Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 4

The hunt commenced in earnest the following day. Given but twenty-one short days to seal the deal, the hunting party coalesced with more than usual dispatch. They gathered at Arch and Faith’s modest farmhouse at dawn intent on scouring the countryside for the man-eating cat. Or, more accurately, boy-child-kidnapping mountain lion.

The modest farmstead bordered the river in the most westerly and most northerly corner of Cathar County in those days, a roughly eighty-acre spread, corn and milo and soybean fields encircling the white and green trimmed two-story farmhouse. Arch took over the land from his Mother Alice, who inherited it from her Father Henry, who inherited it from his Father Luther, as bequeathed by the original Arch. Five grain bins glistening in the rays of the dawning sun. A red barn with white doors and distinctive rooster-shaped lightning rod hulking directly adjacent the modest farmhouse. A brisk May morning, hints of frost in low-lying areas. The sleepy men and women of the valley between the villages far from civilized sight and mind struggling to understand, coming to grips with, the rather remarkable coalescing of violent weather coupled with even more violent animal attack, and the boy of ten or maybe twelve claimed, apparently, by the gruesome coupling.

Damned determined to do something about it.

Even as the men stepped from their creaking Fords and Chevys and GM pick-up trucks -- steaming coffee mugs in hand, many a trusted hunting dog yapping and swirling furiously at their knees -- and even as Arch limped from the family castle to take command of the regiment, trusty rifle in hand, the sound of A. Jacks sorting timber could be heard, if but faintly.

This was just over the edge, adjacent the property boundary between farming land and Home Place. A riot of lumber reposed one atop or askew or beside another. A. Jacks found that too. Where once a patch of ankle high grasses awaited consumption by the family’s half dozen head of holsteins when they, the cows, got around to it, there now lay or lied or strew a haphazard collection of boards and planks and other assorted timber. Just like that, appeared out of nowhere. Right fine walnut and cherry and maple deposited or dumped or dropped on Arch’s land by the storm’s pernicious, not to mention perverse, not to mention proverbially fickle, winds.

A. Jacks signed on for the job of sorting the timber while killing time awaiting the cat’s capture. Or not. He got an early start. Already beavering industriously even as the men of the clan gathered to hunt.

Whether the hunting partiers much noticed the distinctive slap and crack of boards as groggily they, the groggy men, congealed for cat-capturing purposes could not readily have been said. None among the company betrayed the slightest hint of distraction from the grim task at hand. After mobbing for a short sermon and benedicting prayer, eyes fixed and hands clasped, the men scattered purposefully, long striding and clench jawed, exchanging scarcely a pleasantry.

Lute and Rafe and Carl and Tobias and Stevey and Jimmy headed out in a mostly southerly direction to scour the fields and occasional breaks of pine. Harly and Tim and Festus and Joseph and Zac and Randy embarked on a mostly northerly course to finetooth comb the scrub and brush country. Lester and Duane and Rich and George and Mike and Calvin made a vaguely westerly heading, eyes fixed on the soybean fields over which they roamed. The final crew, including Taylor and Teddy and Sisco and Kevin and Bob and the other Bob, manned the eastern corridor. Each calloused farming hand gripping a fully loaded iron firing piece.

Twenty-one because the product of primes, perhaps, and because three and seven bear symbolic significance above all other mere numerals, possibly.

Or perhaps due to the suggestion of chance inherent in it.

By then the tracks were long gone, of course. The three-inch rainfall had seen to that. The rifle-toting men fanned out not with any firm leads in hand so much as armed with the raw hope of stumbling across success on their mission, as augmented by yapping hounds and the hand of divine providence. From field to field they trudged. Up many a hill (few though those be in our county) and down many a dale (assuming we have one). Striding shoulder to shoulder even as two dozen bewildered herefords followed their progress with interest.

Faith stayed home to tend the relatives and neighbors and friends and complete strangers tending her. Well-intentioned family and friends flooded the family farmstead. Word of the savage attack quickly leaked. News spreads powerful fast in our county. Aunt Greta and her daughters Bets and Beth arrived within the hour, covered hot dish in hand. Tuna casserole, to be precise. Cousin Susan and the neighboring Tjomsvitchisk girls arrived more or less at the same time, bearing rolls and cole slaw and ample condolences. Johnny and Mac from the farm just over the hill arrived with their Mother Mabel that very afternoon. Thomas the surviving twin was made to greet them. Under normal circumstances the three boys – or rather four boys, including Peter – well would have taken advantage of the unexpected recreating opportunity. Instead they merely stood awkwardly, shuffling from one foot to another, hands plunged deeply into bib overall pockets, before Thomas mumbled his excuses and fled back to his room.

Somewhat unexpectedly they didn’t leave. The grievers, that is. Not in the collective, anyway. One shift arrived just as another shift left. By some mysterious intuitive alchemy and resolve the women of the village seemed to know when to arrive, and what to bring, so that Faith and her remaining child and limping brother were never without provisions, and never quite alone.

Even as the hunting men disbursed that morning Faith was led ashen-faced from the kitchen sink over which she aimlessly fiddled to a sofa in the living room where sundry comforting efforts flowed.

“Everything happens for a reason,” one among the mourners said.

“A room has been prepared for him,” someone added.

“God does work in mysterious ways, after all.”

And so on.

Yes, … but ..., Faith thought to herself. Why did I survive, she said, or rather thought about saying, but without actually saying it, knowing as she did the futility of rhetorical inquiry on such occasions.

Of course a genuine game warden from the North Platte office had made an appearance by then. Driving a state-owned Toyota Tundra pick-up truck, resplendent in his blue-gray official game warden shirt complete with the moniker “Dave” stitched handsomely over a shirt pocket. He stopped in town long enough to pay respects to our Sheriff, who was a Hampton even then. The Sheriff, that is. He stood maybe six feet four, maybe two hundred forty pounds, boasting two meaty chins and both a sidearm pistol and a Smokey the Bear hat. The game warden, that is.

“We aim to trap the critter,” he explained to our Sheriff and the half dozen locals who happened to be lounging around the Sheriff’s office at the time, eager for some diversion from crushing farm ennui. “Me and a couple boys from the station in St. Paul come to set the snares. If it was a cat, and if she ain’t hightailed it away already, we’ll stay ‘til we’ve caught her.”

“What do you mean ‘if’?” our Sheriff said, leaning back in his chair at his desk in our county jail across from the county courthouse.

The game warden shrugged.

“Not sayin’ one way or t’other. Could be anythin’. Nobody seen it direct. Damn unusual, a big cat like that findin’ its way this far south. Then agin, we had reports of a critter near Thedford just last fall, stalkin’ a family’s schnauzer. And that ain’t but two hundred miles from here as the crow flies. It’s the deer that bring ‘em.”

“You find it?” our Sheriff asked.

“Nope, never did,” the warden responded.

“Uh huh,” the Sheriff grunted. “I see.”

The warden piloted his truck pregnant with trapping gear to the Sinclair station at the edge of town where he went inside with his deputies to take a piss. Not all at the same time. The truck pregnant with gear, not the warden.

When the trio returned to the truck they found the it’s right rear tire was flat.

The warden lifted his cap from his head and scratched it, the head.

“I’m damned,” he said. “Thought I’d checked the pressure just t’other day.”

A deputy kneeling at the side of the deflated tire shook his head.

“Don’t do no good when a knife cut has been made in the tread,” he said.

Sure enough, the tire was well and truly slashed. A jagged tear of the kind a whetted hunting knife makes when assigned the task of emptying air from the tire it has targeted.

They changed the tire, not without effort, before heading out on the gravel lanes north of town, making a fix for the river. The scene of the animal attack. Figuring the beast likely lurked where last seen.

They would have made it, too, but for the radiator going bad.

Not five miles out of town the radiator spouted steam like a Yellowstone geyser gleefully on display. Victim of an unexpected hole the size a b.b. gun makes.

Not a half minute after the state-owned truck slid to a gravel-spitting stop Arch’s third cousin Roger Tunnicliff happened by. Piloting his truck, which just happened to be a genuine wrecker.

Following several minutes of tire kicking Roger winched the steaming state-owned truck for hauling to Lester Gallagher’s garage. Promising to send another truck to haul the warden and his deputies back to town, unless of course they got there first by walking.

The promised ferry never arrived. The three fish and game boys instead traversed the five miles, give or take, back into town by lifting one weary foot in front of another.

They arrived just in time to find that disaster again had struck.

While making its way to Lester’s garage the state-owned truck had somewhat inopportunely, and mysteriously, slipped off Roger’s winch. It fell into a ditch and down a slight slope where it rolled at least twice before coming to a shuddering halt.

They found the trapping gear hopelessly intermixed with the mangled steel wreckage the state-owned truck had become.

Accidents will happen.

A quick call to the insurance man and the fish and game boys loaded up in our Sheriff’s squad car for delivery back to their offices in St. Paul.

They came back later that very day. In a different truck, with a fresh complement of big cat trapping gear.

This time they didn’t bother stopping for coffee.

Or to piss.

Whilst traversing to the river the truck slid to a stop, arrested by a man standing at the side of the road waving his arms while jumping up and down. At least to the extent a boot-wearing farmer can jump.

The warden and his deputies piled from the truck to drink in the clodhopper’s tale, accompanied by much pointing and abundant swearing. The warden grabbed his trusty rifle from the rack in the back of the truck. The deputies unlatched the safeties on their sidearms. Together the men slipped off the gravel road across a field of seedling soybeans through a lonely pine shelter belt to a stand of winter wheat near the juncture of the Platte and Loup Rivers where the big cat had been spied lounging in the thickets not an hour before.

At least according to the leaping local man.

Treading lightly the trio canvassed the area, hunched to the ground, senses on full alert.

They didn’t find the cat. Or any sign of the cat. By the time they trudged back to their second state-owned truck parked by the side of the road an hour or so later, their local guide had up and gone. Disappeared without a trace. Which, unluckily, meant the warden had no one on hand to help him find a nearby phone to place the emergency call on account of the truck being on fire.

A true conflagration. The truck engulfed from stem to stern. Flames leapt from the truck’s every nook and cranny, assuming a state-owned four-by-four with club cab has crannies and nooks.

As the astonished warden and equally astonished deputies lifted their hats from their heads like marionettes on a string to scratch their respective heads, again, mouths ingloriously agape, the ravenous inferno consumed each and every belt, hose, point, plug, knob, dial and associated naugahyde finery, right down to the four tires belching thick black smoke the way burning rubber does.

After watching the truck burn a spell the trio made their way the three miles give or take o’er the Old Chicago Highway to the tavern at Lone Star where they placed first a call to the insurance man and secondly to the St. Paul office before patiently awaiting rescue while sipping the iced tea the proprietor graciously sold them.

The three state lion trappers, would-be, somewhat unbelievably returned a third time, the very next morning. Demonstrating again the seemingly ubiquitous symbolic potency of that prime digit. Or, perhaps, mere maddening perverse rigidity.

This time they didn’t stop in town, and did not arrest their momentum at some yokel’s urgings, either one, instead making their grim-faced way directly to the river. The three men had only just disembarked at the river’s edge intent on deploying the trapping snares when the first bullet whizzed just over one of the deputy’s heads.

The head of one of the deputies.

He hit the turf with no visible reluctance.

His companions merely gaped.

A split second later a second echoing shot lifted the Smokey the Bear lid from the warden’s head.

He promptly joined his companion on the ground.

The third, fourth, and fifth shots sufficed to empty the air from three of the four tires of the state-owned truck. The sixth shot ended its flight at points unknown, fortunately not in any body parts of the fully prone fish and game boys.

Because cell phones did not yet exist in significant abundance in those days, the three men were obliged to hoof it the half mile to the nearest farm house, once they had expended a suitable stretch of time hiding in a nearby ditch by way of satisfying themselves no further fire was likely. Our Sheriff gave them a lift back to St. Paul, promising sure enough to get to the bottom of the unfortunate hunting incident, you bet.

They never came back.

They did swear out a warrant for interference with an official fish and game investigation, and attempted murder to boot. Our local law enforcement saw to it the paperwork was neatly filed then promptly forgotten.

With the state boys thus put effectively out of commission so it was Arch and the men of the brethren or covenant or brotherhood -- or whatever the followers of Arch’s Grandfather Henry and Great Uncle Parrish were calling themselves these days -- gathered to hunt the big cat into extinction. Or die trying. Leaving Faith alone to tend to the women tending her. A. Jacks for his part still patiently stacking.

When, later that morning, Faith looked up -- cousins from the Frederickson branch of the family at her side like barnacles clinging to a trawler’s hull, nieces and nephews from the Mueller line holding up a wall on the room’s other side -- she saw a contingent from the Leese clan arriving en masse, bearing cookies and bundt cake and Great Uncle Parrish.

Parrish was, in those days, nearly blind. A hunched figure supported on both arms by attending women. Great shocks of white hair sprouting from his ample dome. Dressed in a striped shirt with pearl buttons and faded levis and ancient work boots. A riot of age spots adorning each thin arm and each hollow cheek. The old man once seated looked about the room, or at least cast his face about in the manner of one who can actually see.

“I see God’s hand in it,” he said, rubbing his knees absently while fixing his gaze on a distant vision.

Your classic thousand-yard stare.

The womenfolk at his proverbial knee murmured and clucked in agreement.

Someone may have said “amen.”

“It is our sin that brings this tragedy befalling us, for in sin are we born, and in sin shall we die if not saved,” the old man continued, still examining some item of extreme interest a mile or two in the distance.

Hattie Carlson, who remained a mere obedient Lutheran, and thus had not enlisted in the covenant or covey or brood -- or whatever the followers were calling themselves lately -- rose rather more noisily than strictly necessary and stumped from the room, muttering oaths and adumbrations not quite under her breath as she did.

Faith sighed heavily.

Sensing the mood cousin Rebecca, who was ever of a peace-making nature, chose to interject a subject-changing thought.

“Tell us about the Home Place,” she said eagerly.

At the mere mention the old man’s countenance visibly brightened. So too did the visages of the others.

“Yes … please do ..., tell us ….” they said, more or less in unison.

The old man proved happy to oblige.

“Well now,” he began. “Well now. On the Home Place the grasses grow green and deep ….”

Some moments later Faith walked slowly, unhurriedly, from the living room sofa on which Parrish regaled the clan with tales of the Home Place, and the cousins and friends and neighbors yet blathered of shopping and cooking and gossip, out the kitchen door and through the farmyard, grateful to get away for the moment, the spring morn’s steady west wind tossing her locks slightly. Sporting comfortable jeans, a white t-shirt of indistinct origin, and blue New Balance tennis shoes. A slender woman, say five-and-a-half feet or cubits or hands in length, her auburn tresses trailing to her shoulders, blue-green eyed and pleasantly complected. She slipped from the kitchen out the door and across the pasture to the randomly flung collection of molecules comprising the randomly strewn collection of timber where, after a time, she bent and began assisting in the orderly sorting and stacking of same.

A. Jacks looked up from his labors long enough to take note of Faith clutching some among the lighter of the pines.

He stopped.

Faith locked eyes with the man.

“So, you’re a carpenter now,” she said.

A. Jacks made no reply.

“I supposed that makes as much sense as anything else,” Faith muttered, bending to retrieve a perfectly serviceable two-by-four for neat placement on the rapidly growing pile of timber.