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Best Girl by E. Scott Manning
There was a monster in the woods, but daddy didn't believe me when I told him. I tried and tried, begged and begged, but he just didn't believe me. He smiled at me, and when he patted me on the head it was like being touched by the sun. He was a big man -a giant- and a word from him, though rare, was always a blessing. He smoothed the wild strays of my hair, and strode off into the woods with his giant's steps, and with an ax over his shoulder. Mama and the rest of us never saw him again.
When I told mama about the monster in the woods, she smiled at me with a worried smile, but I think she had known all along that I wasn't telling lies or stories. Something had come to the woods, something that hadn't been there before, and she knew it.
Even as the years stretched our memories thin and made a ghost of our daddy, she knew that there was something in the woods, even if she never said anything to us kids.
The trees started growing thicker, coming down the hillsides; small saplings spilled passed the old fence. That old stone fence had been nothing more than a human marker really, a boundary that the forest broke and crossed just as easy as our ancient arthritic old goat did on a daily graze.
Samuel, my youngest brother even though he was a handful of years older than me, hated the woods more than any of us. He wouldn't go into them no matter how our mother yelled or cajoled; he only stayed in the house or the front yard, feeding chickens or helping bake the bread. More than once, Samuel had driven mama to tears with his refusal to do a man's work in the fields. One day after his repeated refusal to head into the far fields, now dotted with trees, Bressen, my oldest brother shamed him in front of the rest of us.
Samuel stomped from the house with a hatchet in hand. I watched, hidden near the salt barrels, as he began to chop at the encroaching saplings. One by one, he broke them down, and left a tide of branches and brush in his wake. He worked all day, and into the darkening hours, tears streaming down his face.
I never saw daddy cry, but at that moment I thought Samuel looked like the very image of our old lost daddy. That afternoon made long shadows of everything; the sound of Samuel's work faded, and he never came in for supper.
Mama collapsed, and none of us ate supper for all our tears.
The years stretched further, past a breaking point, and daddy and Samuel became names we no longer spoke out loud. Bressen grew old quick, and did all the work on the farm. He walked out to the fields, even though mama cried to see him go. He stomped out, in boots too large for him to ever fill, and he glared at the woods, a challenge, an ax on his shoulder like an old ghost.
Mama kept the chickens, until I grew old enough to scatter feed. When Samuel never came back, mama got so sick, I took care of the baking then too.
I watched those trees get closer and closer to the house, and it seemed to me that they moved quicker these days. They had no more shame left, not after I had to drag mama outside to the grave I'd dug for her. I was still too small to do much more than feed the chickens and burn the bread, so I wasn't surprised when the hole I dug didn't hold my mama fast. The forest was at our very doorstep when I saw that it had taken her, too, and left nothing but a hole behind, filled with leaf mold and the small rocks that got everywhere in the fields.
Even the chickens left off into the forest, and I was left behind. Me and that old billy goat: one of us stupid, the other stubborn.
I brought that old goat into the house, now that mama and the chickens had gone. I told him, as the firelight danced in his old billy goat eyes, that there was a monster in the forest. And he watched me, calmly, with those strange old eyes of his.
I could hear the world turning to leaf outside my old mama's house, and one day, the billy goat, calm and arthritic, went on into the forest, the light dappling his old hide. That damn old billy goat never came back either. And then it was just me. The fire light was dying, and the cold was coming, but the trees, the forest, they were already here.
I put on my bonnet, and my very best dress. I put on my coat, and my shoes that were just for holidays. I took out my mother's gloves, the ones that her mother gave to her, and I took up my brother's old belt, and put my other brother's hammer right through it, like a soldier might. Wearing the name my daddy gave to me around my shoulders, I went out into the yard, and into the forest.
And no one ever heard from me again, either.
-end-
Copyright 2009 E. Scott Manning - please don't steal, I worked hard on these, typos and all!