Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I do not recall thinking much about anything at all during my time in the cave. It was as if I had become an involuntary function, much like how I understand a lung to work, or the heart. I had made up my mind to survive, but I do not recall arriving at the decision. I went on about my desperate business like I had been consuming bats and boiling spoiled water with stones all of my life. Being mighty weak, I spent a good many hours of the day with my back to the cave wall, watching the sun slide across the rocks.

One night, about a week into my stay at the cave, I woke to a pained cry such as that of a child or a deranged bird. I stood with my walking stick and looked out from the cave to the dark woods. The night was still and the fog glowed. After a spell, the cry came again, louder. I am familiar with the high-pitched bellering of weaning calves. I recall the cry a little Gelbvieh calf made when it could not move for a nasty protuberance on the side of its head, and Joe Flud had to mercifully euthanize it with the .22 caliber wheel gun he carried in his boot. There was a like fear and sadness in the cry growing out in the woods.

I tightened my grip on my walking stick. Out of the dark there came this little kid mountain goat, the color of caliche, not much bigger than a tomcat. Its little knees buckled and it settled to the rock and whistled at me. A creditable zoologist has recently informed me that mountain goats are the only extant species of their genus and are not authentically goats. They are more closely related to antelopes and make bird calls when they are young. I was hesitant but I took a step closer to it. It was a pitiful and sweet little thing, I dare even the hardest heart to say otherwise. My dear, was it precious! It lay still and did not move when I was upon it.

Hello there, I said to it. What is all this crying about?

It was transfixed by the fire. Its tiny body worked like a pair of bellows with each little breath it took. I sat close and reached over slowly and touched its fur. It did not shy away, nor did it appear injured in any way that I could tell. It could not have been more than a couple days old. My guess was that it had lost its mother before it had learned how to get along without her. The same thing had happened to one of Mr. Waldrip’s cowboys and this left him a bad-mannered and ill-tempered young man with an awful malice for all brown-haired women. He later found his way to a penitentiary in Illinois for punching to death a bank teller who would not marry him.

I got up and beckoned the little kid goat to come along and went to the fire. After some time it inched closer and lay by me. I was up the night watering it from the palm of my hand and stroking its fur. I spoke to it and named it Erasmus, because I supposed it was a male and that is a good name. The goat seemed to get better and calmer the more the night went on and the more I talked to him. I told him about the airplane going down and Mr. Waldrip and Terry and how I had managed to survive for so long with the help of the masked man.

I fell asleep for a spell before daybreak, and when I awoke, Erasmus was up on his tiny hooves cropping the little grass that grew from the cracks in the rock. I bade him good morning and he seemed to know what I had said and he came to me and lay down again. I had occasion for the first time in some days to recall that my name was Cloris Waldrip and that I had been married for many years to a mighty good husband and that I had had a life elsewhere very different to the one I had then.

This portion of my account that I am about to commit will have a number of folk taking the stump in noisy judgment over my soul, but that does not matter a mite to me now. In truth we will all be fiction soon enough and people yet to come can decide what little truth and goodness there was in any of it. So, I was acquainted with a woman named Carol Sanders for some years. I met her at a bake sale for Clarendon Elementary. I liked Carol and she would come over and we would visit on the back porch and watch from afar as our husbands hunted quail, their orange hats bobbing through the grass. But after a while I understood that there was something terribly wrong with the way Carol talked about other people. She could sure talk about herself until there was not a gust of wind left in Texas, but when she spoke on someone else, even her children, she did not care to go into much detail.

Some people do the bare minimum to show up like they care for those they say they care about. But when it comes right down to it all they want is to get what they want out of people. A mighty fine psychologist I have met with, Dr. Ungerstaut, has told me that it is called sociopathy. I do not know if that word works for what Carol was, and I worry we are all some of it some of the time. It eventually came out that she was burning her children with lightbulbs. Thinking about her in that cave next to little ole helpless Erasmus, I had an awful notion that God was like Carol Sanders, only Carol definitely exists because I have seen her name in the phone book. I have always been a faithful Methodist, but today I do not know what to say with any certainty about the nature of God. However I sure can say a lot about the nature of Carol Sanders.

I looked down at poor little Erasmus. He did not look at me, but I did not expect him to. I took a flat piece of flint that I had worked into a cutting implement for the bats and I held him by the horns and cut his throat. It was a warm day and the blood dried quickly on the stone plateau and I rolled Erasmus aside in the shade to have for supper that night.

I decided that I would use the daylight to put up a signal fire with black smoke and to tie ribbons torn from the bottom of my shirt throughout the woods. By the time I had finished making the ribbons, the shirt was like the kind our grandniece used to wear, showing the little blue ball she kept in her navel. I tied the ribbons in a perimeter around the cave and burned some damp logs that made a great deal of smoke. By now I had survived my ordeal in the Bitterroot for some nearly six weeks.

Two days or so went by and I had eaten all of Erasmus and burned his bones. I wore his fur around my neck as a kind of stole. It did keep me a good deal warmer. I have since had it made into a pillow and it decorates my bed here at River Bend Assisted Living.

I had gotten to where I could stand without the walking stick for longer and I hobbled around and burned heavy signal fires all day and all night. Then on a warm afternoon I heard footsteps in the woods. I hollered out my name and that I was lost. The footsteps drew closer. No answer came, but I had a good hope about who it was.

Unclothed, Lewis sank up to her chin in the hot tub. The crown of her head steamed and she steadied bloodshot eyes beyond the deck on mountains like tsunamis petrified, towering blue in the dark. A full moon wheeled over them. A ways off two flashlights swung through the trees and she could hear voices. She figured it was Claude and Pete searching for the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson.

Goddamn goofballs, she said, and she shook her head. The dead skunk was yet stuck in the tall pine and she sniffed the air for it but could smell nothing save chlorine. She turned back to the white cabin.

Jill had come out and sat on the edge of the hot tub, her back to the water. She lit a cigarette and shivered and pulled an arm inside her sweatshirt and held the cigarette in her bandaged hand. Wind raised her curls and stole the smoke from her mouth.

It’s cold, Lewis said into a near empty glass. You ought to get in.

I’m not going to get naked.

I didn’t say get naked.

Why are you naked?

I don’t know, Jill. Maybe had too much merlot. I apologize. It’s inappropriate.