CHARLIE AND MAN-IN-THE-DIRT / Charlie Dunn
Charlie set about on a long walk one morning in July, not having first looked at the weather. He was far from home by noon, for which reason he experienced great relief on looking up and realizing that this alarming sound was not, in fact, the rain starting powerfully, but merely the windblown trees shaking in a certain way as to mimic strong rain—so that he continued wandering farther from home, wrongly presuming that that hard rustling of trees was not prophecy; that rather the world’s hunger for sound had been satisfied by only the susurrus, and—as if the rain were primarily an auditory phenomenon (and “Being but an Ear”), the water produced by it and not vice-versa—that the trees, in the same manner as a lightning rod safely diverts the lightning into the earth which would otherwise have led to wildfire, had safely collected the rain-sound, obviating the need for rain itself. Pleased with this meditation, even utterly lost in it, dreaming buttery, self-satisfied dreams, he continued into the woods an hour more. When the rain did come, following a brief panic that he would not escape it with any square inch of him short of sopping, he shrugged his shoulders, still however reluctant to turn back, in case something wonderful waited for him only thirty feet on, or sixty feet on. Nothing was; and thinking to himself, first, that he was terribly weary, second that despite the rain the air was still fairly hot, and third that a young man sleeping alone in the woods in the rain was a beautiful sight, whether he or anyone else were present to see it, he plucked a mass of fresh leaves for a pillow and lay flat on his back to nap, pleased with himself.
When he woke, not long after, he was drenched and cold, and the dirt around him, which he’d rolled around in somewhat, had grown muddy. He felt afraid, waking in a strange place, cold and all alone. He began to do some physical exercises, both to regain full possession of his mental and emotional faculties, and to warm himself; he removed his clothing, in order that he might at least himself dry out quickly; and when at last he exited again into the full hot day, like a primitive stepped miraculously out of ancient days into the world as it now exists, stunned by the sight of planes and houses, he sighed and lay down.
But presently he heard a little whisper behind him: “sir!” And he turned, but saw nothing. “I am under the leaves,” it said. And Charlie crawled about, wiping the old leaves off the earth, until he uncovered a face upon the dirt, made of the dirt, with wide, excited eyes. “You savage, you savage! Leap into my mouth; you are just the one that I have waited for, these three hundred years.” And that handsome, boyish face in the floor opened wide to swallow the man. But Charlie said, “Why should I do such a foolish thing as that? For I am not so stupid as to leap directly into what is clearly a mouth. Am I not a man? And have I not learned wisdom in my few days, despite that I squander it remarkably well? Yet still I know better than to sit myself upon a great tongue, and tugging the upper row of teeth to slide briskly into a great belly. Ha! The vultures also would love me to spike my eyes out on their talons, but even they are not stupid or brash enough to ask.”
“But sir,” the face in the dirt said, “I do not desire to consume you, but to befriend you. When you step into my mouth you will wear this face of dirt upon your own face, and you will have a body made of the clean forest earth; this is a vital suit; you will be inexhaustible, with force to uproot the oldest trees among those you see here, and we together will run faster than any deer, any wolf, or any cheetah. We will rip the animals of the woods into pieces, and eat them raw.”
Charlie told him in response, “I am a useless man, utterly useless, and therefore what you say greatly tempts me.”
“Leap, leap into my mouth!” The face in the dirt licked its lips, as a joke.
“But, then, humanity has such a need for the useless; there is a niche for my sort specifically; they might throw away all the most useful soldiers and public servants in exchange for one useless cretin like me. Out of boredom, I wager; I at least am entertaining. Or, perhaps God provides us with a preponderance of useless ones, so that the righteous always have someplace to spend out and temper the flame of love in them; so that I am like a strop, upon which to strop one’s spirit. Why do you need someone to wear you, after all?”
“I am lonely, lonely! And moreover, I’m stuck here, without another to help.”
Charlie dug his fingers into the earth around the face, and tried to pull the man up from the ground by his cheeks; but he did not budge. His cheeks were squished together, and then Charlie’s hands slipped, and came clapping together upon the nose. Seven times he tried, before the face in the dirt told him: “Okay! Stop that!”
“Well, alright.”
The face began to weep. “I’m stuck here. Every year the leaves gather over my face. If I am quick to puff out my cheeks and blow, I can keep the leaves off, so long as I don’t let them pile up too high; for then it rains, and they suck to my poor face too heavily. But regardless, soon the snow comes, and there’s no helping it then; I’m as good as buried. Jump into my mouth, and I shall be saved.”
“And how did you wind up here?”
“A long time ago—seven hundred years ago—I was just a young man, running around with the others. I liked hunting with them, and painting myself, and sitting by a fire, and chipping away at one stone with another. But one day, when we went out hunting, I killed a white deer, being too proud for my own good. The medicine man made me eat a certain purple leaf, after he whispered into it, and waved it in three directions. Then he buried my feet in the dirt, and soon I fell asleep. When I woke up, everyone was gone, and I was sunken to my chest already.”
“Hm.”
“Oh, please, please! For I see that you are a merciful creature.”
“Will we live forever?”
“No; I may, perhaps, but you will rot normally, or even faster than normal, once you die.”
So, at last decided, Charlie leapt into the mouth as it gaped. But he was swallowed down to the blackest pit, and that malicious face came up out of the ground on a myriad of long pale roots, and planted itself elsewhere, crying out.—Or, so goes the tale of the Man-in-the-Dirt, which the children at least find fascinating.
Charlie Dunn lived in Ypsilanti. His father and friends are doing their best to get his writing into wider publication.
