The Last Will and Testament of Ugly Joe the Hermit - Part One

PART ONE.

Whenever winter fell upon the little town of Frozen Corners, it always fell hard, like an old angry bear tripping over a basket of eggs. In those parts, up near the summit of Big Muskrat Mountain, when the weather turned, it turned mean, pounding the rooftops and treetops with a mighty downpour of ice, hail, snow, and the occasional flash-frozen duck. Everything freezable froze. The place became so inhospitable and unfriendly, so cold and vile and non-conducive to even the most basic of human activities, that the entire population of Frozen Corners - about three-hundred-and-fifty men, women, horses, and children - annually evacuated the town, packing up their wagons and buckboards in mid November, and ceremoniously following the long, winding Upchuck River down the mountain to the somewhat less murderous environs of Butcher’s Foot, a sprawling mining town built down around the rocky bottom of Big Muskrat.

For two or three months out of every year, sometimes longer, the little homes and businesses of Frozen Corners, the cabins, the hotel, the saloon, the meeting hall and the other saloon, were all left unoccupied, abandoned to the elements for the duration of the winter.

The miraculous thing - or the closest thing to a miracle that any of Frozen Corners’ residents ever experienced - was that each year when the cold weather passed and the people all returned to their homes, the town was no worse for wear. Loose wall boards that might have blown down were securely nailed in place, roofs that might have collapsed from the weight of snow were expertly shored up. Despite evidence that the winters had been hard as ever on the mountain, the town itself was never that bad off.

In fact, the town infrastructure frequently managed to improve while the townsfolk were away.

A number of Frozen Corners’ residents thought this to be the work of mountain spirits. The children believed it was Santa Claus, a theory that was further augmented by the fact that a random assortment of little gifts - whittled wooden animals, folded paper flowers, tinkling jimcracks twisted from the metal of old shoe-paste cans - were frequently discovered tucked away under various beds or hidden behind boxes in the back of closets.

The majority of the townsfolk, however, simply assumed that such handyman mischief was the work of Ugly Joe, the town’s nearest full-time hermit. Rarely seen but rumored to live in Angry Widow Cave up near the East bend of Drowned Husband Creek, Ugly Joe was not particularly famous for being possessed of a philanthropic nature, the exact opposite being truer to the case. But there seemed to be no other explanation for what always awaited the townsfolk when they finally returned home to Frozen Corners.

Had they known the real truth, the townsfolk might have made some effort to put an end to it.

It certainly was Ugly Joe who occupied the town each winter, but he was not alone when he did so. Joe was, in fact, only one of several dozen hermits who quietly descended upon Frozen Corners every year for the annual North Eastern Regional Hermit Gathering - a kind of business convention for the socially disinclined.

The care the hermits always took with the buildings they occupied, and their habit of leaving small tidbits and toys behind for the regular townsfolk to discover, was partly due to an agreed-upon code of Hermit conduct, and partly due to the grudging sense of gratitude they all felt at having a dependable alternative to the musty caves and wind-battered trees and moist underground dwellings they all called home the rest of the year. The soft-bellied residents of Frozen Corners may have believed their town was too harsh a place to winter, but to the hermits the place was a paradise, especially when compared to their usual living conditions.

The existence of Frozen Corners, and its annual availability to the hermits, is no doubt the reason that Big Muskrat Mountain and its surrounding counties boasted a higher number of hermits per capita than any other place in the country except New York City.

The winter that Ugly Joe died was less fierce than some. But as things turned out, it was still fierce enough to kill a man who was thought, by his professional associates, to be essentially un-killable.

There was no way to determine the exact moment of Ugly Joe’s death.

By the time his body was finally discovered, the man had apparently been dead for quite a while. The discoverer was a stout, weasel-furred lady-hermit known as Ethical Fred, and when she found Joe, he was frozen solid, bluer than bottleflies and hard as a wedge of ice, stretched out in a drift of snow a dozen feet from his cave. He had apparently been murdered by a frozen Canadian goose, its icy corpse plummeting from the angry sky to strike Joe in the head. The goose, every bit as hard as the old hermit, was found lying there, sweet-as-you-please in the snow, a mere five-foot bounce from where Ugly Joe lay.

By the time Ethical Fred made this sad discovery, it was late in December, Frozen Corners had been evacuated for weeks, and a small number of hermits - Scandalous Sam, Pond Scum Polly, Sacrilegious Jim, Not Popular Pete, Inconsiderate Sue and Malodorous Mike - had already arrived for the Gathering.

With the unexplained absence of Ugly Joe, however, and with none of the standard preparations having been made, the assembled hermit brethren and sistren were irritated and alarmed. They quickly located Ethical Fred, so named because of her one-time position as a Sunday School teacher over in Twenty Pines. Once the hermits explained their concerns about Joe’s absence to Ethical Fred, she pulled on her fur coat, her fur hat, and her fur mittens, and headed out to discover what the grabnation was keeping Ugly Joe.

“He’s dead,” pronounced Ethical Fred, upon returning to the town.

She spoke with a phlegmy rasp that rumbled through her towering, weather-hardened frame as she stood in the ice-caked doorway of the Corners Hotel and Meeting House. A few recent arrivals had just joined the hermits - Two-eyed Tom from north of Broken Furnace, Nameless Bob who lived in a high oak over near Fort Badger, and Miserable Greg, formerly known as Gregory the Gangrenous.

“Ugly Joe is just as dead as a rock,” Ethical Fred was saying. “Ugly Joe is froze solid, and stiff as a iron stick. If there was ever a speck a’ warmth in old Joe, it’s all gone now. He’s dead!”

To prove it, Fred stepped aside and pointed.

There behind her, out in the snow, flat as a board, lay the stiff blue cadaver of Ugly Joe. Ethical Fred had gathered the dead man’s belongings into two burlap sacks, found a couple of thick leather straps, and using Ugly Joe as a sled, piled the bags on top and towed the whole shebang down to Frozen Corners.

It was quite a sight.

Strangest of all was the goose, the very goose whose destiny had been so awkwardly joined to that of old Joe, now nestled right there between the corpse’s frozen knees.

“Ah shoot, Ethical Fred! Why in hail di’nt you leave him up in his cave?” Two-eyed Tom wanted to know, squinting and staring out the door at the body of the deceased hermit.

“What’re we goin’ do with his old ugly hide?” demanded Inconsiderate Sue.

“Well, I figure we’re goin’ to store him out in the wood shed, first of all,” Ethical Fred replied, evenly. “And then,” she added, producing a leather sack, and pulling from it a folded hunk of paper, “And then, when ever-one’s here … we’re goin’ to read Ugly Joe’s will!”

(To be continued next week, Thursday, Nov. 29)