Jedediah Compton

A short and factual account of the group ride I went on last weekend. My group took a wrong turn, and ended up going about ten miles and fifteen hundred feet of elevation farther than planned. On the way, we passed a kind old farmer, with a hidden hillside farm who pointed the way.  When we saw him, he was doing something strange with some strange instrument out in his field...


One Summer Day in Jed’s Life

    Jedediah Compton had long ago laid to rest those dreams which so haunt a young man in America. Perhaps thirty years earlier, he would have listened to the whisperings of the sirens of fortune and fame—or at least notoriety—that continuously interfere with the normal goings on of a man with big dreams and small abilities; now he had arrived at that permanently retrospective state which is the mimic of contentment. His small mountain farm scraping the clean Oregon skies, his dogs, his peripatetic lump of womanhood called Betsy—all of them orbited in a sort of quasi-existence around the firm reality of his anticlimatical habits and the silent, perverse pleasure he took in contemplating the aesthetic horror of his life.
    That morning dawned hot. The temperature had passed the hundred mark the day before, and the night had cooled it little. Standing on his rough-hewn timber porch, looking out across the Yamhill Valley from his hidden fold in the mountain, Jed saw the eastern hills bathed in a haze that appears in Oregon only once or twice a summer, a haze signifying a leaden air, bereft of movement, languoring in its own heat and shimmering with atmospheric pain. He spat, and walked back into the kitchen.
    “Betsy! Mah breakfust ready?”
    “You hush, Jed. I tol’ you I had to feed them chickens o’ yours ‘fore I’d get to makin’ no brekfust!”
    “Dangitall woman. It’s ‘most six-thirty! You ‘spect me to sit around hungry all day?”
    “You hold your horses, and them eggs’ll be fried up in just a minute.”
    Jed grunted and clunked over to the cabin’s ancient refrigerator. After listening to the satisfying hiss-pop of the bottle top, he glugged for a few seconds on his morning lager.
    “Y’know, Betsy. I hear from Swaggart, down the way, that they’s expectin’ some furreners down in town.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Some furreners on bicycles or somesuch.”
    “Oh, yeh. I seen Zelma at the church bizarre, and she says they come every year, from down- state or somethin’. Some big race or somethin’. They ain’t furreners. They’s just city folk.”
    “Nah, Swaggart says they’s wearin’ them stretchy shorts, ‘an talkin’ funny, and all. No way they ain’t furreners. Terrorizers, mored-n-likely.”
    “Suit y’self.”
    “Just the same, it don’t hurt nothin’ to clean the shotgun. Leastwise, I ain’t getting’ stuck up here in the hills with a bunch of furreners in them funny shorts.”
    After the morning ritual of bacon, eggs, sausage, ham, cheese, milk, and coffee, Betsy began clearing the breakfast things while Jed removed the birdgun from its perch by the door. He cracked it open, sighting down its metallic innards. The cool steel, blued and masculine, had a quieting effect on Jed’s mind, and he completed his familiar chore with an alacrity and precision. When he finished, he snapped the barrel shut with a crack that made Betsy jump and made Jed smile.
    Jed slung the gun over his shoulder and called to Betsy as he walked out, “I’ll be seein’ bout them gorse bushes, Bets.”

    After meandering around the fields for a while, poking noncommittally with a hoe at a weed or two, Jed considered his day’s work done, and started in on the preoccupation to which he had devoted most of his waking hours for the past three decades: oil witching. For generations, the Comptom males had spent hours at a time bent over, lost in concentration, passing a forked stick over their fields, waiting for the tremor in their hands to become an uncontrollable twitch.
    This particular morning, the witching stick was unusually active. When the stick bent toward the ground, crazily and with a force not human, Jed knew that he was standing on money. Liquid, inky, black money. He dropped his stick and took up the small foxhole shovel he had brought back from Vietnam, and began vigorously to tear at green robe of the earth, begging her to give up her treasure.
    In the midst of his fervent exertions, he suddenly halted, motionless save for the sweat that metronomed off his nose. He peered down the rutted gravel rode adjacent to his land, which ran from the little town of Scholls, past his farm, and over the top of Bald Peak Mountain. From below, he heard an echoing and crashing, and saw a figure wending its way around the last switchback and up the sinuous track.
    He slowly stood up from his work, and slid the shotgun, with two barrels’ full of buck shot, off his shoulder, and leaned it against his leg, hidden from view.
    The intruder, Jed could now see, was in fact on a bicycle, pedaling tortuously slowly up the precarious ridge, avoiding the sinkholes and the boulders strewn across the overridden road. When he saw the garb of the rider, Jed’s guts turned over on themselves, and his vision blurred. The rider was clad as though he were a phantasm—blood red and black, upon a blood red steed. Against the shaded mountainside verdure, the rider appeared as a rent in the fabric of the universe: a principality of fire or a harbinger of death. He dismounted and gazed coolly up the mountain, and Jed felt an apocalyptic fear grip his heart. He shifted the weight of the gun, prepared to bring it to bear on what was his certain doom. And it spoke:
    “Ah… Excuse me, sir? Do you know if this road leads to Mountain Top Road, or maybe Bald Peak Road? And… how far it is?”
    Jed was unmanned, and stuttered, “I.. I… uh, pardon me?”
    “Um, do you know how far it is to Mountain Top Road?”
    “Ah, ah… three, four mile?” He managed to gasp out.
    “Oh, okey doke. Three-fourths of a mile. Thanks a lot!”
    In the span of two minutes, Jed had aged ten years. He had seen his death come striding to meet him on his front lawn, and he had spoken to it in human words. As the visiting messenger sat down on the grass in the shade, Jed genuflected quickly and raced up the hill.
    Bursting into the kitchen, breathless and wild-eyed, he flew at his wife, “Betsy! Betsy! I done seen an angel, or, or or—or a spirit, leastwise! I ain’t never seen no creature so bright-colored! He sittin’ down there right now, just resting hisself…. Oh Betsy!”
    “Jed, whatthaheck got into you? What’re you goin’ on about? ……Oh, my! I see him! D’ya see the others? More spirits coming up the hill to join him.”
    “Well, I spoke to him!”
    “What’d you say?”
    “I says… I says… well, he asked me how far to the road up yonder. And I told him it was a few mile. And hilly, and….. but oh Betsy. We’ve been visited!”
    “Oh Jed, it’s just like in Bible times. Spirits comin’, and… and… restin’ under trees and all! D’ya ‘spose I should bake some bread or somethin’?”
    From their porch, they watched in awe as the group of celestials gathered in a circle down in the shade by the road. Blue, orange, green: in the minds of the observers, each bearing a hint of their especial powers in the hue of their raiment.
    And then, as if controlled by one mind, the group rose and continued on their journey. In all of his sixty-two years, Jed had never seen anyone traverse the path that lead over the mountain. Not a pack-mule, cougar, or hoary prospector had attempted it. But he had no doubt that the phalanx below, with their heavenly bicycles, would make it to the top of the mountain, and beyond. As Jed and Betsy stood watching, their hands found each other’s. They stayed there together on the porch, long after the last Rider disappeared over the crest of the mountainside.

******************************

    For years and decades afterward, Jed would recount his story to untiring ears down in the Scholls pub, until it became infused into local legend. Clutching his (always complimentary) mug, wizened and honored, he would begin his tale. The tired farm workers, gathered around after a hot day’s work, would lean in, and Jed would begin:

    “When a man reaches a certain season in life, he starts to give up hope….”