Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 6

When the menfolk returned from that day’s hunt empty handed, not to mention bone tired and more than a little annoyed, they found awaiting them an evening meal of pot roast and cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes and green beans, and apple sauce and tapioca pudding, and devil’s food cake with chocolate frosting for desert, and of course buckets of hot coffee or iced tea, choose one. As helpfully whipped up, or perhaps up whipped, by cousins of the feminine stripe. They, the cooks, stayed to eat, as did a handful of women from the grieving committee, all and sundry gathered ‘round the groaning board that was the dining room table. Feasting communally as villagers are prone to do following tragedy. Or, for that matter, triumph. Or, for that matter, pretty much everything in between.

“We done scoured them hills south of the river there,” Randy was saying between bites of roasted beast. “No damn sign of ‘im anywhere. Say, pass them carrots, willya?”

“Me and my boys done finetoothed every square inch of that pasture hard by the cottonwood grove,” Little Nate responded between mouthfuls of sauced apple. “We never seen so much as a tuft of hide. Say, shoot me them beans again, if ya don’t mind.”

“Them creatures sure do know how to hide good,” ventured one of the company.

“Could by anywhere,” added another.

“Nothing like a cat for layin’ low,” said someone else.

Quickly confirmations flowed from all quarters.

“Bred by nature to be stealthy and inconspicuous.”

“Downright spooky, when a fella gets right down to it.”

Nodding noggins all around.

“We’ll find it,” Arch muttered, not bothering to lift his head from the plateful of potatoes over which it then hovered.

“If the Good Lord be willin’,” someone added.

Amens all around.

After dinner, while the womenfolk cleaned and washed and rinsed and wiped and put generally away, the men huddled around a coffee table in the family room, examining with interest a two-foot by three-foot map of the surrounding area. Much pointing, pontificating, and raucous planning. Or what passes for genuine tactical planning, anyway, in a company of amateur tobacco-chewing volunteer lion tamers, that is.

Faith loaded up a plate and carried it to the cavernous barn where she gave it to A. Jacks who, for reasons known only to himself, had declined invitation to sit at table with all the rest. He made himself relatively comfy in an otherwise unoccupied barn stall, complete with the sleeping bag he apparently had brought, the cot Arch or someone had cobbled up, and the coleman lantern lending a modicum of light and heat. No room at the inn. He accepted the repast with a grunt and a nod. Faith sat at the edge of the stall and watched him eat.

Ajax alone received assistance from none among the Olympians.

You can look it up.

Faith glimpsed the lean killing machine as it leapt past her on the narrow snaking trail in the gloom of a lightning drenched spring afternoon, as mentioned. Glimpsed out the corner of one eye, a mere passing glance, perhaps, but more than sufficient to alert her to the beast’s return, on a mission to complete the twin killing, as it were. The lion clearly had it in for her boys, Faith realized. A beast with distinctive green-brown flashing eyes and the seminal muteness of its breed, boasting claws the sharpness of steak knives, bicuspids evolved to readily separate sinew from tendon, a species perfectly suited to slicing and dicing mere primates, thereafter converting the twin into the stuff that makes a mountain lion a mountain lion, as most assuredly it must if it the lion is to survive, for absent conversion, of deer mostly, and squirrels presumably, and possums probably, and mice aplenty, as harvested from our fields and sheds and barns – and, of course, the occasional newborn baby boy -- the lion’s particles as knit in a mystifyingly complex superstructure of corpuscle and capillary could scarcely continue metabolizing. Just as surely as Man’s Chief Purpose is to Glorify God and Enjoy Him Forever the lion must be fed, and, as luck would have it, whether one was particularly so inclined or on board or kool-aid drinking or not, the creature had a taste for Faith’s offspring.

All of which Faith cognized, realized, understood, in the nanosecond the beast shot past, just before A. Jacks interjected himself in the way of destiny. Thomas thus saved, the leaping beast instead hauled off Peter between its lion jaws, her child picked up and transported rather gently, in actuality, the way cats can be seen to lift and carry a kit from one place to another, the helpless thing dangling but not distressed, safe somehow in the lion’s jaws, and so too Faith recognized the man who had appeared across the river the day her husband dived beneath the waters and never returned.

Or at least not yet, anyway.

Faith looked up to see Aunt May Frederickson enter the barn stall.

“What are you doing out here child?” Aunt May asked. “Sitting in the cold all alone?”

Aunt May took a seat or rather bench at Faith’s side. She placed her hand on Faith’s hand and lightly stroked Faith’s hair.

May is not the same as shall or will.

Aunt May was then aged vaguely sixty-something, though spry as a gray-haired farming matron can be, with heavy arms characteristic to her demographic, round spectacles of a somewhat owlish cast, and a generally pleasant demeanor highlighted by a ready smile. She wore a grey dress and white vest and a white bandana covering her bun. The bun made of her graying hair, that is. Faith’s Mother’s cousin’s sister and so an Aunt of the third order or declension or degree.

“Why didn’t it take me?” Faith said after a time, Aunt May still at her side, still touching Faith’s hand and still gently caressing Faith’s hair.

“My child, you couldn’t have ….” May began.

She stopped.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” she added.

“Why didn’t we stay?” Faith interjected. “How did I lose sight of him?”

“There, there dear,” Aunt May said softly. “It does no good to ….”

A. Jacks leaned back in a corner of the stall opposite the huddled women.

“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed,” he said in a tone boasting just the slightest tinge of some annoyance, or rather mumbled under his breath just loudly enough to be heard. Heard by Faith, at least. Aged nearly seventy or thereabouts Aunt May wasn’t necessarily tuned in to such rumbling frequencies.

Faith watched A. Jacks stand and stretch.

Aunt May eventually hugged Faith and stroked her hair while gently whispering the strictly necessary things that seemingly must be said under such circumstances, but in a practiced, loving, confidently textured way that made the conventional words and phrases somewhat less stunningly empty and glaring. A thankless task, that. Only so much one can say. Easy to get it wrong, God knows.

“Don’t you go listening to them and all their crazy notions,” she, Aunt May, eventually whispered or cooed between reiterating again the necessity of surrender to a higher power, referencing once more those commandments touching upon submission to the living and the doing of that which must be done, for those who remain, even after a loved one has been rudely taken, or seized, or, as in this case, plucked from existence. Faith felt herself being strangely comforted even as the conventional phrases washed over her for perhaps the fifth or fiftieth time.

A. Jacks for his part pored over blueprints arrayed in a corner of the barn stall.

“Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe,” he mumbled while revising slightly the plans for the mud room to be appended to the kitchen, handily.