Anything to speed things up. I went around back, opened the doors and climbed in, latching them behind me. After a minute the truck started again. The sofa felt good enough, but laying there, I didn’t feel sleepy any longer. I kept wondering how in the world I’d find the gate, once I got to Muhlenberg County. Finally I told myself, same way you found the pictures. However that was. Anyway it settled my mind enough that I got to sleep.
When I woke up, it seemed like I’d slept a long time. A long time full of dreams. Dreams with Varia in them. Laying there, I felt them slipping away, and they were gone, just like she was. The truck wasn’t moving, so I got up, felt for the latch, and opened the doors. It was night out, moonlight, and a little spooky feeling, but nothing bad. I hopped down.
We were on a country road, stuck in a mudhole. I went to the cab; the driver was inside, laying against the steering wheel asleep. The door was locked, which surprised me, and so was the one on the other side, but moonlight on the seat showed the whiskey bottle laying on its side without the stopper. I decided he’d finished it off after he got stuck.
There was a little field across the road, but otherwise it seemed to be all woods around there, and a big big hill on the other side. Didn’t look like any place I’d seen in Illinois or Indiana, the hill was too big, so I decided I was in Kentucky.
The moon was full and low in the sky, which meant it was near daybreak. I set off down the road with the moon at my back, not liking to leave the driver like that, but I needed to find that gate. I felt pretty optimistic. I’d made it to Kentucky in under a day, even though I’d lost my truck.
Right away I left the field behind, woods crowding the road on both sides. The night was mild, and in a little bit I started enjoying the hike. The leaves were coming out, and it smelled like spring. I must have walked a mile or more before I came to another cleared field, not more’n six or eight acres, with a little shack at the far end, just back from the road. By that time, morning had started lightening the sky a bit.
The whole shack turned out to be made of shakes, walls and all. I heard a dog woof inside; a minute later the front door opened and an old woman looked out.
“Who’s out there?” she yelled.
“Name’s Curtis Macurdy,” I told her. “I’m lost. I’d appreciate if you could tell me where I am.”
She cackled like a hen. Her old hound came out past her and down the steps, to sniff my legs without making a sound. “Yew ain’t from nowheres ’round yere,” she said.
“No ma’am. I just left Illinois, headed for Kentucky.”
“Kentucky?!” She cackled again. “Yewr in Missoura!”
Now I realized who she sounded like. Her accent was like the truck driver’s, only thicker. He must have drank enough, he decided to go home, and these hills must be the Ozarks. From what I’d heard and read of the Ozarks, it could be a month before the van company found out where their truck was, if they ever did.
“How far to Kentucky?” I asked.
“Don’t rightly know. But yew ain’t goin’ to walk there today. Tell ya what. I got to go fetch water. If’n yew’ll tote it fer me, I’ll feed ya breakfast.”
She didn’t have a well, but across the road just three, four chains, was a spring in the hillside, with a wooden trough for the water to run out of. She had two buckets hung on a shoulder yoke, and I carried them for her. If it’d been me living there, I’d have built a house on the other side of the road, and run the trough on down to it. Or better, put a pipe under the road.
While she fixed breakfast, she chattered on like someone who didn’t have anyone to talk to very often. “I’m a-goin’ up on the knob, when the sun comes up,” she said. “I staked out a young cockerel up there last evenin’.”