An old man sat alone at a crossroad and pondered existence.
The day was long and in seeing the sun begin its retreat beyond the horizon’s low clouds the old man knew that he would no longer make it home. He had walked this road many times in his life, growing as he travelled and learning from each bend along the quiet dirt trail that bothered no map and led its way back toward his home. Although still sure of his path, time allows memory to grow clouded and the correct turn had eluded him on this afternoon.
Slouched upon the stump of a tree he could not remember, the old man sighed and drank from the remaining water still held within his canteen; the country around him was verdant, lush fields often blessed by the morning’s wash of rain, but experience had told him that no stream would be found upon this road, he would soon run out of water.
The afternoon wind brushed past and tugged at the old man’s hat, attempting to dislodge it. It moved with a youthfulness, coiling twice around the tree stump, and whispering of the soon returning rain, a coldness trailing behind it in noiseless step. The wind was free, moving without direction and knowing no loss. It was a voiceless thing that the old man regarded to be as a spirit without knowledge: it had no home, no warmth of the past, and no memory. He held no fondness for the wind but as his own memories had begun to depart, he seemed to know its sadness.
A crossroads it was then that he should pause for a moment and attempt to remember the way. There was bleakness within this road at sunset and the day had become drawn in grey by potential of a night spent without coat nor shelter.
Drafting warmth into his hands to stay their tremble, the old man felt indignation at his weakness. He knew this road, eighty times he had wandered along its unchanging path and he had not yet become lost. How could a path so well traversed lead its way into a crossroad? Had he changed? Was his memory not to be trusted?
Footsteps preluded the dim glow of a lantern.
‘Must you be so melodramatic,’ the old man rasped, still short of breath and agitated from his confusion, ‘I suppose that the temptation of a crossroad be too poetic for a beast to bear, you’ve brought your fiddle then?’
He was dreary, the melancholy of this situation had made him asinine to the stranger, when had grace departed him?
Looking past the lantern’s glow a young man smiled softly, much like he had been in years no distant. The lad had a mop of hair tucked carelessly under a cotton hat that had been faded by years spent in the sun. The patch-filled nature of this stranger’s clothes reminded the old man of a distant picture of himself and he suddenly remembered the freeness of a time before age had dulled life’s edges; there was a time he had been proud, his shoulders were strong, they were not yet burdened by work.
‘A fiddle sir?’ the youth asked with curiosity, ‘are you ok out here by yourself? It looks like a storm is on the way.’
Taking another step closer the youth patiently turned and gazed across the adjacent field, its flaxen grain pulled leftward by the sweeping breeze; dotted flowers, new in blossom amongst the crops, stood out with brighter colour as the clouds continued to build, darkness becoming their shadow.
Stamping his foot in reply the old man let out a huff and softened his face into an honest sense of defeat.
‘I don’t need your help. The chill has just gotten to my bones and I wanted myself a rest,’ he lied, more attempting to convince himself than a stranger he had greeted so unkindly, ‘you may pass me by, I’m just an old fool a’waiting for his devil.’ Lowering his head, the old man looked to his hands and saw the ember of history within their lines. A scar from his first paring knife and a lesson in patience, the callouses that had never healed from tireless days of tilling, his life existed within his head, his heart, and his hands, and it was only now that they no longer seemed united.
‘It’s no night to be alone,’ the youth smiled, unstopping his wineskin, and proffering it toward the old man.
There was something behind the young stranger’s eyes as he spoke, a pain that he had yet to process. He had seen something within the old man that had caused him trouble, a reflection, the old man wondered, did he see me as pitiful?
Failing to stand with strength not yet returned, the old man grew forlorn, what weakness have I shown to so affect a stranger? Damn this crossroads and damn the path that had brought me here, he coiled within himself in rage and remembered the smile that this youth had held before their meeting and how his presence now worried the boy.
‘I am only resting, lad, I am not alone,’ he said after a moment of silence.
‘Then I shall rest with you,’ the stranger replied, dropping his travellers sack to the ground, and dusting at the grass with his cotton hat, ‘I’ve walked today for what seems to be a lifetime and a rest would do me good, as it has done for you. We’ll set off together when the strength finds us again.’
Passing the wine skin without demand the youth lay back upon the grass and attempted to catch a drop of rain that fell from the sky.
‘A year of luck within the first drop of rain,’ they said in unison not hearing each other’s voice.
Taking from the wineskin and turning to regard the stranger, the old man remembered a kind of distance that he had not noticed upon the stranger before, he remembered a coastline undrawn with eleven men too afraid for names, a terrible noise that no memory should ever repeat buffeting them as they could only watch the waves. The waters of that shore will always be red to the old man, coloured as though torn from the wineskin in his hands and then lain as still as winter’s frost, how could a man truly know rest after a day that the tide chose not to return?
‘What brings you to this junction, where only souls do dwell?’ he spoke to the stranger without raising his head, too afraid of seeing how much the youth had aged.
But he sat alone.
He sat alone upon a road that he knew and looked toward the direction he had walked to before. A dim light from beyond the hill flickered in the darkness and filled the night air with memories of his home.
Within the slow drizzle of moonlit rain, the old man stood and allowed memory to carry his feet forward, he walked slowly, tracing his steps as patient as stone and marking them into the dirt as if they were his old friends. He looked upon himself in that moment and saw who he had followed and in that he smiled.
No devil may find him this night.
J. McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 