by ottersong
© 1999 ottersong, all rights reserved
Her invitation took me by surprise. "After breakfast, let's go see my new cabin. There is a pond and we can target-shoot at stumps."
In her Ozark home a full gun cabinet was a given. Row upon row of sleek well-oiled gun barrels did little too alter my lack of interest in firearms. There was a certain asthetic beauty in some of the inlaid stocks and pistol grips, but shooting them had never been brought up before. She knew my husband and I had hunted out of necessity and that I didn't like it.
Peg and I had been friends for decades before she and her husband bought the land hundreds of miles away in Arkansas. My unhappiness with her move was tempered by the peace and beauty she had found in the mountains and shared with me each summer.
We were closer than sisters and often had no need for words to convey even the most complex thought. We were both blessed/cursed with psychic abilities and although it was seldom discussed, we each took the other's gifts as part of the relationship.
Her suggestion of target practice was unusual, but as we were both good shots, it was in no way threatening. I trusted her utterly. She was twenty years older than l and had been my mentor and friend. So it was that we loaded the car with thermos, three 22 caliber rifles (one with a scope), two huge hand guns (in case of varmints), ammo boxes and enough cigarettes for a small villiage.
Riding through mountainous terrain is total joy to me, perhaps because I hadn't seen a mountain until I was twenty-one years old - the swamps are my milieu. The Ozarks were extraordinarily beautiful and healing to my city-battered psyche.
We often rode through the hills, or careened around impossible hair-pin turns, or sat silently on a mountan top for hours. Now, after half an hour of familiar countryside, we turned into a rut-road that seemed to evaporate into the heavy woods. We started up a slight hill and a roof peak appeared on our left as the trees thinned a bit. The road leveled off and a cabin rose to visibility.
It was a simple log cabin, bleached to a silvery gray by time. The woods had just opened like a flower to reveal the small building and the focus of it's view from an overhung porch. The pond was huge, like a small lake, green and lush, primeval, with trees hiding it's width like a secret.
Once the car motor was turned off, the quiet was a scream of serenity. The world was this, which caressed my senses - all else I had known simpy returned to void. We sat on the porch to decompress with coffee and smokes, our backs against the cabin's front.
After being assured that I would harm nothing more than a stump, Peg handed me the rifle with the scope and we chose our target stumps for a contest. After two or three shots, my rifle jammed. Hard as she tried, Peg could not clear it, so it was unloaded and put aside. She handed me the third rifle and I fired two shots and it quit. The firing pin had broken. It too was emptied and put aside.
Peg was distraught, she took scrupulous care of her guns and she was almost embarassed by their malfunction. She then handed me the as yet unfired rifle she held. One shot and it jammed. It was added to the growing pile of useless weapons.
We sat down for a smoke and a laugh about how we weren't supposed to shoot that day and decided not to even try the pistols. So there we were, having a smoke, backs against the cabin's log front and absorbing the calm of the pond. There was a huge padlock on the door of the cabin, and in our haste that morning, Peg forgot the key. The only window overlooked the pond, so we couldn't even see into the cabin.
The quiet and soft sunlight lulled us into easy banter and I started asking questions about the locked cabin. Very slowly, it dawned on me that I knew what the cabin looked like inside and I started to tell Peg what I "saw". The locked and only door was in the middle of the front wall of the little building. Beyond was one room, rather small, with a four-paned window in the right wall.
Beneath the window was a very narrow bed, the likes of which I had never seen. It was constructed by using a small tree cut for the foot and head posts. They were connected by other smaller trees that still had bark, though no leaves or teeny twigs. A rotting rope was woven from side to side and head to foot, there was no mattress, but the rope could have held one once.
Peg listened, accustomed to this ability, then gently said, "Anything else?" My response was, "Something about Madrid on the wall, like an old paper nailed to the wall that says Madrid." This made no sense to me, why would something about Spain be here?
Peg just listened and nodded - smoke rings rising away from her head like thoughts made visible. "What else?" she asked. So l looked around but there was nothing more, just a bed and the paper on the wall with a nail and a dark spot by the skeletal bed.
As my awareness grew, the characteristic chills rose on my arms, breath became short, and tears began to well up in my eyes. Someone had been murderd in this room, this bed, a long long time ago. There was no picture of a face, or sound, or indication of rage... just the faint memory of violent murder. It was stated without emotion, a simple telling of a fact.
Peg said, "You are right, the person who built this place died here. He was brutally murdered, shot. The person who did it and the motive were never discovered. There is a paper on the wall, a newspaper account of the largest earthquake that ever hit here, lt is called the New Madrid Fault. The paper is yellow and curly, but it is still there, held in place by a big nail."
She continued, "The bed is exactly as you describe it. He built it all himself, and dammed the gully down there near a spring to create this pond." We gazed off towards the hard-won pond and gained new respect for it and it's creator. We decided that the spirit of this haven wanted no noise or guns or intrusion - and rendered the weapons useless.
We sat and wished the aggrieved soul peace and light in his journey. We thanked him for the healing we all received and shared on that extraordinary day. We told him how we appreciated his pond and how we knew he must be proud of what it had become through the years. We - the seen and the unseen - sat that day on the porch of a silver picture-book cabin and shared the peace of the pond.
Peg and I had a hard time leaving until we realized it was late afternoon and that waiting for us was the void the others mistakenly call life.
I took the pond away with me that day - in my heart - and if you see me staring into space with a faint smile and wistful eyes... please don't startle me... I am sitting on a cabin porch, lost in reverie by a pond primeval that wears trees to modestly cover it's edges.