Nature's Way

The subtleties of time and nature are fascinating to watch.

• Fiction

								
Nature’s Way

The water in the pond had been disturbed by a few children wading in it and skipping stones across the surface.  The flat pebbles would bounce two, three, even four times if the pitcher exercised proper care, and then, their time up, they would fall useless to the cold bottom.  Huge branches of the aged oak trees hung over the water like the arms of a great magician levitating his volunteer.  They were ominous looking things, bent with years of supporting millions of leaves and buds.  Their heavy trunks were beginning to show the wear and tear of combat with the wind and the cruel elements of the very nature that created them.  Only one had lost the battle so far and when it fell, it formed a bridge over the water for the children to walk on. The jagged stump still stood as monument to its final defeat.
An old man made his way in short, careful steps around the pond to his favorite bench next to the water under the shade of the largest and oldest oak.  He was “Old Man Nodworthy,” a distinguished sort, rumored to have been quite well known in his day, though nobody seemed to know him now.  People always said they could set their watches to him.  Nearly every day since he was retired some twenty-odd years earlier he took his constitutional through the park, stopping first at the peanut stand, and then at his bench where he would feed the squirrels and they would provide entertainment for him as a kind of reward.  No one knew how he lived or what he ate, but now and then he was glimpsed sneaking a nut between squirrels.  His gnarled fingers rustled the paper bag signaling to his friends that he had arrived.
The children always watched and studied him, for they could never quite get the nervous little creatures to trust them as he could.  Some said it was just the wisdom in his old eyes that persuaded them to come to him, but the children couldn’t understand that.  “Guess ya gotta look harmless to ‘em or they get scared.  Th’ol’ crab couldn’t move fast enough to hurt them anyway.”  None of them really knew if Old Nodworthy was indeed a crab.  His aged features and bent posture always made him look mean and cruel – almost magical.
Once a young child wandered over to watch the squirrels take peanuts from the old man’s hand.  He climbed innocently into Nodworthy’s lap and asked him if he was a grandfather.  He answered, “Well, son, come to think of it, I guess I am.  Several times over, maybe.  Have a peanut.”  But before the dirty little hands could grab the nut, his protective mother snatched him away, mumbling a half-hearted apology.  Everyone heard the mother’s admonishing cliché, “Never talk to strangers.  Some old men like to eat little boys and then just spit their clothes out.”
The old man slowly shook his head like the waving of a twig in the breeze, and fed Gramps, a lame, arthritic squirrel.  “So long, old fellow.  Here, share them with your family,” he said, leaving the half-empty bag of nuts.  Nodworthy rose and stared for a long moment into the pond, pursing his lips in thought.  After a time, a slow grin came to his face as if he had just been struck with the answer to a troubling question.  He turned away and even more slowly than he had come, walked back to the peanut stand.  He stood there for a while, watching the squirrels darting in and out of the bag he had left next to the bench.  His eyes smiled in a sort of melancholy way, first at the squirrels and then at his toes.  Slowly he picked up his head and looked at the vendor as if he were going to say something, but then he turned his gaze back to the pond and the trees.  His hands struggled with the buttons of his long overcoat and they began to shake when they had reached about the third one.  It took him a long time, for his fingers were stiff and bent with age like the rest of him, but at last he had opened his coat far enough to get his hand into his pocket.
Pulling out a crumpled wad of bills he again looked over at the squirrels and without counting it or looking back, he laid the money on the counter and put his hand back into his pocket.  He was moving away when he said it, but the vendor heard the order: “See my friends are fed – especially Gramps.”  With that he walked away, almost never taking his eyes off the pond until he was out of the park.  No one ever saw him again but no one ever realized it, including the vendor.
Nodworthy’s request never had to be filled.  An old, old-as-the-hills man walked slowly around the pond to the same bench and fed the squirrels – the water, the children, the skipping pebbles, and the fallen tree reflecting in his spectacles of bent wire.
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