Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  When you give it any thought, it sure is funny how we decide what ought and ought not to be tolerated in the civilized world as time goes on. I cannot always find the reasoning in it. We all desire one thing or another. I suppose we just have to find the decent way to go about getting it, without causing misery to those who do not want the same things we do. The problem with Mr. Plant is that we do not know whether or not any of these animals consented. I am inclined to think they did not. I do not know Mr. Plant but I have not heard of any man who could talk a pig into having sexual intercourse with him.

  However here is the problem with passing judgment on Mr. Plant: we do not give a pig much say about anything else a pig does. I do not believe pigs volunteer themselves up for bacon duty. Yet most people in this country are mighty happy to play a part in that. What I have come to understand now is that judgment is often passed as a matter of convenience. And I am inclined to believe that the savage satisfaction most of us get in casting the first stone will be the eventual undoing of civilization. For this reason I fear there is no remedy to the problems we have understanding one another, and I dare not venture a guess as to how any of it is going to end. The only solace that I can find in any of this is that I do not expect to be around much longer to see how bad it all gets.

  An Agent Derek Ellery at the Federal Bureau of Investigation spoke with me in the weeks following my return to civilization. I told him about my friend out in the Bitterroot. After that, I never heard anything more from Agent Ellery. He was a curt and dismissive young man and I do not know that he believed me. Years later, while doing my research for this account, I was directed to a now retired FBI Special Agent named James Polite. He has been mighty gracious to answer the very many questions of a very persistent and very old woman. I have told him my story and he believes the man who came to my aid out in the Bitterroot may have been a man by the name of Benjamin Merbecke.

  The FBI hold that on Friday, June 27, 1986, at approximately 1:35 a.m., Merbecke entered the Phoenix home of Michael and Paula Hovett through an unlocked backdoor. They will tell you that Merbecke ascended the stairs to the second story, where he crept into the bedroom of the Hovetts’ only child. He is thought to have rendered ten-year-old Sarah Hovett unconscious with a rag soaked in a fast-acting paralytic and to have removed her from the premises to some unknown location, likely someplace in the Idaho wilderness. As I put down this account in the year 2006, some twenty years later, it is my terrible duty here to include that they have not yet found poor Sarah Hovett. May God keep her wherever she might be. There is little else as cruel as a missing child.

  For several months into the investigation of the abduction they could not identify the suspect. Eventually the FBI put Merbecke’s name to the individual they and the newspapers had been calling the Arizona Kisser. His description matched that of an adult male who had been going around kissing young girls, and a man matching his description was also spotted buying girls’ undergarments at various outfitters.

  Special Agent Polite lives up to his name and was kind enough to visit me (in an unofficial capacity) here at River Bend Assisted Living in Brattleboro, Vermont. He showed me one of the composite drawings they do at the FBI. It seems it is the only image of Benjamin Merbecke that has turned up. The FBI has not been able to locate any photography of him. There were no images at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and apparently his mother told them that she had lost the family photo album in a flooded basement. The composite drawing was developed from the testimony of a woman who reported that she had seen a suspicious man circling a middle school near the Hovetts’ neighborhood the evening of June 26th. My goodness, I mean to tell you the drawing was the spitting image of my gallant friend. If the drawing had been in color, I imagine it would have had emerald-green eyes. Therefore, I accept that it is likely that this Merbecke and my friend in the Bitterroot are one and the same man.

  Many people believe that Merbecke took Sarah Hovett. However, twenty years later, the investigation into the abduction is as yet ongoing. As such, Special Agent Polite could not tell me everything they had in the way of evidence against Merbecke, but from what I understand it is flimsy and circumstantial. Special Agent Polite has said as much. It is a considerable shame they do not have any of that DNA evidence that is popular today. I believe that it would show Merbecke is innocent of the abduction, however guilty he may be of his other behavior. But Merbecke has quit the earth, and his body has never been recovered. Still some crazy folk do not want to believe me on the fact that he is deceased. No doubt some people believe that I am making all this up.

  I will put down what is generally known.

  Merbecke lived in a carriage house down the road from the Hovett household. He punched tickets at the Cine Desert picture house frequented by Sarah and her friends. It is unclear if Sarah knew him or not. He had been let go from a position at a summer camp some years prior for having an inappropriate relationship with a twelve-year-old girl there, and again from the picture house under similar circumstances. He never was arrested nor charged with any crime, but some lawmen did speak with him and made note of it. He was also known to buy girls’ undergarments. I will put down here too for good measure that I asked Special Agent Polite about the silly clothes Merbecke had given me to wear and if they had been Sarah Hovett’s. He could not provide me with an answer.

  I cannot say to a certainty whether or not Benjamin Merbecke kidnapped that poor girl. There are very few subjects anymore which I can speak to with certainty. However, I do not believe he did. Some of you will slam this book shut and holler that I am a silly old woman warped and rattled by the awful privation of my ordeal and the loss of my husband and that I am without the sense God gave a pig. You get to decide for yourself what you want to believe.

  Still, no, I do not entirely know what to make of it all. But I do not allow that this man was too terribly different from the rest of us. As far as I can tell, we sure do all cause a good deal of trouble trying to get what we want. We are all of us the benefactors of someone else’s disadvantage some way or another, whether we would call it that or not. We take turns being bound to secret altars, and we take turns wielding the sacrificial knife. I do not now shy away from the truth that I am a part of that and that Mr. Waldrip might could have married himself a better wife. I have taken more than I can ever hope to give back, and just by going for a little ole walk outside I set new roads for the wind.

  There is no great question that the flinty moralists out there who know this story will find nothing in their hearts for Benjamin Merbecke. I surely cannot fault them. Prior to my adventure I would have stood with them in contempt of that pitiful man. Yet whatever uncommon perversion was in him, he had some stroke of heroism in him too, periling his life for me as he did. I cannot be sure that Catherine Drewer would have done any of what he did for me out there in the Bitterroot. I expect she would have thumped me on the head and devoured me over a low flame.

  All I am certain of is that Merbecke was not evil. The only authentic evil I can see in people begins with calling other people evil. Nothing quite makes the sense we would like it to. There are those who just do not fit with the way we have it all set up here nowadays, and that is just the way it is. I suppose I sympathize with Merbecke a little bit about that.

  I fear that misfits like Merbecke may be the least of our worries. I see a dead emptiness in young folk today. Sometimes I worry that there is little left in a person these days save the desire to participate in a mighty strange collective fever dream of fakery and grand-scale mischief. Perhaps I am just too old and do not know how to play along. Maybe those leaving the world always bemoan its being left worse off for those to follow. The good old days have gone, we say. Maybe I just cannot see what the young people see today with their clear eyes shining against all those impossible lights.

  That night after Merbecke passed on, it began to rain. I took shelter leeward a limestone outcrop and used the flip lighter to set a fire in some dry wood I turne
d up there. I put out the tin to catch water and then slept poorly, curled up to the limestone and wrapped in Terry’s coat.

  In the dark I woke to enormous footfalls in the trees like those of a fairy-tale giant. A bull elk the size of Mr. Waldrip’s truck came along. He was a mangy old thing and had antlers that looked as if they had grown too heavy for him. They were chipped and scarred like an old table in need of a good varnishing. I would imagine that he was my age in elk years, howsoever those tally. And gracious, he was big!

  I did not move. He settled by me against the outcrop not two yards away. I could have reached out and touched him. I sat up until sunrise listening to the old beast struggle to breathe and to the pluck of the rain on his hide. Then I got up slowly and as quietly as I could I took the tin and sallied forth again into that gentle storm. Downstream I followed the little river. The sun came out in the rain. Mr. Waldrip used to say that meant the Devil was spanking his wife.

  The nights were dark and damp and cold and it poured some through all of them. Thank goodness it did not snow. I did not sleep much. When I did sleep it was to dream of hot baths and hollow glass people filling up with hot water. Still I pulled on downriver each morning, hammering the earth with the end of my walking stick. I ate anything I could. Mostly I suppered on tubers and once a handful of worms from a rotted beehive. I did not often stop to fish. I understood I had to keep moving.

  By my count I was by my lonesome making my way downriver for five days and four nights until I came to a dewy little cedar brake. Although the rain had let up that day, clouds still covered the sky, but it was not very cold. I sat to rest on a small sickly variety of juniper. I dropped my walking stick to the ground and sipped water from the tin and watched the mountains.

  When I would come to find my way out of that wilderness I made big headlines in the newspapers and was met with a good deal of fame and celebrity. I have encountered many remarkable people in the twenty years since. One such person was a lively and charismatic woman with curly brown hair cut short and peculiar scars on her face almost like chicken wire. Her name was Jillian, if I recall aright. She had an unusual accent, as if she had emigrated from a country that may not exist. I met her earlier this year while I was making a talk at the Explorers Club in New York City about an article I had written for a magazine on the twentieth anniversary of my ordeal. The article was titled “Kingdomtide: A Seventy-Two-Year-Old Woman’s and a Masked Man’s Journey Through the Bitterroot Wilderness.” Anyhow this Jillian approached me as I was leaving and told me that she had known all about my story back at the time. When she was seventeen years old she had been a volunteer with the Forest Service in Montana during the time of my ordeal. Her father had led the search party that had gone after me and she made mention of a park ranger there, a woman named Debra Lewis, who had persisted in the search after everyone else had abandoned it. Jillian said that she had not thought much about that time for many years, and had not kept in touch with this park ranger, but her story and description of this woman have left a lasting impression on me.

  I made an effort to track down Ranger Debra Lewis but have so far not had any luck. There were two leads, a ranger named Claude Paulson whom she had worked with, and a ranger chief named John Gaskell. The former was sorry to say he had not heard from her after she had left, and the latter has unfortunately passed. Debra Lewis remains as yet a stranger to me, although I think on her from time to time. It is hard work to know what difference she had in my adventure. Perhaps her efforts remain unproven and without purpose. Perhaps, in the end, they are the same as Benjamin Merbecke’s. Same as mine. I never had any good reason to live these twenty more years after I crawled out of that little airplane. I suppose the terrible truth of it is that not an earthly creature ever has any good reason to live at all. But we do it anyhow, even when we have all the good reason in the world not to. And just take a gander at all the harm we do. All the which of it is to say that if Ranger Lewis has occasion to read this account, I hope she would find that I have done the story justice.

  I was mighty tired as the sun went down on what by my count was my seventy-seventh night out there in the Bitterroot. I looked through the trees to the world-old mountains behind me. I picked out the one I knew to be where the little airplane had gone down, where I imagined that Mr. Waldrip’s body yet dangled. The entire place looked smaller to me now. Through a break in the clouds the red sunset rolled down the mountain and turned it blue with night.

  Over the bowed and sickly juniper I draped a filthy piece of the blanket I had preserved from the hut and made a tent to keep the spitting rain off. I did not build a fire that night. I wrapped myself in Terry’s coat and pulled my legs into a ball as much as I could and I slept.

  I woke to the sound of the ocean and the sun on my face. Somewhere waves were breaking on a beach. I had not heard that sound in thirty-two years. The last time was just after my fortieth birthday. We had paid a visit to Mr. Waldrip’s brother in Florida to watch him pass away in a hospital near the water. After he did, Mr. Waldrip and I walked down to the beach and we sat out in the sun with our eyes shut. I recall listening to the waves and opening up my eyes to find Mr. Waldrip’s alligator-skin boots nearby with his socks balled up in them. He had gone and trotted off to wade out in the water with his blue jeans rolled up to his knees. He played there in the waves like a little boy and I recall thinking just how terribly much I loved him and how I sure did not look forward to the day when we would have to part ways.

  I opened up my eyes to the sun. The blanket had blown off in the night and I could not find it anywhere. The rain had quit and so had the wind. I looked to where I had heard the waves and I heard the sound again. It was a peaceful swooshing behind the trees. The notion struck me that perhaps I had lost track of time and had traveled for months and had followed that river clear to the ocean.

  I set my walking stick and pushed myself to my feet. The swooshing had gone again as quickly as it had come, but my eye caught something different through the trees. I pushed forward in my tore-up shoes, ducked under a spruce, and stepped out into the bright sunlight. My hair was longer than I had worn it since I was a young woman, my getup as strange as a city person’s and considerably tattered and now the color of earth. But bless you, I was standing on the side of a two-lane paved road!

  I dropped my walking stick and went to my knees. I pressed the palm of my hand to the warm asphalt. All was dead quiet. There were no cars on the road that I could tell in either direction. It went on straight in both ways, cleaving a timbered valley until it could not be seen. I stood up again but had no use for my walking stick. I looked from one end of the road to the other.

  It was not but ten minutes before a blurry element appeared in the far haze off to my left. I could not take my eyes from it. They stung and tears ran off my cheeks. The object drew closer and closer and by and by I could see it was a station wagon. Even now I can shut my eyes and conjure it, growing larger on the road until it slowed and halted just a couple yards from me.

  A young woman got out. She had on a green bowler hat and a black leather coat such as I have seen worn by noisy motorcyclists. She looked at me like I was a polka-dotted cow. She said: Are you all right, ma’am?

  I could do with a ride to the nearest town, I told her.

  This dear young lady, whom I would later know by the name of Sidney Wygant, was a mighty kind and earnest young woman. She had been away at school in Spokane, Washington, for some curious thing called urbanology and was driving home to Colorado. She had decided to take the scenic route through the mountains.

  Sidney approached me and gave me her arm.

  She walked me to her station wagon and opened the door and helped me inside, then got in on the other side and set us off down that paved road away from the wilderness. I looked ahead out the windshield and waited for the buildings and power lines to rise on the thin horizon beyond the little pine-tree-shaped air freshener swinging from Sidney’s rearview mirror.

  Wh
en I later made my return to Clarendon, Sheriff Daugharty had to let me into our dear little house under the water tower. By that time the locks had been replaced, being that the sheriff had been obliged to knock down our front door. Not a soul had been privy to the key Mr. Waldrip kept hid under the rock shaped like a steer. The house was dark and empty. About the only thing left in it were the furniture marks in the carpeting, and someone had missed the First Methodist calendar of 1986 pasted on the pantry door. The pantry light switch was left up and the bulb had gone out, and the calendar pages stirred in the breeze blowing in from the front, where the sheriff stood waiting for me. The pages were still flipped to August. I was overcome with sentiment then and I ran my finger over that little circle Mr. Waldrip had drawn around the 31st, the first Sunday of Kingdomtide. I myself have since circled on that calendar the last Sunday of that desperate season, the 16th of November 1986, the day I escaped the fearsome Bitterroot.

  However nothing escapes the hands of the clock. And nothing of life comes to mean exactly what you expect it will, and neither is it often simple nor easy, particularly when you get to be my age. Though I do not care for the language, I am here reminded of something that Colonel Goodnight, the father of the Texas Panhandle and inventor of the chuck wagon, once said: Old age hath its honors, but it is damned inconvenient.

  It is winter now of the year 2006 as I close this account and I mean to tell you I am not the same woman I was. Whatever strange parts here remain of me will soon be returned to Clarendon. I am having my body flown back. While I do not care to live another day in Texas, I will not mind being buried there. My body will be interred at the Clarendon Citizens’ Cemetery, there under the drifting seeds of a little ole cottonwood beside my dear Mr. Waldrip.