FLOSSIE
AKA COLIN CAMPBELL
“Upon the wicked He shall rain snares, fire, and brimstone,
and an horrible tempest: this shall be
the portion of their cup.”…Psalm 11
Father of the east, give me strength. …Flossie
NORTHWEST IN ONTARIO
To most people Flossie is a queer. Some of them even fell sorry for him. What they think about him doesn’t bother him
at all, in fact he couldn’t care less.
Chances are he doesn’t even bother to think about it. But this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t think,
because he does.
As Flossie crunched along the gravel roadside he couldn’t
help wondering why the town clerk had been over to talk to him today. The fellow usually ignored him, but today he
had stopped to ask questions. Now,
Flossie didn’t mind answering questions, but he often wondered why people asked
them. This fellow, Tort was his name,
wanted to know how many relatives he had and if Flossie had any dependents,
it’s a darn good thing he didn’t have any either, Flossie thought, because they
would be starving right along with him.
Right then a pickup truck pulled over just in front of him and the man
poked his head out the passenger side window.
“You want a ride the rest of the way?”
The two men sat in the truck as it picked up speed, neither
one of them willing to start the conversation.
Flossie looked out his window at the grey leafless, poplars and birches. Only the Evergreens didn’t seem barren, only
they could hold enough moisture in their trunks to outlast this cold, dry
winter. There was enough precipitation,
no doubt about that, but it was all frozen. Suddenly the driver broke into his
thoughts, “You’ll want off at the
crossroads eh?”
Flossie answered, “Yes if the wind doesn’t blow us off the
bridge.”
“Or we may get hit by a flock of geese,” the driver chuckled
This wasn’t as funny as it seemed, because at this time of
year, with everything flying south the wat it does, and with them flying down
the valley of the river, they’d have to
climb pretty quick and pretty high to get over the bridge. One Indian fellow got fined just last week
for hunting on a government bridge.
As they drove along Flossie began to talk to his
companion. “Guess we’ll be getting a lot
of frost this winter.”
“Yes,” answered the man, “ The Indians say there’s gonna be
a lot of snow too on account of the geese took flight so early.”
“Guess the cold gets you pretty hard down there by the
river,” he added.
“Your health is your wealth, “ Flossie responded. “If you’re
healthy you don’t need wealth.” “Your
sins are the cause of your bad health.
Look at me, I’m sixty-three, and I get up at 4:30 every morning to chop
my wood, then I have to walk into town.”
The way Flossie rambled in, it was not hard to see why
people wondered.
Flossie was about to tell him how he was a member of the
Round Church and how the devil couldn’t back him into a corner, but the fellow
was slowing down for his road so he didn’t have time.
His gravel toad petered out and the old logging trail was
clothed in deepening shadow as the old man shuffled off into the dusk. In the
distance he could hear his river as it boiled and eddied on its way to the
great fresh-water sea. Directly across
from the town, his settlement clustered on a slanting deposit of river silt.
Slowly his buildings settled as the back on which they were perched slid towards the river. The old man turned off the road and down his
trail. His cabin had been built far back
from the river by the first of its many occupants. In the Spring, when the river was in flood,
the rotting west wall was in danger of
being washed at high tide. As he
unlatched the plank door he became aware of the sweet raw odor of blackberries
and honey that spoke of bear. He had likely frightened it away when he came
down the path.
After eating a plate of noodles and drinking a cup of coffee
he went out to cut the wood for his night- fire. As he lifted his axe from the splitting
block, he thought, aloud. “This old axe has done many a job for me. Thank you axe, for you saved my life from
cold and taught me to laugh when your head flew off and put a hole in my
outhouse roof – but what a job it was to
fish it out of there.”
The old man chose a straight-grained block as his first victim. They are much easier to split than the ones that are knot-twisted. The twisted, branching birch grew around
close, but he had to go a long way to find a straight, fat swamp- birch.
As he chopped, he thought.
Those kids were a lot of trouble to him whether they meant
to or not. He would never be able to
forget the time last winter when one of them put some soap flakes in his
salt. Kids are usually that way
when they’re young; but it had been pretty hard on him for a couple of weeks until he found out
what was wrong. He had to ask Joe at the
garage to leave the toilet door unlocked, and even then he didn’t make it in
time a lot. Wore out four good pairs of
drawers that winter. But, he was
happy to have the kids come in when they
got cold skiing. Some of them must have
been in a fix like he had been, because they had drunk his coffee.
Flossie never seemed to have time to get married and raise
kids. It seemed inly right that he
shouldn’t pass out of life without
loving children and having them love him in their own uncertain way. He knew that he loved them in one way,
because on weekends when none of them
came over to visit him, he got desperately lonely. He could never be sure of them; maybe it was
hoping where hope had no right to be.
The swamp-birch were something like sheltered people. They grew straight=grained and were not wind-twisted and branch-broken like the hill-birch; but the trees on the hill didn’t die or rot
nearly so quickly as those down below.
Being sheltered and well nourished wasn’t nearly as important as being
able to stand up to, and to recognize
something as being evil. Sometimes the
poorest of people are the most
healthy. Flossie figured that he was the
healthy one.
Flossie had what he thought was one of the most important jobs in town. What do people prize more than their children? His job was their protection; both parents
and children Public school children from
down town were his friends. They were
the only ones who had to cross the highway that bisected the town. He took their small warm hands in his large,
rough ones and guided them across safely.
It was then that he wished he had many more hands; the little hands felt so good in his he thought ge would burst and overflow
with happiness.
As he put another block on the stump, he thought of the time
they had surprised him and how happy to tears he was to know that some of them cared that he was
alive. He swung his axe up and brought
it down on the wood, splitting it almost
in two halves. It had been the same day
that he got the letter. The two things
balanced out and, in one day, he felt pain of love and the burn of hate for
those people who cared only for themselves.
On that day the
principal had stopped to tell him that he wanted to see him at the school at
3:30. Flossie had wondered why, but
quite often people asked him to come
over to pick up old clothes. At 3:15 he had gone up to the school. The principal had taken him to his private
office to wait. He came back and led him
down the two flights of stairs to the
auditorium. The place was full of students and he could see his
friends in the front rows. They all
clapped when he came in and he couldn’t understand it all . He was led up to the platform where six large cardboard boxes were
piled. Flossie was in a daze. The principal told him that all the children
had given something to Flossie, for the long cold winter was close.
At the sight of all the canned food he broke down. All he could do was cry.
Flossie put his axe against the wall and gathered up the
split wood. As he lit the night-fire he
remembered the letter that had come on that same day. The town clerk and the reeve had signed
it. It said that they were taking two cents each day away from his dollar; in case he
should die it would be used to defray expenses, it was a cold letter and it
made him mad when he read it.
Forever, people have failed to realize that love is a many
splendored thing -Prometheus
(I have no idea who the author of this is. B Nov. 7, 2023 ...from our Archives)
