Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

She stopped.

The dog was sprawled on its side, a pink tongue unraveled from its mouth. Black blood slicked the pine needles and pooled low places in the mud.

Goddamn it, she said. She knelt down and nudged the dog with the barrel of the pistol. She squinted and saw its skull was opened. Goddamn it. She took hold of the collar and turned it around the neck and angled the bloodwet heart-shaped tag to the moonlight. The light glanced across the name Charlie.

Lewis shook her head and slumped back to the ground. She wiped on a trouser leg the blood and hair from her hand.

Every fall the ladies at First Methodist would get together once a week in the basement of the church house and sew quilts for the indigent and discuss scripture and the weekly gossip. During that time I learned to quilt very well. I will also tell you that I know how to fix a strong plait.

I used to plait the dark hair of a nervous little girl I had in my class prior to taking the position of librarian. Plaiting her hair was the only way to get her to hold still long enough for me to read aloud from Little Women or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . She was a gorgeous fidgety thing. Gracious, how envious I was of her dodo-bird mother when the awful woman would collect her at the end of the day, smoking a nasty cigarette and scowling at her children like they were incalculable evil. I took the position of librarian in part because students like this little girl had become an unfortunate reminder that I could not have children of my own and, as I have mentioned here before, I was mighty disappointed about that at the time. We once took it in our minds to adopt, but it was not a common practice then in Clarendon and the process was overly difficult and required much more money than we had at the time.

All of which is to say that when I woke up out there in the Bitterroot on what I count to be the 9th of November I was up with an idea. I salvaged all that I could that had not burned up in the fire and I set about building a raft. I plaited reeds and cattails and used them to cinch together odd lengths of pine into a lattice about the size of a large mattress. Then I used the reeds and the spey blade and quilted together charred pieces of blankets and covered the topside of my strange vessel. It was most troublesome and awkward work but I stayed after it and by sunset I had finished. The raft did not look nice, but I hoped it would float. I imagine that many of you will not find it likely that a little old woman could hope to get a fully grown man onto a crude raft and paddle him down a mountain creek to safety. But that is what I meant to do.

I will tell you about one summer when a heifer broke her hind legs in a cattle guard. Our ranch manager, Joe Flud, found her in the pasture. Joe was a diminutive man, but he was also clever and managed to fashion a makeshift hoist out of a fence post and a tarpaulin he had kept in the bed of his truck. He got the heifer back to the pens at headquarters by himself and made splints for the poor creature from a ladle and a spatula he had taken from his wife’s kitchen. Cassidy was away visiting her folks at the time and Joe said she threw a fit when she came home to find her cutlery plastered to the hind legs of that heifer. But Joe saved that heifer and she eventually calved and brought a fair price at the feedlot. My thought was that if little Joe could rescue a heifer by himself with some ingenuity and steadfastness, I ought to be able to rescue this injured man who had done the same for me on so many occasions.

The man did not say much that day save to ask for water. He had gone from green to a terrible shade of orange and his breathing was like that of Judith Ellery, a lifelong smoker who had sat in the pew behind me at First Methodist for many years rattling like gravel caught in the wheel well of a truck. Then her breathing worsened and worsened until one Sunday she did not come to service. She was discovered by her deaf boy facedown in her parsley garden.

Before it was too dark I tugged the raft down a slope of slick mud and into the creek to see if it would float. It did, thank goodness! However I was not certain it would float the both of us. I pulled it back up onto the mud and collected all that I had salvaged. This included a lighter and one fire-starter stick and the ornate spey blade. I bundled it all up in a sheet and tied it down to the raft. I also tied down the long pine branch I had found to use for a kind of punting pole. I decided that we would leave the following morning.

That night I lay close to my friend with my back against him, watching the fire. I did not sleep much. Dawn came fast and cold and I zipped up Terry’s coat and wrapped my hands with strips from a half-burned blanket so that I could better grip the pole in the chill. The sky was gray with skinny clouds and the birds did not want to sing.

By this pale light of dawn I woke him. We have to move you now, I said. We needed to get him onto the raft, I told him, and that I would support his weight and we could take it one step at a time to the creek.

He opened his eyes some but did not utter a word in response. I had left the raft only some yards from us on the side of the creek. He looked at it without moving his head and then used the spruce he was under to pull himself upright onto his good leg. He hollered out an awfully vile word and bunched up his face in pain. I was mighty sorry for him, but I never see a call for nasty language. He leaned on me and my walking stick and I counted out loud each step and bit by bit we hopped him over. He collapsed to the raft and cursed again. Pitiful tears ran off his cheeks. Once he had settled on his back and shut his eyes he was quiet again.

I got a good deep breath and with all my might I pushed that raft down the slope of mud. It took off with less effort than I had expected. I had not accounted for the man’s weight. My gracious, did it take off! I chased after it best as an old woman could but it reached the water without me. He was pulled out to the current and I was not on the raft! I worried I had just sent this injured man on a lonesome boat ride for which he had not bargained. I took a couple of steps back and holding my walking stick I ran and made a jump for it. I flew and landed right on his leg and he gave a big yell! I slung my walking stick over and climbed aboard.

The weight was uneven and cold water sloshed over us. He fussed a bit and held his eyes shut. Out of breath, I told him that I was very sorry I had landed on his bad leg but that he should not worry and we would get him to a doctor in one piece. I situated myself between his legs and forward on the little raft until it balanced and was more or less level above the water.

At first the current was not strong and the raft went slow and was often stuck in the shallows. Often I had to nudge it free with the pole. After a spell the creek turned into a river and the gulch opened up into a great colorful valley of limestone and outcrops of pink granite. We had been blessed with an unusually warm day and the sun was out. We sailed along quicker then and the man slept and after a while we passed a place I recognized, the grave marker I had carved into the stump.

By and by the river wound down into the conifer woods. After going along peacefully through the pines for some time the current turned white and quick and roared over a bevy of jagged rocks. The little raft spun around! We were faced backwards and a pine log broke free from the starboard side. The man partly sank into the cold water and he grimaced and fussed but did not open his eyes. I feared we would capsize and drown. The water splashed in my face and got in my eyes. I wiped them and turned around and endeavored to see ahead. I was shivering something terrible. A little fall appeared ahead in the river. I was sure it would destroy our raft to go over it. I used my pole like a rudder to steer away to the riverbank.