Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

When I blinked away the water, the masked man stood at the riverbank with his heels dug in, hauling on that log. Gracious, what a sight! His huffing and puffing over the noise of the water grew louder the closer I got. It sounded the way Mr. Waldrip’s ranch manager, Joe Flud, would grunt and growl whenever a cow was calving and he had to wrestle it into the chute.

Before I knew it I was close enough to make out the print of the pancakes on the white mask. The cotton over his mouth sucked in and blew out in a damp oval. He dropped his end of the log and drug me out of the water by the pits of my arms onto the bank. I was flat on my back, gasping for air. There I was cold and naked and wet as a Baptist, but I was alive.

People have asked me what I had on my mind just as that little airplane went down in the Bitterroot. It is always the young people who ask me that. And I always have to disappoint them. I cannot recall having a thought in my head. My mind was as empty as one of Mr. Waldrip’s Coke bottles out on the back porch, hooting in the wind. However I will tell you that when I nearly drowned in that river I did have something on my mind. I thought of Mr. Waldrip. I wanted for him to be the last thing on my mind before nothing else would go there, so I repeated his name over and over in my head until I saw that I was going to be all right.

Above me was a blue sky and not a cloud in it. The man leaned over me. The mask, wet and clinging to his face, revealed the shape of a bearded jaw. I was sure I could see myself, a pink and naked old woman, in his emerald-green eyes. Being that he had come to my rescue, I knew then he had been watching me when I had disrobed and gone out to bathe.

Are you all right? he asked me.

I told him that I was.

The man wrapped me up in his down coat and made a fire. It was late afternoon and the wind was up. I sat on the ground, rubbing my hand where the little critter had stung me. The fire burned sideways, singeing tall riparian grasses and warning away the mosquitoes and gnats. Fire looks mighty strange and false in the daylight.

The man went back upriver for my things: my purse, the hatchet, the canteen and the steel pot, Terry’s coat and my filthy clothes and Mr. Waldrip’s boot. He disappeared behind a rise of stones and grass. I waited. I put my hands in his coat pockets to keep them out of the breeze and in one pocket I found a small skeleton key. It looked like an antique. In the other was what I first took to be a handkerchief but was instead a women’s undergarment. It was blue cotton and did not have any special thing about it other than that it appeared to be clean. I put it back and did not think much of it at the time.

There naked in that man’s coat I recalled when Father would take us swimming out at Greenbelt Lake. I would sit on the shore, small and wrapped in a towel, letting the Texas sun dry my plaited hair. Father was not a very religious man. He attended church for Mother and the neighbors. He was raised wild in Colorado by nearly blind Grandma Blackmore, an unlettered gold panner. The true breadth of her past was a wonderful mystery to him. He always told big stories that she had been at one time married to a tongueless court jester in Central Europe and had sold petrified monkey hearts in the markets of Marrakesh. I get my storytelling ability from his side of the family. Anyway, he would take me and Davy and we would all swim as naked as newborns. Mother put a stop to that when she found out. She sure could cow my father with the thousand ways she knew to say his name. By the end all he ever did was what she told him to do.

After little more than half an hour the man returned from upriver wearing Terry’s coat and my purse. He set my purse and a neat pile of my clothes and Terry’s coat beside me. He did not say a word and sat with the fire between us and turned away.

I thanked him for helping me again. I seem to be an awful lot of trouble, I said.

He made no reply.

I stood and let his coat fall to the ground and was naked again. The sun was setting then and the large mountain put a limitless shadow over us. All that was left of the day burned a royal color behind the peak. The firelight was not flattering to my naked body. I set about getting dressed. With my stockings in tatters, I rolled them up and stowed them in my purse. I combed back my hair with my fingers and sat back down by the fire.

I told the man that I was dressed and that he could turn back around. Still he had his masked face to the far rocky land.

There’s not enough day left for you to make any headway, he said at last. You should stay here tonight.

I wrapped myself in Terry’s coat and looked at the man through the whipping flames. Will you stay with me?

I can’t stay here, he said.

I asked him why that was, but he would say nothing.

Did Jesus send you? I asked.

No, he said.

My name is Cloris Waldrip, I told him. What is your name?

The man straightened the mask and got up. He produced a square of chocolate in a foil and told me that it would have to do for supper. I took the chocolate and went to touch his hand, but he shied away like a dog with a past. I apologized.

Tomorrow you’ll cut through the forest, he said. The keyhole I told you about is just right down there. You’ll see it in the morning. The man pointed to a place of darkness where the woods began. Just right down there. Stay on the trail. You’ll see the sign, remember? That goes straight east. Watch out for mountain lions. Snakes too. You can reach the highway in a little under a week if you don’t stop too much.

I asked him to please come with me and said that I did not believe I could make it without him.

Ma’am, he said, I’m really sorry. And he gathered up his coat and set off into the dark of the woods.

Being that I was very tired, I slept well and the morning came quickly. The fire was out. I did not look for the man. On the ground was a small box of oats and four salted fish wrapped in newspaper pages of showtimes for a small-town picture house in Idaho. I cannot recall the name of the town. Beside that there were six fire-starter sticks and a lighter which bore the likeness of a silly cartoon pig playing a saxophone. I righted myself and stuffed the cereal box in my purse along with Mr. Waldrip’s boot, which held the hatchet, and stowed the fire-starter sticks and the lighter and the little red canteen in Terry’s coat pockets.

I was by that time mighty curious about the masked man. I had only ever heard of criminals wearing masks in the commission of their crimes. It is not often that you hear about a person hiding their face for an act of altruism and charity. Still, and perhaps I was being silly, it did not yet occur to me that he could be a criminal.

By then I counted that I had been out in the Bitterroot wilderness for twenty-one days. I was getting used to being outside all hours of the day and night. But gracious, I ached something terrible and was as tired as a tumbleweed. I was ready to go home. So I filled up the red canteen the masked man had given me and I stood a little taller when I looked out at those mountains and that wild land. I was a little braver when I faced that dark opening in the thick woods he had pointed out to me. The place shaped the same as a keyhole.

I later learned that back in Clarendon about this time the church held a candlelight vigil for myself and Mr. Waldrip. I was told that most of the congregation turned out. Even Mrs. Holden, who had lost the use of her legs and weighed a good 250 pounds and had to be carried in on a piece of canvas by her four grandsons like she were being pallborne alive. The vigil was held on a warm Wednesday evening on the mowed lawn of the courthouse, they said, and as Pastor Bill began the prayer of the lost, a wild truckful of bibulous hooligans drove plumb through the front window of the pharmacy across the street. By the grace of God no one was hurt, but some took it as confirmation that we were not coming back.