Swing Low: Chapter 8

Chapter 8:

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Installment #9 of:Sing Low: The Hangman of the WoodsBy B.C. Crow (Download audio podcast here) ()Chapter 8I witnessed one such judgment with my own eyes. It hurt. But not as bad as if it hadn’t happened. We all have dreams. Sometimes we rob ourselves of them; sometimes others rob us of them. Some men deserve what they get. The hangman has ended many men’s dreams; I can only imagine they’d be nightmares if not otherwise. At the same time, he preserved and enriched the dreams of the innocent. I found a taste of those beautiful dreamers that day. That day, my dreams acquired a greater depth, not to mention, duration.Each vine that slapped against my face and each cracking twig under my feet took me one step closer to a mystery that I couldn’t have been prepared for. I don’t fancy myself an adventure seeker and never have. If ever there was someone to hang back and play safe, I was that person. True, I had my moments when this philosophy was incongruent with my actions, but for the most part I’ve always been conservative.While growing up I would position myself so that in a game with peers, I was safely out of the main flow. I did not want to be called on, or risk anything. In school, I never volunteered a comment or answer. If ever called upon, I would simply try to regurgitate exactly what I knew the teacher wanted to hear, even if I disagreed with the answer. Was I a coward? Yes. Definitely. But I was comfortable in my level of ambiguity.Only in the last year had I deviated much from my typical behavior. I hadn’t thought much about it until that day in the woods. I could find no reason for the change, but upon inspecting my life, I saw myself as two people. First there was Iddo the ever cautious and cowardly teen. Then there was Iddo the compassionate, or Iddo the bold, I wasn't sure which. That’s the part of me that landed myself in this situation.I couldn’t kid myself. I was still afraid. More than afraid, really; I was terrified. Maybe shock was what compelled me to do the insane. The sounds of insects filled the air again, and my cheap shoes glided over the spongy leaves of the ground like feathers. My feet felt so light, and my stomach was twisting so acutely, I barely realized I was walking. The hangman had bidden me follow, and despite my better judgment, I couldn’t help but comply.For a good ten minutes, I trailed behind this giant, oblivious to my own motives. Slowly my wits eased back into focus, and I was able to clear the fog in my head enough to think beyond my automatic reactions. I looked hard at the hangman’s back. If I’d never followed him, I would have always remembered him as a giant, twice the size of any normal man, thick with that bone-grinding mouth of his. Now that I could study him, I realized that he was likely just under two and a half meters tall. I knew that in some parts of the world this wouldn’t be considered too terribly uncommon, but for us, being a good deal shorter than the rest of the world, he was a giant. Yes, he was still thick. Most of him was muscle, but his midsection hinted at a girdle of fat hugging his belly.He didn’t look fully Asian, either. I’d seen lots of people of mixed blood, usually an American or European white guy mixing his seed with some Asian woman. Their offspring were beautiful. They were the type you might find on TV. Never would they associate with someone of my class. But this was the first time that, at least as I presumed, I’d seen a man whose foreign parent was black. He had the deep strong voice and darker skin that were unusual around here. While one of his parents must have been black, the other was obviously Asian. This was all too apparent in his face. In the couple times he looked back at me, I got to study his face a little more. Obviously, he was somehow deformed.Yes, his face did look like a cross between an Asian and a black man, but it clearly wasn’t right. Symmetry still ruled his features, but no race of man would have normally produced such a shape. I’d heard of Microcephaly, where a baby is born with an abnormally shrunken head. Could this be its opposite?The farther I followed him, the more I learned about him. Sometimes you don’t have to talk with a person to learn about them. His terrifying face was slowly taking a different shape in my mind. Instead of the spanning grin that at first held so much malice and intimidation, I now saw a physically and quite possibly mentally deformed man who was driven out here because nobody could accept him anywhere else.I almost imagined him as a young boy, with parents who thought he might grow out of his face, only for them to discover that he would always be slow witted and deformed. Then, in desperation, they fell back on the only culturally acceptable practice they knew to follow. They abandoned him in these woods. This explanation made sense to me. If that had happened, and he survived, it would explain his resentment for all these fathers who came to forsake their children. He would wander the woods looking to dole out punishment for the inhumane treatment he’d received at the hand of his own parents.But what of this infant he now carried in his hand? Without the presence of that noose on the end of the coiled rope wrapped around the man’s shoulder, the hangman might actually look gentle. But how could I know? No way could he take care of the child. Then again, the baby was surprisingly happy. I could hear it coo and giggle.The more I watched the hangman, the more I felt my heart calming to a normal beat. Finally, I found myself in possession of my own wits enough to address him.“Sir?”He didn’t respond.“Excuse me, sir—”He turned around.For a moment those giant teeth that stretched around his face seemed to stare right at me. His eyes were almost completely covered by his dark bushy eyebrows. I had to look down at his feet. “W-where are we going? What’s going to happen to the baby?”He just let out a deep hearty chuckle, then started back into his song. “. . . Coming for to carry me home . . .”If he didn’t want to answer me, then fine. But I was still going to follow until I knew the baby would be safe. Not that I could do anything if the hangman suddenly turned violent. Still, I had to know. If he wouldn’t answer me straight, I would have to see for myself. Maybe I’d be able to grab the baby while this hangman slept. I could sneak away at night. Then again, he did seem gentle enough with the child. But what was he going to do with it?After half an hour of hiking, my legs throbbed with the pace this much larger man set. I also wanted to scream out and demand that if he didn’t know any other songs, to either quit singing or to talk like a normal person. But he was no normal person and I knew I’d never find the courage to voice my annoyance.As we continued he must have read my mind. He went from singing his repetitive song to humming it. For the next couple of kilometers, the woods seemed to thicken, and I had a hard time keeping up. Stumbling along, I wiped little droplets of blood from the itching scratches that spidered up both my arms. Maybe this man was purposefully trying to torture me, leading me along the most wretched parts of the woods to test my resolve. If he wanted to see me crack, he wouldn’t have much farther to go. I was ready to sit down and give up. We were traveling deeper into the forest, and more or less in the direction I needed to go. But his hiking was too fast for me, and I’m certain that I could have found an easier way around this stretching thicket.With infuriating exhaustion, I stopped, leaned up against a tree, and wheezed. A dull ache was growing in my side, and if I didn’t stop to rest, it would have become unbearable. The hangman just kept trudging along. Part of me wanted to shout for him to wait. Another part of me thought good riddance. It didn’t matter. Within a minute he could no longer be seen or heard. I was alone again.I looked up into the sky. Streaks of sun blazed down through the canopy. The smell of sap from the broken branches left in my wake was not exactly pleasant. Maybe it was because of the abuse they reaped on my bare skin, or maybe they just stank naturally. I never would have guessed that so much time had passed since I first took to the woods, but from the angle of the rays, I could presume that noon had arrived, and maybe even passed. My stomach chose this time to growl its confirmation of the lunch hour.The side ache that hindered me was fading and I debated pulling out my meager packed lunch. My options were eat, try to catch up to the hangman, or continue on my way to New Tum District. Several kilometers of forest still separated me from the town. In fact, because of my delay, if I abandoned all thoughts of pursuing the hangman, I might still have to spend two nights instead of just one in these woods. I hadn’t brought enough food for a third day.I struggled with indecision. My thoughts kept getting distracted by the humming of an insect or the alarmed chirping of birds. Then I heard something else, totally out of place. It was distant, but audible enough not to be mistaken. It was the muted sound of cheers and laughter. The sounds bounced off the trees, hiding the direction of the sound, but there could be no denying, I was hearing people. The only place I could imagine the voices coming from would be from wherever the hangman had hiked to.I pushed off the tree, forgetting about my lunch, and walked with every degree of caution I could muster. If there was really a group of people this deep in the woods, and if the hangman had been leading me to them, they might be just as weird and dangerous as he. I couldn’t turn away. Carefully I avoided snapping even the smallest twig as I moved. Too many questions needed to be answered and I couldn’t live with the unsolved mystery of this day lingering forever in my mind.As I crept along, the sounds both diminished and grew louder. The stinking sap that invaded my nostrils was replaced by a savory aroma that made my stomach growl louder. I only noticed this because my stomach was making more noise than my feet.The closer I got, the fewer voices were heralding the hangman’s return. Still, those that were making noise had become clearer. I was moving in the right direction. Then the dense undergrowth of the woods cleared and I found myself in a relatively open section of forest. I studied the ground at my feet. Many other feet had compacted the earth where I stood. Slowly I raised my head up. I had to blink a couple of times to be sure. What I saw was impossible to believe.End of Chapter 8Thanks for reading. Remember to comment on anything you liked or that you think should be fixed.Click here to read Chapter 9Copyright 2017: While I encourage you to share this link with your friends and family, please keep in mind that this is copyrighted material. Under no circumstances do you have the right to re-publish any or part of this content without specific written permission from BC Crow and Blue House Publishing.