He had grown up in the area and spent his childhood hiking the hills and running the ridges that jut out above the beaches. He knew the bushes and the berries, the migration paths of the deer and the rock holds that sheltered the turkey and pheasant hiding amongst the trees. His step-father Ansel had raised him firmly (some would say roughly) in a old brown-bricked house near the edge of town, along with his mom and his two younger sisters. He started removing stone from the ground at the back edge of their property when he was seven; he was felling trees by age ten; he was raising fences by age eleven. He was quiet and rock-like himself, a big boy, thick like a stump with four large limbs, the knob on top hidden mostly under a thick swirl of wavy red hair. If you drove by their property on the county road, you would often see him out there, somewhere near the gravelly drive digging a hole behind a berm, or unrolling chicken wire around a frame, or piling things: wood, rocks, auto parts, drainage piping, wire spools.

Most of the time, he would be alone, but once and a while, you might see Ansel out talking to him, a small, thick-necked, stooped and animated man, always with a cigarette in his left hand or flicking around on his lower lip. Ansel would come out, wave an arm around, say some words in spastic gesturing, and then take a long drag on his smoke, and then stare at the boy for a long minute before going back in. And the boy would alter his work regimen a little, and wander behind the house for a while. His mother and girls never came outside.

It wasn’t till second grade that he had showed up alone at Piedmont Consolidated School, arriving for classes on the second day of the second week. He didn’t talk much, but Ms. Sauvone, who had driven by his home for years on her way out to the farmers market in the next town over, recognized him by that eruption of hair, and discerned that he wanted to go to school. She helped get him registered in the school, although she could not get any information from him about his family or home. Or his name. Unresponsive to direct questions, she resorted to listing boy’s name, asking him if this or that was his. He finally nodded yes at “Mike.”

She then took him into her class where she taught nine other elementary school kids. In a short time, she learned that he wouldn’t talk, and he didn’t know how to read or write. But he would come, and she would let him sit in class. He would stare at the letter charts on the walls and thumbed through books she gave him, absorbing the pictures and digesting her instructions to the other kids. He usually returned to “reading” the picture book about the Velvetine Rabbit. Ms. Sauvone noted that, and in time, brought him in a worn gray stuffed bunny. When she tried to give it to him, all he could do is stare at it on the desk before him. He didn’t know what a gift was.

But after a good three weeks, he would disappear from school for a few weeks at a time.

—

Ansel occasionally worked at the wood mill down by Curry Pass. Owned originally by his grandfather and two other partners, the mill ended up in Ansel’s cousins hands, and Ansel had come with the deal. When he was younger, he was skilled miller, easy with machinery and reliable in the field. Sometime in his twenties, though, Ansel had ended up in a fight involving workmates while buying some equipment in Birmingham, and of the four men involved, he had been clubbed unconscious. Ansel had always been a briar in most conversations, provocative and exaggerated, under-educated and impetuous. In his youth, his competence had helped his social jaggedness to be forgiven. In the Birmingham fight, two squad cars had found him bleeding from the back of his head laying in a parking lot, two ribs cracked, and at the ring and pinkie fingers on his right hand broken. His “associates” had left him and driven to a nearby bar. He spent a month in St. Matthais Regional Hospital in Birmingham. During that time, he had two visitors: his cousin Andrus, who came to get the story about what happened from him, and who always spoke with him in hushed terms, leaning over him with secrets; and his father, who visited him twice, said five words, and left telling him how disappointed his mother was in him.

The fight left a visible protrusion on the back right side of Ansel’s head, and a risen scar on the front right of his throat, and when Ansel left the hospital, he was different- older, more jittery, more crazy-eyed.

—

Image Credit: “Yaquina Head, Oregon” by Rhiannon Boyle via Flickr. Under Creative Commons 2.0.

An exercise in narrative, description, and plot development.