The Old Man and the Sea of Leaves

The Old Man and the Sea of Leaves

He waited.

He sat on the splintery green bench in the woods and waited. Twenty years since retirement, he waited.

His entertainments were mostly birds. A mockingbird and a Carolina wren perched overhead and dueled for his pleasure. He liked them, and those mourning doves which sidled up to him, and he fed them sunflower seeds. He had staring contests with bluetail skinks, and once he saw a litter of water snakes being born and wrapping around their mother’s body. In the winter months, he got to be friends with a mink that slithered along the ice on the creek below the bench. Minks were take-no-prisoners—he liked that.

He’d walk along the path to get the kinks out, go back to the bench. Wait. He liked the tock-tock-tock sounds the chipmunks made warning about predators. Sometimes he joined in, clicking his tongue off the roof of his mouth: tock-tock-tock.

In late October, he finally heard it. Hard footfalls like tap shoes. Closer and closer until the shoe wearer came alongside. It was a young woman dressed in tights and a sweatshirt, her privates displayed, her black curly hair bouncing to her steps, a cellphone in her right hand. The spirit world now using a woman, he thought. Keep up with the times.

He nodded. She smiled—too warm, for a specter.

“I see you here all the time. I’m Beth.”

“I been waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“Death.”

“No-no.” She spoke loudly: “I’m Beth. Who are you?”

“Nobody. A old man.”

“Old man in the sea of leaves. Can I take a selfie with you?”

“A what?”

“For Instagram? So my friends can see you?”

“Instant what? If you ain’t Death, get the hell away from me. Tock-tock-tock.”

The young woman shrugged her old people shrug and walked on ahead, her shoes tap-tapping. He appreciated the rise fall of her hips. They didn’t make them like that when he was young. He wouldn’t mind licking her crack.

A week passed, last weekend of October.

He sat on the splintered green bench in the woods and waited. He liked those pileated woodpeckers, the Woody Woodpecker sound they made. Sometimes he imitated the sound: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

At midafternoon, Death arrived. Another woman—but this time an old crone. She was dressed in black from head to toe. Robes or a dress. Black lace. A hand-carved cane with roses carved on it.

A proper Death, he thought.

Her dyed black hair, tight on her skull, was wrapped in a black veil-like thing. Black gloves. Took her half an hour just to shuffle to the bench. She sat next to him. The first person to sit next to him in twenty years.

A tugboat pushing four barges wended its way west past the island. He waved, knowing they wouldn’t answer. The smokestack of the coal-fired plant across the river spat out perfect clouds. He glanced at the old woman and said, “How do. Death?”

The old woman reached in her large black handbag and came out with a plastic bag of bread crumbs. She tossed a handful of crumbs onto the sidewalk. Not a squirrel in sight.

“Death? I been waiting.”

“Stupid man. I am a widow. The Widow Duckworth.”

“How long?”

“One day.”

Ten minutes passed. Dog-eye Sulphur butterflies landed on the pair and fluttered their wings, proboscises probing bare, salty skin. A frenzied Carolina wren warbled a crazy call.

“Where is the deceased?”

“In hell.” She smashed a butterfly against her breast with a gloved hand. “I don’t brook looneys.”

“This my bench. I ain’t no looney. This my bench. Tock-tock-tock, I am the old man in the sea of leaves. Beth said so.”

“A looney for sure.”

A group of teenage boys wearing jerseys imprinted with the logo of the local high school jogged past, playfully shoving each other, even a black kid pushing a white kid and all they did was laugh and call each other retards and a coach yelling knock it off. A line of motorcycles roared by going west, no mufflers, the sound magnified by the river bluffs. They were all going to be deaf, and good riddance. A little girl in a frilly pink dress on a tricycle rod right past their knees, no trailing adult behind her, and she disappeared around the corner of the bluff. A family of skunks emerged from the bushes and crossed the four-lane Great River Road, dodging angry motorists but making it across to the bank of the river.

“I love skunk smell,” the old man said.

The old woman sighed. She reached in her black bag and came out with a small pistol.

“God dammit,” he said, “Ma’am, I forgot to feed Fred the cat”—

She shot him in his right eye. He was dead before he could slump down. There was a millisecond where he got in a last thought: Not what I expected.

And then he folded over onto the bench.

“You were warned,” the widow Duckworth said to the old man in the sea of leaves. Then she looked toward the heavens. “They did a good job on your makeup,” she said to her late husband. “Better than you deserve. I put you in the Shipman cemetery where I don’t have to look at you. My time comes, I will sleep with Momma and Daddy, and we will not think of you. I put all the photos of you in the trash—no one will ever see you.”

She stood and steadied her cane, and she started on her journey to the car.

It waited. The house dark, street lights feebly splashing on the carpet. It knelt, its rump in the air and watched the basement steps going down where the mice scampered. It smelled them. It was night, long past food. Past the time for the show it liked. That “Animal Planet” that came on, big cats running around, and its blood buzzed—oh, it liked that, its teeth chattered. Where was that one who fed it?

And ranted on and on and the only two rants it recognized: “Fred.” “Death.”