Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I was glad that it was not long before the rain turned to scarcely a drizzle. For the better part of an hour the lightning crawled in the night above the trees. The sky seemed to me then like a cracked mirror turning and glinting and giving back all the awful true nature of the earth below, which was a hilly and scorched landscape of soot, a very unlucky and inhospitable place indeed.

One strike was not far away and it lit up a mighty strange presence ahead between the boles of two big pines. The light had come and gone so quickly that I was not too certain what I had seen. My first thought was that it had been the face of a young man, hidden in the dark of a hood. When the light was gone I was stone blind. I screamed out before the crack of the lightning reached me in the dark. I was considerably frightened.

It is a funny thing how I trembled at the notion that another person was out there with me, when another person was just what I had hoped to find. There is just something about strangers. And my thought was: what manner of lunatic would stand quietly in the dark and the rain to watch an old woman suffer? Or was it Terry’s disembodied face regurgitated by that white-eyed raccoon, come to haunt me for what I had taken off his person? Perhaps there are spirits over which God has lost dominion, though I have never given much credence to phantoms.

I kept my eyes on the place in the dark, but when the next bout of lightning lit up the trees, whatever it was had gone. The woods flashed on and off for a spell, and I watched for the face to come back, but it did not. There was only that grand timber, which to me then were like great bars to a cell imprisoning me for convictions I feigned not to understand. I tucked my head to my chest and waited for morning.

Mr. Waldrip’s boot filled up past the ankle overnight, but I only got a little sip that morning before I stumbled and spilt it and would spend the rest of the day as thirsty as a catfish in a catamaran. The morning was overcast but the trees all about were bright and grayly bejeweled with rainwater. The good thing about everything being wet and cool was that the mosquitoes had taken the morning off to do whatever it is they do when they are not out terrorizing us higher creatures.

I did not move for some time. I considered not moving ever again and letting myself perish right there. It might have been the first time that I had entertained the notion of resigning to what many would have said was an inevitability in the case of a seventy-two-year-old woman becoming lost in the wilderness. It most certainly would not be the last. I imagined myself looking something like poor Terry, rigid and squirreled up against that spruce, my jaw off its hinges and flies making a mansion of my skull. I wondered how long my hair would stay in and if I would be found in this most unlovely condition, or never again be beheld by human eyes. I could not decide which fate I most preferred.

I took out the tore-up map and worked to make sense of it, but it could not be done. It might as well have been a swatch of the Chinese wallpaper that insufferable Catherine Drewer had used in her sitting room. I decided to voyage away from the clearing and farther down the mountain, although not before I stepped right in my own mess and had to clean my shoe in the wet grass! I do not mean to offend, and this is again a detail I could have left out, but I believe it contributes to the absurdity of my plight and proves that I am not being false nor grand.

After about an hour I came to a rocky place where I could see out from the trees and down into a valley. My heart jumped! I spotted in the distance the asphalt of a highway, tracing a path back to civilization. I was likely as good as rescued if I could make it down there. With renewed energy and hope I made my way down to the valley. All the while I heard strange noises behind me. I had the notion I was being followed.

I reached the place after a couple of hours and stumbled out of the woods. The highway was not a highway at all but a creek. Gracious, I was disappointed. Although by that time I was mighty thirsty too, so it was hard work to be too disappointed in finding water. I wobbled on like a newborn calf, my stockings tore up pretty good now, and I collapsed at the bank of that creek. I cupped my hands in the water and drank. It was very cold and clear. I had drunk two handfuls when I looked up and spotted in the shallows the hairy corpse of a huge animal! I spat out the water and jumped back. I was nearly sick, but I held my hand over my mouth. The thing had antlers and scraps of hide trailing in the current such as some gowned pagan devil.

I went upstream past this dead monster and filled Mr. Waldrip’s boot. I did my best not to let my imagination wander to what other nasty things might be lying afoul in the water. While I sat sipping from Mr. Waldrip’s boot the light changed color on the mountains all around me. I was hungry and cold so I prayed and then set about building another fire for the night. I piled wood together much the same as I had done the night prior, only I gathered more of it and more dry tinder. I piled the makings near the creek. It was near dark when I sat down exhausted and took out Terry’s matchbook.

The wind was against me and howled wildly over the valley, and the wide sky darkened with clouds. I opened the matchbook to the last match and tore it carefully. I steadied my hand and positioned my back to the wind. I got close as I could to the tinder pile, then said a prayer and struck the match. The matchhead hissed and blackened but did not bring a flame.

Dark came but not before I spotted the silhouette of an animal I took to be a mountain lion prowling a far ridge of rock. Scared and uneasy, and nearly starved, I had my last caramel for supper. It threatened to rain, but the wind chased the clouds from the sky and uncovered the stars and moon. The dark was hardly dark anymore under the bare heavens, which shone down on the grassy fields of the valley, the silvery creek, the woods nearby.

I did not know what next to do. I worried my situation had grown too dire. But I knew come morning I would be compelled to do something, anything at all. The dead monstrosity was yet nearby, its black antlers moonlit and the twinkling water underneath like a bed of lovely gems.

I heard something move in the woods. I recalled the face I was now certain I had seen the night before. I thought of the mountain lion too. My Bible was in my purse and I moved it to the breast pocket of Terry’s coat right over my heart. But I was mighty tired, enough not to be too afraid of mysterious faces and mountain lions. There was not a thing to do but to offer up my prayers to God and succumb to exhaustion.

The pilot swung the helicopter low over gray slopes of scree high above the tree line. Lewis squinted against the crags of sunlit granite, upthrust from the depths of the mantle some eighty million years ago. She brought slowly to her lips a thermos of merlot.

Bloor, long legs folded childlike in the seat next to her, knees level to his chin, turned upon her his pale face. His voice squelched in her headset over the beat of the blades. Have you ever been to Macao?

Lewis shook her head.

An older man with clubbed fingers sat across from them. He watched the window. Bloor had introduced him as Cecil. Keep your eyes peeled, he said.

I left Jill with her grandmother and spent last winter in Macao, Bloor said, and he made a show of looking out the glass. Had to get away. Met a six-foot-three Pekinese woman named Chesapeake. They pick their own English names, you know. She picked Chesapeake. Her friends referred to her by a Chinese word that means ladder. You’re tall too, Ranger Lewis.

Cecil looked up. Keep your stupid eyes peeled.