Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Most nights we sat by the stove and I told him stories about Clarendon and Mr. Waldrip. I told him about growing up in the country in the old days, about how I had lived through two world wars, the first of which I can scarcely recall, being that I was not but three years old when Father went off to France and fought the Germans under General Pershing and came home with a wrinkly right hand that could not make a fist. I told him about the rations and the rubber drives during the Second World War, and about how Mr. Waldrip had been 4-F on account of his poor eyesight, and how he had lost in the invasion of Normandy a distasteful cousin who beat up on his wife but was memorialized as a fallen hero all the same. I told him about how I had taught at Clarendon Elementary and then was the school’s librarian for over forty years, and about how I had dearly hoped to have children of my own but none had come to me, and about First Methodist and the pastors we had had over the years, including Pastor Jacob, who had renounced the church and wedded his Mexican housekeeper in an agnostic ceremony in El Paso.

My companion was not a loquacious man and he told me very little about himself. I am a notorious chatterbox and he would steer the conversations away from himself and let me go on and on until I found a natural end. I did however learn that he was born someplace in the east of the continent and that he had traveled around the world with his mother since he was eight years old and had lived for a brief time in Germany. Despite that, he came from very little money and never knew the name nor origin of his father.

His mother was apparently one of these restless women who saw no need for a husband and was, as he put it, always searching for affection from strangers. He said she would keep the local bars until they shut and she never spent a night at home if she could help it. To hear him tell it she was a pretty good narcissist. When she showed him any motherly care at all, he said, it was on account of she was seeing him as an extension of herself at the time. But being that they had often lived out in the country, he had passed much of his leisure time outdoors and had liked to go off on his own and hunt or fish. He turned out a very able outdoorsman.

He also told me a pitiful story that no doubt many of my readers will find relevant. I do not include it here to suggest anything about his character in particular, save that he told it to me and I felt sorry for him. Along sometime in his boyhood years he lived across the street from a pretty young girl who had immigrated from Bulgaria. She was in the class ahead of him and he would see her in the halls of their schoolhouse. Well, one day after school this girl approached him and invited him to a county fair. They went together and he bought her some ice cream. It was there that she took him aside and held her mouth an inch from his and taunted him something terrible about how she knew he wanted to kiss her. She called him a little pussy boy and said to him that she would never kiss him, not in a million years. He said that all he was able to do was to smell the sugar on her breath and be satisfied best he could with that.

I suppose people tell stories partly because we can tell them over and over again. You can get mighty familiar with a story and know it inside and out, front to back. But while a story has something of the true world to it, mostly it does not. You can get a handle on a story. I hold that much of what confounds young people today is that they can seldom discern the difference between a narrative and the actual events of the natural world. However if you pay close enough attention before long in your years you come to learn that there is no retelling a life and it is by your own secret hand that you are the author of your own demise. In life, no choice is made without it comes to an irrevocable end.

I believe the date of the fire was November 5th. The weather was mighty fine and the sun was out and I spent the day by the creek. A fall chill was in the air but there was plenty of sun to keep it off. I sat on my favorite rock and plaited reeds for no particular purpose while the man checked his traps and deadfalls he had set on the other side of the creek. He was sidewinding away down the gulch until he appeared to be no more than another little old shrub or stone on the floodplain. He had said he was getting us ready for the winter. By and large it was much the same as any other day out there. When he came back he was toting a mangled badger by the tail. The poor animal was old and drooling blood from a withered gray snout. I pulled some cattails to stew with it.

That night the sun set earlier than it had yet out there and I recall remarking that fall was sure deep upon us now. The man cleaned the badger outside the hut by the light of the pine-knot lantern and I built up the fire in the stove and listened to the poor creature’s innards falling and sticking in the grass. I peeked out from behind the old sheet we used for a door as he worked the animal with the spey blade. A gust kicked up and filled his long hair and blue coat such that he looked like a man from an older time, out of an age past when the wind blew from uncharted territories and languages had fewer words.

He brought in the cleaned badger and set about cutting it up. He said: Do you know what I was just thinking about out there?

No, I said. What was it? I had not wanted to seem too eager, but it was unusual for him to offer any conversation.

I was thinking it’d be great if I could change my appearance whenever I wanted. I could be somebody else. I could have a different life every day. One day I’d turn into a beautiful woman and head out in the big city and see what that was like. Or another day I’d turn into just a regular guy in high school and go to a school dance. Or I’d be a child and go see a movie and meet some people there. Another day I could be a white man with green eyes on the beach, another I could be a black woman with brown eyes. Could be anything.

I had some questions. Would only your appearance change? I asked him. Would you change? Would you be obliged to act differently, being that I suppose you would not truly be any of these people?

Once you look a certain way, he said, you don’t have to act too much to be what everybody else tells you you already are.

I asked him why he wanted this shape-shifting ability.

He quit cutting up the badger. He got a scrap of cloth and wiped the blood from his hands and said: Some people’re granted access to experiences others aren’t. I want to experience as many of them as I can. And I kind of always just thought that whatever I was, I was too many things for anybody to accept that they could all belong in one person. Do you know what I mean? For example, I knew a man back home who said sometimes he felt like he was a woman. Most people just want you to be one thing and won’t allow you to be anything else. I guess it’s easier that way for them.

We had our supper and went to sleep. In the night the wind came up again and blew in cold through the chinks in the hut and woke me. The man slept curled up on his pallet. I tucked Erasmus’s fur around my neck and turned to the stove and built up the fire. I warmed myself, listening to the wind, and soon I was back asleep.

I woke up again in the night, this time not for the cold but for the intense heat. Gracious, it was like the Texas sun on my face. I opened my eyes and above me churned an immense vortex of smoke and flame!

Fire! I mean to tell you I could not see a thing past it. I coughed like a steam engine and covered my face with my hands. I endeavored to holler out for my friend but all I could manage to do was cough.

I heard him hollering my name over the noise of the conflagration. Mrs. Waldrip! Mrs. Waldrip!