Out of the Canyon
She told him on the second day of her stay at the canyon that her mother had paid doctors to concoct her illness so that she could be sent away. It seems her mother was conducting an illicit affair with a very wealthy gentleman and did not want it ruined with Thilliada spying on her every move. “The spring will help that too,” Tooms had told her. In the evenings she would cook for him, elegant meals derived from the native flora and fauna: possum and potato stew, crow with lemon glaze. Tooms recorded some of the recipes in his diary.
Thilliada had been with Tooms for a little over a month when he wrote in, as he put it, “a trembling hand,” I have done the unspeakable and there is no turning back. In a troubled confession, taking up three closely written pages, Tooms revealed that early one Monday morning, he snuck a peek at Thilliada as she slipped, naked, into the spring. I saw it all, and I ran down into the cave. In my fit of debauchery, I felt licence to snatch up the bones of the ancient man and work them over thoroughly.
In the privacy of a small shack that stood a hundred yards behind the house, Tooms assembled the ancient man’s bones, giving him a cow skull and the shins of an ass. He lacquered and drilled and pounded for hours at a time, and Thilliada wanted to know what he was making. “When it’s finished,” Tooms told her. He confessed in his writings that he must lower his gaze in her company now. After dinner one night, as he was about to take his plate to the sink, he found a note beneath it, on the place mat. “I saw you looking,” it said. He shoved the note in his pocket and left the kitchen.
As the days passed, she never mentioned the note nor gave any sign that there was some secret between them. Instead she spoke at great length about the current theories that there was a lost continent populated by exotic flying people at the center of the earth and that the entrance to this land was at the North Pole. “I don’t see it,” Tooms admitted to her, and she laughed at him for his lack of sophistication. Every day her excitement about seeing his latest sculpture grew, and he admitted how this fired his desire for completion.
Then came the torrential rains. Both Tooms and Thilliada stayed inside for two days for fear of flash floods and mud slides. She read a book about famous castaways, and he sat by the fireplace, playing his jaw harp. He recorded on the second night, as lightning and thunder ripped through the canyon, how it was the first time he noticed that Thilliada’s scalp had begun to sprout a dark fuzz. The next morning the rains had vanished and so, mysteriously, had his jaw harp.
On the following day, as much as he attested to wanting to spend time working on his pile of bones, he left the house early and went exploring for mushrooms up on the rim of the canyon. It was a quarter of a day’s journey, but before he went, he saw Thilliada to the spring. The harder the rain, the more magnificent the crop, he wrote. He knew he had to eat the hallucinogen right on the spot or its properties would diminish, so he searched long and hard for the most succulent disk.
