Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

This is when I decided to take my life out in that wilderness. I had visions of Mr. Waldrip spotted miserable with flies, an empty bed, and the obituaries that would run in the Amarillo Globe News and the Clarendon Tribune . Bless you, I saw our tragic names banal and blurry in cheap newsprint. I envisioned the article about our demise lining the kennel of a new family’s first puppy dog, our likenesses specked and distorted with mess. I am aware many of the ladies at First Methodist are sure to judge me here on account of suicide being a sin. But there is not much that I can do about that.

I decided I would make a noose of the glittery stockings. I pulled them off and twisted and knotted them and looked around. Mist was on the ground and dew in the trees. I scooted over to a low branch and looped the stockings over it and slipped my head through the noose. I did not want to be discovered that way, hanged half-naked by the silly clothes of a child. What an awful sight! But when you want nothing more to do with this world you do not get a say about what goes on in it without you.

I propped myself up against the tree. All I had to do was let my legs go out from under me and let the noose do its job. I fixed my eyes on that silvery balloon high up in that pine, shining against the grayest of heavens. I let my weight go. My face got very hot and went numb. My sight turned dark.

I came to with my back flat on the ground and a lather in my mouth. I sat myself up and rubbed my neck. It was mighty sore. The stockings were still on the branch.

I then decided I would crawl for as long as I could and that is how I would meet my end and that would be that. I undid the stockings from the branch and put them back on and got on my belly. With my fingers in the dirt I drug my bad leg behind me and crawled in no particular direction, only the way that seemed to be the least troublesome and was downhill. For over an hour I went on like that, expecting to expire. On occasion I was mighty thirsty and stopped to suck on some funny shapes of ice left in places of shade.

By and by I came to a series of stony outcrops. Beneath one of them yawned a dark cave that you could just about pull a wagon through. At the mouth was a little plateau of rock and a polished dark place of creosote where I supposed there had once burned many fires. I imagined the centuries of Indians who had been there. There was also a smooth bowl such as an ancient mortar wore into the rock. I have learned that these are sometimes called gossip stones. In it was pooled some murky water where frogs had been breeding.

I crawled across the plateau to the cave and lay in front of the mouth. The sun had come out and the day was getting warm. A cool breeze blew from the entrance as from an air-conditioned department store. I hollered into it but my voice was small from the hanging. I do not know who it was I had expected to answer me. It gave back in a long echoing volley, as if the cave spiraled into that mountain all the way to the Far East where the Oriental people live and they were hollering back. I was too afraid to go too far inside. It was very dark and the air within smelled like damp carpet. I passed the day outside the cave and then the night. A mossy log was my pillow and I was hungry and mighty cold. I worried a bear or perhaps that lonely backwards mountain lion would return to the cave and have me for supper.

The next day I endeavored to build a fire so that someone might see the smoke and so I could boil up some of that foul water. The problem was this: I did not have matches nor a lighter.

I thought about what I did have. I felt the breast pocket of Terry’s coat. I still had my Bible and Mr. Waldrip’s glasses. I recalled Mr. Waldrip sitting out back on a hot day, reading something or another. The sunlight would catch his glasses and his book would start to smoke if he lingered on it for too long.

To make a tedious sort of story short: with much trouble I managed over the course of the day to set a fire with Mr. Waldrip’s glasses and a few pages of Genesis for kindling. I know that some people will shake their heads at this bit of blasphemy, but I would only say to them that the rules history makes for us do not always hold up in practice. I mean to tell you I sure was pleased with myself that afternoon. I lay back before my fire and considered myself a worthy descendant to that cavewoman in the diorama at the Panhandle Plains Museum.

That afternoon it looked like rain. I crawled around on my belly and gathered any dry firewood that turned up and piled it at the mouth of the cave. This took some time. Then I had some words with myself and got so brave I could have played chess with a rattlesnake. I used a stick from my fire for a torch and scooted my way inside the cave.

The cave was dry and it was empty as far as I could tell, up to where my torch warded off the dark. The walls of it were smooth and the floor grew white crystals the size of rolling pins. I moved the pile of dry wood inside the cave just in time. The rain started coming down. When I lit the wood pile with my torch, the fire warmed the cave considerably and the smoke drew out into the storm. It rained the rest of that day.

When the rain quit and night fell, every star there was came out. All was as still as death. I had not eaten anything since I had left the shelter the day before and I was very hungry. Then an awfully strange squeaking commenced in the cave. I must have known what it was all along. Bats. We do not get many bats in Clarendon and I had probably not seen but two in my life. I was mighty unnerved. But more than anything else I was hungry.

I carried my torch deeper into the cave, banishing that immense dark. I looked up to a ceiling of sleeping bats. The research I have done tells me they are uninterestingly called big brown bats. They are not the eerie variety that drink blood and serve as the subjects of scary stories. But heavens, there must have been hundreds of them! It is a testament to my hunger that the sight of that horde inspired only one idea: thumping one on the head and taking it to the fire to cook for supper.

Maybe you will not believe me, but I tell you now that is just what I did. I picked out a nice juicy plump one and pushed myself up onto one leg and balanced on the wall. I thumped that bat with a loose rock and dispatched it where it hung. It fell dead at my feet and suddenly the rest were screeching and swarming around me. I was knocked on my bottom as they flew from the cave.

I skewered the one I had got on a sprig of pine and put it on the fire to scour. The leathery wings crisped and the body bloated and burst open. To my shame the poor creature turned out to be a pregnant female. It turns out that all of them were. I had stumbled on what I now know chiropterologists call a maternity colony.

I ate all of the mama bat and her unborn offspring anyway, save the bones. I did feel sorry for it, but not too sorry to go without supper. I had a hard time of chewing it, being that I could only use my molars, having lost my dental bridge to the river. Bat does not taste terrible, I will allow. It tastes something like quail.

I would spend near twelve days in that cave in total. To my mind it began to seem I had been there for months. Before too long I was able to hobble about upright. I had turned up a gnarled and hooked branch that I used for a walking stick. I clacked about the rock with it like a pitiful shepherd of bats and vermin, the pink shirt and glittery stockings all dark with filth. My hair was tangled and crazy. I imagine I must have looked like a lunatic cave witch belonging to some period of time unkept by history.

After dusk the bats would return to the cave and I would sneak up to one in its sleep and thump it with the end of my walking stick. Eventually the rest of them did not even wake during my culling and depredations. I became better at cooking them too. I used a flat piece of limestone that I could place over the fire, rather than scorching them on a stick. For a drink I boiled the water in the pool outside the cave by heating up stones and dropping them in. I have since been told this is a technique going back to the first days of man. I ended up accidentally boiling many a tadpole that way and I ate them too.