Lost On The Way Home

Cold mud squished under the weight of a heavy-treaded woodsman's boot. The grey fog of the morning swirled after the passage of the woodsman who wore that boot, who yanked it out of the mud with a noisy schlorp and placed it next onto mossy loam below the dew-heavy branches of a gloam pine. 

Tholbert Salter swung his gaze up the length of the trunk, and scowled, the wrinkles etched into his weathered face rendering his visage nearly as craggy as the bark upon which he placed a callused hand. "I'm as hale a strong man as I ever was," he complained to the tree quietly. "More a fool the man who'd call that birch not so impressive. Don't he understand the wisdom of not bringin' a behemoth down on oneself?"

And there the old woodsman spent some time grumbling and complaining, for earlier in the lumber camp he'd overheard some of the loggers discussing a birch he'd felled. They wondered if old Master Salter was losing his edge. After all, he was getting on in years. 

Honestly, the worst of it was that Tholbert wondered about that himself. He withdrew his palm from the gloam pine's bark, and surveyed the tree again. It was the perfect size for one man to drop alone, without being too dangerous. Perhaps the laborers wouldn't be impressed when Tholbert dragged the trimmed log back to the lumber camp, but at least he was wise enough not to make a fool of himself and lose a limb to the bonesaws at the clinic, as some more reckless and shorter-lived lumberjacks were wont to do. So far, Tholbert's wiles had given him a long life. Longer than his father's life. Longer than his brother's.

Gazing up at the fog-shrouded branches against the pale sky, Tholbert rubbed semi-consciously at the knotted knuckles of one fist, and the further back corner of his mind wondered if it the tight ache around those joints in his hands was already the telltale heralding of elderly infirmity. Almost immediately, he trudged a circle in the pinecone-strewn loam about the foot of the gloamy trunk, and assessed the trunk before detaching the long, jagged-toothed saw from his toolbelt.

It didn't take long, with his experience, for Tholbert to draw an angled notch in the trunk -- and after that, it was even a shorter period of time before a resounding cracking echoed through the forest and the tree collapsed in a pile of brush and broken branches. Yes, it hadn't taken long at all, the rasping of the saw a powerful tool wielded by the master carpenter's hand -- but by then, most of the fog of morning had cleared.

As Tholbert began to survey the felled tree, and the later-morning birdsong resumed its chirruping in the chill autumn air -- a motion in the woods caught the old carpenter's keen blue eyes.

He glanced that way sharply, focusing on who'd watched the last crash of the gloampine. There, amidst the old pineneedles, squatted a little boy. As Tholbert noticed him, he stood up and grinned, and swept a grubby hand quickly under his nose. Slick streamers of snot had been running over the boy's upper lip, and he sent them flung away onto the forest floor with a dramatic gesture. "Mornin', sir!" he chirped, sounding just as high-pitched as the birds, but not a fraction as musical. 

Tholbert couldn't quite refrain from a grimace, watching that mucus fly. He took a long moment before speaking, then asked roughly, "What's a child your age doing in the forest? Git back home, kid."

The little boy shivered. "I'm lost," he complained plaintively, but his eyes were bright, and a smile rapidly took his features again with a genuine hopefulness that truthfully dizzied the old carpenter. How could such a disgusting little waif beam so happily? But the child was still talking, at a rapid babble, and was even coming closer -- swinging barefoot steps across the littered ground. He prodded experimentally at one of the half-cracked branches of the felled gloampine, mouth yapping away.

Trying to focus on what the boy was saying already gave Tholbert a headache, and he interrupted the steady stream of information with a "Sssht!" and an upheld hand. He pretended to listen for a noise off in the forest, but knew well there wasn't one -- he just wanted the kid to shut up for a minute so he could process what he'd heard.

It was the boy's birthday. He was turning seven years old. He'd prayed to Dionos for his parents back. He couldn't find his way back home because Beorth from Sleithdale had only brought him so far as the fields, and then he'd wanted to look at the Mistwatch keep, but had taken the wrong path back towards town, and gotten lost in the forest, and heard a noise, and thanks be to Kalen that he'd found someone, thanks to the noise of the sawing, which had scared him at first before he recognized it, because there was a carpenter working on his home right now, and --

"You know Bill Hidges?" Tholbert refocused on the boy, dropping his hand. When earnest nodding followed, he replied, "So your home's that old place on Painter Street, yah?" More earnest nodding. "Yer granny -- was her name, ahem, Perlie?"

The boy cocked his head curiously up Tholbert, over the felled gloampine. "I dunno, sir," he replied uncertaintly, and the old carpenter well-recognized that strain of secret sorrow in the child's voice. "But my ma, she was Vexie."

Tholbert grimaced, but this time it wasn't disgust that provoked the expression. He looked away, and heaved a long sigh.

Wrapping both arms around himself, the little boy gave a few hops from foot to foot as if to keep himself warm. He shivered.

"You'd be the Thoe I heard tell of, then," Tholbert stated into the silence that followed. He always did like to fancy the boy he'd distantly heard of was named after his own self, but... it was a common enough name. And Perlie had forgotten all about him. Why would she suggest that name for her grandson?  Certainly not due to his unrequited interest in her as a youth. "You're named after me, you know," he heard himself saying, regardless. 

What a stupid thing to say! Inwardly, he cursed himself, but then he was doing something else stupid. Why was he taking off his sweater?

The age in Tholbert's joints didn't twinge hardly at all as he skillfully hupped over the fallen trunk of the gloampine, and then yanked the garment over Thoe's head. Heavy knit wool fell nearly to the boy's ankles. "There," he told the surprised child. "I'll take off the branches, you stack 'em into firewood."

And without further ado, Tholbert turned away and recovered his saw. The rasping of its jagged blade through green wood started up again between strains of birdsong, as the sun rose higher to cast a shaft of warmth through the space in the canopy that the gloampine had once occupied. 

Thoe hummed an off-key tune as he obediently began to break and bundle the branches, and Tholbert daydreamed secretly about taking the last letter off the sign in front of his lumber warehouse.