Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Fish swam by in the creek until the sun was gone and I could no longer see much of anything. Yet the moon kept light on the dead animal in the water where its breaching bones were blue and swaddled in its own rotten skin.

The next day I crawled in the fields eating little gray flowers. They tasted like Cynthia Weaver’s summer melon salad after it had sat a few days in the icebox. Not good. I ate what amounted to a handful of them and when my head began to wobble I rested against a stump by the wood pile. The night had been cold enough to put a frost to the blade of the hatchet and I had not slept much. In the sun now I fell asleep.

I woke to a sting under my arm. It turned out to be a tick. The little monster had already gorged itself fatter than any I had seen before behind a dog’s ear. The thing looked like a chinaberry. Mr. Waldrip used to heat my tweezers on the stove and pick them off his bird dogs when they got big and yellow enough to see in their coats. I jumped up and hollered and slapped it, which anybody worth knowing knows you ought not to do. Blood ran down my side in a mullion of black. The wicked thing clung to me. Its backside was blown out like pitted fruit. I picked it off. Of course the head stayed in.

I wiped the blood on my skirt and left there something like those handprints of ancient people on the inner walls of caves. The weft of blood drying in the wrinkles of my palm made a gory relief of those little life lines and love lines our dear grandniece, Jessica Pollard, had read for me one Thanksgiving and prophesied that I would finish out a long and loved existence. Jessica now lives with her olive-skinned husband and two handsome sons in Phoenix, Arizona. I might have at one time been concerned about her practicing the reading of palms, but now I think it bears little true weight on the condition of the soul.

Suddenly then I felt heat. I turned. You may not believe it yet, but what did I see but a fire burning in the wood I had piled the night before. Fire!

I froze. For most people, surely for the skeptical youth of this most recent generation, it is mighty hard work to believe that a fire could start on its own. It was hard for me to believe it too. I spun around and looked quickly over the woods and the fields, but I did not see much of anything. I crouched down. I stood up again. My goodness, I did not know what to do.

I crept up to the fire. Flies circled a steel pot on the ground. My heart galloped. A little skinless body was floating inside. I guessed it had been a rabbit. I looked around again.

Anyone there? I hollered. Hello? Hello? My name is Cloris Waldrip!

After a minute or two I sat back down on the ground. I sat there good and frightened for a spell, watching those pale flames in the daylight. Upon reflection I considered a sermon Pastor Bill had given some months prior. He had called the congregation’s attention to Mark 10:27: And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. It was soon made plain that my prayers had been answered in nothing less than a miraculous manifestation of the Divine. They say God works in mysterious ways. This was not all that mysterious. I had been mighty hungry and I had prayed and here now was some supper. Had there ever been a more comprehensible answer to any prayer? I certainly had never heard of any since the feeding of the multitude.

I took a breath and I set about boiling up the rabbit over the fire. I prayed aloud, thank you, God, thank you, Jesus!

However I will put it down here that even then my thoughts strayed to the hooded face I was sure I had seen in the woods up the mountain. It is true I have never been one of these silly women to spin tales of ghosts and ghouls. I have always considered those the offspring of idle and devilish minds, nothing of substance in the world of God. Yet when I was a young girl, Grandma Blackmore, who belonged to an older, smokier generation of storytellers, would tell me and Davy about our long-departed great-great-aunt Malvina, and how it was that some unnamed villain had stolen her away and buried her alive in a cow swamp and ever since her unsettled spirit itinerated the whole of Texas in search of living descendants. Some nights I would lie awake after Davy had gone to sleep and I would imagine I could see her out the window, dragging herself across the prairie in a muslin dress freighted with black mud.

But I managed to put these thoughts from my mind. Those of Great-great-aunt Malvina and the hooded face and the gruesome death of Terry Squime. None were of God. I suppered that night by firelight and drank from Mr. Waldrip’s boot and watched the logs glow and next to a tiny midden of clean-picked bones I slept.

I was two days at that place by the little creek, resting and pondering the miracle. Sitting around like that there is nothing much else to do but get hungry and soon enough I had eaten up even the bones of that rabbit. I first boiled them and dried them and then I took a stone and ground them into a meal that I could put to my tongue. The same as the giant in the fairy tale about the beanstalk. I used to tell that fairy tale to my kindergarteners and come up with parts of my own. I did that with most stories. I will not do it with this one. Although I have had students visit me after they are grown and tell me they enjoyed my stories better than all the rest. A tale belongs to whoever tells it best.

The bones did not taste of much, and for that I was grateful. I boiled water from the creek and drank it and in the mornings I relieved myself near a leafless bush dead and calcified like the weird piece of coral that sat on Linnie Curfell’s coffee table. In the sixties she and her husband brought it back from an island in the Caribbean and ever since scarcely knew how to converse about anything else. Anyway, every time I had to use that bush I made an effort to hide myself against it best I could. I laugh as I write this now. It was as if I had become embarrassed before God out there. After the appearance of the fire and the rabbit in the pot, God sure seemed nearer than He ever had back in Texas.

When the sun was up and it was warm enough I removed my clothes and washed them in the creek upstream from the dead beast. Then I bathed in the shallows. It is not something that I easily admit, but I believe it is important; it was romantic to be naked outdoors. I thought about my first kiss. It was with a boy named Charles Manson. Now, he was not in any manner related to that terrible man who murdered those poor people in California. He only shares what has become a terribly unfortunate name. I was twelve years old and Charles was fourteen. He grew a mustache like the mold on a crust of bread. He had taken me out back a hill of dirt and tractor parts stacked in his yard.

I have forgot the kiss, save that it tickled and that it was glorious hard work not to sneeze. But I do recall his words. Open your mouth, moonrise, he said. He was a mighty good talker, Charles, and went on to become the Clarendon school system’s superintendent, which he did very well until he passed away on his forty-second birthday without warning nor knowable cause. He fell to the floor in front of the icebox. His widow, Geraldine Manson, simply said to the police and anyone else who would listen that God had wanted him home, but I do not warrant that she has any notion as to what God does or does not want.

When I got out from the creek there was a shiny black leech on my leg. It would seem everything out there had a thirst for my blood and a hunger for my body. I picked the thing off and chucked it back to the current and went to the fire, where I dried my clothes and sat warm in Terry’s coat, naked as a jay bird. My permanent was all but deflated and I slicked my hair back behind my ears into something like the style Father had worn all throughout the Gay Nineties. I have a daguerreotype of him then, after he had found work as a traveling salesman, selling tonics along the Santa Fe Railroad. That was before he met Mother and settled in Texas.