Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  “His cabin was just up the hill, not far from where we’re sitting right now. It burned down a long time ago—after it happened….”

  “What happened?” asked Mario.

  “He went crazy one day. Yes, Old Man Bolton took an axe and chopped everybody up into little, tiny pieces. The cabin burned down and just the foundations are left. Tomorrow I can take you on a hike up the hill and show you where the cabin once stood… Anyway, they say he cut his own foot with that axe, and when he limped off into the woods he left a trail of blood. The police showed up after a while, and found what he’d done, but they never did find him. Old Man Bolton had simply vanished.”

  A long, thoughtful silence ensued.

  Campers shifted on their logs, edging closer to the fire.

  The forest beyond our circle of light seemed very, very dark.

  Mario shakily put his hand up. “If they never found Old Man Bolton, where is he now?”

  “Well,” said the storyteller, “that’s the strange thing about my story. You see, some people say he’s still out there, wandering the hills with his hurt foot—and his axe.”

  “Hey,” Frankie piped up, intrepid and skeptical, “is that story true?”

  “Probably not,” the counsellor said, “Nah, I don’t think it’s true. But there’s just one thing…” The Bolton Camp yarnspinner took his time getting to the startling conclusion of his tale; sparks cracked up into the dark air as the circle of boys waited patiently. “Boy, if you’re ever out in the woods at night, and you get lost, and it’s very dark, and you’re way out past the last cabins… and you hear a sound coming towards you, something like this,” and he clumped back and forth in front of the fire, demonstrating exactly how an axe murderer might limp around in the forest, “even though it’s probably not Old Man Bolton… my… one… piece… of… advice… is… run like hell!!!”

  He screamed and leapt towards the children, who tumbled off their logs and lay gasping in the dirt.

  We picked them up, dusted them off, sat them back down, put new marshmallows on their sticks, and tried to sing “Cumbayah” to close the campfire. Then they marched single file down the trail, listening more intently than they ever had in their young lives for the telltale echo of approaching footsteps. A few years later, the administration decided that the children, coming as they did from troubled homes, shouldn’t be exposed to stories about this terrifying ogre of the forest, and so the counsellors were forbidden to tell the tales.

  My feeling is that they were wrong to ban the story. Many of these boys had already met Old Man Bolton in their homes, neighbourhoods, schools. He was the drunk who beat up their mama, or the bureaucrat who decided they couldn’t get welfare that month, or the ongoing horror of a life lived in the shadow of hunger. Hearing a story about Old Man Bolton meant they were no longer alone. When you name evil you begin to conquer it. Besides, the ghost came to them in the form of a story and in the voice of a counsellor who could also make them laugh, sing and talk. Old Man Bolton may be strong and wild, but the circle of listeners and storytellers is even stronger.

  This was the heaviest real-life magic I’d ever seen. These boys sitting so rapt around the campfire were the same bunch who liked to run through the camp, playing pranks, bashing each other (rarely—I was strict about that), farting as noisily and often as possible, and generally earning their reputation for being the camp’s most extravagant lords of misrule. Yet when the storytelling began they became utterly quiet and well behaved. Even after marching in trepidation back to their cabin, they kept their mood of awe and even reverence. By some mysterious power the storyteller was able to transform my wild pack of boys into a community of listeners Homer himself would have been proud to play for. Every one of them had been labelled by teachers and social workers as having “severe attention deficits” and “unmanageable behaviour.” Yet when the stories began, I watched them relax and breathe more deeply, their eyes shining with joyful—and sometimes fearful—anticipation. What was the secret of this astonishing art?

  Even before coming to camp I had travelled via books to the storyteller’s shire. I had had a great Chaucer teacher in college. Professor Marvin Mudrick read the Middle English of the Canterbury Tales aloud in his Philadelphia Jewish accent, and led us into a world where everybody—or at least pilgrims sharing the road to Canterbury—could be counted on to have a remarkable story to relate. Falling in love with Chaucer, I then read the other great medieval story collections, Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights. Each collection reflected its own culture, but shared a common vision of stories being rooted in oral communication. In Boccaccio, the stories are told by young survivors of the Black Death. In the Thousand and One Nights, the stories are told by Scheherazade. In a cross-cultural leap, I also found myself reading my way through the Icelandic sagas. Then I discovered epic. During my last year at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I lived in the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In all of these studies, the storyteller seemed like a wonderfully romantic figure from bygone days. The idea that bards like Homer once travelled the countryside, finding a welcome in every royal court (and probably every roadside wineshop, too), carrying epics they knew entirely by heart—it all seemed tremendously noble and compelling and impossibly remote for a suburban kid who grew up in the 1950s as a member of the first television generation. I spent my childhood watching Batman, not hearing bards chant epic or troubadours recite courtly romances. I never dreamed that the storytelling tradition might be alive and well in my own society. Yet here at a summer camp for kids from Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods the art of storytelling burned as richly and brightly as the fire we encircled.

  Everything about that fire pleased and thrilled me: the clearing in the woods, the children’s intent faces, the teller’s voice carrying clearly over the simmer and spark of the fire. This was the same fire around which the human race had gathered since our earliest days, listening for wisdom and entertainment. By such fires Native elders conjured the creation of the world, hunters told spear stories, Irish shanachies spun long wonder tales, African griots chanted ancestral history, Homer sang of the king of Ithaca’s long journey, caravan travellers shared desert yarns, grannies told folk tales. This was the oldest fire in the world. As I sat by the fire I remembered a moment from the Odyssey. At a feast in King Alkinoos’s hall on the island of Phaiakia, Odysseus praises the art of the royal bard Demodokos:

  Alkinoos, King and admiration of men,

  how beautiful this is, to hear a minstrel

  gifted as yours; a god he might be, singing!

  There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,

  than when a summer joy holds all the realm,

  and banqueters sit listening to a harper

  in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped

  with bread and roast meat, while a steward goes

  to dip up wine and brim your cups again.

  Here is the flower of life, it seems to me!

  We were eating toasted marshmallows instead of royal wine and meat, and our bottoms were falling asleep on hard logs instead of the queen’s soft cushions. Still, the same summer joy held our realm, although its borders covered only a few hills fifty kilometres northwest of Toronto, and its citizens were a couple of dozen scruffy boys from the inner city and their teenage counsellors. This was as close to the “flower of life” as I had ever come. I decided that despite being shy, tongue-tied, stagefrightened and forgetful, I had to master this art.

  I started by reading stories aloud to my boys. On my days off I’d drive back to Toronto and head for Boys’ and Girls’ House Library, which used to be at St. George and College (it’s gone now; like Old Man Bolton’s cabin and the camp itself, only the foundations remain). The Folk and Fairy Tales section of the library—398.2—was my stomping-ground. I plunged into the stacks with indiscriminate delight, hunting and gathering stories because I liked the colour of the book cover, or the cou
ntry the tales came from, or the name of the writer. I feasted on folk tales. Every week I’d bring back a stack of books, and read them to the guys after their night-time snacks.

  The time finally came for my debut performance, the night I was going to tell a story instead of read it aloud. I’d picked a Russian wonder tale about Prince Ivan and the Firebird, learned it by heart, and now I was ready to give storytelling a try. I settled the boys in their bunks, lit a candle and began:

  “Once upon a time there was a king and a queen and they had three sons.”

  So far so good, I thought—I can do this! Just then, Frankie blew a mouth-fart. The boys cracked up, and my story was derailed. I was pretty cross but I tried to stay calm. There’s a school of child psychology that suggests when a kid misbehaves you should ignore the misbehaviour and it will go away. So I decided to carry on despite Frankie’s rude interruption.

  “The king and queen had three sons. The first two were very proud and clever, but the third son was lazy and good-for-nothing and his name was Prince—”

  Frankie’s fart was even louder the second time.

  I felt cold fury. To hell with books about child psychology. This was a showdown. I stopped telling the story, walked over to his bunk (an upper bunk), and looked at Frankie who lay grinning impudently at me. I spoke to him very slowly and very clearly and never stopped staring at him while I spoke: “If—you—do—that—one—more—time—I—am—going—to—kick—your—little—butt—out—of—this—cabin.” I wish I’d remembered that children, especially ones like Frankie, are filled with a great natural curiosity. They’d rather suffer the consequences than never know whether you’re serious or not.

  I walked back to my chair and continued: “The prince’s name was Ivan, and he was always getting into trouble around the palace. Instead of working, he liked to lie around under an apple tree in the royal garden. One day their father the king went blind and called his three sons. ‘My boys,’ he said, ‘it is up to you to find a cure for my blindness. Go far away to a land I’ve never seen and bring back something you find there. You’ll know what it is when you find it. That will be my medicine.’ The two elder brothers rode off, proudly and cleverly, but Ivan just went out to the garden to have a nap under his favourite fruit tree. And when he fell asleep he had a dream, and in the dream he heard a voice, and the voice told him—”

  “PPPHHHAAAFFFFFTTTTT!” Frankie struck a third time.

  What do you do at a moment like that? I know now, thirty years later, that the best thing is to continue telling your story, and trust that the audience will eventually settle down. I could have told the story sitting close to his bunk, and probably quelled the rebellion before it started. I could have joined the boys in laughing at the mouth-fart instead of taking offence, perhaps even made it part of the story: “Prince Ivan liked to sit under an apple tree in the royal garden daydreaming and practising irritating and unpleasant sounds that drove everybody crazy…” There are many things experienced yarnspinners would have in their toolbag for just this kind of situation. At the time, I knew none of them.

  What I did know was that this was my world storytelling premiere, and a little punkass camper had just sabotaged my beautiful fairy tale. I was royally pissed off. I jumped up, turned on the light and went straight to his bunk. I yanked him out of bed in his pyjamas, opened the cabin door and deposited him on the step outside. Then I locked the door, turned off the light and continued telling the story of Prince Ivan and the Firebird to my now very attentive audience. There were many incredible adventures as Prince Ivan, with the help of a magic horse, found the golden feather of a firebird, battled dragons, married the firebird maiden and cured his dad’s blindness. (The version I tell now comes from Charles Downing’s Armenian Folktales and Fables.) I told every detail to the very end, accompanied by Frankie’s frantic banging on the door as he shouted, “Let me in! Old Man Bolton’s gonna get me!”

  When the story ended, there was a long silence. Some of the boys had fallen asleep during my telling. (I’ve learned since that this can be a tribute to a storyteller’s soothing voice, if not to his or her ability to create breathless suspense.) David, the sad boy with the sealed trunk, got out of bed and unlocked the door. I didn’t stop him. Frankie trudged in quietly, climbed up to his bunk, and soon the whole cabin was peacefully quiet—my eight young boys breathing gently in the summer night.

  A few days before the period ended, I sat with David, my quiet child. I thanked him for being kind to Frankie, and asked him if he was happy to be going home.

  “When my mother opens my trunk,” he whispered hopelessly, “I’m dead.”

  I knew I couldn’t ask him directly what the problem was, so I made a wild promise. I told him that I was going to Toronto for my half-day off, and that I would take his trunk with me. I told him that since I was a camp counsellor I could fix anything. I tied David’s trunk on the roof rack of my 1959 Volkswagen and drove to my parents’ house. I put the trunk on the front lawn and opened it. Inside, neatly folded, were David’s camp clothes, mostly unworn. On top of them, fully loaded, was a pair of underpants. On his birthday, just before I’d arrived as their replacement counsellor, this child had pooped his pants. Mortified with shame, he’d stuffed them in a bag and hidden the evidence in his trunk. Those undies had been in there a long time.

  I gingerly picked out the poopy underpants and buried them in my father’s rose garden behind the house. I’m not sure why I didn’t just throw them out in the garbage. Somehow it seemed they deserved a more formal interment. I washed David’s clothes at the local laundromat, cleaned out the trunk, refolded everything and drove back to camp later that day. When I slid the trunk back into place at the end of his bunk I told him, “Your trunk’s clean now. Go have some fun.”

  His eyes opened wide and he nodded. Then a very small smile opened, and he ran off to play. Two days later, the buses came to take the children back to Toronto. By the end of that summer, I had decided to become a storyteller.

  Why did the Muse send Frankie, my boy-shaped dragon, to block my path on my very first attempt to become her apprentice? I think she was trying to initiate a newcomer into the deepest secret of the teller’s art: the listener is the hero of the story. A tale about Prince Ivan or Jack or Cinderella must have room in it for the real Jacks and ash-girls in the audience. Ever since that summer, whenever I meet an audience I try to remember that the hero of my story may be sitting right in front of me. He or she is the one who is labelled a slow learner, the goofy kid, the child at risk of dropping out. For these listeners, the story is much more than an entertaining stream of words. They are listening because they desperately want a story of their own, one that can include even their wild passions, terrors, frantic misbehaviours and possibilities of change. My troublemaking camper had no polite and civil way to let the storyteller know of his ferocious need—farts were the best he could do as he sought admittance to a world where apple trees can speak, and good-for-nothings can discover golden feathers. I always look for the Frankie in every group where I’m telling stories. I still owe the greatest of all listeners his fairy tale.

  THE STORM FOOL’S TALE

  The world is gone

  I must carry you.

  PAUL CELAN, “Vast, glowing vault”

  I FIRST HEARD THE TERM “STORM FOOL” from Ron Evans, a Metis storyteller from northern Saskatchewan. He remembers how he and his family would be camped out on a trapline in the middle of a blizzard. They would settle in for a long stay, knowing it would be days before they could get back to the village. Then, through the blowing snow, an unexpected visitor would show up. “You could be sitting in your lodge in a winter camp in a storm, snow blowing, and all of a sudden—’cause we didn’t knock on doors—all of a sudden the door flap parts and in crawls this guy with snow all over his hair and coat, shaking the snow off, and it would be a storm fool who’d just come out of the storm…. They wandered about from camp to camp telling stories, bringing news. They wer
e definitely regarded as medicine people, elders. They were seen as just a little mad—that’s why they were called ‘storm fools.’” These intrepid northern narrators told myths, legends, news of the tribe, tall tales, jokes; their purpose was to keep people connected to the community. Then they would travel on to the next group of stormstayed listeners.

  Storm fools are one of the oldest artists’ alliances in the world. They include all the storytellers who have ever left their own house and village and set out to bring their stories to new listeners in other places. Homer was a storm fool, and so was Peire Vidal, the Provençal troubadour who travelled from court to court in late medieval France. The Irish Traveller described by Ruth Sawyer in The Way of the Storyteller was a storm fool. He went from village to village mending tin pots, and drew his customers by telling wonderful folk tales by the side of the road: “He gathered a crowd in no time. Words became living substance for all who listened…. For the duration of the story nothing lived but the story, neither listeners nor storyteller.”

  Martin Buber evokes another, more spiritual kind of travelling storyteller. The great Jewish rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov has come to a village marketplace and begun telling stories. First one man begins to listen, then “a second man came up, soon after a third, then ever more and more, mostly servants and poor people who begin the day early. They all remained standing, listened eagerly and called over still others from the houses. As the hour advanced, the maids came with their water-jugs on the way to the fountain and stopped, the children came running out of the rooms, and the family heads themselves left their businesses and their pursuits to hear the strange man.” The strange thing about the Baal Shem Tov’s tale was that whenever a new listener arrived, he or she found its “red thread” (a wonderful German phrase for the inner life of a story). “His narration… was so delightfully intertwined that whenever some one came up it seemed to that person to be at the beginning, and those who earlier had not been curious were now entirely concentrated on what would happen next and awaited it as if it were the fulfillment of their most precious hopes. Thus they all had one great story, and within it each had his own small and allimportant story.” And what did these spellbound villagers hear in the storyteller’s intricately woven narrative? Buber answers somewhat mystically: “[I]t was no report of distant times and places that the story told; under the touch of its words, the secret melody of each person was awakened….” In other words, each listener heard the story he or she most needed to live.