The Woods

The Woods
By Nick Munoz

1
The winter after I turned eight my father died. He was a cautious and overprotective man, although you’d have never guessed it by his appearance. He was large and brutish looking, knotted with muscles and bulging veins. His eyes always seemed full of power but he had a heart to match his size. He always made me stay inside when he went to the woods behind our house to cut logs for our fireplace.
One night I begged him to take me with him. I loved my father the way only a small boy can love his father. I looked up to him, wanted to be just like him and, to me, he could do no wrong. I went to him thinking this argument would end like it did every other time. To my surprise my father said he would love my company and might even need my help. I leaped up the stairs like a mountain goat and ran down the hall to my room to get ready.
He was dressed from head to toe in black and red checkered flannel, tall as an ancient oak. His huge axe was slung over one shoulder, like it only weighed an ounce. I remember dressing just like him, even picking up a large stick at the edge of the woods and holding it, just as he held his axe. That was the last time I saw my father that way.
I returned home alone that night. I burst through the door red-faced and crying. My mother was sitting at our little, polished wood table drinking a steaming hot cup of tea, in the fireplace the flames danced close to the edge as if wishing to escape and fulfill their destiny to destroy. The instant she saw me her face went from a soft wondering to a look of shocked fear. I tried to explain to her what had happened but could only manage sobs and partial words. Finally, I gave up and began to run back to where my father was.
She grabbed a heavy black skillet from the kitchen and followed me back to the woods. We were already too late. My father was lying on a bed of dead leaves in tattered and bloodied clothes. My mother fainted. I went to my father’s body and laid next to him crying into his chest. In the distance I heard the howling and yelping of beasts. I trembled. My mother eventually woke up and dragged me away from my father’s body screaming.

2
After that my mother stopped talking to me. She gave me chores to do and sometimes had me run errands while she ran the shop in town. She would tell me when meals were ready and make sure I kept up on school work. She didn’t, however, ask me how my days were or tell me of hers. She didn’t ask where I was going when I left, or when I would return. Mother never gave me a second thought, just looked at me with those cold accusing eyes and went about doing whatever she was doing.
Once she came back from shopping and began putting groceries away, I asked her if I could help. She only nodded her head and continued putting things away. I asked her how her day was. Asked her how business was. I asked if she thought it was going to rain. I pestered her with question after question, until she simply stopped what she was doing and walked away. After that I didn’t try talking to her anymore. We went on with our lives together, but separate.
I was almost never at that house. The silence was unbearable; in it I could hear howling and snapping jaws and growls of pain. If I closed my eyes I could see my father’s face twisted in worry and anger. I would have to slink by his favorite rocking chair, still able to smell the tobacco he smoked out of his brownish red wood pipe. I would wake up standing by my bedroom window looking into the woods crying. His scent was still there, his stuff, part of him still lived in this house. So, I couldn’t stay there. I began to explore the small town we lived in, always staying away from the woods, careful not to even look between the trees. Being next to those old, giant trees with darkness between them that seemed to be eternal made my skin crawl. Afraid my father’s ghost would be there in that darkness looking back at me, questioning me with his eyes.
“Why son? Why couldn’t you be stronger? Why couldn’t you be braver? Why couldn’t you run and get help?”
Those were questions I didn’t want to face, didn’t want to answer. No. Shouldn’t have to face, shouldn’t have to answer. I was a boy, nothing else.

3
I began to walk around town, anything to avoid the maddening silence at the house and those terrible woods. I walked around the small town so often people began to smile and wave when I walked by. Few said anything about my father’s death, and that was alright with me. Even as a boy I didn’t want their pity, didn’t want them to waste their sad eyes on me. I walked around the town, trying to forget the way my mother looked at me. I tried to forget that my father, my hero, would never pick me up again. He would never give me one of his great big bear hugs and tell me he loved me. I tried to forget that my father and mother and I would never again go to the river and splash and play together just like we were all kids.
Eventually I did forget. My mother’s silence became customary. I no longer associated the relics my father left behind with him, and as terrible as it sounds, I couldn’t remember my father’s face. His features grew faded and murky in my mind’s eye. Even when I tried hard to remember what he looked like and what he sounded like I couldn’t bring the whole picture back. My life was beginning again.
I had almost blocked out everything until the day I discovered my fathers axe. I was in our backyard, having already explored the town and getting bored. I remember that I was pretending I was fighting demons with my sword when it broke. I had vigorously rushed a particularly big and nasty demon, not realizing that his flesh would break my weapon. Of course, this demon was the large tree in our backyard and my sword was a branch I had picked up, but I was having too much fun to notice.
I set about looking for a replacement, so I might continue my adventures. I shuffled through every inch of the moist brown and yellow autumn leaves, which were our backyard with no luck. Then my eyes came upon our shed. It was much older than me. A large, rotting wooden structure half painted white. My mother had begun painting it before my father died and never finished. I had almost forgotten about it because I had not been in there in three years, it had been far too close to the woods.



4
I slid the door open and was immediately overwhelmed by odor I would always associate with 1000 year old Egyptian mummies. I walked just inside the door and gave my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. I looked around the shed and saw many things that I hadn’t seen in years. I saw my old red wagon now the color of dried blood. I saw the rocking horse my father had made for me when I was only four years old. I saw the tools with which he made that horse. I saw shelves full of things I had all but forgotten, but even when I gazed upon these things I looked at them with the disconnectedness of a stranger. None of these things affected me the way my fathers axe did when I saw it.
It stood in a corner half hidden by my mother’s old sewing table with dusty moth eaten clothes on top. As soon as I realized what I was looking at my whole body shivered and grew covered in goose bumps. I thought the axe was lost. Only it wasn’t, here it stood. Its blade, which my father had kept polished and sharpened, had become covered in rust and was dulled. The smooth wooden handle had been made part of an intricate spider’s web and the color had faded. It was almost as if the axe had died along with my father. I walked toward it in a dream-like state, the world wavering in and out of existence. I approached it and reached for the handle, which was pointed accusingly at the sky. As soon as I touched it everything came back. The memories hit me like a train and I stumbled away from it.
I remembered how excited I was just to be able to go with my father that day, even if it was to do something as trivial as cut wood. I remembered how he looked fifty feet tall and thinking that, if he needed to, he could fight Paul Bunyan himself and win. I remembered how carefully I looked for a branch that would be my own axe, finding it and being overjoyed when my father looked at it and smiled. That smile told me that he was proud of me, but in an instant all of those happy memories were replaced the memories of my father’s death.
I remembered walking into the woods, smelling the old trees and damp leaves. I recalled looking up and seeing the full moon through the leaves and thinking how odd it was that it was a bluish color. We walked further into the woods looking for an area whose trees were not as wet from the rain that came earlier that day. I ran ahead thinking I would find them first and my father would swell up with pride and tell me what a good son I was. I barely heard my father call me, barely heard him say the woods were too dangerous for a boy to be alone.
I kept running until I found the perfect spot. I yelled for my father to come and began hitting the side of a tree not even thinking that I was using a branch and not an axe. That’s when I heard the snarling. I turned around and saw three wild beasts. They were four legged animals with beautifully shining coats eyeing me like I would be easy prey. Two of them had terrifying yellow eyes and small jagged teeth. The largest one, however, had cold, piercing, ice blue eyes and long dagger-like teeth that looked as though they could have cut through stone. I was too scared to scream, I stood there paralyzed. Then my father appeared next to me, seeming to come from nowhere at all. The two smaller animals cowered back just a little, and then seemed to realize that their numbers were greater.
At once they all leaped for my Father. He reacted just as quickly and brought the blunt side of his axe down on one of the smaller ones. There was a howl of pain immediately followed by an even greater howl of pain, but not from one of the attackers, it was from my father. He yelled at me to go, run! I could only stand there, watching him try to beat the beasts off with his massive fists. With one of them already down I had hope that he could overcome the other two.
He could not. They dragged him down, biting and clawing and scratching. He didn’t give up; he continued to kick and punch them. The beasts were merciless. He yelled at me again and again to go, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He began to fight slower, his blows grew weak. Finally, he screamed at me as loud as he could and the spell that held me there suddenly broke.

5
I stood in the midst of the dust covered, forgotten items of the shed, weeping uncontrollably. I didn’t have much time to grieve. An instant after the memories of what happened to my father came back I was snapped back into reality. From the woods behind our house came a terrified sounding scream. In the silence of the evening it stood out like a red rose in a field of snow. Instantly flooding my mind were the sounds of snarling, growling and snapping teeth locking my legs in place. A second scream came, louder this time. The moment I heard it my blood froze, turning to ice in my veins, I knew it was my mother. After an instant my legs unlocked, I wobbled for just an instant.
Then something took over, some unknown primal instinct. My hands instantly reached for my father’s axe. I didn’t fight them, I let my fingers wrap themselves around the handle of his axe. It was much too heavy to lift so I rotated it until the axe blade was touching the old, wooden floor of the shed. I dragged it behind me that way out of the shed and into our backyard, running as hard and fast as I could. I left the backyard and came to the threshold of the woods, pausing only long enough to free the axe from a knotted, earth covered root.
The old fear left. No longer was I afraid of going into the woods, I had one thing on my mind: Help my mother. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I lost all sense of direction the instant I entered the woods. I ran listening, trying to hear anything that might indicate where I needed to go. I ran, watching, trying to see everything at once. Then, suddenly I heard a low rumbling growl straight ahead of me. I slowed down, my heart beating in my throat, my legs weak and aching. There, between two of the trees I saw it standing alone. The blue eyed, ivory toothed beast
It was even larger than I remembered. He had my mother backed against a tree and was growling at her. When she tried to run he darted, as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and blocked her path. He seemed to be toying with her, like it was a game to him. I crept between the trees, not knowing exactly what I intended to do. Then my mother’s eyes caught my own. They were filled not with fear but worry, just like my father’s had been that night. Tears began streaming down her face. She looked down scanning the earth. She stopped after a moment, knelt down and picked up a large, jagged rock.
I’m not sure how but I knew she meant to distract the beast so that I could get away. I looked at her and shook my head. I would not let her die without a fight. I would not because I knew that’s what my father would have done, and I had to make things right with him. I looked at the great beast. He had turned around. Our eyes locked, I would not look away, would not show him that I was afraid. His lips were curled back in a sneer black gums showing, as if he knew who I was and meant to complete unfinished business.
He crouched down and arched his muscular back. He lunged. Without thinking I let out an enormous roar not knowing how I managed such a mighty sound, only grateful that it came from my own throat. I summoned every ounce of strength I had and swung my fathers axe. It was impossibly heavy, what little muscles I possessed stood out. Sweat beads appeared on my forehead and my legs and arms trembled with tension. The blade cut through the air in a crescent, slicing through the neck of the beast just as it closed the distance between us. No noise escaped its grinning lips. Its body merely fell out of the air like a stone and landed hard on the ground behind me. His head lay to my side. Its eyes, looking blankly back at mine, had turned from icy blue to a dull gray. I knelt down and, with my pointer and middle fingers closed those cold eyes under the pure white light of the moon.
I looked up. My mother stood in front of me looking stunned. But also, for the first time since my father died, I saw not accusation but life in her eyes. I stood there, sweat beaded on my brow, chest heaving but feeling stronger than I ever had. We looked at each other, neither of us moving for a long time.