"Freddy Fox" by Salvatore Difalco — Our March 2022 Silver Medal Winner

Salvatore is our second place winner from the contest posted in our March 2022 issue!

What the judges had to say:

“Fox, van, field, farm: nearly every natural element depicted was woven into a touching story of love and loss, adventure and misfortune. This author took those elements and used them like good props on a professional stage, creating a story that is equal parts joyful and sad, like life itself.”

“An excellently written humanistic tale!”

“I loved so many lines in your story, for example, “... a natural greenhouse of such riotous growth it scared me a little.” The closing line was also phenomenal.”

Meet Salvatore

Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto. He is the author of What Happens At Canals (Mansfield), a book of poetry.

Learn more about Salvatore’s past publications with Blank Spaces.

Freddy Fox

the unedited story by Salvatore Difalco

A red fox skulked out of the rusted hull of my Uncle Lou’s abandoned van—the one he’d driven across Canada to Banff and Jasper, and later Vancouver and Victoria, with his then girlfriend and future wife, Aunt Julia, back in 1977—and slipped into the abandoned wood shed beside it. I’d seen the fox nosing around the van and shed earlier that summer on a previous visit to Uncle Lou’s country spread, near King Creek, about an hour north of Toronto. Suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer, Uncle Lou looked fragile as tissue paper sitting on his big porch wrapped in a red wool blanket despite the June warmth. He said the fox was likely hunting down the field mice nesting in the shed. “They’d overrun the property if it wasn’t for him,” he said. “I call him Freddy Fox. He’s been coming by since we moved up here. He’s a beauty.”

I watched the fiery red tail streak through the tall grasses growing between the shed and the van. I imagined Freddy Fox inhabiting the van like some kind of dark-browed, pointy-nosed gangster, sitting high in one of the rotting vinyl van seats and presiding over his dominion of paranoid yet industrious and fecund rodents with an iron fist. There he was now, stepping out in the dusty heat of late afternoon, while the rodents snoozed, to scare the hell out of them—he liked to keep them off balance—and in the meantime stop for a little munch, why not?

Uncle Lou had retired with Aunt Julia to the country house on the two-acre property after working for forty years with Toronto Parks and Recreation as a landscaper. He’d purchased it back in the 1980s for a pittance—and where he found a proper a final resting place for his beloved van—and over the years, driving up on weekends from the city, had meticulously renovated one of two decrepit houses on the property to its current immaculate condition, tearing the other one down for firewood and scrap. It had always been his dream “to breathe a little fresh air when I retire and have a garden and do some fishing.” And he was a man living his dream. He’d built a pergola by the house and grew everything from tomatoes and peppers and eggplants to gargantuan dangling Sicilian zucchini plants. He loved having people—he and Aunt Julia had three kids and a gaggle of grandchildren, not to mention our extended family—over for lavish feasts. And he was five minutes from some of the best fishing in the province. But it didn’t last long. Nothing does, in the end.

Not more than seven months after his initial and terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and four years after retiring to King Creek, Uncle Lou succumbed to his illness. Devastated, Aunt Julia moved in with her youngest, my cousin Margaret, and the property was put up for sale. Seemed the only one sentimental about it was Uncle Lou. I thought I’d drive up for one final visit before it did sell, I don’t really know why. Uncle Lou hadn’t lived there long enough and I hadn’t visited enough times to make or hold any real memories. Maybe I needed some closure. I’d lost my father when I was twelve and Uncle Lou, my mother’s big brother, had stepped up, guiding and even disciplining me throughout my adolescence; I loved him like a father.

I walked through the tall grass brandishing a broken hockey stick I found near the house, and swatted my way to the van. Its windshield was gone and vegetation sprang out of the interior. It was remarkable—the van and its components returning to nature, consumed by the surrounding field of switchgrass and the sky and the sun. The rubber tires had long ago disintegrated, the rusted wheels crumbling into the ruddy soil. A side window somehow remained intact and peering into it I observed the result of a long hot summer and late summer rains—a natural greenhouse of such riotous growth it scared me a little. I poked at the window with the stick and gave way like wax paper with a billow of vegetal scent. The sudden angry humming of wasps made me jump back waving the stick. I wanted to see the fox up close—I even contemplated peeking inside the shed—but the aggressive wasps repelled me.

I recalled the first time Uncle Lou pulled up to my mother’s house in the van. He’d kept the exterior stock, but had tricked up the interior with shag carpeting, leather bean bags and a parkerized black bar fridge, for the excursions he’d planned. “I want to see my country,” he said. “I want to know it.” Of course, he’d been born and raised in Italy and had made his way to Canada in the late 1940s after being a POW during World War II—but he’d become the most patriotic Canadian I’d ever met in my life, and after vowing to never return to Italy, he kept his vow.

As for me, I was torn between two stages of my life: the heavy, echoing past, and a wish at least for something lighter, something more affirmative in the future. I pulled out a joint and lit it as the late afternoon sun began to soften. I caught a good buzz and just stood in the tall grasses taking in the moment. I don’t know how long I stood there—stoned, my thoughts flowing and associating randomly. Looking around at the beautifully ragged property, a winey autumn tang in the air, I felt great sadness for Uncle Lou—but I also felt sad for myself, for my loss. And then, as my sorrowing threatened to become even more self-indulgent and embarrassing, I caught site of the red tail again, flashing from the shed, and followed that nervy redness past the metamorphosing van and into the waving switchgrass.

Use the comment form below to let Salvatore know what you thought of his story.