Lisa-Anne and the Lonely Woodsman (a folk tale)

In a quiet village near a quiet forest, the people were neighbors of the truest spirit and rarely spoke in hushed whispers about others.

Save, that is, for the man known to most only as the Lonely Woodsman.

Though few can claim honestly to have seen him...his comings and goings for supplies are the stuff of ghost stories and old wives' tales...he is known to live in the deepest, most foreboding depths of the great forest tending a garden of exotic flowers and protecting the property that has, legend has it, been in his family for more generations than anyone could put number to.

He is said to be a man of dour continence, monstrous strength, and withering melancholy. A terrible, lonely hermit foregoing the company of his fellow man in favor of a sad, solitary existence in the shadows of his corner of the quiet forest.

The Lonely Woodsman will take you if you're bad...the Lonely Woodsman doesn't like bad little boys or bad little girls...

Lisa-Anne had grown up hearing these admonishments...parents all throughout the village invoked the Woodsman's name to cow their children into proper behavior...grown up hearing the hushed tales of the Lonely Woodsman shared over fences and over coffee on those rare occasions when he came into the village, soft and unobtrusive as a whisper, and stole away again, the storekeeper being the only one to tell the tale.

Lisa-Anne never believed the tales...for they were always lurid and fanciful...nor the threats. In her heart, she had always known that the Lonely Woodsman wasn't frightening...or supernatural...or malicious.

He was, she had decided at a very early age, just misunderstood. He was, in fact as his nickname stated, just lonely.

Lisa-Anne's heart had reached out to the Lonely Woodsman...from her nights as a little girl including him in her most heartfelt prayers to the Lord God to her maiden's nights now knowing that her love could make him free. If only he knew...somebody could love him and he wouldn't be lonely anymore.

In the summer of her nineteenth year, Lisa-Anne gathered her courage, her chaste love, and her steely resolve and slipped out of her parents' house and down the path towards the forest one clear, portentous morning.

Making sure that she had not been followed, Lisa-Anne stole away off the path she had been admonished to stay on from the day she could walk and lost herself in the gathering shadows of the deeper forest. Though no one ever went there, everyone knew well the way to the land guarded and kept by the Lonely Woodsman.

Lisa-Anne's courage began to falter as the woods grew denser and less familiar...as the way home seemed lost in the shadows behind her. In an instant of panic, she turned to run back to the path and was lost. The curious cry of a sleepy owl, his rest disturbed by her frantic thrashing in the brush below, startled Lisa-Anne and she stumbled against a dead tree. She lost her footing and went tumbling, head over heels, into a crevice she hadn't even known was there.

The old dead tree, dislodged by her futile attempts to regain her footing, followed her down, wedging itself securely on top of her in the damp crevice.

Lisa-Anne, stunned and scraped but otherwise unhurt by her fall save for a dull ache in her right ankle, struggled against the old tree but it would not budge and she could not get out from under it. Her first instinct was to cry but she knew that tears were of no use to her then and there. And so she continued to struggle against the tree...but her strength was not up to the task and she lay back in the cool grass and damp earth and looked up to the tops of the trees above her. Here she would die, she thought, and no one would ever know what had happened to her.

They might even blame the Lonely Woodsman as they had when others had disappeared from the village (even though it was generally known that most of those who had "disappeared" had in fact escaped to the towns and cities beyond the great forest for reasons all their own.)

Lisa-Anne began to cry...tears for herself, pride and folly leading to a fall as her father had often warned they would...and tears for the Lonely Woodsman, who would never know that somebody loved him.

And then, he was there.

He was dark and massive, a giant with massive shoulders and broad powerful hands (with, Lisa-Anne noted to herself, tapered, heartbreakingly-evocative fingers); a great black beard and dark, unsmiling brown eyes that bore into hers.

Lisa-Anne gasped and tried to speak but found that she could not. The Woodsman slipped down the incline into the crevice without saying a word. He took hold of the dead tree and hefted it casually up off Lisa-Anne and tossed it aside.

A shudder went through Lisa-Anne as she witnessed this confirmation of the Woodsman's fabled strength. She gasped again when he reached down to pick her up but instead of being crushed by his awful strength she found herself lifted from the crevice with wounding tenderness. The pain in her ankle grew suddenly sharper and she went limp in his arms, fleeing consciousness to escape the pain.

Lisa-Anne woke disoriented sometime later. She found herself alone in a neat, warm cabin. She on a sturdy sofa and covered by a handmade quilt of many subtle colors and her ankle was expertly bandaged.

She sat up and looked around the cabin. There were books and candles, sturdy wooden furniture, a red-brick fireplace, and framed photographs that reached back into someone's storied family history. From behind a closed door, she could smell a fragrant aroma teasing her senses.

She heard singing...deep and masculine and melodic...in the near distance and she rose, unsteadily at first on her wounded ankle, and made her way to the door.

A cool breeze was dancing through the clearing...for that, she now saw, was where this cabin was...and in a garden of bright flowers and healthy fruits and vegetables, was the man...the Lonely Woodsman... the great, muscled expanse of his torso basking in the late afternoon sunlight, contentedly singing as he worked the soil and tended his plants. He was not, Lisa-Anne noted, nearly as old as her elders’ stories implied he was. Perhaps there were a succession of Lonely Woodsmen, she mused, wondering in that instant where his parents were…where his…wife…was…

The Woodsman noticed Lisa-Anne on the porch of his cabin and stopped singing. He rose and walked towards her. He picked up his shirt where he had tossed and put it on without fastening any of the buttons.

"How’s your ankle?" he said as he drew closer.

Flustered by the sound of his voice, Lisa-Anne stammered wordlessly and then found her voice. "It's fine, thank you..."

The Woodsman nodded. Seeing that he wasn't going to say anything else, Lisa-Anne said, "Thank you for saving me...I thought I was going to die..."

"We're all going to die, girl," he replied softly. "Your day just wasn't today."

"Thanks to you."

The Woodsman started to say something and then thought better of it. Then, after a pause, he said, "Why were you so deep in the forest? I thought you villagers knew not to get too far off the path."

Lisa-Anne winced at the hint of sarcasm she thought she heard in his voice but let it go. "I was looking for you..."

The Woodsman's eyebrow rose. "Why?"

Lisa-Anne blushed and took a deep breath. "I didn't want you to be so lonely," she said in a small, self-conscious voice.

The Woodsman looked directly into Lisa-Anne's eyes, looking for something though Lisa-Anne couldn't begin to fathom what. "I'm not lonely, girl," he said, not unkindly. "I am just alone."

Lisa-Anne frowned, not completely comprehending his words but noting that there was no wife in his world. The Woodsman smiled, not unkindly, for the first time. Lisa-Anne was wounded again by the giant man's tenderness.

"You do not have to understand," he said. "I do and that is all that matters."

He walked up the stair to the porch. "Come," he said, holding out his massive hand. "You have been sleeping all day and it will be dark soon. We will eat and in the morning I will take you home."

Lisa-Anne's heart filled with longing and dread at the thought of spending a night in the heart of the quiet forest with the Woodsman. She took his hand, marveling at its rough-hewn softness, and followed him back into the cabin. They passed through the room where she had slept into the kitchen.

On an immaculately maintained wood stove was a kettle full of vegetable soup.

They ate their soup at the small kitchen table in silence.

"I'm not much for conversation," the Woodsman apologized at one point. "I don't have many visitors...."

Lisa-Anne nodded. "I understand."

"No you don't," the Woodsman said. "But I thank you for saying that just the same."

As darkness fell, the Woodsman lit candles and lit a fire in the red-brick fireplace. He installed Lisa-Anne in what was his favorite chair and gave her a book he thought she would enjoy.

And, in fact, the book was one that reached into her very heart and she wondered how he knew.

The Woodsman settled down by the fireplace, barefoot and comfortable, and took up a book of his own.

After several hours, Lisa-Anne grew tired again and she started to yawn.

The Woodsman looked up from his book. "Perhaps we should retire," he said.

The pangs of longing and dread filled Lisa-Anne's very being and she could only nod. She rose from the chair and, forgetting her injury, put too much pressure on her right leg. She cried out and started to fall.

With speed and grace belied by his size, the Woodsman caught her on the fly and drew her up into his solid arms. Without saying a word, he carried her towards another door and gently pushed it open. In flickering lamplight, Lisa-Anne could see that it was the Woodman's bedroom...sturdy and solid in unpainted natural woods.

The Woodsman placed her down on the huge bed and Lisa-Anne, braced expectantly for whatever was going to happen next.

The Woodsman moved to the back of the room and lit a candlelight lamp in a small bathroom just off the bedroom. "I don't have a bathtub," the Woodsman said. "But that shower pump brings fresh water directly from the well."

He moved to the door leading to the living room. "I'll be out here if you need anything," he said. "Good night." And he was gone.

Lisa-Anne sat up on the bed, watching as the candlelight from the other room slowly disappeared and there was only the faint glow from the fireplace left.

She listened as the Woodman shed his clothes and threw them over his chair and then heard him take the quilt of many colors and settle down on the floor of the living room.

Lisa-Anne rose from the bed and hobbled into the bathroom. She took off her clothes and washed herself with water from the shower. She extinguished the bathroom lamp and went back into the bedroom. She folded her dress and her undergarments and put them at the foot of the bed. She put out the lamp and slipped naked under the downy blankets of the Woodsman's bed.

Lisa-Anne laid in the darkness waiting. But only the steady rhythm of the Woodsman's breathing from the other room and the soothing night songs of the birds and animals of the forest could be heard. Lisa-Anne, disappointed and relieved, slipped into a peaceful sleep.

In the morning, Lisa-Anne woke momentarily disoriented but she quickly composed herself. She slipped into her clothes and went out into the living room. The soreness in her ankle was all but gone.

The Woodsman wasn't there and she was briefly worried. But then she heard his song coming from the forest. He entered carrying a small basket full of apples.

"Good morning," he said. "Did you sleep well?"

“Very well, thank you," she answered. And indeed she had. They ate apples and toasted oats and fresh honey at the little kitchen table. "Isn't it awful living here all alone?" she ventured to ask at one point.

He smiled, a bit wistfully Lisa-Anne imagined. "No," he said resolutely. "It is neither good nor bad...it simply is."

Lisa-Anne had no answer for that so she said nothing else.

After breakfast, the Woodsman put on a backpack and said, "Come, I will take you home now."

Lisa-Anne wanted to protest but she did not.

They walked through the forest in silence until the Woodsman, completely comfortable in the foreboding woods, started to sing a song that reached up into the sky obscured by the majestic trees...that reached down to the deepest depths of Lisa-Anne's heart.

In a surprisingly short time, Lisa-Anne could smell the distinctive aromas of the village’s morning and she knew that they would soon be there. The moment was slipping away and her heart was breaking because of it.

As the path to the village loomed in the distance, Lisa-Anne put her hand on the Woodsman's arm. The Woodsman turned around and looked at her.

"I need to tell you that you don't have to be alone," she blurted out. "I need to tell you that I love you."

The Woodsman looked into her eyes. He reached out and gently touched her face. "You don't know me, child," he said not unkindly.

“I’m not a child,” she replied, just a bit petulantly. She started to say something else but he put one of his great fingers to her lips to shush her. He bent down and brought his lips to hers softly. He brushed the tear from her eye and then he took her hand and continued to lead her to the path.

As they reached the path, they could hear voices...the men of the village were searching for her, Lisa-Anne surmised.

The Woodsman reached into the backpack and brought out the book that he had given her to read the night before. "I want you to have this."

Lisa-Anne, a tear tracking down her cheek, took the book and clutched it to her chest.

"Lisa-Anne!" a voice called out. It was her father and she turned to see him rushing up the path towards her followed by a dozen other men. Lisa-Anne's father gathered her up into his arms and showered her with tears and kisses.

When Lisa-Anne turned, the Woodsman was gone without a trace.

Lisa-Anne allowed herself to drawn into the celebration of her safe return but as the happy throng ambled up the path back to the village, she strained to hear the Woodsman's song echoing from the darkest depths of the quiet forest.

Sometime later, Lisa-Anne disappeared again. She would not return this time.

For her parents she left a brief note: Please don't cry...I am safe...and I am not alone.