LITMIR.BIZ

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in your memory.

      As it turned out, Sam would not see the summit that day, nor would he have any whiskey with Randle Marsh. Instead he would be carried out ignominiously by the Boudine sisters who found him late in the afternoon trying to crawl down the mountain with his broken ankle trailing behind him.

      Perhaps, as long as Randle was going to regale Sam with warnings and advice, he should have mentioned one other thing—the ancient rock outcroppings that are everywhere on the flanks of the Taconics. These have been exposed for ages to the forces of erosion, and one effect of this erosion is that the rocks eventually split apart, creating small crevasses. Over time, falling leaves and twigs fill up these spaces, making them appear to be solid ground. And right after the autumn leaves fall, these cracks can be particularly well hidden. Sure enough, Sam fell prey to this hazard as he strode along with increasing confidence and decreasing caution toward the top of the mountain. There was the unexpected plunge of his right foot, followed by a sickening cracking sound, leaving Sam and his broken ankle at the mercy of the mountain and whatever the weather and eventual darkness would bring. With fear gripping him, and the icy shock-induced sweat breaking out all over his body, Sam was able to do little but gingerly pull his leg out and begin a snail-paced crawl back down, stopping at intervals to call for help.

      When the Boudine sisters found him, they worked quickly. Ariel fashioned a litter from fallen branches lashed together with thin roots she cut out expertly from a nearby grove of spruce trees. Tara started a small fire and brewed a concoction composed mostly of the roots of valerian, a wild plant that is the herbal precursor of the synthetic and similarly-named drug, Valium, prescribed these days for our wired-up and stressed-out lives.

      Tara’s tea was so strong that Sam soon fell into a profound sleep, and this proved fortunate because it was hardly a smooth trip down the mountain. There were some places where the sisters had no choice but to let the litter drag and slither down the steep pitches like a sled. Once he even rolled off the litter and fetched up against an oak tree. Sam reacted not at all.

      The recorded statement of Emma Bailey, Cedar Falls Librarian, as told to Sheriff Ron Bosley, concerning the incident involving Mr. Samuel Witherspoon, October l9th-4:30 p.m.

      At first I thought the poor devil was dead when those sisters, or whoever they are, came in and plopped him right down on my main reading table. As if that weren’t gruesome enough, then one of the sisters takes my Websters Unabridged Dictionary-—they run about a hundred and fifty dollars you know—and they prop his feet up on it and put his coat under his head for a pillow. Now you know, Ron, that I don’t have the strongest heart and it was flip-flopping like a toad inside my chest to where I couldn’t even catch my breath to say anything at first. But then I see the sisters are just going to leave me with this mess and so I finally managed to shout at them, “Is he dead or what, for lands sake?” The one with the dark hair says no but they think his ankle is broken and I should call a doctor. So then I ask why is he lying there unconscious and pale as death if he’s only got a broken ankle and she says they tranquilized him. God knows with what. Folks say those women make all kinds of foul potions up on that mountain which is probably half the reason they are as they are in the first place, though I suppose it’s not my place to be judging others So, anyway, then they’re gone like phantoms before I can get another word in, and I’m left holding the bag. I rushed over to the telephone and at the very same time the fellow on the table starts moaning and groaning which, let me tell you Ron, is giving me the unholy creeps. Then while I’m trying to dial the phone, he suddenly sits up like he’s got a spring inside him and vomits all over his pants and his shoes and my Websters Unabridged Dictionary, which by the way costs around a hundred and fifty dollars...or did I already say that? I’m an old woman, Ron, I did the best I could.

      As for Sam, he got over it and didn’t even mind telling the story in its entirety after time and distance had blunted his embarrassment. He finished college, took a job as a civil engineer and married a green-eyed beauty from Vermont. They bought a house on Chesapeake Bay and when the winter storms would blow the water up into billowing whitecaps, he might feel just a touch of soreness or stiffness in his right ankle. When that happened he would go outside and watch the storm and think about the mountain and about the Boudine sisters and about his grandfather, whose picture he carried in his wallet. He always thought he would be going back to the mountain someday but he never did.

      Sheriff Ron Bosley had not minded having to deal with Sam. His job often involved dealing with mishaps on the mountain or in the woods. At least once a year during hunting season, a hunter would get lost and the sheriff would have to spend the night cruising around the back roads blowing his horn or sounding his siren, hoping he could bring in the hunter that way. Otherwise he’d have to notify the State Troopers and deal with search parties and paperwork and frazzled relatives.

      In fact these days, Ron Bosley didn’t mind dealing with anything and everything that blew his way because in truth, he wondered how long Cedar Falls could continue to afford its own full time sheriff. He knew he could always find another job; small town law enforcement didn’t pay diddly-squat and so there were always vacancies. Still, he was comfortable here and didn’t want to go anywhere else any time soon The only thing he didn’t like were the bar fights. There were more of them now that times were bad and more ornery men were out of work. What made matters worse was that there was only Tony’s Bar and Grill left in town where people could drink besides at the bowling center. No one made trouble at the bowling center because Gil Brady ran that place and Brady wasn’t someone these make-believe tough guys wanted to mess with when they got feeling their oats. Besides, Brady was careful and watchful enough not to let anyone get sufficiently drunk to consider the idea. This meant that with only one watering hole, when bad blood broke out between two or more men, no one could back out and get drunk elsewhere. The Sheriff got called over to Tony’s at least once a month and so far had always been able to break things up, only having to make one arrest so far. But secretly, inside, Sheriff Bosley had a gnawing fear that one of these times he would freeze up and be unable to enter the fray. Some of these men were burly monsters who might go after each other with pool cues or broken beer mugs and were drunk enough to not give a shit. The sheriff knew if he ever chickened out just once, he would be through in this town. Word would get out that he could be had; that he could no longer keep folks safe. And since there was less for him to do these days, he knew he needed to be impeccable with what was left if he wanted the Town Board to keep renewing his contract.

      So he didn’t really mind driving Sam down to the hospital in Bennetsville; didn’t really mind making out the reports; didn’t really mind having to answer all the silly questions that came later from the people in town who had already heard several versions of the story. He let pass most of the wild conjecture with a shrug and a smile but did feel compelled to squelch the rumor that the Boudines had drugged Sam and violated his person in a bizarre sexual dalliance of some kind. Others—who considered themselves to be good God-fearin’ folk—professed themselves to be above such prurient squalor, and declared the entire subject out of bounds among polite company.

      Only the Boudine sisters knew that earlier that autumn, there had been two other visitors to the mountain when the leaves turned to shades of bright orange and gold during one of the best leaf seasons anyone could remember. No one saw these visitors in the predawn hours as they parked in the abandoned school parking lot, passed through town and headed up Bakers Mountain. They were Native Americans, one from the Mohawk Tribe and one a Mohican. They had become fast friends in New York City where they worked together at construction on many of the high-rise buildings that push toward the sky on the paved-over island of Manhattan. It is a strange irony that when the White Man should begin constructing these massive steel towers of our modern cities—-so much the antithesis of the New England Indians’ long-houses—it would be Native Americans who were hired by the hundreds to work up high on them. No other people come close to the ability of many Native Americans to work quickly and fearlessly on the narrow precipitous beams towering hundreds of feet above the teeming city streets. The two climbing Bakers Mountain had rescued themselves from years of heavy nighttime boozing by instead becoming immersed in their ancestors’ heritage. They read books, they visited museums, libraries and archives. They travelled too, painfully visiting the sad, isolated enclaves of poverty

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