Desire Path II

Desire Path




It took a while for folks round here to notice him. Drifters often passed this way, looking for a hand-out or a bite to eat. You never see them again. But our boy…Every month he comes, along a pathway beaten by his feet alone. It’s been the same these past fifteen years, they say. He is patched together, head down and silent. There is some thing that is burning inside of him; that binds him to this lonely road.

He is big, bigger still in his Frankenstein coat. He jogs like a tortoise, a ridged carapace over his back; almost round. His wide shoulders swing; short legs bending under the weight of the corrugated leather. His face is a half moon, the skin pale under his wide-brimmed hat, his chin eaten away by a beard. His eyes bulge, inexpressive as eggs. You see them coming first: whites that are perfectly white, the dark iris and black pupil like bites taken from their milky flesh.

The wind rises, whips through the trees. The flowering dog-wood, white as a new bride, hooped hem worn high over the knee, the shyer big-tooths; spreading their leaves like hands over a naked body, the quaking aspens, arms outstretched, tinselled for winter and shivering like blue-skinned dancers. Here he comes, through the pignut and shagbark hickories, through the American hornbeams, Old Leathery, bouncing, flat and awkward as a punctured football along his mystery trail.

In every town he has his favourites: the McCrachans in Branchville, Oviatts in Mount Kisco; Pettibones in Trumbull. In Peekskill he returns to the Muzzys. Floyd Muzzy in the drugstore always has a piece to eat for Leathery, though Floyd himself is over sixty and must be the older man. There is something ancient about the Leatherman, something elemental in his stillness and silence. He’s a sailing stone; scoring tracks through the parched earth, pushed by the wind over the flat desert basin.

I spoke to him once.

He smells of the earth and clay and pine; his coat is mud smeared and curls away from the crude stitches that run down it. Rain and snow have turned up the torn seams so that his back has a spine of ragged horns. As he walks, head low like a buffalo, he watches the path ahead of him, and the circles cut into the soft earth by his stick. He carries a patch-work bag over one shoulder. It looks empty, bending as he moves, flapping in the breeze that ripples over the Hudson, as though it has nothing to anchor it. But the big square-cut pocket on his shell of a coat, that’s different; it bulges. There’s something heavy in there.

“I don’t ask him,” said Floyd Muzzy, palms flat on the counter. I was in my second year at a miserable military academy and had the idea to spend as little time as possible on the school’s grounds. The drugstore was a welcome distraction from being “toughened up” for my parent’s sake. My school uniform was stiff and disinclined to bend but I was a determined sloucher and had spread over the counter as if spilled. I quizzed Muzzy on Old Leathery; he had, after all, spoken to him, fed him and on a few occasions even shared a beer with him. He was the nearest thing to an expert on the subject that I knew of and I asked him what he knew about the man’s past.

“You know Albert Beebe, over in Naugatuck?”

I didn’t.

“Well you’ve no need to,” said Muzzy, “Has a store over there and it’s on the Leatherman’s route. Leathery used to drop by; sometimes he’d have money and that’s a mystery in itself. Mostly he didn’t. Albert would always give him something either way. One time, it was just before Christmas and bitter cold, Albert gives him a gill of brandy and has a glass himself to be neighbourly. They set to jawing, and, as the brandy’s beginning to loosen him up, Albert straight up asks the man; why are you walking that big old circle year after year, rain, snow or shine? Without a word Leathery gets up, walks out of the store and never comes back.”

I sucked noisily on my milkshake, the paper straw melting between my lips.

“But you’ve spoken to him, Mr. Muzzy,” I said, “whatever did you talk about?”

“He’s a gentle soul,” said Muzzy, “has a couple of gardens that he tends on his way round, so we talked about that sometimes. In the winter-time he stays in the caves over by Watertown; lights a fire and heats the stones when the weather gets bad. That’s about it. He’s none too talkative anyways, on account of him not speaking too much English and me not speaking too much French.”

This was news. “He’s French?”

“Canadian, most likely,” said Muzzy, “but could be French, could be. That would be one of the things that I wouldn’t ask about,”

I left the drugstore reeling. This was heady and exciting news: Old Leathery was a foreigner! This would explain his outlandish behaviour, his inscrutable actions. If my French were better I felt I could crack the mystery of the Leatherman and his long, seeming pointless journey. I determined to meet him, to speak to him. Back at the school I found a French phrasebook.


A full moon sat low and white in the sky that night, just out of reach of the blackened tips of the trees. I sat on the edge of my bunk looking out through the half shuttered windows. The fluttering breathing of the sleeping boys synchronised with the thin black clouds that striped the moon like peeling paint. Old Leathery was due in Peekskill tomorrow and I intended to talk to him.

He came out of the shivering trees, walking with his usual purpose. In the distance his bobbing head, short legs and patchwork leather coat lent him the likeness of some monstrous bipedal cow. I leaned against a gate in my stiff grey uniform, twin military tram-lines running to my waist. I was as neat and smooth as he was shaggy and unkempt. Never-the-less he tipped his cap at me as he moved past. I froze. I watched him walk by me; the awkward gait, his great corrugated coat hanging down one side, weighted.

“Monsieur,” I shouted. He kept on walking, an arm rising up and waving over his shoulder.

“Monsieur,” I shouted again, “Qu’est que tu…vous ave…dans…Monsieur, please; what do you have in your pocket?”

He stopped and turned, slowly and deliberately. I had the impression that he had not previously turned back on his journey. He made his way down the pathway with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. I backed away, unnerved by his scent, like mushrooms, his giant thatched head under the leather cap; those too white eyes; black spots on a hen’s eggs.

“Ma poche?” he said, “Dans ma poche?”

He stood in front of me and I could see the cracks and veins running over that coat, the discoloured patches, the mould and rot. The smell of him was overwhelming and the babyish softness of his face was perverse beaming out of that battered upholstery. His white eyes were smiling. He pulled from his the pocket a thick and rusted iron “U” and held it out for my inspection. It looked like an old horse-shoe but as I studied it closely I could see no sign of human manufacture; there were no sharp edges, no maker’s mark. At the two prongs the metal seemed even more impacted and misshapen and was tinged with a dry earthy red. He pushed the object still closer to my face.

“L’aimant de l’amour,” he said, “pour la chance!”

I looked up helplessly. “I don’t understand,”

He wrapped his fingers around the lump of metal and pushed it back into his pocket, and, turning gracefully on the ball of one elephant’s foot, he carried on down the path, his head low and invisible behind his collars.

“Je suis l’aimant d’amour,” he shouted, “C’est pour ca que chacun m’aime!”

He turned where the river naturally bent and ducked behind a shaggy hill, long wild grass devouring him like thin green flames. That was the only time I saw him.

My parents removed me from the school and took me back to Pennsylvania. They never attempted to instil manly virtues in me again and I later attained an acceptable degree of manliness under my own steam. Old Leathery carried on his journey for another fifteen years or so until they found his body in a cave up by Saw Mills on a beautiful spring day. The Connecticut Humane Society had previously had him arrested and admitted to hospital; he was sick from the constant chewing of tobacco, they said. He ran away, of course, back to the path: back to his life. A search party was formed on the first day that he missed his schedule. He was always so punctual and always so well loved.