Short Stories by Phoenix Hocking

THE OLD WOMAN
BY
PHOENIX HOCKING


The old woman waited on her front porch, rocking gently in her rust-colored wooden chair, a handmade quilt upon her lap. Mitzi, an ancient dog of indeterminate breed, curled at her feet, snoring softly. On the railing a calico cat licked paws, then face, then ears, over and over again.
She sighed and ran a hand through her prickly more-salt-than-pepper hair, then covered her face with her hands, briefly, and became still again. She had known it would come to this, eventually, but she was not prepared. Probably would never be prepared.
Around her a Vermont summer had gasped its last desperate wheeze and was becoming a brilliant autumn. Leaves of crimson and yellow and orange flung themselves off the trees in a dizzy dance with the wind. In her garden grew pumpkins big as your head, and gourds of green and gold. A huge maple tree shaded the front of her tiny cottage.
She lived in a world of green and white. Her small white typically New England house with its green shutters was surrounded by a green yard and traditional white picket fence. Geraniums and pansies and Sweet William provided color and grew in profusion along the side of the house. A tall oak tree stood sentinel in the exact center of the back yard. It was the type of house the leaf-peepers took photographs of while cruising the streets of the back-country.
She kept to herself, mostly. Not that she was unfriendly, you understand. It's just that in speaking with her, one got the feeling that she'd had quite enough noise and crowds and people in her life, thank you. Usually, she was content to rock upon her porch in the summer, or sip hot chocolate by the fire in winter.
But today, today she was tired. Tired of running, tired of hiding. Tired of waiting.
When the old woman first moved here she opened a small bookstore and tea shop she named Pekoe, O. Henry and Me. It was a cozy place, a subtle blend of old Victorian charm and New England spirit. She stocked books and magazines of substance, of style.
Not for her the latest pulp fiction or x-rated trash. No video movies or comic books. No, the books the old woman sold were literature of the best kind, books that made you ponder the mysteries of life, taught you something about yourself or your world, made you laugh, or made you cry.
Pekoe's had been a success, no doubt about that. The old woman, surprising even herself, turned out to have a head for business, as well as a love of books. She treated her books tenderly, as old and fragile friends. And if she caught a customer throwing a book down, or snapping the binding back to make it easier to read, or God Forbid! dog-earing a page to hold their place, well!, she would descend upon them with a tongue sharp as any axe and ban them from the premises for an entire fortnight.
Considering that Pekoe's was not just the one-and-only bookstore in town, but also a gathering place for everyone from members of the town council to high school students, nobody wanted to be banned.
Consequently, the old woman's books were treated well, and the old woman stayed happy.
She was friendly, and community-minded, but never talked much about herself. Someone said that she had lived all over the world, but that could never be proven. Another said she spent much of her life in a small Northern California town, where winters were not white enough to suit her, and summers were hotter than a body could bear.
Few knew the truth, and those that did kept it to themselves.
She sold the bookstore a few years back, curtailed her many civic duties, and slowly began spending her time simply enjoying the scenery from her front porch.
Thirty years, she thought. Has it really been thirty years?
The old woman was short and round, a woman who liked hot chocolate in the winter, and ice cream in the summer, and made no excuses for her vices. When she owned Pekoe's, she often baked fresh bread, coffee cake or cookies and brought them in to serve with hot herbal tea or apple cider.
Her hair was mostly gray and cropped close to her head in a fine peppery halo. She wore bifocals that changed with the light, and large hoop earrings usually preferred by teenagers or harlots.
She wore heavy sweatshirts and woolen pants in the winter and long, flowing djallabas in the summer. On days such as this, when the leaves fell and a nip was in the air, she pulled on her knee socks, a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, and went to sit on her front porch.
She looked at her watch, and straightened in her chair. It was exactly four o'clock in the afternoon, just as dusk was beginning to think about falling, when a long, white car pulled up to the curb in front of the old woman's house.
Finally, she thought. Finally.
Mitzi, the old dog, looked up from her nap. She thumped her tail against the porch, yipped once, then went back to sleep. The cat stopped its ablutions and watched as an old man, stooped and frail, eased his way out of the car. The old woman stopped her rocking and stared at the man, her face an unreadable mix of what might have been resignation, sadness or joy.
The old man reached into the car and brought out a three-footed metal cane. He leaned heavily on it as he walked around to the curb, then rested for a moment against the car, looking at the house, and at the old woman who had risen from her rocking chair.
Slowly, he made his way to the gate, opened it, and walked in. He seemed very old, much older than the woman. His back was humped and his wrinkled, veined hands trembled. He made his way cautiously up the walk, pausing every few steps to catch his breath.
The old woman watched, breathing when he breathed, and held her hands across her chest, fists against her trembling chin.
He arrived at the base of the porch, looking haggard and ill. He put a foot on the bottom stair and heaved himself up. Each step seemed an agony, yet the old woman remained rooted oak-like in the spot, and made no move to help him, nor did she speak.
At last, he arrived at the top of the porch. The old woman stepped out of the way and indicated the rust-colored rocker. She herself took a spot on the porch swing. He lowered himself into the chair, took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
They sat thus for a long while, not speaking. The dusk grew darker and the chill deeper still. Children chattered on the sidewalk. Men and women in business suits hurried home from their offices. Women all bundled up in coats and hats carried groceries home from the store.
Finally, the old woman spoke. "Henry," she said. It was a sigh, a statement, as if entire worlds were brought into being by the very sound of the word.
"Yes," the old man said.
"How did you find me?" she asked.
He fixed his eyes on her, taking in the plump, round body, the gray hair, the glasses that perched on her nose. "I looked," he said.
"For thirty years?"
"Yes.”
Around them, in the deepening twilight, sounds wafted in on the breeze. Sounds of dinner being prepared, children laughing, television sets expounding the evening news. Lights came on around them, making the porch on which they sat seem doubly dark. Fat old Mrs. Wilson, and her smelly guide-dog Jake ambled home, oblivious to the deepening dusk.
The cat rose, stretched, yawned, then jumped from the railing into the side yard. Tail high, it marched around the corner and was lost to sight.
The old woman pulled her quilt about her shoulders and shivered. "I had to leave, Henry," she said.
The old man was silent.
"It wasn't you," she said. "It was never you.” Suddenly it was imperative that he understand, and her voice took on a desperate, shrill quality that stuck in her throat like old sand. “It was never you. It was me."
Still, the old man said nothing.
"I went from being a child in my father's house to being a wife and mother in yours." She stared out into the street, breathing deeply. Fireflies began to appear near the oleander bush in the corner. "Child. Wife. Mother." Her voice caught, as if the words hid barbs that bit into her throat. "I was always what someone else wanted me to be. I never got to be a person, Henry," she said.
"And have you been a person here?" the old man asked.
The old woman thought back to those years just after she had left her family. She had just walked away one day; walked away without a thought in her head except to get out, get out, GET OUT! Took the $4,312 dollars they had in savings, an almost sizable sum then, and left. For years she had felt hunted and frightened that they would find her and take her newfound freedom away.
She remembered driving aimlessly from one state to another, one town to another, searching for a place to be, staying briefly, but running away again when she felt she was close to being found. But, when she crossed the Vermont state line, and beheld the picture-postcard New England of her earliest childhood fantasies, she knew her days of running had ended; she had finally come home.
The reality was much different from the fantasy, of course. The winters were far colder than she had imagined, and more than once, as she scraped ice off the windshield or unfroze the lock or bundled up against the shrill shrieks of winter, she had wondered if she’d made a mistake. Or in the summer, when fish could swim through the humid air, and black flies seemed to be the state bird, and she shed clothes as much as modesty would allow, she thought about going “home.”
But this was home. She remembered the first piece of furniture she had bought, the first bread she had baked, the first snow.
She remembered opening day at Pekoe's. Her bookstore was the only one in town then, and it seemed the entire population had turned out to wish her well. They ate her fresh, homemade bread, drank her special hot apple cider, and bought books, books, and more books, hungry for more than physical sustenance.
She remembered Mitzi, who arrived at her doorstep one cold winter's day and never left. And the cat, abandoned as a kitten in the trash can behind the bookstore. She could still see them curled up together on the hearth, the little dog giving her warmth to the tiny kitten bravely holding on to life.
The old woman thought of the many committees she had served on: the library committee, the beautification committee, the Meetings For Sufferings committee after she had joined the Quakers. She thought of the Guatemalan refugees that occasionally slept in the front parlor, using her little cottage as just one stop on this modern Underground Railroad, on their way from persecution in the south to the relative safety of Canada.
She looked out into her yard, at the oleander bush and the maple tree, planted with her own hands, at her pumpkins peeping from the side, and thought of the many vegetables and flowers she had grown here, of the jams and jellies and vegetables she had laid by for winter, and the unmitigated joy of being able to write for hours undisturbed.
She remembered the last day at the store, when she had turned out the Closed sign for the final time. She had cried then. But after she had shed her tears, she walked home to her cozy little cottage and her front porch and was content.
She remembered all these things, and said, softly, "Yes, Henry. I've been a person here."
A speckled red maple leaf wafted in on the breeze and settled in the old man's lap. He plucked it off with gnarled, old fingers and studied it carefully. "And now?"
The old woman thought of the years that stretched behind, and the few that remained. She thought of lovers not taken, triumphs not shared, sorrows not divided and joys not multiplied. She remembered how cold it was in the winter here, even though she had learned to love the snow.
Inside, the little cottage was dark. Wood was already laid in the fireplace, awaiting a match to bring its cheery light to life. The kettle was on the stove; it would only take a minute to bring water to a boil and share a nice cup of hot chocolate. A plate of cookies, fresh this morning, waited on the counter.
And beside her, a man. An old man who had searched for her; found her; loved her still.
The old woman got up from the porch swing and put out her hand to help the old man to his feet. "It's getting cold," she said. "We'd better go in."
She opened the screen door and held it for him. Mitzi slipped in between Henry's feet, almost upsetting him. She reached out a hand to steady him. The old woman held on to his sleeve a trifle longer than she needed to, then laughed.
His eyes brightened, then closed, a few tears trickling down his cheeks. The years fell away from his face as if by a magic hand. "Ah," he said, "but I've missed your laugh!"
The old woman closed the door behind them, and before long the sounds of a dinner being prepared, the crackle of a fire, and laughter came from this bright little cottage, on a small New England street.




THE END