High Tide

Willie Foot lived up the road from us in a falling down, gray clapboard house, surrounded by weeds that grew taller than most of us kids. He was, so the ledgend went, crazier than a bedbug. He walked most everywhere,
a crooked, short figure in dusty, ragged clothes, always having animated conversations with friends only he could see. These were extravagant conversations with wild, energetic gesturing and sometimes he would pause, do a few dance steps to the music only he could hear, and then resume his pace. He walked very quickly with short, jerky strides and would often stop to shift invisible burdens from shoulder to shoulder. He was crippled and walked with a pronounced limp, a defect from being born, my grandmother said, but she never did explain any more than that and we were too young to know the word inbreeding.

He survived, so it was supposed, on disability benefits and pity. Odd jobs turned up routinely all over the island, jobs that really didn't need doing - an errand to be run, a letter for the post office, a sack of feed to be delivered.
Willie was paid in food or cigarettes or household goods. Once, Nana let him draw water from the well, not prepared for him to strip down and bathe in the backyard, as she said "...buck naked in front of God and everybody..." . She happened to glance out the kitchen window and in the next moment had gathered an armful of towels, cast her eyes heavenward and was marching toward the well. She never missed a step.

It was rumored that Willie had once worked on the mainland as a busboy for the Chinese cafe but that the tourists had been put put off my his multicolored hair which stood up on his head like spikes and his crossed eyes. Nana maintained that there was no truth in that whatsoever because no self respecting tourist would ever actually eat in the cafe. Everyone knows, she advised me sternly, that those people serve dogmeat.

One summer, Willie found a red wagon. He would carefully pull it down the hill and load it with rocks, then haul it up the hill where he unloaded the rocks and started down again. The following day he reversed the process. We watched with fascination as this continued day after day, not understanding what he was doing or why but still taken with his dedication to the task. Down the hill, back up the hill. Strictly speaking, the corner really wasn't quite wicked enough to be considered a hairpin turn but it did curve sharply and the guard rails on the ocean side hadn't been put up that summer. When Willie discovered that it was much faster to ride down the hill rather than walk, even the kids recognized the potential for danger. He began at that top, put one knee in the wagon and pushed hard with his other foot. The wagon picked up speed and was going like the wind by the time he hit the curve then sailed out over the embankment, arms outstretched to the sky and shrieking.

High tide and a quick thinking fisherman saved his life although the wagon fared less well. Willie was pulled from the water and brought ashore uninjured but the wagon sank like a stone into the Bay of Fundy and was never recovered.

Willie stopped moving rocks after that. He had learned to fly.