Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Hello, I said. Hello?

Nothing answered. Then all of a sudden from the gloom of the trees came a bulky form of arms and legs and skull and soon by the light of the moon I saw that it was him, the masked man after all! I cannot say how very glad I was to see him!

He moved awkwardly and cradled a bundle of firewood in his arms. He walked past me quickly. He sure looked to be a man of real flesh and blood and not some wild senile vision like I had feared. He did not say a word. I do not believe he even looked at me. He dropped the firewood and took from the back of his belt a red baton and one of those little lighters that you flip open. Then he wedged the baton into the firewood and lit it with the lighter and the pile caught.

He came around again past me towards the trees.

Wait! I said. Please wait! Where are you going?

But he did not turn and kept on at a sure pace away from me into the dark. He was gone again before I knew it and I stood shaking wildly and holding on to the hatchet for dear life. I watched the place where I had last seen the growing firelight touch him. It was not long until he came back with more firewood. He lumbered by me again, as if he were in a trance, heaving muddy boots, the mask slipping around on his head.

He dropped the entire armful into the fire and stood in the upwelling of sparks that carried off over the water like little lightning bugs. He fixed the mask and lined up the holes with his eyes. He took a seat in front of the fire then with his face turned away and put out his legs. Neither of us spoke a word. I had forgot about the hatchet. I dropped it and sat down on the other side of the fire and warmed myself. It was mighty good to get warm again.

We did not talk. I stole glances at him through the flames. He wore big floppy leather gloves and a great puffy eiderdown coat the color blue of postmen. Around his neck was a pair of binoculars and around his wrists were bunched many-colored pieces of elastic like the bands to undergarments. He reminded me of a figure somewhere between a storybook marauder and a homeless man named Leonard who Mr. Waldrip used to employ from time to time to clean the dirt from the eaves and repaint the cattle pens. Leonard was good help, but after a while my powder and a dress or two had come up missing from my closet. Not much later Mr. Waldrip said he spotted an ugly and oddly familiar-looking woman in a similarly familiar-looking dress hitchhiking on an I-40 access road. I do not hold this transformation against Leonard, but I do not believe it is nice to steal things.

Finally I said to the masked man: Has God sent you here to help me?

He watched the fire. His eyes gleamed like metalwork in the holes of the mask.

I told him that I was very frightened.

He looked up at me. Where are your teeth? he said.

It was a moment before I had an answer. I lost them in the river, said I.

In the river?

I told him that it was a dental bridge.

Can you chew all right?

Middling, I said.

It occurs to me that in nature if an animal is old and toothless surely they are not long for this world. This must have occurred to the man too because he looked at me with some worry in his pretty emerald-green eyes. Nowadays civilization keeps a person alive much longer than ever before. I mean to tell you there is a lawyer I know from First Methodist, Dalton Mills, who is 104 years old as I write this and has divorced three wives and has had six different cancers removed from his neck and is all but blind. He has a stainless-steel machine that breathes for him while he sleeps and he smells deathly of olives and talcum powder. I have no concern of his reading this, so I will say that if he were an elephant the herd would have left him behind to die many years ago, which, I am told, is what elephants do.

The man looked back to the fire. Then he said: If you keep downriver you’ll come to a forest in little under a week. If you keep moving all day. The river will go left, and you’ll want to go right. Into the forest. Watch for two tall pines that make the shape of a keyhole like to an old-timey house. Go between them, straight ahead into that keyhole. You’ll meet up with the old Thirsty Robber hiking trail. There’ll be a sign with a wooden flower. Follow the trail and you should hit the highway.

How far is it to the highway?

Far, he said. But it’s your best way out. You’ll have to hurry. It’s not safe out here and bad weather’s coming.

I am not sure if I can make it, I said.

The man unsheathed the long strange knife from his hip. It looked to me like the kind of spey blade I had seen our cowboys use to geld the workhorses, only larger. He must have heard my breath quicken because he told me he was not going to hurt me and he set about digging mud from the treads of his boots with the point of the blade. Go to sleep, he said. You’ll have to leave at daybreak. You won’t see me, but I’ll be with you as far as the keyhole. Go into the keyhole. Then you’ll be on your own.

You are not coming with me?

No, he said. I’m sorry. But you can make it after the keyhole.

I asked him why he was wearing a shirt over his face. He did not reply, only worked at his boots. I wanted to ask him more questions, but I decided against it. At the time I did not know what to make of him. I was nearly sure he meant me no harm, but I could not guess what a man would be doing out there with his face covered up like that. I suppose at the time I took a comforting notion that he was an eccentric hermit of some kind or an earthbound angel or somehow both of those peculiar things at once. The man said nothing more and after a spell I curled up there next to the fire and drifted off watching the light of it flash the blade of his knife and dance over his white mask.

The fire had smoldered out and the masked man was nowhere to be seen. The sun had yet to rise. A fearsome and colorless light haloed the big mountains. Beyond them, I imagined, lay civilization entire. Painted homes and fenced lawns, watered gardens of little foreign flowers, cats belled and little old dogs tethered to telephone poles, and clothed men and women following those sidewalks and roads paved for their shod feet and wheels. Streetlights aglow.

I got up and brushed myself off. I had left a pitiful and fetal shape in the grass. The notion crossed my mind that as long as I had lived I had not lived long enough. I had gone from Mother’s belly to that fearful swale in the Bitterroot in the blink of an eye. And all those years in between had not set me right for what I was to face out there. God makes us one way, and we make ourselves another. It is a mighty troublesome misadventure to learn this in the evening of your life.

When I was the librarian at Clarendon Elementary School I often watched a wall clock tick away the minutes of the day with not much else on my mind other than the passage of time itself. The library was located in the basement of the school building and it was cold and musty and there were no windows to speak of, only high cuts of fogged glass that put out the same light no matter the hour of day. I had the idea that my library was where time went when it was wore out and needed some shut-eye. I thought that to live forever a person would only need to sit in that library and watch that wall clock. I retired and left Clarendon Elementary School and forgot about that wall clock. Well, I can sure tell you it did not forget about me and suddenly there I was out in that wilderness an old woman. And even more suddenly here I am at my desk and an older woman yet.

The hatchet lay on the ground. I wiped the dew from the blade and returned it to my purse. On a flat rock near the softly smoking coals was a small compass and a little red canteen the masked man must have left for me in the night. I stowed them in my purse and then I struck off downriver, thinking all the while that Father Time was slinking around after me in step with that tagged bobcat.