Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Many people believe that Merbecke took Sarah Hovett. However, twenty years later, the investigation into the abduction is as yet ongoing. As such, Special Agent Polite could not tell me everything they had in the way of evidence against Merbecke, but from what I understand it is flimsy and circumstantial. Special Agent Polite has said as much. It is a considerable shame they do not have any of that DNA evidence that is popular today. I believe that it would show Merbecke is innocent of the abduction, however guilty he may be of his other behavior. But Merbecke has quit the earth, and his body has never been recovered. Still some crazy folk do not want to believe me on the fact that he is deceased. No doubt some people believe that I am making all this up.

I will put down what is generally known.

Merbecke lived in a carriage house down the road from the Hovett household. He punched tickets at the Cine Desert picture house frequented by Sarah and her friends. It is unclear if Sarah knew him or not. He had been let go from a position at a summer camp some years prior for having an inappropriate relationship with a twelve-year-old girl there, and again from the picture house under similar circumstances. He never was arrested nor charged with any crime, but some lawmen did speak with him and made note of it. He was also known to buy girls’ undergarments. I will put down here too for good measure that I asked Special Agent Polite about the silly clothes Merbecke had given me to wear and if they had been Sarah Hovett’s. He could not provide me with an answer.

I cannot say to a certainty whether or not Benjamin Merbecke kidnapped that poor girl. There are very few subjects anymore which I can speak to with certainty. However, I do not believe he did. Some of you will slam this book shut and holler that I am a silly old woman warped and rattled by the awful privation of my ordeal and the loss of my husband and that I am without the sense God gave a pig. You get to decide for yourself what you want to believe.

Still, no, I do not entirely know what to make of it all. But I do not allow that this man was too terribly different from the rest of us. As far as I can tell, we sure do all cause a good deal of trouble trying to get what we want. We are all of us the benefactors of someone else’s disadvantage some way or another, whether we would call it that or not. We take turns being bound to secret altars, and we take turns wielding the sacrificial knife. I do not now shy away from the truth that I am a part of that and that Mr. Waldrip might could have married himself a better wife. I have taken more than I can ever hope to give back, and just by going for a little ole walk outside I set new roads for the wind.

There is no great question that the flinty moralists out there who know this story will find nothing in their hearts for Benjamin Merbecke. I surely cannot fault them. Prior to my adventure I would have stood with them in contempt of that pitiful man. Yet whatever uncommon perversion was in him, he had some stroke of heroism in him too, periling his life for me as he did. I cannot be sure that Catherine Drewer would have done any of what he did for me out there in the Bitterroot. I expect she would have thumped me on the head and devoured me over a low flame.

All I am certain of is that Merbecke was not evil. The only authentic evil I can see in people begins with calling other people evil. Nothing quite makes the sense we would like it to. There are those who just do not fit with the way we have it all set up here nowadays, and that is just the way it is. I suppose I sympathize with Merbecke a little bit about that.

I fear that misfits like Merbecke may be the least of our worries. I see a dead emptiness in young folk today. Sometimes I worry that there is little left in a person these days save the desire to participate in a mighty strange collective fever dream of fakery and grand-scale mischief. Perhaps I am just too old and do not know how to play along. Maybe those leaving the world always bemoan its being left worse off for those to follow. The good old days have gone, we say. Maybe I just cannot see what the young people see today with their clear eyes shining against all those impossible lights.

That night after Merbecke passed on, it began to rain. I took shelter leeward a limestone outcrop and used the flip lighter to set a fire in some dry wood I turned up there. I put out the tin to catch water and then slept poorly, curled up to the limestone and wrapped in Terry’s coat.

In the dark I woke to enormous footfalls in the trees like those of a fairy-tale giant. A bull elk the size of Mr. Waldrip’s truck came along. He was a mangy old thing and had antlers that looked as if they had grown too heavy for him. They were chipped and scarred like an old table in need of a good varnishing. I would imagine that he was my age in elk years, howsoever those tally. And gracious, he was big!

I did not move. He settled by me against the outcrop not two yards away. I could have reached out and touched him. I sat up until sunrise listening to the old beast struggle to breathe and to the pluck of the rain on his hide. Then I got up slowly and as quietly as I could I took the tin and sallied forth again into that gentle storm. Downstream I followed the little river. The sun came out in the rain. Mr. Waldrip used to say that meant the Devil was spanking his wife.

The nights were dark and damp and cold and it poured some through all of them. Thank goodness it did not snow. I did not sleep much. When I did sleep it was to dream of hot baths and hollow glass people filling up with hot water. Still I pulled on downriver each morning, hammering the earth with the end of my walking stick. I ate anything I could. Mostly I suppered on tubers and once a handful of worms from a rotted beehive. I did not often stop to fish. I understood I had to keep moving.

By my count I was by my lonesome making my way downriver for five days and four nights until I came to a dewy little cedar brake. Although the rain had let up that day, clouds still covered the sky, but it was not very cold. I sat to rest on a small sickly variety of juniper. I dropped my walking stick to the ground and sipped water from the tin and watched the mountains.

When I would come to find my way out of that wilderness I made big headlines in the newspapers and was met with a good deal of fame and celebrity. I have encountered many remarkable people in the twenty years since. One such person was a lively and charismatic woman with curly brown hair cut short and peculiar scars on her face almost like chicken wire. Her name was Jillian, if I recall aright. She had an unusual accent, as if she had emigrated from a country that may not exist. I met her earlier this year while I was making a talk at the Explorers Club in New York City about an article I had written for a magazine on the twentieth anniversary of my ordeal. The article was titled “Kingdomtide: A Seventy-Two-Year-Old Woman’s and a Masked Man’s Journey Through the Bitterroot Wilderness.” Anyhow this Jillian approached me as I was leaving and told me that she had known all about my story back at the time. When she was seventeen years old she had been a volunteer with the Forest Service in Montana during the time of my ordeal. Her father had led the search party that had gone after me and she made mention of a park ranger there, a woman named Debra Lewis, who had persisted in the search after everyone else had abandoned it. Jillian said that she had not thought much about that time for many years, and had not kept in touch with this park ranger, but her story and description of this woman have left a lasting impression on me.

I made an effort to track down Ranger Debra Lewis but have so far not had any luck. There were two leads, a ranger named Claude Paulson whom she had worked with, and a ranger chief named John Gaskell. The former was sorry to say he had not heard from her after she had left, and the latter has unfortunately passed. Debra Lewis remains as yet a stranger to me, although I think on her from time to time. It is hard work to know what difference she had in my adventure. Perhaps her efforts remain unproven and without purpose. Perhaps, in the end, they are the same as Benjamin Merbecke’s. Same as mine. I never had any good reason to live these twenty more years after I crawled out of that little airplane. I suppose the terrible truth of it is that not an earthly creature ever has any good reason to live at all. But we do it anyhow, even when we have all the good reason in the world not to. And just take a gander at all the harm we do. All the which of it is to say that if Ranger Lewis has occasion to read this account, I hope she would find that I have done the story justice.