Old Man Yirdle

When we were boys, we spoke of Old Man Yirdle as if he were an old myth, nothing but hearsay and exaggeration. We thought he was some kind of witch, that he ate children to keep him from ageing. He was old, but he was eternally ninety years old; like, with each passing year, he managed to stay the same age. He was a moral story, a way to keep children away from the woods. Children often went missing in the woods. While it was often ruled that a bobcat or a coyote got the impishly curious child, there was always an inkling that may have been Old Man Yirdle that gobbled them up.

The whole town knew about Yirdle. Generation to generation can recount first seeing the old man. Every summer when the air was warm and smelled of the milk from freshly-bloomed wildflowers, the local boys would make their annual trek to the woods just behind the suburban development where we lived with our camp guides. We would sit around a burning campfire and tell the countless stories of Old Man Yirdle we’d heard during our short lives, passed down from our parents and older siblings, comparing and embellishing the twisted legacy that followed him.

“My dad told me that one time, one boy threw his baseball into Old Man Yirdle’s lawn by accident, so he decided to climb over the chicken wire fences and sneak into his yard. Yirdle saw him and hit him in the head with his shovel, and he never got his ball back and no one ever heard from him again.”

“I heard that Yirdle ate him.”

“Everyone knows he ate him.”

“You think he buried him the backyard?”

“Well, didn’t he bury his wife there? And his kid?”

“Old Man Yirdle had a kid?”

“Yeah, you didn’t know? I think he had a daughter. One day, she was playing in the street or something, and she wouldn’t come in for dinner. Yirdle let the dog on her and it ripped her to pieces. He has her buried in the backyard.”

“I heard it was the same dog that took Yirdle’s hand.”

“Is that why he wears the glove?”

“My brother told me he lost his hand when he killed his wife. She tried to fight him with a kitchen knife and cut off his finger, but he ended up stabbing her with the same knife.”

“So, he’s missing a finger?”

“I heard he’s missing a hand.”

“Yirdle is a sick old bastard.”

The glove. It was his glove that was always a mystery to me. No one had ever seen Old Man Yirdle up close, but everyone knew about his glove. I used to ride my bike nearby his house just to watch the way the supple, leather glove would shine in the sun, a dull shine that glowed as he moved his hand when he walked. I would never get too close, deciding it would be better to watch him from two blocks away rather than run the risk of getting eaten, but I would stare at that glove for hours on end as he tended to his lawn on summer days.

Old Man Yirdle lived at the end of the town, right at the top of a lonely cul-de-sac. Geographically, the farthest location possible in town from city centre. A sagging, chicken-wire fence cordoned off a dilapidated three-storeyed house, which was wrapped in softening wood panelling and weather-beaten paint. The only thing that was immaculate about the property was the spot where the lawn hit the sidewalk. His lawn was always lush and perfectly golf-course manicured in the summer. We theorized it was the fertilizer that Yirdle used, made of his victim's flesh, that was kept in a stinking pine box next to the wire fence. I hypothesized that it could have easily accommodated five bodies. When the summer sun decided to beat down on the box for during the day, the wind would catch the putrid fumes of festering soil from the box, sweeping it over the town with each breeze. I often spent evenings on our porch imagining what Old Man Yirdle put in that pine box. What stunk the way it did in the summer heat. It was a smell that found its way into your pores, a smell that you never can really get rid of.

As time progressed and some of us grew up and moved away, Yirdle became a thought that occasionally crossed our minds or a great conversation starter about the small town we grew up in. Yirdle became a caricature of man, a man that may have killed his wife and kid, may have been missing a hand, a man that always wore an old leather glove, a mystery within an old house and the end of town. Old Man Yirdle became a fixation for me, a go-to story to tell my friends. Yirdle was Vietnam, we survived him - the boys who weren’t eaten.

My parents died a few months after I finished college, and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I decided that maybe the comforts of my old home may bring me some peace. I sold the old house for well over its asking price, paid off my school loans and decided that maybe I could live in my hometown for a while and maybe jumpstart my writing career. I rented the main floor of an old house near the forests, just adjacent to Old Man Yirdle’s property. Imagine my surprise seeing him after six years, still mowing his lawn with his leather glove; I was almost certain he would have been dead by then. Perhaps he had eaten a few more children since I had left.

Even though I did have a fascination with the Old Man when I was a child, I never intentionally decided to live near him. I admired him the way a child might admire a dragon in a fairy-tale. In a way, Yirdle wasn’t a real man. He was just a figure of my imagination. Living next to him, I realized that I didn’t enjoy never being able to open my windows in the summer, or hearing him drag his lawnmower over his front lawn every morning. He was no longer myth, he was a real man who had little to no consideration for the people around him. But the apartment was what I could afford, and I was able to lead a quiet life away from the prying eyes of the small-town neighbours. I spent my days, and nights, typing at my keyboard for hours at a time, sleep-deprived and overly caffeinated. Yirdle kept to himself, working on his lawn, and I kept to myself and worked in my study.

About two weeks into my stint as Yirdle’s neighbour, I began to track his behaviour. Yirdle became a kind of case study. I would watch him from my office window as he moved in long, jerky strides about his yard. He would rake and sweep, plant and fertilize, scooping out big mounds of black earth from his pine box, his right hand swathed in leather as he worked. Occasionally, I could see him scratch at his windows as pulled the drapes back every now and again.

I used to spend my time gazing at the old man from the dirty, translucent pane of my window, wondering what was under his black leather glove. My insomnia, fueled by late evening cups of coffee and my creative stand-still, would keep me at my window for days on end, tracking his movements in the house. I would watch the lights turn on and off in the windows of the house, watching his face as they walked by the panes. I liked knowing where he was at all times. Like I could trace the time of day it was based on where he was.

I spent my days and nights watching him through the windows. I followed him during his daily routines, I began to know him inside and out. It became normal that I would only leave the chair when I needed to. I would sleep for a few minutes and snap back awake, making sure I could keep Yirdle in check. I couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, watching Yirdle was a way to pass the time. It was after three months that I started to notice that every two weeks, on Wednesday nights, Yirdle would drag a large, black garbage bag out to the pine box around one in the morning. He would heave the bag into the box, straining his back and wiping his temple with his leather-clad palm from the exertion. I would sit in the chair of my study and watch with the drapes hung low and the light on dim as he closed the pine box and shuffled back into the house. The rational part of my brain immediately thought it was the leftover carcass of a deer he killed and stripped for dinner. Yirdle must’ve had traps set in the woods. He must have put the bones and viscera in a bag for compost. But why does someone compost at one in the morning in the middle of the week?  

It was the sixth week that Yirdle had composted a large bag and the sixth week since I had slept more than a few minutes. I decided to go for a walk in the woods, both as a way to ease my mind and a way to put my stomach at rest. I pulled a wayward branch from a tree, stabbing the ground in front of me to set off any well-hidden traps Yirdle must have laid in the woods. I followed the path about ten minutes out, uncovering nothing but abandoned bird nests and the rotting smell of foliage and damp earth. I turned back, knowing Old Man Yirdle couldn’t possibly walk out any further than where I was while dragging a deer carcass. It was halfway back that I noticed a red sneaker poking out of the falling leaves, right at the base of a tree. It was no bigger than a size ten a child’s shoe. The white laces were clean, and the sole was barely worn. Children get lost in these woods all the time. The child may have just lost a shoe. Or it could have been eaten by a wildcat. Or a coyote. Or Old Man Yirdle.

It must have been a child. The bag looked as if it was heavy enough to be a child. I knew somewhere in the pit of my stomach that it must have been a child in that bag, and now that child was in that pine box and the rest of that child was in Yirdle’s stomach and that’s why he was forever ninety years old. Yirdle was eating children.

I rushed back to my apartment, pulling a sweater over my shoulders and jumping in my car. I made my way into town, stopping at the local general store. I picked up two pounds of coffee and some pepper spray. The cashier was talking to a lady while she cashed me out.

“Oh, it’s the saddest thing.”

“I hope he turns up soon. That poor dear is just sick with grief.”

“Well, it’s unlikely. I think the coyote’s got him.”

“Sorry to pry, but what’s happened?”

The two ladies looked at me with sad eyes, “You didn’t hear? The Henderson’s boy has gone missing. He’s been gone for three days now out in the woods. I was just saying that the coyotes must’ve gotten him by now. The poor thing is only four.”

“He just got lost in the woods?”

“Well, you know kids. He was kicking that soccer ball with some of the older boys and he probably didn’t realize that he had gone too far. The boys tried to look for him, but no one could find him.”

I must have gone pale. I felt the blood drain from my brain and into my stomach. I shoved some money into the cashier’s hand and left.

The bag. The glove. The pine box. Yirdle probably wore the glove to hide his fingerprints. He had really been killing children. I got back to the apartment, brewed a pot of coffee and sat at the window, watching the lights go on and off as Yirdle moved through his house. If the boy had been gone for three days, and Yirdle composted him last night, that must be mean he was keeping him somewhere until he killed him. This was just logical sense. But I had been keeping an eye on him this entire time, and never was there a boy anywhere near Yirdle. That must mean that he captured the boy in the woods and then brought him back. I pulled newly purchased pepper-spray out of the bag and examined the directions. I was going to have to go see for myself what was really going on in Yirdle’s house.

Old Man Yirdle had a lattice-work garden frame next to the landscaping astride his house. A dried climbing-rose bush sat with its thick, yellow vines clawing at the green wood as it dug itself out of the dirt. The frame was just high enough to kiss the sill of the second-floor window. Flashlight in hand and armed with a can of pepper-spray, I climbed the fence for the next few nights, scaling the chicken wire fence as it wobbled under my weight even though I wanted to sleep. I climbed the frame a few minutes after Yirdle’s lights went out, listening as his feet padded the creaking floors as he curled into bed. I watched as he slept, the moon highlighting his sleeping figure, his glove still sheathed his hand as he laid in bed. I stood there until three in the morning each night, well past the time when he would visit his pine box and watch his chest rise and fall, the gloved hand moving up and down as it lay on his belly. Night after night for nearly a week I watched, waiting for him to do something, anything to indict himself. He never got up to do so much as use the washroom. He slept soundly, something I hadn’t done in months.

Every night I climbed the frame, and every night he slept soundly. I decided I may have to take matters into my own hands. It was on the eighth night that I waited for him to go to bed before entering the cellar on the opposite side of the house. I saw the light go out in the window of his bedroom, and I made my move. The latch was broken on the cellar door, and Yirdle had crafted his image so well that no sane person would ever think of breaking into his home. I crept down the stairs, widening the beam of my flashlight to its widest setting and bathing the contents of the basement in white light.

I was bleary-eyed. I hadn’t slept in a week proper, my mind running far and fast with thoughts of Old Man Yirdle. I moved through his home in a fog as if I were moving in a dreamscape. I was there, but I wasn’t, nothing about breaking into Yirdle’s home seemed real.

The cellar was empty save for a few old paint cans and a pile of splintering wood beams. I made my way to the first floor, making sure I was as close to invisible as possible. I was a ghost as I moved through the living room, the kitchen, the dining room. The place looked as if it hadn’t changed since the forties. Everything was dated, old-fashioned. The drapes were yellowed with age, the lace falling apart from the moth holes. The couch was overstuffed and sagging with its own weight. The dining room table was far too large for just one.

I turned towards the mantle in the living room and examined the pictures in the frames. There were three of them, all of them were of Yirdle, and in all of them, he looked the exact same. Yirdle in front of a house, Yirdle standing in front of a tractor, Yirdle holding a goat by the neck, and in each, he sports his black glove. My fingers reached out to touch a frame when they grazed something else, something spongy and round. I passed some light over the object. It was a soccer ball. It was small and green, the perfect size for a four-year-old to kick around.

He was kicking that soccer ball with some of the older boys and he probably didn’t realize that he had gone too far.

Yirdle saw him and hit him in the head with his shovel, and he never got his ball back and no one ever heard from him again.

It had been true all along. The soccer ball was the last nail in Yirdle’s perpetually open coffin. I picked it up, feeling the weight of the ball in my hand, examining the hexagonal mosaic pattern as the light from my flashlight caught it.

I rubbed my burning eyes, attempting to focus them in the dark. I caught a glimpse of something shiny in the residual beam of light of my flashlight when I saw the light shift behind me. Yirdle had come down the stairs, dressed in a coat and a pair of jeans painted in stains and caked with dirt. He had the splintering handle of a shovel in his leather-encased grip. He didn’t say a word, he just stood there, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the invasiveness of my flashlight. His glove squeaked against the wood. I felt the weight of the pepper-spray in my pocket and squeezed the soft ball that was in my hands.

Yirdle placed a second hand on the shovel, the spade above his head as if he were a batter at a baseball game. My ‘fight or flight’ instinct kicked in just then as I threw the ball at him, reaching for the can in my pocket.

I heard it before I felt it, the cold metal spade of the shovel cutting through the air and landing squarely between the blades of my shoulders. I dropped to my knees as I felt my spine bend against its arc.

I lunged for his knees, knocking Yirdle flat on his back. His shovel had skittered away from him, out of his reach and his gloved hand was pushing my face away from him. I had never been so close to him before. His leathery skin was wrinkled but smooth, like a well-oiled boot. His bright blue eyes were wide with terror as he watched me above him. I was so close that I could see my face in his eyes. I was wild, the dark circles under my eyes and sunken hollows of my cheeks made me seem like I wasn’t a real person. The old man’s gloved hand splayed across the right side of my face as if he was forcing me to look at myself.

I took my weight off of him, squatting as I looked at Yirdle. He was old, but he wasn’t frail. He propped himself on his elbows, looking me dead in the eye. He clutched his chest with his black glove, slowing his breath. I pointed at the discarded ball, “What did you do?”

Old Man Yirdle looked at me blankly, and I asked again. “What did you do?”

He huffed through his nose, snarling at me, and I lunged at him. My hands found his neck, his right hand pawed aimlessly at the pressure. “You killed them? You go into the woods? You kill them! You kill them and you eat them and you put them in your damned box and they rot! You let them rot and you put them on your lawn, your perfect fucking lawn! You eat them and you stay young and you kill these kids!”

He never let out a sound. I loosened the hold and matched his glare as I looked for some kind of reaction. He was still as he looked at me, his gloved hand laying limp in his lap. “Nothing, huh? Nothing to say? I always knew it was true about you. Everything. Your wife, your kid, everything. You got another kid somewhere, Yirdle? Some other kid you gonna eat later tonight? Strip them bare and compost the rest?”

He furrowed his eyebrows, and my eyes were burning and I was in a haze as my fingers tightened around his neck, his glove touching my hands limply as I placed my weight against him and felt the breath slide out of his neck. He looked at me, wide and bright and I could see myself clearly in the glaze of his eyes. I looked serene as if I was about to drift off to sleep, my eyes were hooded and my breath was even. I felt him slip away from me, his body as lifeless as his gloved hand, his mouth agape.

I stood up calmly, reaching for his glove, finally putting an end to all the childhood rumours and hypotheses. Yirdle was missing the tips of all five fingers and the hand was badly mangled. I turned back to the shining object that caught my attention. It was a mason jar with a tongue in it. I went over to Yirdle lying on the floor and peered into his mouth. Sure enough, there was no tongue.

My brain cut through the fog sleeplessness. That was why he didn’t talk back. And if his hand was essentially useless, then there was no way he could have taken a child. I made my way to the kitchen, in his fridge was packages of meat, and neatly labelled – deer and caribou – prepared and seasoned, ready for dinner. I ran to the backyard, flinging open the top of the pine box. I was hit with a wall of festering flesh and filth and I tore open the bag sitting in the corner of the box. There were big bones, bones of an animal, thick leg bones. Yirdle dragged these animals here, butchered them and composted the waste. He was a farmer – as evidenced by the pictures, he could have butchered these animals expertly with one hand, but capturing a flailing child? He just couldn’t do it. He never ate any children. He was confused by my questions. He was innocent.

I wanted to sleep. All I wanted to do was sleep as I stood in the backyard. Yirdle was innocent. Just an old man who lived peacefully. When the kids would go to the woods to camp that summer, I would be the man they would tell stories about. I was the man who couldn’t sleep. I was the man that watched an old man, stalked an old man, killed an old man because I believed a campfire story from my childhood. I was the man their parents knew. Old Man Yirdle would just be the man who had no tongue and no right hand and still had the best lawn in the neighbourhood.

I wanted to sleep. I walked back to Yirdle’s body, lying on the floor. I wanted to sleep. I took the glove from the floor and put it on. It fit snug, but it fit and I laid next to him on the floor and I wanted to sleep. I was Yirdle and I went to sleep.