Chapter 16Caty’s Strong Medicine
Charles felt his body being lifted, or more accurately, vaporized from its mucky darkness. He found himself on an open plain, unlike any he had ever seen. It was a barren mesa, but yet filled with sounds and smells. The fresh fragrance took him back to those spring mornings at Elk Creek, just after a cleansing rain, when he would awaken early to go squirrel hunting with his father. But this tableland contained only strange shaped brush and small, stout pines that looked as if they had been swept by timeless winds. There was no fauna, no flora, which could give off such a balm.
From the depths of his childhood, he began to retrieve the smells. It was the pungent smell of the sage in his mother’s garden, blended with the smell of bacon being cooked for
