Journey With the Comet

by Dana Wayne Haley

  Before long, Leona was crossing the School Road and running down the Stream Road again. Thanks to her natural speed and athleticism she managed to stay a little ahead of them, but the much bigger boys were slowly catching up to her. She ran another 500 feet before one of them grabbed her shoulder, causing her to stumble to the ground. Despite being nearly out of breath she quickly rolled onto her back and looked up at her pursuers.

  “Now you’re gonna get yours, Leona,” Jake said, also out of breath. “You’ve made fools out of us for the last time.”

  “Leave me alone or you’re gonna be in big trouble with my father,” Leona yelled.

  “I don’t see your father here,” Jake responded sarcastically.

  “Do any of you fellas see Mr. Haley here?” he said in a mocking tone this time.

  “I don’t see anyone here but us,” Billy chimed in. “Especially not Mud-cock Haley.”

  When Leona gained her second wind, she got off the ground and stood there surrounded by the four boys, two in front of her blocking her path home and two behind.

  “What do you idiots want?” she asked.

  “I want you to apologize to us, for starters,” Jake replied.

  “What for? Why should I apologize to you?” she asked defiantly.

  “Because you insulted us in front of everyone, and that wasn’t a smart thing to do. I told you I’d get even someday, and today’s the day. And when you get done apologizing to us we’re gonna give you a fancy new haircut. You’ll look real good as a boy. Won’t she fellas?” Jake laughed. “Now, start apologizing.”

  “You can kiss my you-know-what,” Leona said, before turning and aggressively pushing the weakest looking boy to the ground, clearing the way to once again take off running toward the stream.

  Leona had considered staying and fighting, but the boys were much bigger than her, so she put her head down and ran as hard as she could. With the boys again caught off guard, she was able to run almost 50 feet further along the road before they gathered their wits and began chasing her. By that time Leona noticed an unmarked path heading off to the right and decided to take it, hoping to reach Ohio Street before they could catch her. Maybe then she would see someone on the road, or be in earshot of one of the cabins in the woods and hopefully someone would hear her shout for help. Fortunately the path she took was smooth and reasonably straight, making running much easier than it had been on the Stream Road. After running for about a half-minute on the new path, the boys closed to within a few feet of her.

  “You’re gonna get it now, bitch,” Leona heard Jake yell as she rounded a bend in the path.

  When the path began to straighten again, she saw an open area only a hundred feet away. As she neared it Leona eyed a woodpile to the right and then saw a small log cabin off to her left. She raced at full speed to the cabin’s back door and burst through it screaming:

  “Help! Help!”

  —1—

  As fate would have it, when Leona ran through the door of the cabin she twisted her ankle on the doorsill and fell to the floor screaming loudly and writhing in pain. A man, sitting peacefully at his kitchen table drinking cider and reading the morning paper, was startled by the sudden noise and he jumped back in his chair. The cup of warm cider he was drinking went flying across the table, nearly soaking a copy of the Saturday Evening Post that had been left there. When the befuddled man saw Leona on the floor crying for help, and then saw four boys standing perplexed and out of breath just outside the door, he finally realized what was happening. Without hesitation he grabbed a shotgun from his wall rack and rushed to the door shouting:

  “Get off my property or I’ll fill you full of holes and make mincemeat out of you hoodlums.”

  “It’s Crazy Charlie! Let’s get out of here!” one of them shouted.

  For good measure, the man aimed his shotgun at a woodpile and fired one shot, being careful not to hit the boys, or any animals that might be in the area. With that, the boys turned and ran back into the woods, quicker than a rabbit fleeing a wild dog.

  When Leona heard the name Crazy Charlie, her mind instantly jumped back to the time Grandma Eunice warned the Haleys about an old hermit named Charlie Berry, and she felt her heart jump into her throat. Then she looked up and saw the old man standing with his newly fired shotgun in hand, and her heart began to beat faster-and-faster, even faster than the time she almost plowed into Mr. Perkins’ horse with her sled, down by Eunice’s. The old man saw how frightened Leona looked and knew he needed to say something. But first he put his shotgun back on the wall rack.

  “It’s okay now, young lady. Those jerks are gone, and I can guarantee you they won’t be coming back this way anytime soon. In fact, never, if I know them. I have a well-earned reputation in these parts that will make them think twice about coming back here again. Not for a long, long time anyway. A very long time.”

  Leona nodded to the old man. She had no doubt that the cowardly boys wouldn’t dare come back.

  “I’ve heard of your reputation, Mr. Berry,” Leona said politely, not wanting to antagonize him.

  Hearing fear in her voice, Charlie tried to calm the clearly apprehensive girl.

  “Oh, you don’t hav’ta be afraid of me, young lady. I’m not half as bad as I let on. I’ve heard the rumors going around about how I killed my family and all, and about being in a mental institution, but let me assure you: those are only rumors. I’m as gentle as a kitten. But don’t you dare tell that to anyone else, okay?”

  Leona heard the sincerity in his soft grandfatherly voice, a voice that she seemed to recognize, and her fear slowly faded away.

  “But why do you want people to believe all those terrible rumors?” she asked incredulously.

  “Oh, I have my reasons, young lady. Believe me, I have my reasons. Now it’s my turn to ask questions. Why were those jerks chasing you?”

  She laughed at the old man’s candor, realizing that she had referred to them as jerks once herself; and with a smirk on her face, said:

  “I kinda made them mad a while back, and I guess they finally got up the nerve to take their revenge. Those cowards didn’t dare confront me when I was their size, but now that they’re much bigger than me, well, I guess they finally found their courage.”

  “I don’t call it too courageous for four big boys to be picking on a girl,” Charlie said with contempt. “What were they going to do to you?”

  “They said they wanted me to apologize and then they were gonna cut off my hair. Of course, I didn’t think that was such a good idea, so I ran like a bat out of hell, until I stumbled upon your cabin.”

  “Stumble is the right word,” he laughed, amused by her metaphor. “You are one spunky little kid. Why don’t you pick yourself off the floor and we’ll have a cup of warm cider, as soon as I clean up the mess I made. Or maybe I should say, you made.”

  “I’m sorry about your cider, Mr. Berry. I’d help you clean it up, but I think my ankle’s broken. I twisted it bad when I ran through the door. Now I know why Mama said not to run in the house.”

  “Here, let me take a look at that for you, young lady,” he said while helping her into a chair.

  As the old man checked Leona’s ankle for any signs of broken bones, she noticed the June 7th, 1924, Saturday Evening Post that was lying on the table. On the cover was a Norman Rockwell painting of a slender old man sitting at a desk with pen in hand, apparently intending to make a notation in a large book or journal, but instead he was staring off into space over the top of narrow eyeglasses which sat on the end of his nose. He was clearly daydreaming, and the image in his mind’s eye was of a multi-sail schooner sailing across an unknown ocean. Leona began to imagine herself on that same vessel, traveling to Europe.

  Finally, she awoke from her short daydream and spoke.

  “I see you read the Post, Mr. Berry.”

  “Yeah, but ta
tell ya the truth, I buy it more for the Rockwell covers than for what’s inside.”

  “That’s what my Mama and Papa say too. By the way, Mr. Berry, my name’s Leona.”

  “I know, young lady. We’ve met before.”

  Leona looked puzzled. She remembered seeing Charlie Berry a few times outside his cabin, but darn if she could remember ever talking to him before, although that voice did sound familiar.

  “When did we meet?” she asked.

  “Let’s see now, if I’m not mistaken, I believe it was three years ago last December. Don’t you remember the man who helped your dad when he fell off his wagon and got hurt?”

  “That was you!?” Leona said in disbelief. “But that man looked much younger. And he didn’t have a beard.”

  “Well, at that time, I didn’t. And a beard will do that to a man: add the years, I mean. The fall before your dad was injured I had to cut it off. I fell into a damn burdock bush chasing a ‘coon through the woods—pardon the French, missy—and, wouldn’t you just know it, some burrs got stuck to my beard; and those pesky things are darn near impossible to get untangled from a person’s hair. So I figured the easiest thing to do was to cut off my beard and grow another one. Took me nigh on ta 6 months to get it back to this length. Actually, I tried going clean shaven for a few months, but my face was too cold during the winter and I decided to grow it back.”

  —2—

  Leona knew just what Mr. Berry meant about those darn burdocks. In the past she had gotten a couple of those miserable things caught in her hair, and from that day forward she was very careful to avoid the prickly burdock bush that gave birth to them. A smile came to her face as she recalled her father’s reaction to her annoying predicament, and she proceeded to tell Charlie the story.

  “By chance, it happened right after my father yelled out the back door and asked me to fetch some firewood outta the shed. At that moment I was on my way into the woods to look for a bracelet given to me on my birthday by my best friend Jill, that very day, in fact. On the way back from Jill’s I dropped the bracelet and didn’t realize it until I went to pull it out of my pocket to show my mother. That’s what I get for taking a shortcut through the woods, I guess. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my father needed the wood, right then and there, so I nodded and kept on going, figuring it would only take a couple of minutes to find the bracelet. After finding it snagged on a burdock bush, I made it back home about ten minutes later, with burdocks stuck in my hair, and I saw my father carrying wood into the house.

  “Oh-oh, I thought; thinking that he might be mad at me for not obeying him. But fortunately, Mama had already told my father where I was going, so he wasn’t mad at me after all. However, just for the fun of it, he acted angry and told me that anytime I disobeyed him I would get Murdock’s burdocks caught in my hair. Then a loud roar came from his mouth; and, let me tell you, I was so relieved to hear his laughter and to realize that he was just kidding. Still, after that I’ve taken great pains to never disobey my father again, even unintentionally.”

  —3—

  Charlie was laughing when Leona finished her story, and that made her feel even more at ease with him. He now seemed almost like a friend to her, so much so that Leona asked him a question that she otherwise might not have asked.

  “Why do you have a beard anyway, Mr. Berry? You look so much better without one.”

  “I know,” he said with muffled laughter, “that’s why I grew it. It makes me look real scary, and gives credence to my nickname: Crazy Charlie.”

  “But why do you want people thinking you’re crazy?” Leona asked.

  “Because, I don’t much like most people, and so I don’t want them around pestering me. And the best way to assure that is to let them go on thinking I’m crazy. I don’t start the rumors, but I don’t refute them either. In fact, I’m more than happy to encourage them.”

  “It sounds like you’re crazy after all, Mr. Berry. Crazy like a fox!” Leona remarked; and then she noticed the old man wink and exhibit a wily grin.

  Leona learned that Mr. Berry—being born in 1870, ten years before her father—was 54 and that the reason he wanted to live in isolation as a hermit was that he enjoyed communing with nature and, on top of that, preferred the company of forest animals to that of most humans he met.

  “The hermit lifestyle suits me,” he told Leona in answer to one of her questions. “It allows me to avoid people, and the hypocrisy, jealousy, and greed that most of them possess.”

  “My parents are not like that at all, Mr. Berry. They’re as good as they come; and I know you’d like them a lot.”

  “I’m sure I would,” Charlie answered, “but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve surely got to be the exceptions.”

  As they talked he carefully wrapped a bandage around Leona’s ankle. After he was done she talked with the old hermit for nearly twenty minutes more. During that time she learned that his wife and children were indeed killed, but not by him. They died in a bad train accident in upper New York when his wife was visiting her parents. Charlie told Leona that it happened not long after he turned 38 and that he never married again.

  “It took a long time to get over my loss,” he said with a quivering voice and a tear running down his cheek. “As you see, I’m still not over it. It’s hard when you lose someone you love, especially your whole family. They were my life.”

  Leona noticed a photo of Charlie and his family sitting on the mantel over his fireplace. His wife looked like someone she had seen before, but she wasn’t sure who or where.

  “Maybe in the movies,” she thought. “Oh! Now I remember. She looks like one of the women in Papa’s family photo; one of his sisters: the really pretty one.”

  “Your wife and children were so beautiful,” she said. “Did they live here with you?”

  “No, we had a nice house next to Pushaw Lake in Orono. Can you believe it, I was a professor in the Department of Wildlife and Forestry at the University. But after the accident my heart wasn’t into teaching, so I took an early retirement, in 1916. I was only 46, but fortunately early on I bought stock in the Ford Motor Company and General Electric, and could afford to. After looking around I bought this land in Glenburn and went about building this cabin.”

  Charlie built his cabin with his own hands so he could live his lonely, yet carefree life in solitude.

  “Why do you like living here all alone?” Leona asked, not quite understanding the first reason he gave.

  “As I said, I like living amongst the animals, and being able to smell the sweet aroma of the forest every day. Who wouldn’t like to fall asleep to the soothing sounds of crickets and frogs; or wake up each morning to the sound of chirping birds; or, for that matter, go walking in the woods anytime you want to? All I hav’ta do is walk out my back door and within seconds I’m in the woods where I can see beautiful whitetail deer, a red fox or two, now and then a Canadian lynx, and sometimes even a stray black bear. And, of course, enjoy the intoxicating aroma of fir, spruce and pine trees.”

  Leona was beginning to understand how the old man felt; after all, that’s exactly the way her father felt about things, but she was still puzzled about one thing.

  “But how do you live without working?” she asked.

  “Oh, I have plenty of money stashed away. But I don’t use much of it, ‘cause I might need it when I’m too damn old to care for myself. For now, the land gives me most everything I need. I pick wild berries and apples; I have a garden to grow vegetables, just like everyone else; and I fish and hunt wild animals for furs and for nourishment. But I don’t go around killing animals willy-nilly, or go cutting down trees or other vegetation, unless I need to, to survive. The animals are my friends. As I said, I get along better with my wild animal friends than I do with most people. At least animals are not hypocrites, although they can get a little jealous, and sometimes even greedy o
n occasion. But not to the degree that humans can.”

  “What’s a hypocrite?” Leona asked.

  “That’s someone who says one thing and does another. And you’ll often find those people are the ones who usually go spreading rumors about others, to cover up their own shortcomings.”

  “Oh yes, my Mama and Papa often tell funny stories about people like that. You’re a lot like my Papa, Mr. Berry. He moved us from Bangor to Glenburn so we could enjoy the woods too.”

  “Your dad sounds like he’s a good man, missy. I’m glad I was able to help him when I did.”

  Looking at the clock on the cabin wall, Leona turned to Charlie and said, “Well, Mr. Berry, I’d better head home now. I told my mother I’d be back by noon. I’m already fifteen minutes late, and, knowing her, she’s probably worried out of her head.”

  “You’re probably right, Leona,” Charlie said. “Though, you shouldn’t try to walk on that ankle just yet; at least, not ‘til a doctor takes a look at it. Tell you what, I’ll get my wagon and give you a ride home. Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  Leona watched the amiable old man walk out the cabin door and thought:

  “Mama and Papa were sure right. You can’t judge someone based only on what you hear about them. Mr. Berry is as nice as they come, even though people say he isn’t. And those four boys are nothing but pure evil, even though a few people say good things about them.”

  —4—

  Charlie was back in a minute with a small hand-wagon he used to haul deer out of the woods. Although it was small compared to the Haleys’ wagon, it served its purpose. It was big enough to haul a large buck and thus was more than adequate to carry Leona. After placing the wagon close to the door of his cabin, Charlie went inside, picked Leona up in his strong arms and carried her outside. She saw the wagon and thought it looked much like a wagon that her father had made for Wally last Christmas, just much bigger. Charlie’s wagon had a four-foot wooden pole attached to the front axle that was used to both pull and steer the wagon. A large handle was attached to the front of the pole, and a rope was attached to a wooden lever that allowed the brakes to be engaged with very little effort. The cleverly designed, lightweight wagon allowed a man of Charlie’s size to easily maneuver it. After placing Leona on the wagon, he helped her get comfortably seated so her bad foot was properly cushioned. Then he went into his cabin and returned with shotgun in hand.