Say "Amen" and pass the mustard

I can remember like it was yesterday.  In my mind it was.  It was the summer of ’46. Americans were reveling in the end of the nastiest war to ever be waged on this earth, too bad I didn’t share that reverie.  My father had still not come back from the Pacific; he was officially listed as missing in action, but we all knew that he was no more.  My brother and I had daydreams of his heroic march up Mount Suribachi, bayonet fixed to his government issued rifle, just spoiling to take on the Japs.  In truth, he never even got off of the transport.  He died a fiery, ignominious death as a kamikaze performed his duty for emperor and country.

In the fall of that year, my brother, mother, and I moved to her home state of Kentucky to live with my maternal grandfather.  She was so overcome with grief and the prospect of rearing two wild children alone that she had given up all of her prewar dreams and retreated to safe ground.  Living with my grandfather was hard at times. He was exceedingly old, I was told, not even conceiving my mother until he was well past middle age.  I won’t bore you with the details of his existence, save the fact that he was not a drinker and was perhaps the most honest person that I have ever known.  That makes what he confided in his two young grandsons on that stormy December night all the more difficult to comprehend.  You will have to trust me that same way that I trusted him.

It was well on the way to Christmas, perhaps a day or two past the ides, that Gramps became very agitated.  We could hear him stamp around above us as we two boys occupied the overstuffed coaches in the grand cathedral of a living room.  His persistent cough had grown steadily worse and his bloodshot eyes now sported large dark circles under them, giving him an almost ghostly appearance. His frail body shook violently sometimes, like an addict with delirium tremens.  It was clear to all that Gramps was not long for this world. 

My heart broke as I watched him struggle to descend the wrought iron stair case that morning, the pain etched brightly on his normally cheerful features.  All that day he was gone.  He had mumbled something about seeing his woods this morning and he would need us to be around that evening in order to tell us something exceedingly important.  My mind raced wildly all day as I went about doing my chores on the small farm.

My mother spent most of the day busy in the kitchen.  Throughout the morning and into mid afternoon she had been hard at work preparing various victuals that happened to be my grandfather’s favorites. My mouth watered as they piled up on the large, double leafed table in the dining room.  It was clear that she was preparing for his last meal.  Although I thought that she would be inconsolable, it was quite the opposite.  She sang quite beautifully as she worked her way through the variety of dishes, even stopping to give me a firm hug and kiss as I brought in fresh firewood and dropped it heavily into the firebox in the living room. I was happy to see that she was at peace.

I have never spent a longer day in my life.  About the time that dark was creeping its way across the snow painted valley that pinched in behind our large farm house, Gramps returned from his sojourn.  His countenance was much changed from the morning.  Although he still had that nagging cough, his face looked much rosier and he had shaved his scraggly beard and slicked his thinning grey hair back with his greasiest hair treatment. The four of us tucked in to perhaps the best meal that I have ever eaten.  I wanted many times to stop, but Gramps urged us on.  With a final slice of my favorite gooseberry pie half eaten on my plate, I called it quits.

The old man got up and crossed out of the dining room into the spacious living room beyond and began building a roaring fire.  In minutes the room was quite cozy and I was splayed out on my favorite velvet coach, my tummy full, drowsy in my satisfaction.  My brother occupied the twin sofa just opposite me and Gramps took his customary seat in a large leather chair adjacent the crackling fire.  As was his usual custom, he filling his favorite chestnut pipe, struck a match, and lit it.  In seconds, exceedingly fragrant pipe smoke began to curl to the ceiling like benevolent ghosts reaching for heaven. He sat there for what seemed an eternity until he began to speak to us in a tone that I had never heard him use before.  Later I would realize that it was the tone taken for a eulogy.

“I don’t know if I told you boys, but I haven’t always lived here on this ground.  Sure my family came fresh from the old country to this plot, oh before I can remember.  Just like that rail splitter Lincoln, I was conceived and hatched right here in the grand Commonwealth.  Like you two, and your father to some extent, I was a wild one.  I was ever back and forth across this countryside and I soon realized that it was just too dern small to hold me. About that time some fool stumbled into a fortune in a place called Sutter’s Mill, and I was bound for parts west,” he began, now warming to his story. I would later understand that he meant the gold rush in California.

“Now I never had but a penny to my name so I figured I could hire on to the railroad and make my way across the country that way.  Of course, by the time I reached where I was going all the fortune making was done and I was out in the cold. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men’ I guess,” he chuckled lightly.

“I had happened to make my way over to San Francisco and was working on one of the wharfs gutting fish for next to nothing.  I tell you, if I ever hear another bark out of one of them nasty smelling sea lions, it will be too soon.  Anyhow, after work I frequented this little bar just off the wharf there, as I was a man that partook of a stiff one on occasion. So one night I see this Chinaman sitting there by his lonesome and he offers me a seat.  We struck up a good conversation, me in my accent and he in his, and after a few too many, my chair tips back and away I go through the floor.  Someone gave me a mean few whacks and the next thing I know I’m on the high seas for three years on a whaling boat. Well after those years there, I haven’t taken a drinking ever since,” he continued seriously.

“In order for those they had shanghaied not to complain to the authorities, who never would have listened anyway, we put in up in Portland, Oregon to sell the whale oil that we had collected all that time.  As soon as that ship slowed down enough, I bailed off the side.  That water was so cold I thought that I would have a heart attack, but the thought of them catching hold of me for another voyage was enough for me to stroke my way to land and get out of there. Anyhow, there I was penniless and soaked to the bone with nowhere at all to go,” he continued, now stopping to refill his pipe and collect his thoughts a bit.

“I got me a paper that someone had left on a bench and it was advertising for men to cut and float timber.  Never one to shy away from an honest day’s work, I asked directions to the address in the ad and hired on jacking lumber. It was clean enough work and I got paid a good wage on occasion. Mostly I was outside in the great wide open West.  Finally a land big enough to hold me,” he said, his smile broad across his face.

“Now seeing as I had given up the drink, my social life was somewhat limited because all of my lumbering buddies were off to the watering hole the second the foreman let us go.  You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I have been known as something of a scholar by those that don’t know any better.  Instead of drinking I would go in to town and buy every new book that hit the trading post shelf.  Mind you there weren’t many to choose from. Lord, did I get sick of westerns and that Horatio Alger is one the worst hack writers I have ever seen.  Now this is where the tale gets a little off track,” he warned, now standing and stretching. It was then that he turned and left the room.  Wide eyed, the two of us stared at each other, wondering if the story was over. We could hear him in the next room moving something around.  Soon he came back with what looked like two pieces of shoe leather.

“Here take this and chew on it while I continue,” he said, handing the two of us the stringy item.  Surprisingly it smelled sweet and inviting. As I took my first bite my mouth exploded in wonder.  I had consumed most of my favorite things in the world not an hour before, but this delectable piece of heaven that I was now chewing on made that meal seem like poorhouse gruel.

“Try to pay attention, now I know it’s hard while grinding on that there, but it’s very important that you do. Let’s see, where was I? Ah yes, lumberjacking. Anyhow all the time that I spent by myself wandering those woods to find a good spot to read my next novel, I was being watched.  I’ll be darned if I didn’t have that creeping feeling sometimes when I was alone under those great pines, but I never would have dreamed that someone like that was spying on me,” with that statement, he wet his lips a bit and furrowed his brow, as if he was trying hard to get the next sentence exactly right.

“Have you boys ever seen something that you know just couldn’t be real, but there it was right in front of God and everybody and it just had to be? Well it was about six months after I started in the lumber trade that I impressed the foreman enough that he groomed me to take his position when he retired.  He was a broken down old man by then and was about to give up the ghost any day.  I guess he figured they needed a man with some smarts to run the operation, so he figured I would be it since I spent so much time in my books and such. “

“Soon after I became foreman they moved me out of the bunkhouse with the rest of the jacks into a nice two story log house all my own.  It wasn’t more than a week on my new job that I was cozy in my bed when I swore that I heard someone enter the cabin door.  I sat bolt upright in bed and listened.  Sure enough there was someone making a scuffle down in the kitchen.  I distinctly remember him opening and closing the cupboards and moving one of the wooden chairs that were around the kitchen table.  Being a peaceful man, I never had any use for firearms, so I grabbed me a nice chunk of firewood and snuck down the stairs as quietly as I could,” the old man was now in a trance, his eyes wide, the dying fire reflecting back at us from them.  My brother and I stopped our chewing and stared back at him.

“There at the table, as Almighty God is my witness, sat what I thought at first was a grizzly.  I rubbed my eyes sore and looked again.  It was not a bear, or woodland creature that I had ever laid eyes on before.  It was a man.  I swear to you, it was a large hairy man.  He was sitting just like you or me in that rickety chair chomping on a bit of beef that I had left over from my supper.  He was chewing quite politely, even using a knife and fork.  He was washing down his meal with my finest bottle of root beer.  I swear if I hadn’t seen it myself there isn’t a person on earth I would have believed that story from,” he said, now visibly shaken, as we two boys were.  There was no doubt that he was telling us the scene just as he had witnessed it those years earlier.

“The most amazing thing happened next: he began to talk to me,” Gramps said, now gaining his composure.

“’You are Hollis T. Snodgrass, are you not?’ he began in a deep, rich voice that was surprisingly gentle,” my Gramps continued.

“All I could do was stammer out an affirmative to this question, as I was completely dumbfounded,” he said.

“’Firstly, let’s put things straight between the two of us. My name is Tongalagook and I am what you could call a native of these parts.  I have been watching you for some time now, and have come for your help in a very important matter.  You are a man that knows how to read and write, correct?’ he asked me earnestly.  I just nodded my head in agreement as he took another swig of root beer.”

“’As you may not know my people have been a part of this country for many generations.  Long before the first man used the ice bridge to come across the water, my people fled their native soil to settle here. We were numerous in those days, and at peace.  We were foresters mostly, and we bore a great responsibility as shepherds of the lower creatures.  Those were the days of the great mammoth, when the wooly rhino and saber tooth cat still roamed free here. Those were good times and my people multiplied greatly.  We had great cities underneath the earth and grand towns with lovely broadways’ he said, with a gleam in his eye.  Then it was that he became more serious, even a little bit frightening as he told me of what happened next,” the old man continued, his tone deepening as well.

“’What we didn’t know was that things were not going well for those that we had left behind in the old country.  Humans there were multiplying at an incredible rate and pushing our cousins deeper into hostile territory. Furthermore, the ice bridge that bound our two continents was melting, and soon they would be trapped in an ever smaller world.  It was then that they decided to gather all of the rest of our kind and make their way to join us here.  It was upon their arrival that things began to go terribly wrong.  Because they had lived in such close proximity to humans they began to take on some of their more undesirable traits.  They became greedy, parceling off more and more lands for themselves, just to  prove how much more important they were than others,’ he continued, now so upset that he was grinding his wide teeth together.  I moved to sit down across from him at the table, and he told me more,” Gramps said.

“’The Invaders, as we came to call them, were increasingly aggressive.  It was one of our unspoken rules that lower animals were not to be killed except for food, and only then if the whole carcass was used. They began to murder animals just to take their skins or their choicest parts, and would leave the rest to rot. Soon our great herds that we had taken so much care in protecting were disappearing.  The more alarming thing was that the Invaders began forming gangs of their strongest and they would burn and pillage our peaceful towns, even invading and sacking our richest cities.’”

“’The worst was yet to come though. Unknown to us, with their close contact to human kind, they had been infested with fleas. Those fleas carried terrible diseases inside of them.  The Invaders had gotten used to them through years of contact, but few of us here were immune.  Every time they came close to us they spread those nasty parasites all over.  Soon my people began to die by the hundreds, then the thousands.  They suffered gruesome deaths, mostly drowning in their own fluids, as their lungs filled with mucus.  The ones, like me, that were fortunate enough to be immune knew that we must act quickly to save ourselves. We decided that we would have to head east, away from our natural lands,” he said, now lowering his hairy head into his humongous hands. I tell you, I felt as sorry as could be for him.  He must have been at the end of his rope to be telling me this story and asking for my help.”

“’We tried to get away from them, but they came after us.  It seems that something horrible had happened on one of their raids.  A blood thirsty group of them, that happened to be seven brothers, came upon a small family trying to leave their home.  This group attacked and killed the group, and in their blood lust, ate one of the children.’ he now just stared down at the table unable to speak.  He stayed that way for a good while, ashamed to look at me. “

“’I am told that the meat of that child tasted like nothing they had ever tasted before.  It was perhaps the sweetest flesh in the world.  It had a drug like quality to it, and they could not get their fill of it.  Soon they were hunting down and eating as many as they could find. Only a small number of us managed to escape,’ he said, his rich voice now overcome with emotion. I can’t honestly say if I was crying too, but I sure felt like it.”

“’The only thing that saved us was the arrival of humans across the bridge of ice.  They began to come in to our homeland as well, and they too brought their disease with them, a fresh sickness that the Invaders were not used to.  Because they didn’t mind living close to humans, since they had done it in the old country, they began to die off as we had. A short time later those humans that crossed the bridge fell to white man’s diseases.  It’s a shame that a people that held us in high regard died the same way as we did,’ he said, shaking his big head.”

“’Here is the final problem though.  The very few families that we have left are still in great danger.  As the Invaders began to die, they distanced themselves from the humans.  They became solitary and reclusive, but they never gave up their taste for our flesh.  They still hunt us and some of our few remaining have been taken.  Since whites have come, they have gotten more vicious, knowing that the land is disappearing faster, and so too is their favorite food.  They have grown increasingly bold and we are running out of hiding places.  Soon, I fear, all of us will be lost,” he said to me. I could see his problem. The arrival of whites, like me, had the situation worse for certain. I did wonder something though: How was it that he was sitting here talking to me in plain English?” Gramps said.

“’We finally decided that we the males of our kind, of which there were just a handful, would hide in plain sight.  Since the Invaders were afraid of man, we would have to learn to be like men.  I have had several different human jobs.  I have dressed like men, I have eaten like men.  Surely I don’t look much different, except for my height of course, than some of the ruffians that you used to share the bunkhouse with,’ he said, and I had to agree with him there.”

“’The great problem is that we are separated from our females, and soon our numbers will dwindle to nothing.  Since you are obviously a man of books and ideas, I thought I would explain my plight to you and perhaps you could help me with an answer,” he finished, now handing the problem over to me.”

“I have to tell you boys it was a puzzler.  I of course was wanting to help him, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I suggested that we could get all of his kind together and hunt down the group of crazies that were hunting them. He would have no part of killing off more of his kind, even if it meant saving their own lives.  I told him I would think about it for a couple of days and told him to come around after midnight three days from then,” Gramps said, now relighting his pipe that had long ago gone out.

“It was in the middle of the night on the second night that I got a whale of a plan.  What if we just moved the whole lot of them so far away that the murderers could never find them?  What if we left the west entirely and came back east where their kind were totally unknown?  The best part was that I would journey back west every couple of months and leave signs that the creatures were still around in order to convince the Invaders that they were still there but were just in hiding,” the old man said.

“Since we had no better options, I convinced Tongalagook, and he rounded up all of his kin.  We all pitched in what money we had made and bought some covered wagons to head back east.  We stayed off of the normal routes and soon reached the valley here.  The family of what we call Sasquatch has been living here ever since. Matter of fact, I visited a group of them today, just to say good bye,” Gramps confessed.

“I am not long for this earth and I must now ask you boys for you solemn oath.  You must never tell another soul what I am about to tell you,” he said, and we readily swore not to divulge anything.

“We had lived here together for a great many years.  I had gone back several times out west to leave tracks, pieces of hair, and other traces that my friends were still living there.  I was getting old though, and I would soon not be able to go back and our plans would be ruined.  It was then that my friend made an incredible sacrifice.  One day he approached me while I was out hunting in the woods and asked me to dinner.  He had done this several times before, so I accepted eagerly.  That night we had a great feast of local game and whatever wild plants and mushrooms they had gathered.  After we had eaten the bulk of the meal, Tongalagook told me he had a special dish that only I could taste.  He brought a steaming bowl and set it down in front of me.  I sniffed it a little, and It was the most incredible smelling dish I ever smelled.  The taste was a hundred times better than the smell even,” Gramps confessed.  I have to say I was puzzled by the look on his face. It soon became apparent to me why his countenance was such.

“I have to say I ate so greedily of that dish that I was quite embarrassed about my bad manners. I looked up to thank my host for his magnificent offering and noticed he was bleeding rather badly from his side.  It looked as though a big patch of muscle had been carved from him.  Slowly i began to realize what was happening. That delicious dish that I had wolfed down was him.  He had, for some strange reason, given me part of his body to eat,” he said, now laying his hand across his middle as if he were going to be sick.

“I was at a loss. I couldn’t understand why my friend would do such a disgusting thing to me. What he told me next explained an act of self sacrifice that still cuts me to this day,” Gramps continued.

“’Good, great friend, Hollis T. Snodgrass, you have done more for my people that any human could have ever done.  You have protected us from extinction, and for this is thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I know that you are getting older and will soon be unable to continue what you have done for these many years.  This gift of my flesh will help you to keep living long after a normal human would be dead.  We do not age as you do, so by eating part of me, you can keep on living.  Not only do I wish an exceedingly long life upon you, as it stands my people still need your help.  Tomorrow I will die, my good friend, and my remains will be smoked and cured for you.  In this way you may keep living, so that my people may keep living,’ he spoke, looking deep into my eyes.  I could tell he meant every word and there was no changing his mind about it.” Gramps said, a tear now trickling down his wrinkled cheek.

“The following week his family delivered him to me.  It was part of him that the two of you partook of when I started my story,” he said.  My stomach suddenly took a somersault. 

“Now you two must continue what I have been doing for almost eighty years.  That’s right, as of today, I am one hundred thirty years old. My body is ruined beyond repair and I must turn my charge over to the only two that I can trust with my story,” Gramps said, now rising from his chair, crossing the room, and gathering the two of us in his arms.

“Will you boys, finish what I started?” he asked us earnestly.  Only a monster would say no.

“Oh and if you ever grow tired of Sasquatch jerky, just eat it with a bit of mustard,” he added, smiling brightly.

That is why, I, Arnold P. Worrell, am the foremost authority on Sasquatches in the entire world.  I have pretended to hunt them for most of seven decades now, a quisling in my own community, setting up clues to throw those nasty Invaders off the track, and perhaps fooling a few humans in the process. My brother and I have made tracks of all sizes, collected orangutan hair and thrown it about, and even made a video or two, just to keep the hunters off of the scent.

I tell you this now because I will be following in the footsteps of my dear departed grandfather soon.  It is up to you now to save my big, furry friends; so keep believing.  Oh by the way, with mustard on it, Sasquatch tastes just like chicken.

 



Josh Hider

http://jhider.wordpress.com