Читать книгу Kingdomtide - Rye Curtis - Страница 11

Mr. Waldrip and I had a calendar of 1986 from First Methodist pasted to the pantry door. Prior to us leaving on our trip to Montana, Mr. Waldrip had circled the 31st of August with black pen and had neatly written in the appointment we had with Terry Squime for the flight to our cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest. I have always thought it noteworthy that the 31st happened to fall on the first Sunday of Kingdomtide. If you are not a Methodist of a certain age likely you have not heard of Kingdomtide. It is meant to be a season of charity and unity in the Kingdom of God observed after Pentecost and before Advent. Not many churches observe it anymore. For me, ever since my time in the Bitterroot, it has turned out to be a season of considerable hardship and grief.

I now have the calendar here with me at River Bend Assisted Living on the wall above my desk. Mr. Waldrip could not have foreseen he was marking the day he would wind up in a tree and I would be stranded in the wilderness, but that is just the way these fateful moments go. Often we do not know the significance of a thing until it is good and well in the past. It is seldom now that I shut my eyes without I should see that calendar and the first Sunday of Kingdomtide circled in the glittery dark you can find on the inside of your eyelids. I fear it may be the last thing I ever see.

There was painful little sleep to be had that first night. I must have said my name into the radio near to a thousand times. I was hoarser than a pioneer preacher on a Monday. I was not certain whether the radio still worked, but I made an effort nevertheless. When I did endeavor to get some shut-eye, I learned how mighty afraid I was. I did not care for staying in that little airplane with Terry’s disfigured body looming up in a terrible silence, but I came to reason it was a sight better than sleeping out in the open with the dark and all the unknown critters that call the dark their home.

When I woke the sun was high and my shoulder and knees ached something terrible. I was getting thirsty. Dried blood flaked off my forehead like paint off an old prairie home. A filthy latticework of scratches and scrapes covered my arms. I was not even sure they were my arms. They seemed to belong to some old and pitifully treated indigent woman. I sat up and climbed out through the gash in the little airplane.

Terry was still strapped in his seat, warped up like an old cigar-store Indian left out in the weather for a considerable long while. His fingers had buckled into an array like buzzard talons and his jaw was crooked and dried out. I cannot know what on earth compelled me but I covered my mouth and went closer to him. Tiny gnats danced on his opaque eyes and I studied the way the bigger flies throned the tongue in his gaping mouth like little green potbellied despots.

I left Terry and went to the edge of the escarpment and stood next to Mr. Waldrip’s boot. My poor husband was down there yet caught in that spruce. He had not moved. I prayed then and there that this would be the most heartless sight to which I would ever bear witness. I got a handful of pebbles and chucked them at him. Some missed entirely and others bounced clear off his back. Mr. Waldrip did not move. I was reminded of when he had been hospitalized for his back surgery in 1974. When they put him on the morphine he went quiet and helpless. I had never seen him like that before. I had certainly never seen him deceased before. He was a mighty sweet man, dear Mr. Waldrip, God rest his soul. I miss him very much.

A young black woman who is a therapist here at River Bend Assisted Living has told me that there is a woman in Switzerland with one of these doubled surnames that are fashionable today, Elisabeth KŸbler-Ross, who believes that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am sure that she means well, but I do not believe she has it exactly right. The stages of grief are myriad and you could not endeavor to name them all. A stage for every recollection, for every ever-failing memory, and these stages are nameless and they are many, so that cast before you is a measureless spectrum of unparticular nostalgia and loss. Grief is the cold end of the night, I believe.

I turned back to the airplane and decided I would try the radio again. By then I had grown used to the foul way Terry smelled so that I did not even flinch when I crawled in around his legs and took hold again of the receiver. I said the same thing I had said all night prior: Help me, my name is Cloris Waldrip. Our airplane went down.

I repeated this at intervals some one hundred times or better. I was getting mighty hungry and thirsty so I looked for my purse and found it had tumped over on the floor next to my seat. I put back what I could find: my gallbladder medication (which I had nearly finished and did not especially need to take anymore, thank goodness), a packet of tissues, my little copy of the King James Bible, my house keys. I did turn up a handful of my caramels under the seat, but I could not find my copy of Anna Karenina nor my pocketbook. I did not imagine I would need my pocketbook, but I would have liked to have had the copy of Anna Karenina. I could not find any water.

I backed out of the fuselage with my purse and I unwrapped a caramel and ate it on a short boulder close by so that I could still hear the radio should anyone come through. It was a Monday and I usually had my Panhandle Ladies’ Breakfast Club on Mondays out at the Goodnight House. (Colonel Charles Goodnight was a celebrated cattleman who helped settle the Panhandle, and his family have kept up his fine estate as a landmark of historical significance.) We often ate on the veranda. Had Mr. Waldrip not convinced me to go on this crazy trip, I would have been sat between Sara Mae Davis and Ruth Moore, the sun in Ruth’s dyed orange hair like a Christmas light, both of them yammering about the new establishment in downtown Amarillo that was said to be an iniquitous place for women who liked women and men who liked men.

I had reached into my purse for another caramel when suddenly Terry shuddered and growled! Dear me! Flies blew out like smoke from his nose and mouth in a great retch. I let out a terrific scream and covered my face in horror. I fell to my knees and prayed.

A kind pathologist would later inform me that Terry had eructed. Unpleasant a thing as it is, during decomposition a corpse will build up internal gas that has to escape somehow. I understand the gas is sometimes called cadaverine. It does not sound right to me, but this pathologist was a medical man so I am inclined to believe him. It would be a shame if he were pulling an old woman’s leg.

After I had prayed for some time I opened my eyes. Terry was much as he was before. The flies had resettled him and his mouth was black with them. I was in dread for fear he would move again. After a spell, when finally I decided that he would not and was very deceased, I looked to the sky for the time of day and could not tell what it was. If I had been in our little house I would have been able to tell by the way the light falls through the windows in the sitting room. Living that long in a place makes it something of a clock. Everything tells you the time. You could know the hour by the shadow of a chair leg on the carpet. But out there on that mountain the light fell about so strangely that I was hardly ever too certain.

I guessed it was late afternoon and I decided I would take a look around before dark. I was just then beginning to get my wits about me and think rationally on what I ought to do. Though I do not believe I had as of yet understood my situation entirely. I scouted around the escarpment, but never left sight of the little airplane. The place was not large. It was a narrow chance we had stopped there instead of farther down the mountain in the timber. I found little else besides granite cliff faces, which I could not climb. However I did spot a raccoon with a white eye hiding in a shrub that grew straight from the rock. I watched it for a spell and it watched me back best it could. It reminded me of a pet raccoon that an unusual neighborhood boy had named Duodenum and had kept in a messy dog kennel and fed scraps of cooked meat, except that Duodenum had the whole of its sight.

I went back to the airplane and shuffled some more through the debris in the cockpit and turned up a tore-up map of Montana. There was also an issue of Time magazine from the year prior about President Reagan’s colon surgery. I sat on a rock and read it until the daylight had all but gone. Then I returned to the radio. The little light in it had gone out. I tried it but did not hear the static I had heard before. It occurred to me that I ought to have stayed after it earlier until it had died.

Night fell after what I hold to be the longest day in creation. A gentle rain began and I sat back in that little airplane and held my eyes shut and thought about Mr. Waldrip out there in that spruce. I was mighty thirsty but I was too frightened to go out for a drink of rain. Something rustled around outside. I told myself it was only the white-eyed raccoon and did not open my eyes to find out for sure.

In the morning I woke to an awful shock. Terry had slid out into the aisle and his face was within a foot of mine. His eyes and nose and lips were all but gone. I suspect that the white-eyed raccoon had made a meal of them and was sleeping soundly someplace with a red muzzle. My goodness gracious, I hollered like a steam whistle and scrambled from the airplane. I fell to my knees and shut my eyes and prayed for some time. When I opened them they were on the mountains and the rolling valley. In the valley I saw a thing which at first I took to be swifts flying. But I rubbed my eyes and saw better that it was smoke! Lead-colored smoke over the treetops.

I stood up and dusted off my stockings and tidied my hair. I went up to the edge of the escarpment. The smoke was from a campfire, I reasoned. Here I was to make a fateful decision. Best I stay near the airplane and wait for help? There was no water at hand and I had no way to know if anyone had heard me over the radio. How long would pass before they would know to look for us? Or should I venture down to the smoke with the idea that there might be a campsite? The smoke was at a considerable distance, but I judged I could reach it before nightfall. Although I was concerned I could injure myself (seventy-two-year-old women are not meant to climb anything), that little airplane had become a mausoleum of wickedness and I dreaded another night there more than anything else. Troubling a decision as it was, and fateful as it would prove to be, I made up my mind that I would leave the airplane and make a pull for the smoke. I had a good idea that it was a nice family down there cooking breakfast.

I happened to look down at my side. Mr. Waldrip’s boot was still upright there at the edge of the escarpment. It was full up to the ankle with rainwater. I was then mighty pleased that I had bought him those good alligator-skin boots, being that alligators are waterproof. I knelt down and got that boot and gulped the water until it was gone. I ought to have sipped it and saved some in the toe, but you do not think that way when you are thirsty.

I went back to the airplane. It was cooler than it had been, so I had decided I was going to take the big wool coat Terry wore. If Mr. Waldrip had been there with me he would have done the same thing. I imagine he would have been disappointed with me if I had not salvaged everything I could both from the airplane and from Terry’s person.

I inched closer to him but kept my eyes on the ground. He smelled like a dead horse. I grabbed for him and felt for the seatbelt and unbuckled it. He slid out of his seat and toppled to the rocks with a heavy thud and an upwelling of many flies such as dust beaten from an old cushion. I turned him on his side and worked one arm free from his coat. His joints popped. I told myself I was only loosening up the stiff leg on the old card table we used for bridge night at First Methodist. I rolled him and did the other arm. He ended up on his back, and I was stood over him with his coat. It was a gray color and was patterned with blood and looked now a little like red damask. I had the thought that I had robbed him. I looked him full in the face or what else there remained of it. It had been gnawed away and there was no blood nor flesh to it, only such as would be left on a watermelon rind after a picnic.

I turned out his hip pockets and was careful not to disturb his dignity. The stench was powerful and I held my breath. I found his billfold and a book of matches from a gentlemen’s club called the Polecat printed with a multicolored cartoon of a masculine and muscled dancing skunk. I have never known a man to frequent one of these establishments, although I have been told that many do. I wager I have met quite a few of them and did not even know it. I ought to mention here I do not include the description of the matches as a comment on Terry’s character. Men and women alike lead common secret lives that necessitate common secret places. I pass no judgment on them.

I put the book of matches in the coat’s breast pocket. I opened his billfold and looked through the photographs he kept. There was a photograph of an attractive blond man fishing and another of a young girl holding balloons next to a waterfall. I found the one of Mrs. Squime he had shown us on the airplane. I replaced it and laid the billfold over his heart. It is fortunate that I had worn my good walking shoes, so that I did not need to take his boots. They would not have fit me, and I believe there is an old caution about wearing a dead man’s boots.

A funny thing occurred to me while searching Terry’s body. When I put my hands on another man who was not Mr. Waldrip, even one deceased and bodily abused, something stirred in me and I recalled a boy named Garland Pryle. Garland grew up down the road from me on a little ole alfalfa ranch. Our mothers sat next to each other in the old Methodist church house. He was four years my junior and played war games in the pasture with my brother, looking everywhere for sticks that were shaped the most like firearms. Garland was a mighty handsome, green-eyed boy, and his chin was the finest chin I have ever seen. I will soon tell what there is to tell about Garland Pryle, for I will not cower from the truth as I recall it. But for now all I will say is that while the years can sure put a memory in its place, some memories are darn ornery and like to return at inconvenient occasions.

I put on Terry’s big coat and was very small in it. I crawled back into the fuselage, and under Terry’s seat I found a plastic sack containing a small black hatchet and an old blue umbrella. I was sure happy to find these. There was also a tennis ball with the word stress written on it in marker and a flashlight that would not turn on so I left it where it was. I rolled up the issue of Time magazine and the tore-up map and put these in my purse. I climbed out of the fuselage and did not once look back at the little airplane. In hindsight, I ought to have left a note telling anyone that might come along where I had gone.

At the edge of the escarpment I picked up Mr. Waldrip’s boot and stuffed it toe-first into my purse as far as it would go. After scouting around I found a suitable enough slope with soft dirt and loose rocks. I dug in the heels of my shoes and carefully climbed down to the floor of the woods below. I had not been in the dirt like that since I was a little girl. After I had caught my breath I pushed on through the trees.

I had not gone far when I spotted Mr. Waldrip’s glasses on the ground. I looked up. Mr. Waldrip was hung above me in the spruce. His arms were out wide as if to greet me in a way he had never done before. His head sat mauve and swollen on his shoulders at a funny angle. There were no cuts nor blood to his face. The expression on him was one I had seen when someone talked to him about a drought. That dab of jalapeño jelly was still on his chin.

I recall wanting to bawl, but I did not. I suppose some things are just too sad that tears cannot do them justice.

When Mr. Waldrip and I were a young couple, we would argue about small infractions just as young couples do. I recall one summer night in the backyard of our new home under the water tower when the cicadas were very loud and I was as mad as a wet hen and we had raised our voices at each other. About what I do not now remember. But while I was still hollering and pointing up and pointing down and going red in the face he had calmed. He smiled. He reached out and brushed away my hair and said, No matter how angry you get, Clory, I always know you still got your kind little ears.

Standing under his body then, I wished to be the woman I was when he had loved me the most. Mr. Waldrip always said I was the most whip-smart woman or man he had ever met and that I could outword a dictionary. I thought that if I could manage to be that woman for just minutes at a time, maybe I just might survive this ordeal. Perhaps I had a way out of this immense and terrible place. So I fixed my hair around my ears best I could, knelt down, and picked up Mr. Waldrip’s glasses. I stowed them in the breast pocket of Terry’s coat and set out through the trees in the direction of the smoke.