Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

The man pulled out the other chair and sat down. He straightened the mask again so that his eyes lined up with the holes in it and the print of the pancakes was over his mouth. He took off his gloves and unlaced his boots and pulled them off, sending mud and snowmelt to the puncheon floor, then he set them by the stove to dry and pulled off some funny striped socks and hung them inside out on the clothesline. They smoked in the heat like rashers of bacon. He looked up at me in what little light there was and he cocked his head as if I had confused him, same as how Mr. Waldrip’s Labrador Sally used to do when Mr. Waldrip asked her a question. The man shook his head and went about rubbing his feet at the stove.

After a minute he got up and went to the dresser. He rifled through it and brought back a light pink shirt with pictures on it of a blue castle and a white horse. He also provided me a pair of yellow socks and glittery dark purple stockings. Newspapers would later describe them as spandex leggings. Here, he said, and he put them on the table. He faced a corner to give me some privacy.

I thanked him and removed Terry’s coat and hesitated in my ragged and damp clothes, the threadbare zigzag sweater and blouse and the torn skirt.

I won’t look, he said.

I removed my filthy clothes and arranged them on the table. He had already seen me as naked as a nickel, but I mean to tell you it was still something mighty unique disrobing in a room with a man who was not Mr. Waldrip. I took the dry clothes from the table and dressed. They were small even for a small woman such as myself. When I put on the shirt I imagined I could smell the little girl who must have left it there. Such of apples and a mowed lawn. I did not think on it much at the time.

When I was a little girl I dreamt of having many children. When Mr. Waldrip and I were married we made an effort right away. That is what you did in those days. Mary Martha Hart, an acquaintance of mine from the Women’s Historical Society, was pregnant within weeks of her wedding. She was seventeen. She had a baby boy who grew up to become a well-liked singer in Las Vegas. He had hair like a cockatoo and sang songs about lonesomeness. Another woman in my congregation, Joycie Farwell, had twins, a boy and a girl. The boy grew up to be a pink-eyed lunatic. He held some people hostage in a Red Lobster restaurant someplace in North Dakota, until one of the hostages realized he was holding not a pistol but a carrot stained black with shoe polish. I suppose what I am wanting to suggest here is that children are not a good thing to a certainty, so perhaps not having them is not necessarily a bad thing.

Finished, I said.

The masked man turned from the corner and looked me over. It was a funny outfit. I never will cease to be amazed that young people dress the way they do. I suppose often the clothes people wear only make sense to the people wearing them. He did not say a thing about my getup.

Then he sat a spell with his back to the stove, reading a book that looked like it had been in water. I asked him what it was and he told me that I would not like it. I told him that I had been a librarian for a good many years and I was interested in literature. The shape of his mouth changed under his mask and he held the book cover towards me so that I could read the title. The lettering on the cover was a faded purple. It read: The Joy of Lesbian Sex: A Tender and Liberated Guide to the Pleasures and Problems of a Lesbian Lifestyle by Dr. Emily L. Sisley and Bertha Harris.

I found it in the dresser, he said, and he held the book in front of his mask again and read on.

I sat there and listened to the wind toss snow against the smokestack and whistle in the unceiled walls. The lantern light played over the man and for the first time since the little airplane had gone down I wondered how it would be to return to Texas. The first thing I would have to do is to unlock the front door with the key Mr. Waldrip kept hid under the stone shaped like a steer. My ferns and zebra plant would be dried up like old goats. Our poor cat, Trixie, would have eaten all the food we had left her and she would be hunting mice to survive, something I did not believe she could do. I imagined her laid out skin and bones at the base of the front door, poor thing.

I thought about the life I would have without Mr. Waldrip. It did not make a lick of sense to me. Night after night waking to turn to him in bed just to find him gone and then remembering the whole awful story. Riding to doctor’s appointments in that paddywagon of old fools the city provides these days. Taking walks by myself, down to the bluestem pasture where the idiot bull is tethered with that corncob pipe in its mouth.

No, home did not make a lick of sense without Mr. Waldrip, and I was afraid I myself would not make a lick of sense back in Texas after all I had seen out in the Bitterroot.

Snow was on the ground for two days. The masked man and I stayed warm as dogs around the stove, consuming rations of beans and canned beets. We scarcely spoke. When it came time to sleep, we bade each other good night, our teeth as red as roses. I slept on the bottom bunk and he on the top. He seldom rolled over in his sleep and it would have been easy to believe that he was not up there at all, but for the sag in the grate underside the bed. I had not slept so near a man who was not Mr. Waldrip for many years. Still I slept well. It was nice to have a soft place to lay my head.

The second night I heard a sound and went to the window. By the light of the moon I spotted that same mountain lion prowling backwards around the cabin. I alerted the man and he said he had seen the mountain lion before too. He believed the creature had an ear infection that gave it a bad case of vertigo. He said that it was merely lonely and confused and a poor excuse for a mountain lion.

During the day the masked man sat by the stove whittling inscrutable figures with the spey blade and tossing them into the fire. I read the book he had found about homosexual relations between women. It is an interesting book with explicit subject matter. I did not entirely understand all of it, but I am glad that I read it anyway. For the longest time I did not know such a thing as lesbianism even existed. It was not something anyone ever talked about, not like it is today. There was a girl who grew up with us in Clarendon, Edith Pearson, and she played baseball with the boys and was not at all interested in wearing dresses. I have learned this does not make a lesbian, but Edith and another woman, Beth Stout, did live together in a double-wide trailer in Perryton, Texas. The ladies at First Methodist could be mighty cruel about Edith, but I do not now see the point.

On a cloudy afternoon when the light outside the cabin was bluish-gray on the snow, I recalled an evening Mr. Waldrip and I had attended a performance at Clarendon Elementary School. I was a young teacher there at the time. We sat in the half-dark and watched the children put on a darling play about the first cattlemen in Texas. Not but five minutes in, Mrs. Craddock, the librarian whom I would come to replace, slid from her seat and passed away right there on the auditorium floor. She was about the age I was then sitting in that log cabin. A frail old man I knew to be Mr. Craddock crouched over her and whispered in her ear. He did not shed a tear. Others stood around and folded their hands. Dr. Gainer endeavored to revive her, holding a palm to her forehead and shaking her gently by the shoulders. This did not work. All the children stopped and watched from the stage, stricken in their ten-gallon hats and painted mustaches, save for the slow red-haired boy, Merritt Sterling, costumed like a stalk of Indian grass, who yet performed his part and swayed as if blown by the wind, unaware anything at all had changed.