Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 3

Leaping Lion Nabs Kid. A local lad barely escaped fatal entanglement with a lethal creature while fleeing from a funnel not far from the river’s edge in the company of his Mother last Sunday, as an alert bystander insinuated himself between the tyke and certain death just before the twister lifted the roof off a henhouse and demolished the family’s ancestral home. All at no greater cost than a twisted ankle for the lucky duck’s Uncle. Make and model of the leaping creature remains a mystery, on account of the wind and rain, and general hubbub, as too does the current whereabouts of the survivor’s twin brother, who plunged over the edge never to be seen again when left unattended in the tumult. Or at least not yet. The twister destroyed many a tool shed, not to mention two dozen head of herefords, though the missionary meeting at the Methodist church went off as planned that very Sunday afternoon. Mystery man allegedly responsible for salvaging the alleged widow’s allegedly surviving son reportedly remains missing, too. Sightings of man or beast kindly should be reported to this desk.

So might have reported the Plowman Meteor, narrative-commencement-essence-wise

Exactly when and how A. Jacks came to our County and its remote backwaters hard by the Platte River’s roiling flow remains even to this day a matter of some dispute.

Greater Nate claimed the man appeared at precisely the instant a mountain lion sprang from its concealed perch atop a sandy bluff intent on snatching the more slightly built of the twins from his mother’s clutches. A prototypically tawny beast splayed elegantly against the sandstone mesa, jaws cracked, salivating, presumably, at the sight of the untended twin’s fleshy loins. The mountain lion, that is. A. Jacks himself somewhat notably less tawny and long, not to mention a mere man, standing seven cubits at the shoulder, or should that be seven hands? A little over average height, in any event. His burly frame topped by an unruly shock of thick black hair, his chiseled features punctuated by characteristically blazing orbs. Eyes which lacked not the foresight, apparently, to spy the crouching predator and take action before it could, or perhaps at precisely the same time.

This near the family farm north of Plowman some years after Faith’s man up and disappeared without a trace, leaving behind the wife and twin boys, and Faith’s brother Arch, not to mention inconsiderable incandescent incongruity inherent or maybe incipient to the illusion the several potential mountain lion appetizers had -- or were about -- to become.

So to speak.

A half second later and the big cat would have succeeded in its mission, as all later agreed. Particularly being as Thomas, the more slightly built of the twins, could and would have fit comfortably in the lion’s gaping jaws. A mere snack for the big cat. A boy aged ten or maybe twelve at the time -- we can’t remember precisely -- suitably pre-pubescent, in any event. The lad maybe ninety-eight pounds soaking weight. A mere sliver of the man he would someday become. A prototypically towheaded boy-child boasting but enough fleshy tendon to satisfy a big cat’s ravening appetite for a day or two, tops. Even less if the cat had cubs stashed nearby anxious to devour whatever lifeless bundle of protein their mother brought back to the den that day.

This on a May late afternoon some years ago now, in the land of black dirt pastures, cottonwoods dotting the plain, flat land fanning in every direction, as far as the eye can see, mostly, with one notable exception, to be addressed anon, an egg by spunky swimmer impregnated -- so to metaphorically say -- in the customary way one supposes, all modesty aside, gestating conventionally, as dictated by genomes, or DNA, or Darwin grinning modestly, or perhaps the chance of infinite happenstances. The child frolicking long in the womb-y soup, happy as the proverbial clam, one presumes, at least until the rather rude eviction by circumstance demanded -- for one’s hips can only be so wide, practically speaking, upright walkers that they were, and are -- a sudden expulsion, ejection, slippery catapulting from place of safety into the way of blinding light and predator.

In a manner of speaking.

With a thunderous oath A. Jacks leapt just as the lion leapt also, colliding with the cat in mid-flight. The burly man crashed against the flanks of the seven-feet-long-if-it-was-an-inch feline, causing the cat to careen down the sandy banks of the roiling Platte, heels over teakettles, screeching and yowling every step of the way, while the former, A. Jacks, merely bounced in a generally equal and opposite direction from the point of impact, like a cue ball that expends its momentum in the billiards against which it has hurled itself, and reposes more or less serenely even as those particles scramble chaotically through space and time. Whether A. Jacks attempted to wrangle the cat, or merely propel it harmlessly into the roiling Platte, none could say for certain, and remains also a matter of conjecture. Either way, Thomas the more slightly built of the twins found himself in the arms of his mother, and not traversing the gastrointestinal tract of a ravenous cat, bite by grinding bite, as he otherwise might have been.

From the mountain lion’s perspective a somewhat less dramatic event, probably. Lurking in a well-concealed lair of a late spring afternoon, just waiting for prey, when up comes the wind and the thunderous rumble accompanying lightning’s flashing, clouds bunching, a storm brewing, twisters in the air, but concealed and comfortable enough withal, merely waiting and watching. When suddenly under one’s very whiskered nose stumble a company of bipeds. Though in the storm-induced gloom one particularly smallish package of protein looks very much like a newborn deer fawn lurching its uncertain way. Thus instinctually primed, leaping as one’s nature commands in the general direction of the unexpected bounty in one’s way cast, only to be rather rudely interrupted mid-flight, propelled over the very edge of the narrow snaking trail -- albeit landing on one’s feet as is customary -- before skidding to a halt in the dirt and the mud and the dust. Only to find the deer fawn tumbling directly into one’s clutches a half count later, as if bodily flung by the fierce and unpredictable wind. Doing then what one’s very DNA commands, without hesitation or reflection, because instinct cannot be debated. Dragging the prey to the protective cover of nearby scrub and brush as is customary, notwithstanding that it, the prey, turned out to be not a deer fawn at all, albeit plenty rich in amino acids, its upright-walking weirdness notwithstanding.

All in a day’s work.

Brung by the surplus deer population, we later agreed. Notwithstanding nary a speck of mountain within six hundred linear miles, our county nonetheless attracted a card-carrying exemplar of that exotic species, as Faith and Arch and Thomas and Peter the other twin learned the hard way that very late May afternoon while scrabbling from their modest two-story farmhouse to escape the impending tornado. “Too damn many deer,” we muttered one to another at the Idle Chat in downtown Plowman proper. “If only them danged fish and game boys opened up the season a month or two earlier them bambis wouldn’t be so damn many of them and we’d have no damn bloodthirsty mountain lions to eat our sheep.” Or our kids. Many a trigger finger itching. Deprived of opportunity, we holstered our weapons, thus paving the way for a slightly superior predator to occupy the field, or, in this case, sandy bluff hard by the Platte’s roiling flow.

Oh, the cyclone. Shifting spring winds tend to bring them our way. Cold winds scudding in the grip of the jet stream crash against the flanks of sluggish gulf air unlucky enough to stray in the way, the radically misfit air masses intermingling chaotically, with predictably disastrous results. Located some ten miles from town as they were, at the end of a dirt and gravel lane mere yards from the river’s edge, Faith and Arch and the boys benefitted not in the least from the siren blasting warning from atop of the courthouse on the Plowman town square -- for not even seventy-mile-an-hour winds can whisk a siren’s sound all of ten miles – but scurried for cover (Faith and Arch and the boys, that is) nonetheless, as the rapidly advancing low pressure anomaly made a beeline for their front parlor. Intuition, call it. A Midwesterner’s hard won sense of precisely when and where a twister threatens imminent death and destruction.

Signs aplenty that particular May day. At least for those with eyes to see. Monstrous thunderheads bunching in the west. An eerily atypical darkening of those towering clouds. Ominous, brooding, blue black cloudbanks blanketing the horizon. Skiffs of unusually intermittent breeze sallying from all sides. Most provocatively, the storm’s swirling sentries descending from the blackened mass in scouting parties of two or three, then five or ten, then ten or twenty. Oddly shaped, oddly rotating swirling currents dropping from the damn wall cloud itself, some flagging east, while others make a course due west, while still others dance and dally in a north-southerly minuet.

Rotation, they call it. Damn bad news, we call it. No sight quite like it.

“That ain’t right. See how them tails swirl and bunch and drop down like a fog atop a stream bed? And one cloud goin’ this way while another goes t’other way? That there is a twister, or fixin’ to be.”

So we mumbled one to another while anxiously scanning the sky.

Faith and Arch no exception, veteran plow jockeys that they were.

Death an ever present threat from above.

Followed soon enough by the silence.

The awful silence. A clammy, oppressive, stifling, unnerving vacuum of sound. No stillness quite so deep as that of a prairie landscape lying in the way of a tornado. For those five or ten or twenty minutes, as the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen making up mere atmosphere surrender serenely, passively, yes indifferently to the low pressure center’s summons, the grass-strewn steppes stand lifeless, still as the proverbial grave, a deep and abiding sheer stillness so deep and unyielding as inevitably to make the hair on the back of one’s neck leap to attention. Which it does, and did, that particular May day. Birds and beasts of the field cease movement, or even the slightest hint of braying, bleating, belching, or chirruping, powering down to mute mode uniformly and on cue even as the sheer stillness thickens, like a formerly raucous pool hall stunned into silence by gunshot.

Alerted, as it were, by all this and more, Arch and Faith gathered up the twins and made haste away from their modest two-story farmhouse up the hill to the storm cellar or, as we say around here, the “cave” Arch’s great-grandfather Arch thought to dig before he died. Just in the knick, too. By then the twister had lifted the roof off a henhouse near Silver City, and flattened an implement shed at the outskirts of Hart Creek, before, scarcely sated, apparently, digging its windy mitts into the lending library/pioneer museum/slot-machine casino at the edge of nearby Viborg.

How the timber flew. Splintered in an instant into a blizzard of sticks and bricks. Like a dollhouse surrendering to a peevish toddler’s hammering. A gigantic toddler’s peevish hammering. A cross beam intended as support for the main roof truss imbedded itself in the side panels of a like new 1988 Buick with only 85,000 miles halfway across town. A perfectly serviceable IBM selectric typewriter winged its way out the door and through the front window of the hardware store next door. The pioneer museum was particularly hard hit. Highly prized if seldom thumbed missives detailing the escapades of Achilles and Paris, and Leif and Ethelred, and Arthur and Mordred, and Sherman and Lee, and Rockne and Chamberlain (Gus the football-toting Nebraskan who beat the fabled Four Horseman twice) took brief albeit memorable flight. Lovingly preserved photographic collections commemorating the county’s settling by and through the extraordinary efforts of the Hendersons and Connors and Slaughters and Johnsons and Andersens and Andersons and Cyvliks and Shotskis and Hauptmanns, and many too many others to mention, surrendered to entropy, all semblance of order abandoned. For days grazing herefords stumbled across the widely-dispersed snapshots in time, here an Aunt May, there a Grandfather Arch, not to mention Parrish and brother Henry and Luther and the faded mug shot of the whole fam founding damily recorded the very winter of the empire’s homesteading, not long after the War Between The States, Leese clan patriarch Arch and his imported Swedish wife Becky and their five boys and five girls ranging in age from thirteen years to thirteen days, as assembled by an itinerant photographer under the big maple that then and still commands the north forty south of the river confluence, from which humble sod shanty beginnings the chain of begats began, and uninterrupted continued, at least until the day the churning funnel took dead aim at the family castle, setting its sights on Faith and Arch and the twins, seemingly, and the stranger who quite suddenly appeared in their midst even as the family scrambled up the hill to the cave just below the Home Place, unaware a genuine mountain lion perched on a sandstone outcrop awaiting a tender fleshy morsel’s distracted passing.

That the lion would leap even as a simmering twister bunched both surprised and did not surprise all and sundry, for though living things generally cower in fear as the winds ominously stiffen, of all God’s creatures the most inscrutable by far is the cat.

Leave it to a feline to break rank unforeseeably.

The narrow snaking trail from the family’s modest farmhouse to the cave at the edge of the Home Place boundary offered just such ambush opportunity, as it turned out. Surprisingly and against all odds a formidable bluff climbed to the sky just adjacent the farmhouse, a promontory left behind, apparently, by the glacier that otherwise flattened our land tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years ago now -- we aren’t quite sure of the precise dates -- the bluff -- as we sometimes called it -- itself a compilation of sandstone and scattered pine rising gradually at first, then more steeply, to a promontory backed up against a cliff on the Platte’s very roiling edge. A unique geologic feature boasting not least a solid stone cellar -- or “cave” as we call them -- cut into the very hillside itself, and to whose welcoming arms Arch and Faith and Peter and Thomas hurried even as the very sky died, or seemed to, a stunning emptying of all things that presaged the even more sudden coming of hellacious wind. And, trailing them just slightly, the stranger A. Jacks, unknown and unnoted, at least until the lion leapt.

Arch never saw it. He was otherwise occupied scanning the horizon with one eye while leading his family to the cave’s mouth for throwing-oneself-in purposes. Peter the older and slightly huskier of the twins clad in levi’s and plaid short-sleeved work shirt and Angels baseball cap trailed Arch by a pace. Whether he saw the lion leap could not have been said. Faith gripped Thomas, one hand on the boy’s shoulder, urging him on, trailing her son and brother by a good ten yards, incognizant of lurking predator, understandably -- what with the storm bearing down, wind steadily thickening, heavy raindrops spattering intermittently -- which is when she sensed slightly, or perhaps vaguely cognized, the bushy-bearded man scampering mere paces behind her.

Did not perceive so much as intuited the presence of. Or perhaps Faith herself wished the very man into existence, knowing as she did not know she knew, but nonetheless somehow did know, that a bulky, muscley, modest-to-a-fault, unfailingly brave interceptor of leaping lions would come in quite useful just then. Or perchance A. Jacks had been there all along, running up the same snaking trail hour after hour, day after day, year after year, waiting, just waiting, for the convergence of Faith and family and a ravenous lion and churning funnel in the same place in the same dimension at the same time.

Who knows?

That Peter the huskier of the twins was slightly ahead on the trail, while Thomas the more slightly built of the twins strayed slightly behind, could not be attributed to design, intelligence, so much as mere fortuity, happenstance, accident, the random chance dance of figures fleeing chaotically, scrambling serendipitously, jiggling unpredictably, while on the lam from a funnel’s twisting fingers. Though many the possible configurations of the four on the narrow snaking trail – Arch/Peter/Faith/Thomas, or Faith/Peter/Thomas/Arch, or Peter/Arch/Thomas/Faith, and so on -- no particular order could be said to be inevitable, necessarily, in the sense of preordained, static, immutable. Or, for that matter, the manner in which a river, say, tugs beneath its roiling flow four boaters -- or perhaps five -- cast into the watery murk when the boaters’ boat tips. Or, for that matter, how those soaked boaters will disperse, or where the flow might individually cargo their struggling somethingness-es. To the sandy bank, for example, or upriver a spell to a gravel bar, alternatively, or directly into a tangle of logs and brush, perhaps. All mere possibilities, potentialities, the interplay of innumerable variables of dizzying complexity -- force and drag and momentum and drift and so on -- complexities indeed sufficient to stagger a supercomputer. So that, in a very real sense, Thomas might just as easily have been the twin pushed over the edge while Peter remained safe in his Mother’s grip. Unless of course one entertains the possibility that some accommodation indeed had been reached, a design, a meeting of the minds, a tete-a-tete ultimately resulting in conversion rather than loss of matter, for matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and in this, perhaps, can be found a hint of something other than “accident,” so-called.

As eternally writ.

Even as Faith saw or perceived or intuited the largish man blasting past her on the narrow trail, bolts of lightning erratically illuminating the rapidly darkening sky, the sheer stunning silence of unmoving air gave way to the first screaming sentries of the coming cyclone. Sticks and stones jet propelled by the twister’s collision with the library-cum-museum-cum-casino in relatively nearby Viborg penetrated the farm’s perimeter. Not to mention a Zenith 13-inch black and white television, a nearly intact Whirlpool washer-dryer, and, of course, splintered bits of stick and shattered sections of stone too numerous to tally. Not to mention further, as legend had it, the serene figure of Slim Torgerson slipping nickels into a one-armed bandit even as he and the machine careened o’er the landscape in the zephyr’s vicious grip, flying at an altitude of five to five hundred feet, variously, before being unceremoniously deposited on an island in the Platte River’s middle, where Slim continued to robotically tug the machine’s one arm even as the rains came and winds multiplied, or so local legend had it.

Game of chance, indeed.

But not Faith and Thomas the slighter of her sons. As lightning forked and thunder clapped and skies thickened and the funnel made its weaving way from Viborg’s edge to the river’s bank, demolishing the odd grain bin, henhouse and tool shed on its meandering way, Mother and son clambered and scrambled for the cave’s safety, blissfully unaware of quite another form of lurking danger.

It should be mentioned the four or rather five figures clambered and scrambled up the bluff from the valley below, and not down the trail from the plateau above, primarily because the Home Place had been lost some years previously. Lost in the sense of surrendered. Surrendered in the sense of conquered. Conquered in the sense of foreclosed. A victim of the Great Depression and Grandfather Henry’s perhaps o’erzealous financial ways, as abetted by Pop Slaughter’s sheer mendaciousness, coupled with that of other damn bankers, and the lusting greed of an Omaha insurance mogul. He, the mogul, bought the land for a song at the foreclosure sale a few short weeks or months before Pearl Harbor. Then all hell broke loose. Next thing anybody knew the Home Place had been well and truly sealed from undue intrusion, by electric fencing among other formidable barriers. Coming down the bluff from above would have been easier than rushing up the bluff from below. Alas, Faith and Arch and the boys had not that opportunity.

Whether the twister might have plucked the family from the edge of the very ledge on which the narrow trail snaked had the big cat not interceded remains too a matter of mere conjecture. Suffice to say the family thought the twister had done precisely that when, in all the confusion, the crew eventually gathered wits sufficiently to count heads.

Which is when they realized Peter was missing.

Unaccounted for.

Gone.

They would, of course, immediately have deserted the cave into which they had only just thrown themselves in favor of a rather vigorous search and rescue operation, except the very fierce winds that bodily had tossed them into the cave -- while lifting Peter over the edge in the other direction, apparently -- at that precise instant chose to slam an enormous tree branch into the hillside not five feet from the cave’s mouth. A not un-mean feat, particularly given that the tree the branch originally came with clung to the planet a good half a hundred yards to the west. A mere stick becomes a missile in a twister’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour grip. Try though they might, Arch and Faith and A. Jacks could not summon strength to overcome the vicious winds pinning them. From that stony refuge the five or rather four of them weathered the storm’s passage, shielded yet able to hear the storm’s tumult and feel -- yes physically feel -- the storm’s pressurized passing. Quite a sensation, that.

When at length the winds abated A. Jacks and Arch scrambled down the steep sides of the bluff over whose edge Peter had been tossed, apparently, but by then the boy was gone, lost in a tangle of scrub and brush, and, of course, the ominously sporadic scattered tracks of a big cat. Though diligently followed for long hours with aid of flashlight and moonlight, the tracks eventually disappeared, simply up and disappeared, as if the creature had moved wavelike in many directions -- or perhaps every possible direction -- before vanishing altogether. Peter, too, having vanished.

Then it rained.

Hard.

When we gathered in the basement of the Methodist church for the makeshift rescue-planning summit and memorial service the following evening many a man amongst us remarked on the characteristic freight train sound the twister had emitted while making passage through our county, and the random manner in which flotsam and jetsam first scooped up then casually vomited by the storm had deposited itself. As, for example, the holstein milk cow Gabe Sutter thought he had lost to the twister’s maliciousness, at least until his neighbor, Abe Connor, found the creature still chewing her cud in his, Abe’s, kitchen, calmly dropping cow pies on his, Abe’s, kitchen linoleum. Aside from the de-materialized grain bins and tool sheds and library/museum/casino, and many a shattered fencepost and windmill and telephone pole, and the scattered elms and maples and oaks and other assorted flora ripped to shreds by the twister’s winds, and a handful of hereford yearlings found in an ungainly pile by the river, their necks gruesomely snapped -- the calves not aligned with Lady Luck, apparently, as had been Gabe’s holstein (for ever unpredictable is the cosmic crap game in which all and sundry are mere players) -- the storm blessedly did relatively little in the way of material damage, and not a single loss of life, or at least of human life, Saints be Praised.

Excepting, of course, the boy fallen into a cougar’s clutches. Missing and presumed … well, missing.

Once assembled in the church basement we collectively marveled again at the storm’s power, remarking again on the awful and absurd terror of raw nature, his Mother most of all, for none grieve a child’s loss quite like the Mother of that lost child. Arch at Faith’s side, staunch-backed and stoic, determined not to make eye contact with the midnight-blue clad agents arrayed at the back of the church basement in surreptitious fashion, concealed so effectively that Arch alone much noticed them. “A. Jacks” as he eventually came to be known, or, more accurately, A. Jackson Payne, which by and by was shortened to A. Jackson, then A. Jacks, sat alone on a folding chair in the back of the church, or so Faith testified -- for none amongst us much noticed him either -- as Pastor Bowman intoned the homily to the cadence of sobbing women and more than a few sobbing men. The boy, Thomas, A. Jacks had saved by timely colliding with a leaping lion sat head bent and eyes closed at Faith’s side, unable, apparently, to so much as witness the awful event, buckled at the emotional knees as he undoubtedly was by his twin brother’s untimely loss.

A sad deal all the way around.

By then Faith had emerged somewhat from the confusion in which she marinated in the moments and hours after the lion unusually leapt. A vague, discombobulated, surreal, flummoxed brand of perplexed bewilderment. What happened? Where was he? The lights fairly blinding from the flashing forks of enervated gases, accompanied by the steady thrum of rushing wind as propelled by devilishly low pressure, the deafening -- or nearly so -- catatonia of overwhelming flustered lusting euthanasia, or an epidural or something, even as complete strangers strained and heaved over her prone somethingness, the something that is not nothing, all well intentioned, presumably, but still, a woman’s bare butt merits some modicum of modesty, but not here, oh no, not in this place, where even as Thomas periodically yelped by way of exercising his twice-burning lungs, and cast confused glances this way and that in search of something familiar, a babe in need of nurturing for sure, and even as the beautiful boy-child slid into her mitts and atop her heaving bosom for Mothering purposes, the hissing wind notwithstanding, low pressure’s yearning to cleave the boy from her heaving sides frustrated by fate, reality so-called, the welcoming embrace of the cave, from which no giant funnel might suck them. But not Peter, who apparently never bodily made it into the sanctuary, or rather out of the sanctuary -- depending on one’s viewpoint -- but instead fell or was pulled or plucked or propelled over the edge, just over the edge, having strayed too close to the edge, down by the water. Faith herself was heavily sedated, of course, as befitted the occasion, for the days of dropping one’s cubs by the side of the field while taking a slight break from planting are long gone, thank God, or at least relatively so. She lay abed surrounded by mourners and grievers and weepers, once news spread. Oddly idyllic, too. “All part of God’s plan,” someone said. “Everything happens for a reason,” added another. “Such a beautiful child,” observed more than a few. “God is love,” the general consensus. Neither she or her husband knew, had known, the twin would be lost, a fact attributable to the inadequate machinery of the time, so were heartened by the first child’s struggling, kicking, gasping emergence, only to be shoved over the edge themselves, so to speak, when the second child was by a leaping lion bodily taken from them, from her, from the child’s Mother, even as the nurses quietly assured her the good Docs had done all that was possible, and the Docs quietly explained how this fang or that cord or claw had gotten wrapped around a windpipe or shoulder or sucking chest wound, as sometimes happens, sadly, a confluence or coincidence or chance collision of child and leaping lion that cannot be completely precluded, one’s very best efforts notwithstanding, or so they explained. Holding the surviving twin in her arms as together they huddled in the cave while outside lightning forked and thunder rumbled, Faith turned to the man we knew only as A. Jacks and gripped his arm with the ferocity of a lion or, in this case, a Mother deprived of her child.

“Can I hold him?” she asked.

She could not. He was gone.

So explained the nurses and Docs and grievers and mourners and weepers in due course.

Only A. Jacks oddly seemed to understand. Seemed to understand, oddly.

“You have to find him,” Faith said.

A. Jacks nodded.

“I will,” he replied.