rope too.”

“That would be handy to tie him up,” I replied. “What if he’s not a vampire?”

“He could be a werewolf,” Ron said. My eyes bulged at the thought.

“That would take a silver bullet and we can’t get a gun.”

“We’re hosed,” Ron said.

“I have a Beebe gun,” I said.

“Better than nothing,” Ron said. “How do we know what he is? People say he’s wicked, what does that mean?”

“That he’s nasty and no good. You better bring your sling shot too.”

The only real facts we knew about the old man that he lived in an old two-story house covered with green vines, under a grove of oaks it looked like night even on the sunniest days. The place looked spooky.

 It was a Saturday morning we stood at the top of the gravel driveway, dressed in green, and armed. Breathing hard, getting our courage up. All the voices I had overheard shouted in my head ‘stay away from that old codger, he ain’t in his right mind.’

The old man didn’t keep his yard clean. Weeds and patches of bare dirt, tree limbs laid everywhere and cracked under our feet. The old man couldn’t have good grass under the twelve oaks. At the sight of us, birds flew from limb to limb, and squirrels ran up the tree trunks.

The two-story house had broken boards, paint peeling off, shutters hanging sideways, creaked eerily, vines covered the structure like snakes slithering from ground to roof. At the back of the house stood an old empty barn. This place had at one time been a working farm, before the town grew up around it.

We whispered back and forth as if our plan was smart or dumb. The voice echoed in my head. Stay away from that old man.

“Are we doing this or not?” Ron asked. His voice crackled like he wasn’t sure if we should.

“We are,” I said with as much confidence I could muster. We continued walking through the grove. The air dark and musty. We walked ever so slowly, straight as a plumb line, closer to the haunted house.

The old man walked out onto the porch. He had seen us coming.  We stopped and stood still as fence posts. He looked at us, with his back hunch over he looked shorter than us. MY knees knocked. “What do we do now?” I whispered.

“We can run,” Ron whispered back.

At that moment the old man crooked finger motioned for us to come closer. Without a word we moved forward as though a force had pulled us. We stopped at the foot of the steps. I looked him in the eye to see if they were black vampire eyes.

“He looks like a hobbit,” Ron whispered. The old man let out a squalling laugh,

“I don’t hear well, boy, but I read lips.” The old man howled.

“Werewolf,” Ron whispered, covering his lips so the old man couldn’t read them.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Well,” the old man squealed, “are a going to stand out there all day?” He motioned for us to come closer. Every instinct and every alarm bell of mom’s warnings ran through my head, but curiosity ignored the fears.

“Leave your weapons on the porch,” the old man said.

With some hesitation we did and then walked inside. The house opened up like a museum. Every stick of furniture was old, pictures of people with stiff neck expressions hung on every wall. The kind where folks looked scared or mean. Back when no one smiled for a camera. It seemed to me they hated getting their picture taken as much as I did.

The old man didn’t say much. We strolled around like a day at the fair. It’s when we went upstairs my jaw dropped. One gigantic room hadn’t a stick of furniture but had every kind of musical instrument I could phantom and some I had never seen before. We spent a few hours strumming on a banjo or a fiddle. I tried making the xylophone sound good, but I couldn’t play a lick. The old man could play every instrument he had. From a harp to a saxophone. I counted thirty-six instruments that the old man had taught himself to play. Any song he heard he could learn to play. We spent a full day with the old man. One I will always remember. A man who lived alone, no one knew him and most people feared him, but he was gentle and brilliant, a man comfortable in his own skin.

As I remember that day, we learned a valuable lesson that not everything we hear about someone was true. Vampires and werewolves still make wonderful stories. From that day on, whenever Ron and I heard someone say something about the old man in the haunted house, we’d set them straight.

The next summer we moved, and I never saw the old man again. He didn’t give us his name, and we didn’t ask. It didn’t seem necessary, for we knew all about him and he wasn’t what everyone imagined. The old man was so much more.