“I hope you cleaned it up.”
“Course.”
The dog sat on the sidewalk, looking at Carolyn, shaking all over like he might be left behind. Carolyn carried the box to the back of a small U-Haul trailer, set it on the floor and pushed it tight against the other boxes of books. After making sure she had the key, she closed and locked the cargo door. She had planned to tie everything into place but she didn’t have time. All her carefully packed boxes would shift and tumble into a big pile but she didn’t care. She’d deal with it later. They needed to get out of here right now.
“This is your home.” Mom stood inside the gate, teeth clenched, tears welling. She flipped her cigarette into the street and dusted off her hands, symbolically wiping both her and Jason out of her life forever. There would be no goodbye hugs.
Good grief.
“I’ll call you as soon as we get there. Okay? After Jason gets through his first new school year, who knows? We might not like it there. We might decide to move back.” Ventura or Santa Barbara might be far enough away from her.
THEY STARTED UP THE Grapevine at 10:15am, took Highway 14 through Palmdale and Lancaster, and stopped for lunch and gas in Mojave. From there they took 395 North through Red Rock Canyon, up the east side of the Sierras and stopped for the night in Bishop.
Early the next morning delivered their first taste of fresh mountain air, crisp with a scent of pine. It smelled of freedom.
EARLY MORNING LIGHT always opened Willis Donner’s eyes. The Perch had ample windows facing east. The first wink of sun from over the mountain peaks at the eastern rim of the valley lit his whole interior, good light for cleaning up after breakfast.
Morning and night, ever since he could remember, he’d bathed in the hot spring near his west facing doorway, followed by a swim in the near freezing water of his small lake.
Water from his hot spring and lake fed into the nearby stream and over the falls into Potter’s upper meadow. He’d long since built a trail, following the stream down.
Judging from the angle of the sun, it was near 9:00am when he stepped out from under the trees at the top of the upper meadow.
Whatever had happened the night before, there’d be work today.
Being the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, Willis had never touched tobacco or alcohol, much less these modern drugs. He kept himself fit, busy with stone masonry, carpentry and the like. The only thing to wear him down was not knowing what lay ahead.
“A worrisome nature causes a wrinkled brow,” his father had often preached. Willis had never learned not to worry after a full moon.
It wasn’t so bad after this new ritual, the worrying part. A dead calf had become a blessing.
Before the ritual, what he sometimes found had brought misery for him and for others. That pain couldn’t be buried with hard work. It lingered in his eternal soul.
Thank you, God.
The head and carcass of another bull calf lay on that sacrificial rock, chest ripped open, heart gone. The ritual had been working for several years and nobody had suffered from it. The beast of this place had been satisfied, for now. He wouldn’t come back tonight.
Nesting meadowlarks fed on bloodworms at the edges of the rock, ignoring Willis, singing their heavenly songs, maybe even comforted by his presence. Heat from this rock kept these birds here year round. Like the Perch, this rock ran deep into the belly of the earth, warmed by geothermal energy.
He loosed the tie from under the calf’s jaw, grabbed an ear and carried the heavy head seventy yards to a dark pool in the slow moving brook, a quarter mile below the waterfall. The pool went deep, down where large fish and blue crawdads would feed on it for a month.
Willis unsheathed his hunting knife and walked back down to that carcass on the flat rock. He slit the hide in an ample arc around the genitals and cut them free, cleaned out the entrails and carried it all back to that deep hole. He tossed it all in and watched it sink, much slower than the heavy head.
Small fish darted out from under the bog in a feeding frenzy, everything slowly disappearing into the deep. He knelt, cleaned the knife in the stream, snapped it into the sheath at the small of his back and washed his hands.
He returned to the carcass, hefted it over his shoulders and followed the dirt road uphill to an opening in the fence where he went onto Jim Embry’s place, moving steadily uphill toward the mine. He stopped at the rock debris field and adjusted the weight, looking up the well traveled path, planning his steps.
He carried the carcass up the rubble mound quickly. His feet knew the way. He topped the rise and walked across the flat of rubble to the boarded up entrance of the mine, near a giant Douglas fir and an undisturbed boulder. A long used chain hung from one of the tree’s fat limbs. Willis climbed onto the boulder and lowered the carcass onto the top.
He opened a small work shed near the boarded up mine, pulled out a length of hemp rope, climbed back onto the boulder and tied the rope to the rear hooves of the dead calf. He looped the loose end of the rope through a ring on the chain and hoisted the calf into the air.
Good.
Blood still drained from the calf’s open neck, splashing over the rock.
Hot sun prompted the removal of his jacket. He hung it in a tree branch and walked to the far edge of the debris field, a place near the cascading waterfall. He let the mist cool him, grabbed a tree root and leaned out into the flow, taking several mouthfuls of cold, fresh tasting
