The Boogey Man of the Woods

 Some of my earliest memories go back to bedtimes.

My oldest sister, six years ahead of me, shared my bedroom.
When the day’s light retreated in the evening hours, darkness would fall on our bedroom too, the time when sister would sometimes raise the specter of the Boogey Man by scratching a nail on the metal surface of her bed.
“Listen!” she would exclaim in a frightened whisper, “You hear the Boogey Man scratch inside the corner cabinet?  Maybe he’s coming to get you!”
Part of me knew it wasn’t so, but the too easily quickened irrational part of the young (do we ever outgrow it entirely?) felt haunted by a demon.
Maybe it was my sister’s way of exercising (and, perhaps, thereby exorcising) her own demons, but the memory of that awful scratching sound in the dark has stuck with me.

Did it prepare me for the encounter with the Boogey Man in the woods?

And WWII, the most monstrous Boogey Man of all?
Perhaps it did – to intensify, not allay the fear.
                        
                                                         *-*

Once upon a time there was a little boy …

The little boy had a big sister and brother, but they were too old to play with him.
He also had a younger sister, but she was too little.
So he played with a cousin who lived next door and was only a year older.
She would come over, and they would play pretend games or walk to the woods together that lay way at the back of the farm.
They would walk through the fields, climb over the gates that divided the fields, and cross the little bridge over the stream that ran through the fields.
Sometimes the two would pick a bouquet of buttercups from the back field next to the woods and take it as a surprise present to Mama.
That made Mama so happy that she would treat the little playmates to a cookie or candy.

To the little boy and his cousin, the woods were scary and therefore exciting.
Rabbits and hares lived there and other creatures of the wild.
Inside the woods the sun did not shine.

The children would enter the woods down a narrow path.
The deeper the path would lead them into the woods, the more hesitantly they walked.
“Ssshh,” they would whisper, “don’t let the Boogey Man hear us!”
Then, scaring themselves, they would soon turn around and hurry back to the sunshine and the view of their home in the distance, just to feel safe again.

 But one day they didn’t feel safe at all.
They had gone farther into the woods than usual, holding each other by the hand, moving slowly and very quietly.
The path had become narrower now and overgrown in places with brushwood.
They had never gone this far; they felt surrounded by the darkness of danger.
Then, just off to the right of their path, they saw it: a wild hare, almost perfectly blending into the dry dust-colored underbrush.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
It looked like the hare did too, because it was not moving.
They stood and stared open-mouthed: why wasn’t the hare moving?

Then they heard the snapping sound of twigs: someone or something was coming their way!
“Let’s run,” gasped the little boy to his cousin, and he tugged her hand to rush back toward the sunlight.
Instead she pulled him off the path into the trees, then crouched down behind a thicket.
“Don’t move and don’t make a sound,” she hissed into his ear.
The little boy bit his lip; he was scared and he wanted to cry.  His heart hammered in his chest and his body shook.
But the two watched through the tangle of twisted scrub brush that hid them from view.

And then they saw the Boogey Man, a large man in a blue farm jacket.
He stopped where they had seen the hare.  They saw him bend down with his back toward them.  They heard him growl, “Gotcha!”  When he straightened up again, they saw that he held the dead hare and dropped it into the burlap sack he had been carrying.  He swung the sack over his shoulder and disappeared in the same direction he had come.

 On the way home, the little boy and girl did not stop to pluck flowers for their mama.
And for a long time they did not go back to the darkness of the woods.
They did not know about poachers then; but they had seen that the Boogey Man was real, and that was more than they had wanted.

Back at home, they would play church or school, until the girl cousin had to go to the real school, a year before the little boy did.
Now he had to play by himself.
He missed his cousin who had also been his best friend.
And he looked forward to his 6^th birthday, when he too could be in a real classroom.

But when the little boy had his 6^th birthday, something very frightening happened….
            [see “When War Came,” the blog entry for April 30, 2011]