Out of the Canyon
To this day, standing sentry within the cave of the glowing, yellow-green waters, are those sculptures that Tooms created from the remains of animals he had either discovered dead in the canyon or had shot, himself. The idea of making them came to him after he ingested a certain red capped mushroom that appears along the upper rim of the canyon following a heavy rain. He was gazing at the sun-bleached skeleton of an armadillo when he envisioned it rising up into a two-legged stance. Instead of its own insignificant head, he saw the skull of a coyote balanced on its negligible neck. Its paws were now bird talons dried like beef jerky by the sun. It said, “Build me,” to him in the voice of the woman who had broken his heart and sent him West in search of his fortune.
Because so many of the cures have, in recent years, been verified and confirmed by scientific research, the religious community came to believe that there must be some part of God swirling in those strange pools. In 1970, Hawaiian pearl divers were hired by the Vatican to explore the depths of the Tooms Canyon Curative Springs. Hundreds of feet deep, at the phosphorescent heart of the magic, they found a book half buried in the snow drift sand. When it was brought to the surface, the experts discovered that even the ink had been completely preserved by the inherent chemistry of the waters. It was clear that what they had resurrected was Elijah Tooms’ own diary.
Hardly anyone noticed the story, a mere 150 words, which appeared in the Horace/Griffin Examiner of January 1st, 1971. It was reported that in an unusual show of generosity, the Vatican bequeathed the diary outright to J.T. Mortenson, the famous neo-Freudian fundamentalist critic. “Le Mort,” as he was known by those who feared him in the academic world, immediately took a sabbatical from his teaching duties in order to begin poring over the unusual find.
During that year off, the critic became estranged from his wife of twenty years. Lilian Mortenson was said to have told her friends that the book was the cause of all of their problems. She confided that he had become obsessed with it, not just the story, but the actual letters of the words, the ink that formed them and the paper they were written on, as if some grandiose secret lurked just below the surface of the physical object.
During the divorce proceedings, she had it put in the official record that Mortenson had begun to consult ancient texts of magic and could be seen in his study hopping on one foot and reciting things backwards. “The day he drew a big circle on the Persian carpet with chicken grease and sat at its center for eight hours, playing some viciously annoying little instrument, was the last straw,” she said. “After that I packed my bag and went to my sister’s place.” All Mortenson could say in his defense at the deposition was, “Time is of the essence,” and with this he lost the Mercedes and house to his wife.
The following year, when Mortenson returned to teaching at Preston University, his colleagues found him a changed man. Whereas Le Mort had always cut a trim, dagger-like figure, as seemingly deadly as his reputation for slashing the works of those who disagreed with his proto-sexual sublimation theory, he was now grossly overweight and perpetually reeking of tobacco. “His eyes were like the openings to deep dark pits,” said his department head, Joshua Hyde-Summers. “He was always clutching his brief case to his chest and darting looks over his shoulder. I found him in the hallway that runs beneath the Fine Arts building one night well after the last class had let out, lying on the floor in an alcove, staring blankly at the ceiling. On another occasion, he nervously confided to me that he was being stalked.”
