Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Something about Mrs. Craddock’s passing put a special kind of fear in my young heart at the time. Suddenly I was afraid of growing old and dying, afraid of muddling through life putting stock in all the wrong things. I was afraid nothing was as I believed it to be. I did not chew over this discomforting notion for long, however, because the next day at First Methodist Mrs. Taylor, a little woman with a vibrating sickness, stood buzzing like electric hair clippers and led the congregation in prayer for Mrs. Craddock and her family, and I was put at ease that all was safe in God and community. But then and there in that log cabin, when nothing was as it had ever been before, watching where the shirt over that mysterious man’s face was damp with the shape of his mouth, that special kind of fear returned and I worried that I had made a mighty big mistake believing in comfortable things.

On our third day in that dingy old cabin, the masked man went off to retrieve more water from a nearby spring and to set some of his traps, and I took a chair out front and sat in the early-afternoon sun and watched the snowmelt drip from the trees. I breathed that cool, clean air and I was not frightened anymore. It is peculiar how the human spirit endures. A person can get used to a situation, even if that situation may have once seemed intolerable.

After I had sat a spell, the masked man came charging back through the woods. He was straightening the mask over his face. I hallooed him and he put a finger over the haunting place where his mouth was and shushed me.

He squatted close by and pointed to the place in the trees from whence he had come. He was out of breath. He said, Walk straight in that direction and call out your name.

I got up from my chair and I asked him if he had seen someone.

Don’t tell them you saw me, he said. Tell them you were alone.

I have to tell them about you, I said. You have saved my life.

He said, Please, and he looked back over his shoulder.

Come with me, I said.

He pleaded with me again. Pieces of long brown hair stuck out from the eyeholes in the mask like whiskers on a cat. I told him that I would do as he wished. He thanked me.

Do you suppose they will believe it? I said. It is not an easy thing to believe that a woman my age could survive out here on her own.

You’ve just got to convince them, he said. He touched my arm with a gloved hand. He rushed past me into the cabin and came out a minute later with his duffel and set out in the opposite direction.

I watched after him until I could no longer see him in the timber.

I walked quickly through the woods hollering out my name. It was not but ten minutes before I found a clearing that opened up to a bluff and I quit hollering. Out in a rocky ravine, granite slopes fell to country patchy with snow and motts of spruce and pine. At a considerable distance, a troop of people in orange moved across the floodplain. They had a dog. I heard their voices echo over the range. They were hollering my name.

I do not imagine many of you can truly understand how it was for me to hear my name in the mountains and see those benevolent souls arriving to put an end to my ordeal. Few people have had the experience of being rescued. I had been out in the Bitterroot for near a month by then. I am certain a good many of you will not understand what occurred in my heart nor the decision I was to make. No doubt many of you will holler at the page, turn back, turn back, you old fool! Bless me, I suppose I do not entirely understand it myself. But a person has to make sense of their own behavior best they can and get on with it.

I stood perfectly still. I did nothing. I did not raise my arms nor wave them about. I did not holler out for help.

It was a dire sadness that came over me and at that moment, despite all the desperation I had endured out there in the Bitterroot, I could not see any good reason to go back home. It was impossible to imagine that Clarendon would be where I had left it back in the plains of the Texas Panhandle. Perhaps I did not even believe our house was still under the afternoon shade of the water tower, nor that First Methodist was holding services, nor that the congregation had bowed their heads in prayer for myself and Mr. Waldrip. At the time I was not sure how anything could exist after the great colorful ramparts of that wilderness. I worried that if I went back I would find nothing at all.

I feared a life not terribly unlike the one I live today. I live in an assisted-living facility and have been here for eleven years, since I turned eighty-one. I have a small air-conditioned single-room apartment. Most hours of the day and night I am alone. Visitors seldom come now, and when they do I am less certain what I mean to them or they to me. In truth I do not enjoy their company very much. Often I worry that compassion is perfunctory in this place, though perhaps it is that way in most of the world and nobody has caught on. But bless you, yes, there are new and dear people in my life whom I now know because of my ordeal, and in the most melancholy of ways I am grateful for that, and you dears know who you are. But at the time I could not see any potential for goodness in my return to the peopled world. Psychologists have told me that I was grief-stricken and dissociative and traumatized, but they were not there. To them those are just terms from a book. I assure you I was something else entirely.

I watched until the search party crossed out of sight into the woods. Then I turned back for the log cabin. I tossed my filthy old tore-up clothes into the stove and burned them.

The old dog limped in back of the four searchers, all of them clad in vests of orange, carrying packs and bedrolls. They came in a slow single file: Lewis, Claude, Jill, and Pete behind. Lewis led them under boughs and overhangs of rock, massaging on a forearm bruises like hourglasses, an eye hooked far on a helix of smoke. She drank from the thermos of merlot, then from a canteen of water.

Claude snapped his fingers at the old dog and it came along, nosing the tracks of his boots and stringing under the daylight silver tendons of slobber in the dirt. I’d say this isn’t goin to turn out the way you picture it, Debs, Claude said.

Jill chewed the butt of a dying cigarette as she followed them.

Pete wheezed behind and tugged at the strap for the video camera. He beat a fist on his pigeon chest. How far?

Another two miles, give or take, said Lewis.

Pete shook his head and coughed into his palm and looked wide-eyed at the phlegm he had brought up.

Claude tipped back a campaign hat and searched the sky. I’d say we’d better turn back, Debs. Looks like we can’t make it to the shelter and back to the vehicles before dark. It’s too far out there on foot.

We’re not turnin back, Lewis said.

Claude stopped and the rest stopped behind him. I’d understood the sleepin bags to be a precautionary measure.

Lewis balanced against a pine. When we find Mrs. Waldrip we’ll radio for a chopper, she said.

What if we don’t find her?

Think of it as a goddamn company retreat.

Jill ended the cigarette on a pine. Maybe our murders will be reenacted on television by actors that kind of look like us.

Pete dabbed his face with the coif. What if we got a real owly man up there? That Kisser fella. I just said I’d take a look around with you guys. I didn’t sign on for nothin like this. Not with my heart misbeatin like it is.

It’s Cloris up there, Lewis said.

Claude came around and took Lewis aside behind a tree away from the others and whispered, You all right, Debs?

I’m fine. You don’t need to ask me that.

Are you drinkin wine right now?

No.