Saturday, August 29, 2009

The old butcher and his late wife

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 38

Arriving in town we were met by a meandering young man who asked if we had a moment to help him.  It was early morning, and there was no one else awake, let alone on the street.  We agreed, and we followed him through the brightening mist to the town square. Once there, he led us to an old iron park bench which was stationed underneath an old-fashioned street lamp.  He paused and pointed to the bench, upon which we could now make out the form of a slight old man curled up asleep.

“It’s my grandfather,” the young man whispered.

We inquired of the young man how exactly we were expected to remedy this situation, which we found exceedingly odd.  The older gentleman was not by any means a hobo or a vagrant.  On the contrary, he was well dressed, wearing silk pajamas and a sleeping cap, after the custom of this area.  He did not seem uncomfortable.

“I have to get him back to his shop,” the young man told us. He began to step towards his sleeping grandfather.  He paused then, and motioned for us to take hold of the feet.

Lifting the snoozing old gentleman, we carried him across the town square and into the entryway of a small butchers shop, where we laid him across a row of chairs.

“Grandfather!” the boy hissed.  He jabbed the old man lightly in the ribs.  “It’s morning!”

The old man woke and rubbed his eyes.  With looking around or acknowledging our presence, he hobbled into the back room, presumably to change out of his pajamas.

“This is….ordinary?” we asked, trying to inquire into the nature of the situation without offending the young man.

“Now it is,” he said.

He told us that his grandfather had been waking up in various locations throughout town for a number of months, and that his father had assigned him the duty of seeking the dozing patriarch and returning him to his place of work each morning.  We asked him if the old man was prone to sleepwalking, and the young man told us that as far as he could tell, that was “Not exactly true.”

Well, we asked him, what could it be then?  The young man sighed heavily and rubbed his hand along the back of his neck.  “You promise not to laugh?”  We promised. 

“Last night, I locked his door,” the young man said. ” And I put a door under the handle.  And I locked the kitchen door and the main door to the house. He could not have comes out that way.”

“Then?”

“Well,” he continued.  “My grandmother recently passed away.  She was a large woman.  Much bigger than my grandfather.  When they shared a bed, she took up the majority of it, and he had only a small sliver.  Before she died, though, she kept complaining that my grandfather was keeping her awake all night.  Because she outweighed him, we thought she was delusional, or suffering from dementia, because she could have simply pushed him out of bed if there had been a problem.  She certainly pushed him around when he was awake.”

The boy chuckled at his joke, then his face quickly darkened.

“Right before she died, though, she told me something very strange.  She told me that my grandfather flew in his sleep.”

“Flew?” we asked.

“Yes,” he said.  He nodded earnestly.  “She said he flew every night just when the stars came out, and that he would lift out of the bed and bring the covers with him.  She said that she had to stay up all night just to pull him back down, and she said she was afraid that one night she would miss his grabbing ankle and he’d fly right out the window.”

He looked at his feet.

“I laughed at her,” he said.  “I said, ‘Oh gram. Don’t tease with me.’”

“But you know what?” he said.

We waited.

“When I went into his room this morning, the sheets were all off the bed.”

The old man emerged from the back room, wearing a butcher’s smock.

“Hello my boy,” he said in a warm voice. “I just had the most marvelous dream.  I floated around town as light as a feather, and seeing only by starlight, I looked into chimneys all over town.”