THE BEAST AND THE BAIRNS

I.
Amity Bairns came home late one fall day,
clothes in tatters, face white with shock.
Her mother cried and ran from the cabin,
brother Amos jumped up from where he rocked.

In the lands west of old Fort Plain,
in seventeen hundred and eighty-five,
Amity slumped to the ground in pain,
a look broken and lost in her eyes.

Amos fumed,"Was is the damned Mohawks?”
But Amity then weakly shook her head,
“Well just tell me who forced themselves on you,
and I’ll go make that bastard dead!”

Tears still flowed from her green eyes
when she somehow managed to speak:
“It looked like a m-man, but it was not—
n-not like anything that I ever seen.

“He-he stood really tall, near eight foot,
and he wore not a stitch of clothes.
H-he was huge and covered in fur…
brown from his head to his great toes.

“H-his face weren’t right, it was to f-flat,
he didn’t speak, j-just whooped and roared.
I-I was coming from Montgomery’s when…
when he grabbed me and made me his whore!”

With that she bawled, and spoke no more,
Amos shared a long look with his ma.
They’d heard of this beast who walked like man
but did not answer to reason or law.

For years folks had sighted him in the trees,
and last winter Ben Miller had found tracks.
He’d gone out early one morn to follow them,
but Ben Miller had never come back.

Still Amos stood and clenched his fist.
“I don’t care be he a man or a beast.
Nothing gets away with hurting my kin,
no matter what the size of his damn feet!”

Amos went to get his musket and pistol,
his mother Mary pleaded for him not to go.
“Since your pa died, you provide for us both,
if you die we’ll both starve come the snows!”

Amos frowned, but he still stood resolute.
“If I don’t come back go to Uncle Ike.
Pa’s brother looks at you as pa once did,
he’d whole-heartedly make you his wife.”

He left them both, and took to the trail,
soon finding where it had taken Amity.
Its footprints were huge, simple to track
finding the monster would prove all too easy…

II.

Days passed slowly, Amos didn’t return,
Mary Bairns now had to reasons to weep.
Her son was gone, there could be no mistake,
and her daughter, half-mad, didn’t sleep.

She packed up their things and traveled east
to just outside the town of Albany.
There lived Uncle Ike, who heard the sad tale,
and to take Mary as wife, he agreed.

Things quickly became quiet, if not okay,
since Amity’s belly soon began to swell.
Mary and Ike knew she could not be a mother
2ith painful memories leaving her unwell.

To make it worse a rumor had come
from where they had once made their home,
that poor Amity had a run-in with the beast,
many versions soon became well-known.

But Mary and Ike, they formed a plan,
and with the help of some padding,
forty-two year old Mary claimed a miracle,
after all this time she was ‘expecting.’

When Amity’s baby came into the world,
Mary told all that the child was her own.
The rumors soon cooled and the child thrived,
raised up in a true, loving home.

They called him Warren, and he grew tall,
broad of shoulder with much body hair.
But a nicer man the world never knew,
he was a big, old, gentle teddy bear.

He grew up and took himself a wife,
and served proudly back in Eighteen-Twelve.
His children just scoffed at the crazy rumors,
which faded off but were never dispelled.

As generations turned it became folklore,
a fun tale told to entertain the kids.
The Bairns even sometimes play into it,
dressing up and telling the tale to tourists.

But one day in two thousand thirteen,
while on a drive through central New York,
Scott Bairns saw a farm that he had to have,
with a barn, fine house, and fields to work…

III.

Scott bought the farm and some dairy cows,
and set about building himself up.
He soon made a name for quality milk,
local wholesalers could not get enough!

One summer day he took to the plow,
preparing and old field to grow hay.
The plow hit something, twisting it hard,
just badly enough to ruin his day.

He grumbled loud, went back to look,
and saw there, to his great surprise,
a hole in the ground, empty and long.
A new cavern there before his eyes!

Now caves were quite common where he lived,
several were open to tourists for show.
The thought of building up just such a place
made the dollar signs in his head grow.

The next day he returned with lanterns and lines,
carefully descending into the dim.
When he touched bottom and lighted it up,
what he saw laying close by shocked him.

Two skeletons lay just five feet away,
it was a miracle he hadn’t crushed one.
Both looked human and one of the dead
lay with the moldering remains of a gun.

The other was huge, at least eight feet,
and the bones too thick, impossibly large.
The skull was giant, the teeth oversized,
Scott found the sight of it quite bizarre.

In the middle of the great ribs did lay
two balls, the kind from old muskets.
And near the spine was the rusty head
of an aged and battered hatchet.

Turning to the other, Scott Bairns saw
they were the bones of a normal man.
The ribs were broken, every one,
so were both of the man’s hands.

And on the stock of the old gun,
Scott found an old, tin name plate.
He bent down low to read it clearly,
‘Amos Bairns’ in the metal was scraped!

Scott flinched back, remembering tales
told in childhood long, long ago,
Campfire stories of bigfoots run wild,
to his mind they all started to flow.

And now when he stared at either of them,
both the large and the small skeletons,
he realized the truth behind all the myths,
he was staring down onto his kin!

Scott hurried out, and filled in the hole,
then gave the field over to brambles and berries.
He never plowed there, or spoke of it at all,
for some truths are better left buried...