A Mouth, Full of Charcoal

It was a cold, late morning in September, about as welcoming as a hangover is to a drippy faucet. Matthias gathered all the wood that he could find from behind the shed to warm the house. It was getting too late to prepare any more wood.

Matthias was the sort of person who would wait until the devil said it was time to go before he considered heaven. Now, that weakness of will and ambition was catching up to him, because he was short on firewood for the winter, and it was already too cold in the back of the mountains to spend much time outside chopping more. Not to mention the trees he had on the property weren’t his, because it wasn’t his property.

Matthias was living in another man’s house and living off another man’s wages, because he never set out to make a living. Farm-work was too hard, carpentry was too complicated, being a store clerk meant you had to work with people and he hated people, and, most of all, he was too proud to admit he couldn’t read enough to get past the title of the Bible. So, he spent his life trading his limited skills for room and board, nothing more.

He’d never had a penny in the bank, and the clothes he wore were the old clothes of his employers--his masters, really. Even the trees knew they were higher-class citizens than Matthias. Probably, that’s why they always seemed to fall at him every time he chopped one down.

As he walked into the waning warmth of the main room of the cabin, he tapped the muddy droplets off his boots onto the floor. He set the wood next to the fireplace after a bit of a tired struggle, because he’d skipped his first meal, earlier that morning, in favor of saving the effort for sitting on the chair in front of last night’s embers, rather than build the fire and gather water to boil for food.

Now he felt he had no choice but to build another fire, since the embers had gone cold. He grabbed a few logs and tossed them into the squared cave, not caring where they landed. He came at the logs with kindling and a healthy stick, worn round from rubbing. A small nest of the kindling was set on the log that landed closest to the front-center of the hearth, and Matthias commenced to twisting the smoothed-out stick with just enough vigor to light the hairy wisps fluttering underneath. He stood up, tapped the other logs closer to the flame with his foot, then grabbed the thin handle of the metal bucket near the hearth.

The well near the shed was starting to get too many leaves around it, so Matthias opted to walk a slightly longer distance to the nearby creek and get his water from there. The water was icy and kept biting his hands like a basin of cold garden snakes, but he paid no mind. He got the bucket as filled as it could get while it lay in the stream at a miniscule declined angle. He was satisfied enough, so he went straight back to the cabin, water lapping at the sides of the bottom of the bucket.

Matthias didn’t feel like waiting for the water to get hot, because he was starving. So, he simply put a handful of old meal in a dirty bowl, dropped a splash of cold water into the bowl straight from the bucket, and started eating without even a slight stir with his spoon.

The meal was watery and left his mouth feeling gritty and wet, but, to him, it beat all the effort to make it the right way. No one was to tell him how to make it the right way. No one was to tell him how to do anything the right way, because whichever way he chose was the right way for him, because he decided that it was right. No one else was him, so no one else had the right to tell him what was right versus what was right to him.

The bucket sat near his bowl on the table, neither of them totally vacant of nutrivite occupants that had wandered in throughout the late-morning. Matthias had made his way back to the chair on the hearth of the fireplace. He stoked it a little, since the wood was a bit wet and losing its savor to the flames. The embers took a shallow breath of the air, and breathed out enough warmth to satisfy the armed stoker.

Matthias’ stomach didn’t feel full. He must not have eaten enough, again. That had happened every meal for the past two weeks, or so, ever since the landlord had come to visit, and just happened to neglect a few biscuits he’d brought with his lunch. Matthias knew he could just wait for the landlord to come again, before he put too much effort into making decent food. After all, he thought, I can afford to wait a little longer because I don’t do this all the time--I’ve made myself plenty of good food in the past, I can take a break for a little while longer. It’s not going to hurt for just a little while longer.

He began to nod off with thoughts of biscuits, and the pressing urge to turn the bucket away, because he thought the handle was smiling at him. Everything he saw he would deal with later. Right now, he needed to do what was most important, and that was to rest. It had been a busy morning, and he had only himself to look after, so his well-being was top priority, and he was no good to himself if he was too tired to do anything.

When the landlord would visit, again, he would be met by the calm silence of a lifeless tenant, resting in the fireplace with a mouthful of charcoal.