That an old man with arthritis in both knees and shrapnel in one hip could move so silently seemed impossible.  Yet there he was, a grayed shape in the pre-dawn light, limping his way soundlessly along the path to the garden.  The girl tried to breathe quietly as he walked to the top of the hillside garden and into the tree line where she lost sight of him.  The girl breathed deeply, and then hurried on to the outhouse, suddenly achingly aware of why she had ventured out into the chill morning mist.

       The Sears fall big book sat beside the girl in the dim interior of the toilet.  Its pages would serve only one purpose this trip out.  Her mind was too preoccupied with the old man to look at corduroy jeans and jumpers in fall colors with matching striped sweaters and oxblood penny loafers.  He had seemed so intent on his way.  He had looked neither left nor right, but had plodded straight up the narrow path. 

       The girl tore some pages from the menswear section of the catalog, set the catalog aside, and absently crumpled a page into a tight wad, uncrumpled it, then to further soften the glossy paper she rubbed it rapidly between the knuckles of both hands as though washing out a dishrag.  She smoothed out the softened page on top of the catalog and picked up another page.  Her mind still on the old man, the girl wondered what could make a man in his seventies, long since retired from the coalmines, labor up the steep path before the morning sun cut through the fog.  If she had seen him through his kitchen window laying a fire in his old cook stove, she would not have been even one bit curious.  But, as it was, she couldn’t help wondering why Caleb had gone into the woods.

       The girl took her time going back to the house.  She kept looking back over her shoulder hoping to glimpse Caleb coming back from the woods.  Her mother was building up a fire in the Warm Morning coal and wood stove when the girl finally went inside.

      “I told you not to eat so many of those golden cherries.”  Her mother’s voice was serious, but her eyes were laughing.

      “Yeah, after I ate a quart!”

      They both laughed.  The girl never could resist the amber cherries streaked with crimson and filled with golden juice.

      “Mom, why would Mr. Caleb be going into the woods above the garden this early in the morning?”

       Her mother had her back to the girl.  She had the bale of an old five-gallon lard bucket filled with split wood in her left hand and a stick of stove wood in her right.  She almost had the poplar completely into the mouth of the stove, and her hand stopped mid-motion when the girl spoke.  She deliberately dropped the yellow wood into the stove, added two more pieces, shut the door, straightened up, reached back to the stovepipe, opened up the damper, then turned to face the girl as she dusted the wood grime off of her hands onto one of her husband’s old flannel shirts.

      The girl was aware of the flames crackling from the kindling and imagined that they were hungrily licking along the sticks of pale yellow poplar as she waited for her mother to speak.

      “Lucy, you shouldn’t be spying on that old man.  It isn’t right.”

      “I wasn’t, Mom.  I promise.  I saw Mr. Caleb go into the woods when I went to the toilet.  I didn’t mean to see him, but I couldn’t help it.  Where was he going, Mom?  Why?”

       Lucy’s mother almost opened her mouth.  Lucy could see her jaw working.  Instead she turned her back to Lucy and acted like she was straightening first the stove wood in the one bucket and then the kindling in the other.

      “Maybe he was going squirrel hunting.”  She didn’t sound like she had convinced herself.  She sure hadn’t convinced Lucy.

      “He didn’t have his twelve gauge.”

      “Maybe he ate too many cherries.”  Lucy’s mom wasn’t completely serious, but she wasn’t quite kidding either.

      “Aw, Mom.  You know something.  I know you do.  What’s the big deal?  Is it a secret?  I’m not a little girl anymore.  Tell me.”

      “Nothing to tell.”  That’s all she would say.

       Lucy squirmed a bit and then froze as Caleb opened the screen door and stepped onto the front porch.  She was lying on her belly in the dew damp grass at the edge of the yard just out of sight of the big picture window in the living room.  Caleb’s frame house was below the bank on which Lucy’s parents had built their more modern house with the parti-colored brick that had the imprints of leaves, nuts, twigs, and wildlife paw prints on random bricks.  Lucy loved the paw prints especially.  She would often put her fingertips into the depressions and imagine what it was like to be whatever woodland creature had left its tracks on the brick.  Her favorite was the raccoon.

       Caleb walked to the far end of the porch and sat heavily on the white porch swing that faced away from Lucy and offered Caleb a view of the valley that fell away below him.  He set the swing in motion with what he considered his good leg, the one without the shrapnel he had carried for decades, and gazed across the valley.

      Caleb was troubled.  Once he would have been soothed by his wife’s kind heart and soft words.  She had been gone these six years past.  He missed her still.  He couldn’t bring himself to sit on her side of the swing, so he rocked a bit off-kilter.  Her side of the bed had seemed so lonesome that he had taken to sleeping on the couch a few years back.  He seldom ever entered the bedroom after that.  The last time had been to move his clothes, shoes, and personal things to the spare bedroom, all of his belongings except his blue serge suit.  That he had brushed and slid into its dry-cleaning bag, and then he had hooked the hanger over the empty clothes rod.  He had pinned a note to the bag that had burial printed on it in neat block letters.  He had left the closet door open and had shut the bedroom door with a firm finality that had resounded in his thoughts for days.

      Caleb had thought that he had lived long enough, yet now he knew that he still needed some time.  He wasn’t quite ready after all.  Something was unfinished.  A lone dove flew into his thoughts and onto the lowest limb of the huge old tulip poplar just under the hill below the porch.  It was soon joined on the branch by three more doves.  They sat there, softly rosy brown, and pretended to preen, eying him.  One-by-one Caleb counted thirty-seven more doves over the next few minutes.  They drifted to the ground by twos and threes and devoured the cracked corn he had put out just after he had returned from the woods.  It was part of his morning ritual to toss out handfuls of the corn in the early light of day, go in and fix a bowl of oatmeal with raisins, butter a single piece of toast, and settle into the recliner to eat breakfast and sip coffee while he watched the early news show.  By the time he finished up the dishes, the doves were usually coming in for their breakfast.

       Caleb liked watching the doves.  They seemed sociable.  Some were comically clumsy when coming in for a landing on the poplar branch.  Others bypassed the poplar and landed in the edge of the yard.  The doves had long since lost any fear of him, so they walked along beneath the edge of the porch just below him in search of stray bits of corn.  They sort of seemed like visiting family coming and going throughout the day.  They would coo and settle into the grass as the sun warmed the yard.  Caleb was always a bit sad when they whirred away and left him sitting there alone in the morning silence.  The morning came alive with doves, wings thrumming, startled into flight as Lucy came around the corner of the house.

      “Morning, Mr. Caleb.”

      “Good morning, Lucy.”  Caleb heard the shortness in his voice.  He almost didn’t care.  The kid had ruined his morning routine.  What else will go wrong today?  The sight of the doves wheeling around toward the woods stilled his thoughts.

      “Mr. Caleb, do you ever get lonesome?”

      That kid sure gets right to the point.  “Doesn’t everybody?”

      "Is that why you go to the woods, because you’re lonesome?”

      Caleb started to snap that it was none of her business when he looked into Lucy’s face.  The child was tomboyish.  She was wearing faded jeans cuffed at the ankles, a striped tee-shirt, scuffed brogans—all hand-me-downs from her older brother—and an old flannel shirt with a duck hunting scene repeated on the worn fabric that was once her father’s.  Caleb often thought she looked like a mischievous pixie, but just now her usually grinning face was adult serious in the morning light, her eyebrows dipped toward each other, her brow furrowed, and her lips pressed together as she waited for his answer.

      “I miss Anna.  I’m lonesome without her.”

      “Is that why you go into the woods, because you’re lonesome for Mrs. Anna?”

      Caleb sighed.  Rather than answer Lucy, he looked away from her, back out across the valley.  He felt her hop onto the swing beside him and settle into Anna’s place.

      “Is it?”

       Lucy’s quiet voice brought Caleb’s eyes back to her.  She peered into his thoughts and it seemed to him that it somehow wasn’t Lucy there beside him, but Anna.

      “No.”

      “Then, why?  Why, Mr. Caleb?  Why do you go into the woods every morning?  I haven’t been spying on you, honest.  I just saw you once a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been watching for you ever since.  You go every single day in the gray of the morning.  I see you go along the path.  Why, Mr. Caleb?  Why?”

       Caleb looked across the valley, across the years, and he told his story.

      “I was a young man, full of piss and vinegar.  You know how I was, full of myself.  My older brother, Lum, had a gambling streak.  We lived down in the hollow then, all of us kids, with Mom and Daddy.  Sometimes on a Friday night Lum would get up a card game.  Daddy didn’t allow card playing, said it was the Devil’s own pastime, so we would say we were going to walk into town to see a movie, and then we would sneak up the hollow to the big rock in the woods above the garden and play blackjack and poker.  We’d sit spradle-legged on that big rock, playing and drinking rockgut or moonshine until around midnight.

      “This one night things got out of hand.  Lum was dealing from the bottom of the deck.  John and Arlen, two boys from down on the creek, started complaining that Lum was almighty lucky.  Then Arlen caught Lum pulling the bottom card.  It was on then.

      “Lum and Arlen wrestled on the rock until they rolled off onto the ground.  Arlen was on top of Lum, pounding him in the face.  I jerked Arlen off of Lum and threw Arlen to the ground.  John tossed Arlen a knife.  Arlen came at me.  Lum stepped between us.  Arlen took a couple of steps back toward the rock, then turned toward Lum.  Arlen was
going to cut Lum.  I was facing Arlen.  I could see it in his eyes.  He was going to kill Lum if he could.  He slashed at Lum.  Lum sidestepped him.  Arlen hunkered down, getting ready to lunge at Lum.   I pulled a little twenty-two out of my jacket pocket and shot him square in the chest as he sprang up.  He was going to cut Lum.  Arlen was going to cut Lum.  Arlen fell onto his face at Lum’s feet.  I could see Arlen’s chest as he fell.  Dark blood spread across his checkered shirt before he hit the ground.

      “John went wild.  Lum took the gun from me and hit John across the back of the head with the butt of the revolver.  While John was out, Lum tied his feet and hands with some baling twine from the barn.  Lum stood over John and Arlen for a few minutes.  The sweat stood out on his forehead.  He was considering what he could do.
“Lum told me it would be alright, that he had gotten me into it and he would get me out of it.  I was fifteen.  I was scared.  Lum told the sheriff that John had caught Arlen cheating, that John had shot Arlen.  He handed the sheriff the twenty-two and told him that he had taken it off of John. 

      “The sheriff asked me if that was how it happened.  I said it was.  I said it again on the witness stand.  It was my word and Lum’s against John’s.  John went to prison.  He died there.

      “I had this place.  I had my Anna.  I had my kids.  I had my job.  I had my fishing.  I had my hunting.  I had everything a man could want, everything John and Arlen never had, everything but peace.

      “I go to the rock in the woods everyday to beg God to forgive me.  I beg God to forgive me.”

      The strangled sound of Caleb’s voice died in the air.  It was so still Lucy could hear a ground squirrel as it scurried to gather the corn the doves had left behind.  Caleb had been twisting his old cap in his hands as he spoke, but now his hands were limp in his lap.  Lucy placed her small, smooth hand atop his large, wrinkled hand.  Caleb had forgotten that Lucy was there.  As softly as her hand rested upon his, she spoke. 

      “You’ve already been forgiven.  You don’t need to be forgiven again.”

       Caleb looked into Lucy’s upturned face.  Her words curiously soothed his troubled mind and eased his weary heart.  You’ve already been forgiven.  You don’t need to be forgiven again.  It was something his Anna would have said.
“I’ve already been forgiven.  I don’t need to be forgiven again,” he whispered.  Lucy smiled and nodded.

      Caleb made one last trip to the rock.  There was a small depression on its top near where he knelt daily to pray.  As he rose from his knees he noticed a frail sprout reaching up from the leafmeal that littered the stone.  He smiled. 
“I don’t need to be forgiven again.”

      Lucy climbed the path to the garden.  Weeds had reclaimed it.  Saplings stood where the cornstalks once had been.  Lucy was a new mother with an infant daughter of her own.  She had brought the baby for her mother to see.  She had worked it out with her boss, and he had agreed for her to take a few days off while the late autumn weather was still warm.  She had driven south over four hundred miles to her childhood home.   Anna
was being cradled by Lucy’s mother after a five a.m. feeding when Lucy slipped outside and up into the woods.
The rock was still there.  Rising from its edge was a perfectly symmetrical leafless dogwood resplendent with crimson berries.  Where it rose from the rock, where its roots had burrowed deeply, where the winter rains that had sustained it had sometimes frozen, the ice had swollen, and the rock had been cloven.  Lucy put her fingertips into the depressions on the side of the rock and gave voice to the word Caleb had chiseled there.  FORGIVEN

Author’s Note:  I had a difficult time naming the central character, Caleb.  I did some research and chose Caleb because of the following, which I copied and pasted from the website Behind the Name: the etymology and history of first names.