Kingdomtide. Rye Curtis

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.