The Skinner Co. Network
DDoP - 6 - The Forgotten Man
Not long after his arrival, Bill was told of a small cabin residing in a forest clearing a half-day’s walk - if you knew the way - north of town.
6. The Forgotten Man Not long after his arrival, Bill was told of a small cabin residing in a forest clearing half a day's walk, if he knew the way, north of town. It was by no means the only holding beyond the town's boundary, and it was not unusual for the village folk to go a full winter, or even if the hunting was good and the business of homesteading busy, two or three, without seeing a particular familiar face. So was, with the family in this cabin. Two decades previous, when the home was built, it was likely that most of the elders in town had been well familiar with the inhabitants in their lineage. However, by the time the visits were coming on, but on an annual basis, everyone in the town remembered the father simply as Teodor and the mother as Azkbas. They bore a single child, but that is enough to keep occupied with while carving survival out of the lamb, and so the visits had become even less frequent. The baby was announced, and two years later there was a visit where the now walking child was shown off with pride. There came another great gap of three years, and then Teodor arrived again in town, the left half of his body recovering from a bad burn. Azkbas had died in that spring, he reported with soggy cheeks, and his boy's right hand was gnarled by the embers of the falling roof beam. The townsfolk were most generous in the supplies they provided Teodor to trundle back to his rebuild home. Then, for some fifteen years, no further sightings of the family were reported. It was not intentional, the storyteller had relayed to Bill. They had, without the reminder of seeing the outlier's faces, simply forgotten about them. It's Bill's own guess that some sightings of "the confused stranger" during this period may have actually been the sun seen hunting, but it was only when he arrived as a young man, a bow engineered to work with his injured hand strapped across his back and toting a string of rabbit furs to trade for flower that they truly remembered the boy. He was grown now, but they had not forgotten his father's haggard appearance or his tail of the boy's hand. It was, "Last ship leave them behind," his name they couldn't recall. "Culcan? Carwin?" The youth seemed to know them all, apparently having been buoyed through the years of helping his ailing father by the old man's no doubt embroidered tales of the townfolk's doings. He remembered details of the year of the chicken fled that had long been misplaced, or may have never existed at all, and Mayor Treams was both amused and befuddled to be labeled both the wisest man in town and the greatest living friend Taedor had ever known. They joined the lad in mourning the loss of his final family member, feeding him better than he'd ever known, implying him with watered down whiskey, but in the end, despite their slurred protestations that he should stay, the lad returned to the home where his familial graves rested. It was only as they watched him leave that each resident came to admit they could not recall his name, and by then, even though the frequency of his visits increased, the townfolk were simply too embarrassed to ask. So it seemed a happy coincidence that the forgotten man was in town upon Bill's arrival, and even caught him in a quiet corner to introduce himself. Yet, once his host had told him the story, and closed by pressing Bill for the name he had been given, the outsider had to sheepishly admit that he had lost it in the flood of introductions that day, and thus the forgotten man continued to be so.