| Black Mountain Lady |
Jay
Dyck
Dyck
Diary of a Goatherder January 23, 1980 (continued)
Then I drove Chevelle down to Stallion Oaks, six miles. Bob had said in the note that he
would be at Rick and Stony's. I called there, and Stony answered. She said Bob had just
come in, and gave him the phone. He was fine, with four stitches and a fifty-eight dollar
doctor bill.
Then I drove Chevelle down to Stallion Oaks, six miles. Bob had said in the note that he
would be at Rick and Stony's. I called there, and Stony answered. She said Bob had just
come in, and gave him the phone. He was fine, with four stitches and a fifty-eight dollar
doctor bill.
| Chapter Ten AGNES |
Agnes Tawny had been leaving on that snowy night a year before the fire, just before the winter solstice. She
was going on a trip, as she had done many times before. She was going a'wandering. She would celebrate the
turning of the sun somewhere else, on some other hill, with some other holly or yew.
Perhaps she would see old friends. By the following late summer, she had settled back into the cottage. Andrea
Clare Dolan nee Devlin was heavy with child. Agnes noted this only from a distance, and nobody knew she was
back.
Close enough for drama, Andrea Clare gave birth to her beautiful daughter at the sound of the same thunder
clap. Perhaps she saw the flash in the gloaming come through the flowered curtains of her room in the old
farmhouse on that cold November afternoon.
As the fire slackened and turned to embers, Agnes turned her attention from the glowing ashes of her home to
the mountain lion who had let herself be drawn closer and into the open by the cooling and the darkening and
the death.
Agnes observed the hunger in the animal eyes. She felt her lust for flesh. She smiled and sagged forward into
an unresisting sprawl. Her smile broadened. Just before she died of a multitude of internal injuries, she said, to
the lion, apparently, for nobody else was about, "Looks like this time," and here she took her last breath, "the
cat won. "
Cat One.
The blood was what had finally overcome the cat's last leeriness. Blood meant life; blood meant fresh death;
the difference between that and a kill was a quibble of pride.
Tawngness was hungry. She padded silently to the sudden warm corpse. Death does have such a smell to it. She
had whiffed it a hundred times. She nosed at the head.
Agnes had fallen into her last sleep with open eyes gazing at the moon just now peeking through the broken
clouds. Tawngness reached and swiped the face with a single claw, drawing a long red scratch across the cheek
and nose. She withdrew her flared paw, and she brought the claw to her muzzle. She sniffed the droplet of blood
that dangled like a crucible of soul from the very point.
Were Agnes to be dreaming at this point, her dream may very well have been as follows. She may have
pictured herself standing, as though on a passenger platform, like the times she had traveled by rail. An old
woman, in hat and coat and sweater, she held the carpetbag that she carried, when she journeyed on the
conveyances of humanity. Water and air, she dangled, with her crimson promise of fire and her memory of
earth. She offered herself like a prayer to the lion. Her fragrance danced into meanings like, "Oh, sweet lion,
take me onto your tongue and into your jaws. I am already dancing in the nerves of your nose. Let me race
like a river to your stomach and beyond. Let me fill your need. Let me be consumed and flourish. Let me
blossom again as energy from the tips of your arteries. Let me gather. Let our breath become one. "
And so it did. The droplet opened the flood gates. The lion bit the throat, attached itself like a nursing kitten,
and sucked the hot liquid. Agnes entered the lion like Cleopatra floating on the Nile. Open wide! and she joined
with waters gathered hours earlier from the creek that ran nearest to the meadow and the smoldering cabin
ashes.
Tawngess' first bites were gruesome, if you like that sort of thing. Pulling off the wrinkled skin of the face in
so doing, the cat gnawed first one eye and then the other. All of it disappeared into the gnashing maw.
Agnes was not so withered as might be expected of a woman who had lived a hundred years. Her cheeks were
succulent. Her lips were full. Her bones were healthy, but they crumpled anyhow within the lion's jaws, the thin
ones that formed the facial features foundation, the delicate mountainscape around the nose and eyes.
In ecstasy Tawngness gnawed relentlessly, and by and by the main skull gave way, opening at the front, drawn
in through fang-mined eye sockets. The earth of Agnes' being was here, with connections running to every
far-flung finger tip. Her memories, her habits, her longings and her fears were filed here in physical detail.
Bereft now of a central focus, each group floated with private awareness of its own data in a world of
disconnected turmoil. Time-worn nerves carved deeply with the etchings of the phases of the moon tumbled
random in the lion's jaws with picture perfect plans and poses of Andrea Clare Devlin.
was going on a trip, as she had done many times before. She was going a'wandering. She would celebrate the
turning of the sun somewhere else, on some other hill, with some other holly or yew.
Perhaps she would see old friends. By the following late summer, she had settled back into the cottage. Andrea
Clare Dolan nee Devlin was heavy with child. Agnes noted this only from a distance, and nobody knew she was
back.
Close enough for drama, Andrea Clare gave birth to her beautiful daughter at the sound of the same thunder
clap. Perhaps she saw the flash in the gloaming come through the flowered curtains of her room in the old
farmhouse on that cold November afternoon.
As the fire slackened and turned to embers, Agnes turned her attention from the glowing ashes of her home to
the mountain lion who had let herself be drawn closer and into the open by the cooling and the darkening and
the death.
Agnes observed the hunger in the animal eyes. She felt her lust for flesh. She smiled and sagged forward into
an unresisting sprawl. Her smile broadened. Just before she died of a multitude of internal injuries, she said, to
the lion, apparently, for nobody else was about, "Looks like this time," and here she took her last breath, "the
cat won. "
Cat One.
The blood was what had finally overcome the cat's last leeriness. Blood meant life; blood meant fresh death;
the difference between that and a kill was a quibble of pride.
Tawngness was hungry. She padded silently to the sudden warm corpse. Death does have such a smell to it. She
had whiffed it a hundred times. She nosed at the head.
Agnes had fallen into her last sleep with open eyes gazing at the moon just now peeking through the broken
clouds. Tawngness reached and swiped the face with a single claw, drawing a long red scratch across the cheek
and nose. She withdrew her flared paw, and she brought the claw to her muzzle. She sniffed the droplet of blood
that dangled like a crucible of soul from the very point.
Were Agnes to be dreaming at this point, her dream may very well have been as follows. She may have
pictured herself standing, as though on a passenger platform, like the times she had traveled by rail. An old
woman, in hat and coat and sweater, she held the carpetbag that she carried, when she journeyed on the
conveyances of humanity. Water and air, she dangled, with her crimson promise of fire and her memory of
earth. She offered herself like a prayer to the lion. Her fragrance danced into meanings like, "Oh, sweet lion,
take me onto your tongue and into your jaws. I am already dancing in the nerves of your nose. Let me race
like a river to your stomach and beyond. Let me fill your need. Let me be consumed and flourish. Let me
blossom again as energy from the tips of your arteries. Let me gather. Let our breath become one. "
And so it did. The droplet opened the flood gates. The lion bit the throat, attached itself like a nursing kitten,
and sucked the hot liquid. Agnes entered the lion like Cleopatra floating on the Nile. Open wide! and she joined
with waters gathered hours earlier from the creek that ran nearest to the meadow and the smoldering cabin
ashes.
Tawngess' first bites were gruesome, if you like that sort of thing. Pulling off the wrinkled skin of the face in
so doing, the cat gnawed first one eye and then the other. All of it disappeared into the gnashing maw.
Agnes was not so withered as might be expected of a woman who had lived a hundred years. Her cheeks were
succulent. Her lips were full. Her bones were healthy, but they crumpled anyhow within the lion's jaws, the thin
ones that formed the facial features foundation, the delicate mountainscape around the nose and eyes.
In ecstasy Tawngness gnawed relentlessly, and by and by the main skull gave way, opening at the front, drawn
in through fang-mined eye sockets. The earth of Agnes' being was here, with connections running to every
far-flung finger tip. Her memories, her habits, her longings and her fears were filed here in physical detail.
Bereft now of a central focus, each group floated with private awareness of its own data in a world of
disconnected turmoil. Time-worn nerves carved deeply with the etchings of the phases of the moon tumbled
random in the lion's jaws with picture perfect plans and poses of Andrea Clare Devlin.
| * * * |
Perhaps nothing more than a reader's imagination rose from that hot kill in the cold fall air. Like a ghostly
soul it raced and wandered and mixed with the winds of time. Years went by, till a gust summoned by the
passion of a brief battle raised a scamper of dust about the dancing hooves of horses, and graceless falling
bodies.
The dust settled. One of the three living humans lay in a pool of his own blood. The back of his head a mass of
bloody, blonde rumples, Bob Cabler slept with the serenity of the unconscious.
Johnny and the young lady whom he knew to be Carol Gallagher looked at one another. They looked at the
dead, as well. First were the driver and passengers of the panel truck. There were four of these. Rowdy
shitheads. Johnny and Bob had ten rounds between them, the total of two revolvers. Johnny had one left when
the last outlaw bit the dust, and Bob had none. The four bad guys had absorbed nine forty-four caliber slugs of
lead.
The blown apart elbows, faces, hearts and arteries were mute evidence of the trails of the lead.
Spot had begun to buck with the chatter of the hardware. As his final shot powered through the chest of a
shady looking creep from San Diego, Bob slid off of the horse's rump, leaving stirrups and saddle as clean as he
found them.
It would be safe to say that Bob was ploughed, in the alcoholic sense of the word. His unerring shots not
withstanding, he could ride, but he probably could not have walked. And he was having a good time.
Johnny would find, when he checked Bob's pistol, that the kid had participated fully, drunk or not. All five
cartridges had been fired. There were two troublemakers that Johnny had not even shot at. Each of them had
four wounds on the surfaces of their miserable, shattered bodies, two entry, two exit, two bad guys, four bullets.
As it said in that original story composed in Marilyn's barn, the sheet of paper sticking out of the typewriter on
a cold, drunken midnight, "For a while there, the boys weren't missing anything. "
Bob tumbled heavily to the ground. Immediately he rolled, scrambling in a daze, alarmed but stunned to near
senseless. He collided with Maggie Murphy.
Maggie was still fighting. The scene that the two young cowboys had come upon when they topped the rise had
been far from a done deal in the heart of Maggie Murphy.
soul it raced and wandered and mixed with the winds of time. Years went by, till a gust summoned by the
passion of a brief battle raised a scamper of dust about the dancing hooves of horses, and graceless falling
bodies.
The dust settled. One of the three living humans lay in a pool of his own blood. The back of his head a mass of
bloody, blonde rumples, Bob Cabler slept with the serenity of the unconscious.
Johnny and the young lady whom he knew to be Carol Gallagher looked at one another. They looked at the
dead, as well. First were the driver and passengers of the panel truck. There were four of these. Rowdy
shitheads. Johnny and Bob had ten rounds between them, the total of two revolvers. Johnny had one left when
the last outlaw bit the dust, and Bob had none. The four bad guys had absorbed nine forty-four caliber slugs of
lead.
The blown apart elbows, faces, hearts and arteries were mute evidence of the trails of the lead.
Spot had begun to buck with the chatter of the hardware. As his final shot powered through the chest of a
shady looking creep from San Diego, Bob slid off of the horse's rump, leaving stirrups and saddle as clean as he
found them.
It would be safe to say that Bob was ploughed, in the alcoholic sense of the word. His unerring shots not
withstanding, he could ride, but he probably could not have walked. And he was having a good time.
Johnny would find, when he checked Bob's pistol, that the kid had participated fully, drunk or not. All five
cartridges had been fired. There were two troublemakers that Johnny had not even shot at. Each of them had
four wounds on the surfaces of their miserable, shattered bodies, two entry, two exit, two bad guys, four bullets.
As it said in that original story composed in Marilyn's barn, the sheet of paper sticking out of the typewriter on
a cold, drunken midnight, "For a while there, the boys weren't missing anything. "
Bob tumbled heavily to the ground. Immediately he rolled, scrambling in a daze, alarmed but stunned to near
senseless. He collided with Maggie Murphy.
Maggie was still fighting. The scene that the two young cowboys had come upon when they topped the rise had
been far from a done deal in the heart of Maggie Murphy.
