The Missus and the Troll

This Story is dedicated to my two nieces, Amadea and Chloe, so that they might learn from my mistakes, and to the friends that I  have lost because a troll once befriended me.

Not so long ago, in a small village not far from Hoonose Weir, there lived a young boy name Justin. Justin lived with his Uncle Hubert, a grouchy old man who didn’t seem to like his nephew very much at all. No matter what Justin did to try to win his uncle’s approval, Uncle Hubert would tell the boy repeatedly just how much of a disappointment he was.

Justin worked twice as fast to finish his chores, studied three times as long to get good grades in school, and concentrated four times as hard to get things just right, but he never could please his uncle. No matter how hard he tried he always got it wrong, and that made him very sad.

Once, Justin had spent a month of Sundays building a model boat to give to his Uncle Hubert as a Christmas present. Late into each night he worked, paying close attention to every detail, measuring and carefully cutting bits of balsa and pear wood, gluing those bits into place, and then painting it all with just the right shades of blue, green and red, a perfect replica of his uncle’s fishing boat, ‘The Missus’.

On Christmas morning, Justin could hardly contain his excitement as he handed his uncle the present he had made. The model Missus looked just like the real Missus; it was perfect in every way. It was so well balanced, and with that extra two coatings of finish, it would even float if you wanted it to.

On Christmas morning, Uncle Hubert opened the packaged and hmmphed. He spent a long time examining Justin’s handiwork, checking out every detail, poking and prodding here and there with his thick fingers, opening the hatch, adjusting the rigging. After a time, Uncle Hubert cleared his throat and spoke in the softest tone that Justin had ever heard him speak.

“It’s very pretty, boy, but what use would I have for such a thing? Better if you’d used your hands to repair some of those fish traps sitting in that pile out back.”

Justin felt his heart sink. He had been certain that his uncle would have been pleased with his gift; he had put so much time and care into building it. “Yes, uncle” he replied, trying very hard not to let his disappointment show.

“You see to it right after breakfast then. Just because it’s Christmas, doesn’t mean there ain’t any work to be done. We gotta make a living out of this godforsaken place. No time to be frittering about with fancy things.”

Secretly, Uncle Hubert really had been impressed with Justin’s skill at building the model, but his Nephew spent so much time day dreaming as it was, he didn’t want to encourage him. “Life is hard enough without wasting effort on such nonsense,” Uncle Hubert thought. “The sooner the boy learns that lesson, the better off he'll be.”

After breakfast, Justin went out behind the house and looked at the huge pile of fish traps that needed to be repaired. Untangling one from the rest he examined it. “This will be easy to fix” he decided. “All it needs is a bit of twine to keep it from falling apart.”

Methodically he went though the pile, separating the traps into smaller stacks according to how easy they would be to repair. Next, he got the bale of twine and a knife from the shed, and sitting on a log he began to work. He was determined to fix as many of the traps as he could before his uncle came back from the fish shed for his midday meal. But as he sat there tightly weaving the twine through the slats and around the wooden rings, Justin’s mind wandered back to when his uncle had opened his gift that morning, and he continually had to wipe the tears out of his eyes so that he could see what he was doing.

“Old Uncle Hubert was wrong you know.”

“What?” Justin croaked, looking this way and that and nearly falling off the log as he tried to figure out who was speaking, and from where the disembodied voice was coming from.  He had been taught to always be polite, but the voice had startled him.

“That model boat is a beauty; yep, a work of art, she is.”

“Th...thank-you” Justin stuttered, for just then, out of the shadow of the pine trees behind the house, walked a creature like he had never seen before. “What are you?” Justin shrieked, again forgetting his manners.

“Haven’t you ever seen a troll before?” the creature replied, moving into the light of day.

Next to the pile of broken fish traps, proudly stood the ugliest, the shortest, the hairiest, and the most knobby jointed, spotted faced, snotty nosed being, that Justin had every seen.

“We’ve no time to waste on introductions; I know who you are. I know everything about you, and you can call me A... Gregory, if it suits you.  I’m here to help you.”

“Did you come to help me repair the fish traps then?” The thought of finally being able to please his uncle was just enough of a temptation to stop Justin from running away in fear.

“Fish traps?” Gregory seemed insulted that he was even asked such a thing. “No, I’m here with a much nobler mission than to help you with those ... things.” He dismissed the pile he was standing next to with a flip of his gnarly knuckled hand. “I came to help you find your confidence son, and to teach you how to take care of yourself.”

“You’re not my father.” Justin frowned.

“Clever boy you are, eh.” The troll snorted. “Yep, I can see we are going to get along splendidly. That’s right, I’m not your father, but that uncle of yours is a poor excuse for one too. He doesn’t treat you with respect, and doesn’t appreciate you like he should. Here it is Christmas Day, and you’re sitting outside in the cold working, just like it was any other day.”

Justin shrugged. “Just because it’s Christmas, doesn’t mean there ain’t any work to be done.”

“You’re just repeating what your uncle said, and you know it. It’s not how you feel is it?” The troll didn’t wait for an answer; he just kept right on talking, his face getting redder and redder with each word he spoke.

“I’ll tell you how you feel. You feel sad and hurt that the old man didn’t notice how much effort you had put into that model boat. You don’t understand why you are not getting to have any of the wonderful things that other boys at school get on Christmas Day. And what did you get? Nothing but a pair of mittens and an extra spot of jam on your bread for breakfast, the same thing you get every year. That’s just not fair, is it?”

Justin stood there with his mouth hanging open, watching what looked like steam puffing out from the trolls enormous pale green ears, and not being able to get a word in edgewise, even if he had an answer to his question.

“You would like it if your uncle would smile at you, maybe once,” the troll continued, taking a moment to flick a stream of mucus out of his right nostril. “... Or pat you on the head, anything to say that he cared, just like you see the fathers do with the other kids in the village. And another thing....”

Gregory was just getting fired up, but just then, he heard Uncle Hubert’s bellowing coming from the bottom of the hill, and in a blink and a snap, the troll vanished into the cold winter air.

“Justin! I don’t see any smoke coming from the chimney. Knowing you, you let the fire go out. Head always in the clouds, I say. Can’t rely on you for a single thing.”

Was it midday all ready? Justin wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried around to the front of the house, his heart pounding in his chest just as quickly as his legs were moving over the frozen ground. He wanted to get inside and at least get some bread and cheese on the table before his uncle stomped into the kitchen.

That night on the way up to his bed, Justin stopped for a moment and looked at the model he had made. It still sat on the table where his Uncle Hubert had pushed it aside in his disgust. “It really is a spitting image of ‘The Missus’” Justin thought, and for the first time in his life he was proud of something he had done.

Over the next year or two, whenever Justin felt like he was going to cry, Gregory the troll would show up at his side to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault, that he had been misunderstood or mistreated, and Justin began to believe in himself. He began to think that he wasn’t hopeless after-all, despite what he had always been told, and he felt angry at his uncle Hubert for telling him such things. “Everyone deserves to be treated with respect,” Gregory had told him, “so if everyone deserves to be, so do you.”

As time passed, Justin’s confidence grew and so did his anger. Once, that anger had even given him the strength to stand up to his uncle’s badgering, but it didn’t do him any good. Uncle Hubert would never change his opinion of his poor dead sister’s wayward son, and Justin’s  outburst had only gotten him a spanking and nothing of the respect he thought he deserved.

In the school yard though, it was a different story. The bullies no longer saw Justin as someone they could pick on, and they left him well enough alone. He had even gained a friend because of his courage to stand up for what he believed in, and that friendship meant more to him than anything else in the world.

“You’ll be sorry!” Gregory chided, leaning back, leisurely twisting the long thick hairs sprouting out of his left ear. “You can’t trust anyone but yourself ya know. You learned that lesson this spring when that farmer boy offered to go into the village to buy your uncle’s medicine. You trusted him to do , and see what it got you, red faced embarrassment when he laughed at you in front of everyone, and a red backside from the walloping your uncle gave you when you told him where the money had gone. You’re too soft I’d say, and you’re putting too much faith into that friend of yours.”

“I am not!” Justin protested. “Thomas is my best friend; he likes me!”

“Then don’t come crying to me with your feelings all hurt when you find out you’ve misplaced your trust. Thomas is just like everyone else; when push comes to shove he will let you down. Mark my word.”

“You’re wrong!” Justin shouted, just as angry with the troll as he had ever been at his Uncle Hubert. He couldn’t believe what Gregory was saying, he just couldn’t. But the seeds of doubt were planted, and he worried about it all the way home.

Half way there, as he was crossing the bridge just before the turn off to his uncle’s cottage, he came to overhear two trolls speaking and he stopped to listen.

“That Angry sure is losing his touch with that young feller.”

“What do mean? Looks to me like he’s doing a great job teaching him how to take care of himself, and the boy’s picking it up quickly too. A chip off the old block, I’d say.”

“I think Angry’s been feeding off the boys doubts and fears for so long he’s gotten lazy. I bet it won’t be very long before the boy calls him by his true name and puts an end to the whole thing. Why, just now I heard that he even let the lad talk back to him today, and no troll would take that kind of guff.”

“Ah, he’s just priming him up for more disappointments, is all, so he can reap the rewards later on. Don’t you worry, ol’ Angry knows what he’s doing”

Justin didn’t have a clue what the trolls under the bridge were talking about, who the boy and Angry were, and all that stuff about feeding off of doubts and fears, well, that just didn’t make any sense.  His curiosity would have kept him standing there for a long time listening, but he had to get back to the cottage to make the evening meal before his uncle came home with the day’s catch.

Justin soon forgot about the two trolls under the bridge. He had more important things to think about. Gregory’s warning wouldn’t stop playing over in his head, and no matter how hard he tried to forget what the troll had told him, the thought that Thomas just might not be a true friend, kept him awake almost every night. He started watching Thomas and it surprised him just how many reasons he could find to doubt his friend, and Justin began to think he must have been blind to not have seen those things before.

One day, while the two were sitting on the bank by the river, Thomas asked Justin what had happened to the model boat he had built.

“You did a great job on it. I would love to have a boat just like it. I would sail it everyday, and when I got too old to sail it, I’d put it on a shelf to display it for everyone to see.”

Justin felt the anger rising up to his face. He knew that Thomas couldn’t mean what he said. No one ever liked anything he did;  Why would his friend do that to him? He had told him that his uncle had packed the boat away in a box and stuffed it in the cupboard with the rest of the useless things, that out of politeness, you never threw away.

“Why are you bringing that up now?” Justin asked, not even bothering to hide his anger.

“I don’t know” Thomas shrugged. “Those leaves floating down the river made me think about what it would be like to have a sail boat, is all.”

“You’re lying!” Justin stood up and glared down at his friend.

“I am not! Why would I lie about something like that? I really liked that boat.”

“You are too” Justin shouted, knowing that he was sounding childish, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say; he was so angry.

Thomas stood up as well, ready to defend himself. “Why would you think me a liar? I’ve never lied to you before. Take it back Justin.”

“I will not! For all I know you’ve been lying to me forever, and probably laughing at me behind my back too. Two faced is what you are, a lying two-face!”

Thomas’ mouth dropped open and his eyes began to burn with tears. He couldn’t believe what Justin was saying, but there he stood, his fists clenched at his side, calling him two-faced loud enough for the whole world to hear. “You’re not my friend anymore if you think that!” Thomas croaked, wiping his tears away with his sleeve as he climbed the embankment. “You’re not my friend!” he shouted, and without looking back once, he ran down the road.

Justin’s anger carried him all the way home. To think that Thomas would ask such a thing, when he knew it was a sore spot of his. Thomas must have had a reason, either that, or he just wasn’t being very considerate.

For the rest of the evening and well into the night, Justin fumed, but by morning his anger had vanished and a heavy sadness took it’s place.

Thomas had cried real tears when he told him that he was two-faced, and he had looked very much like how Justin himself might have looked like whenever his uncle  didn’t believe something he said. 

“Maybe Thomas is hurting just like I am” Justin thought, and he began to feel like a hunk of something rotten that you’d want to scrape off of the bottom of your shoe.

The more he thought about it, the worse he felt. Thomas was his best friend, why would he have reason to doubt him? Justin was confused. By afternoon, he was downright distraught over how he had behaved, and as he stacked the firewood that his uncle had chopped that morning, he let the tears fall freely from his eyes.

“You’ve no doubt learned a valuable lesson then.” Gregory gloated, suddenly appearing on the top of the woodpile.

“Leave me alone.” It no longer surprised Justin that the troll would show up unannounced like that, but it astonished him that Gregory seemed to have grown twice in size since the last time he had seen him, and he wondered if his imagination was playing tricks on him.

“I told you not to trust that boy, but no, did you listen? When will you ever learn that you can’t trust anyone but yourself? ...and me of course. I am your only true friend.”

“You’re not my friend” Justin scoffed. “Leave me be.”

“Gregory puffed up his chest. This was much better than he had anticipated. The lad was so angry, he was even barking at him! Gregory was so proud of his handiwork; he could feel his body growing larger and stronger by the second. Never had he felt so powerful, and to think that it was only two years ago he had been the scrawniest troll under the bridge. “I sure know how to pick em," he patted himself on the back. 

“Now Justin”, he said in his most fatherly tone of voice, “don’t kick the dog for sounding the alarm, son. I don’t want to tell you I told you so, but....”

Justin felt his anger rising. fuelled by his rage he tossed the armload of wood he was carrying aside, but just as he quickly as he turned to face the troll, he stopped dead in his tracks. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Sitting there on the top of the pile, Gregory appeared THREE times larger than he had been only minutes before.

He wasn’t imagining things; the troll was growing before his very eyes. Suddenly, Justin remembered the conversation he had overheard that day on the bridge. How the two trolls spoke of a troll named Angry, and how he fed off of a boys doubts and fears. …It was all beginning to make sense to him now.

“Your name isn’t Gregory, is it?” Justin asked, his anger calmed by his newly found knowledge.

Gregory stopped preening. He made a point of watching the piece of dried skin that he had peeled from his chest float slowly down to the ground. He hadn’t expected this, and he needed a moment to think. “Why would you say that?” he asked, trying to keep the shock he felt out of his voice. A troll couldn’t tell his true name to a human, it was simply how it had to be. And why they got all bent out of shape when they found out that they had been lied to was a total mystery to him.

Justin didn’t answer. He just stood there watching the troll squirm, watching the spots on the trolls face turn from a vivid green to a pale yellow.

The troll knew what was coming next. Eventually, it was bound to happen. Sooner or later they all came to the conclusion that anger distorted how they saw the world, no matter how much it gave them the confidence to believe in themselves. Gregory had thought he could have had at least another year or so with Justin; maybe the other trolls were right; he was losing his touch after all.

“Now Justin” he said, trying very hard to sound like he cared more about the boy than where his next meal was coming from. “Think before you speak. If you say what I think you are going to say, I will disappear from your life forever. You don’t really want that, do you? Remember how I taught you to believe in yourself, and how to protect yourself from all the bad things your uncle said about you.”

Again Justin didn’t answer, but stood there seeing the troll for what he really was for the very first time.

“What will you do without me?” The troll snivelled. “How will you defend yourself, or stop the hurt when something someone says makes you question your worth? How will you cope? You can’t live without me boy. Think!”

“This is it,” Gregory thought as he flipped a string of snot off of the tip of his fingers and sighed. “I’m a goner.”

For a few moments Justin did panicked as he wondering just how he would manage without the troll’s help. Then he remembered how his temper had made him see things that weren’t really there, and how he had behaved like a monster, when he really truly wasn’t one at all. The troll had tricked him, and what he had taught only made him feel worse. Justin could do much better on his own, especially if he stopped behaving like an angry ol’ troll. 

He knew what he had to do.

“You’re name isn’t Gregory, is it?” Justin said; this time it was more of a statement than a question. “You’re name is Angry!” He shouted in triumph.

“NOOOOOOO...” Angry wailed, and then in a puff of black smoke, that stank of sulfur and something quite similar to seven-day-old rotting fish, he was gone.

Justin watched the smoke billow and then fade.  There was nothing left of the troll but an oily smudge on the top of the woodpile. To Justin, it felt as if a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders, but at the same time he was frightened by the thought of being on his own.

More than anything else, he was sorry for how badly he had behaved toward Thomas. If someone had told him that they didn’t believe something he had said, he would have been twice as upset as his friend had been.

“The wood pile can wait” Justin decided. “There’s something more important I have to do.”

Justin pulled the dusty old box from the back of the cupboard. It seemed like such a long time since that day when his uncle had hidden the model boat away, and he thought he would have to make a few repairs, but the boat looked just as fine as the day he had finished building it. His uncle wouldn’t miss it he was sure of that, and if anyone would appreciate the gift Thomas would, … along with the apology Justin owed him.

Of course he couldn’t blame Thomas if he didn’t forgive him, but this was something Justin still had to do, and the knowledge that he finally was getting something right filled him with a sense of purpose as he headed down the road.