By The Writers’ Guild
Editor’s Note: Each month, the YU Writers’ Guild accepts submissions for a short story following a specific theme. This month’s theme was “coming home” featuring homecoming stories where a character is elsewhere; bring them home. Members of the club voted on a short story to be featured in the YU Observer. For the month of February, “One Hundred Miles” written by Breindy Berger was selected.
It was dark. He’d been so engrossed in the motion, placing one foot in front of the other, that he hadn’t noticed the sun’s steady sinking into the horizon. It was late, and the man resolved to stop at the next town.
In the distance, pinpricks of light glittered. He welcomed them – they were an unnatural blight, the mark of human achievement, a haven of humanity to break up the stillness that was his haven from humanity. He had not had a serious rest in two days. Carefully, he began his final descent, picking his way through the frozen shrubbery until he found himself on the road.
It was a small town, one he vaguely remembered from his childhood. It was probably populated by the same seven hundred and thirty-one people, twenty years older but still near-ancient. Faces stood out clearly in his mind from the handful of times he stopped here. He would find a warm place to stay for the night.
He had traveled close to one hundred miles by foot, through forests and mountains and small fishing towns. He took his time – he could have been here last week if he wanted to, but there was nobody waiting for him this time, no warm words and certainly no hot meal. He was not in a hurry. He followed the dirt road to a larger, paved one, passing cabins and a couple of apartment houses, and he easily found the town’s tiny commercial area, where a wooden sign nailed to a post informed him that there were rooms for rent.
He ducked into the dimly lit room and rubbed his hands together, exhaling gratefully. It was cold.
He often told women he didn’t get cold, it was a superpower of children born too far north to accommodate high schools to parents too set in their ways to accommodate them, anyway. And they would laugh, because he spoke like a scholar from some other country, a country with fashionable clothes and world-famous singers and tourists who speak too quickly. Or like a poet travelling from some earlier generation when people saw the world as bleak or beautiful, but at least they cared to see it at all. They imagined he was different from them, that he had seen other countries and accomplished great things. They were wrong about this. He was one of many fishermen in their tiny European town, who spent most of his life on his boat, staring at the night sky. Sometimes, he bothered to correct them, but he usually let them believe. Stories were often more real than real life, and even the most sinister nursemaid tales were more pleasant.
He was prepared for the weather – he was not a stranger, he knew the difference between boots that looked warm and boots that would stay dry. A map of every town stood out clearly in his memory, and he knew how long it would take to scale each mountain with three meters of snow or with ten centimeters. God, he could backpack here blindfolded in February with nothing but a belt satchel. But the cold still affected him, just as it did all the residents of the region. The patrons in the bar all showed clear signs of it. People were quieter in the winter; they were grim and resigned, but they were not hopeless. His father was never hopeless.
He fingered the key that he’d worn around his neck since he’d heard. The letter in his pocket burned a hole right through to his heart and out the other side. He ducked his head shamefacedly and returned to his drink.
He had grown up in these lands and they had raised him as much as his father did. The mountains were his companions and the trees knew his secrets. Most of his early twenties were spent gazing at the stars over the ocean, and he knew the night sky better than the palm of his hand, but the forest knew him. There would be no keeping secrets this far north. Here, his father’s name defined his identity more than his first.
He had fantasized about avoiding staple figures that stood out in his memory: a street-sweeper in the first large town he came across; in the next, a matronly woman who baked sweets. Any teacher who ever taught the unruly children he’d grown up with. Or, he shuddered to think, any of the children themselves. He found himself scanning the face of each child he passed, realizing it was stupid, and continuing anyway.
He had not encountered a single person that knew him, but as he travelled closer to his final destination, he imagined it more and more. The musician, the hockey star, the family with six big-boned children and three dead babies. His father’s friend, the man with the books. The smoker who always coughed. Would he recognize his primary school teacher if he was sitting next to him at the bar? He probably wouldn’t recognize him if he was the bartender. He was ashamed of his long absence, and almost angry that there was nobody to point it out to him. He slept uneasily and dreamed that he was living his past and all of its possible futures all at once.
When he rose, yesterday’s harsh weather was but a memory, the sun shined cheerily and the town had been up for hours. He was back in the woods by midmorning, zigzagging in the direction of the building that had been his childhood home.
He spent his childhood in this forest, running after his father with a small pair of binoculars and a large pair of mittens. He had once scampered up that very tree and would not come down for hours, withstanding threats of missed dinner and promises of hot chocolate. When he was eight, he had declared himself king of this mountain, and he’d grown testy and territorial when strange hikers passed through. When he was older, he brought girls up here, helping them climb to the very top and laughing before offering a hand. He had an itching desire to climb to the top of the ravine right now and declare himself king of the world. But he knew how much longer it would take to climb back down, and he also knew that he did not deserve the title.
His father could make every bird sound, and he could name each kind in four languages. At night, he would read Thoreau or Darwin or the Holy Bible. On some days, the boy would listen carefully, mouthing each word and memorizing each sound. But usually he would run around in circles, laughing crazily until the sad old man sighed dramatically and played with him. He could not become a learned man like his father, not when he was raised to frolic in the trees and dance with the wind. The man shouted his best imitation of a birdsong now at the forest. He heard his own voice echo back to him, but he was joined by the sound of a few birds far in the distance, and he imagined that he was not alone.
He passed the sharp outcropping of rock that overlooked a steep drop into icy water. Many a summer, he jumped from the ledge into the water far below, and it was bluer than the eyes of God and colder than the innermost depths of hell. A boy had actually died here once – he remembered the brave winter jump, and the failed rescue, and how people had steered clear from here for months after. Everyone genuinely mourned his death, but youth has a collective death wish, and for several years they revered him for doing what everyone danced on the edge of but could not bring themself to do. Though the water called to him, the man moved on. He would reach his hometown tonight.
He was walking now at the pace of his own heartbeat. It sped up, and he sped up. He burst out of the forest at a full sprint.
He was at the top of a hill, and the town spread out below him. It was a scene out of a holiday movie. Here was the small building that had housed his old school. He played soccer on that field and hockey on that lake. There lived an older man who would sometimes take care of him. He beheld every driveway and every lamppost until he could no longer put off looking at the building he had come here to see, and his eyes fell on the tidy wooden structure that used to be home. It was nearly identical to all the surrounding structures, but they had always seemed impossibly different. It was evident that they were different, now: snow covered where the walk should be, and its windows were dark.
Like a child, he tried to make as few footprints in the snow as possible. It took him several attempts to turn the key in the lock, first because it was rusty and frozen, and then because his hands shook so badly he dropped the key in a snowbank. He fumbled for the lights and found the heater in his bedroom closet. It did little to assuage the cold and nothing to minimize the dreariness. He resolved that he would not stay longer than strictly necessary. He would find the papers that he needed, and speak to a real estate agent. He ought to pay a visit to his father’s old friend. He read aloud to himself from his father’s Thoreu before falling asleep in his twin bed.
In less than twenty four hours, he was on the road with little desire to head in any specific direction. The paperwork had been relatively simple and his father had left him little worth keeping. His father’s friend had been a little too glad to see him. He was the only person he encountered who recognized him, who remembered him from when he was small. He told him that his father talked of him often, recalling fond memories and expressing hope that he was well. He told him his father was proud of the way he turned out, and the man smiled a frozen smile. He had not produced anything like his father had, nor had he established any roots at all. There was nothing on this earth to testify to his being here. True, he had established a strong knowledge of the trees in the forest and the stars of the night sky, but he might have invested in a proper education. He should build a house as his father had, and give up living in a rented room in a city that would never learn his name. He could put down roots and watch them grow.
He retraced his steps, climbed up the hill, and reentered the forest. He was more at peace with the silence now. He was satisfied that he had finished what he came here for, and he could not imagine anything else left for him to do. In the distance, he heard the birds singing. This time, when he heard the water call to him, he undressed and dived in.