Under the Flowers

Chapter 1 The Day Seth Jackson Disappeared When it’s early summer in Idaho, the sagebrush is blooming, aspen trees have new leaves, and cottonwood is ready to go to seed. In the open meadow, the grass is fresh and sage hens are looking for nesting material. Everyone is ready to start another hot Idaho summer. Well, almost everyone. Seth Jackson was digging a grave. The fella they were planning on putting in that grave wasn’t ready for anything in this life. He was wherever old prospectors go when they have worn out their welcome on earth. Only this one was not that old yet, but he was a lot older than he should have been. It’s amazing how fast eighty grains of lead ages a man. Seth got paid five dollars to dig a grave. No one else wanted to. They were all planning to get rich panning gold in the Clearwater River. That’s the river the small town of Cougar Rock was built on. If you follow that river you will find the Oxbow River on the other side of town, a few miles upstream. Farther up from there, in the headwaters of the Clearwater, lots of other miners are digging. Cougar Rock was a small town in a big land. The time was early in the twentieth century and cars are a strange sight, and not always a welcome one yet, but now and then one shows up. To find this little piece of paradise you would need to head up the Clearwater from Bear Valley. The road narrows and hugs the river for a few miles and gets a little rocky. It wanders through tall pine and fir trees and sees no end to the sweet-smelling sagebrush that grows among the trees, like the buffalo grass and meadow grass that provides pasture for everything that lives there. Fresh clean water flows past deep and clear, and the Chinook salmon are just starting their run. Steelhead won’t be far behind. Indian paintbrush, bluebells and lupine dress the land in wonder and scent. Their new blue heads stand in the knee-high green grass as if they just came from some good hiding place in a child’s game of hide and seek. Farther down the dusty little road, and dead in the middle, there stands a ponderosa that might be more than 500 years old. The road goes up to that tree and then turns a hard right and goes around it. It turns back to the left again on the other side. Nailed to that tree on a tamarack board is a sign that reads. “Welcome to Cougar Rock, population unknown.” The tree serves as a sort of gate, with large rock and heavy brush on its left, and the river on the right. The road squeezes by with just enough room for a freight wagon to go past. In the street the road becomes, a town appears. It used to be a quiet little town. So quiet that people in the rest of Idaho didn’t even know it was there. It was small but growing fast. On the left as you entered, was a saloon, across from that a stable, and then a street that led to the old crossing of the river. Now that gold had been discovered, the main street was becoming a highway for horses. On that same corner was the blacksmith shop. It was across the main street from the morgue and next to that was a street that looped around the general store. Farther up was a residential street and then a rather rundown hotel and across from it the mill. Other structures and houses were in the process of being built or were in the planning stage. Freight wagons came and went every few days from the mill to new projects or on down to Bear Valley. Out in the cemetery, Seth Jackson was busy about his grave project. He was a strong young man who had outgrown his wool pants and every muscle in his lower body was pushing for more room. He had on a brown shirt, and wore a hat that was worn out when he found it. It was blowing across the high desert grass like a tumbleweed in the Idaho wind, a few years before. His curly jet-black hair had long ago sprouted out from under it, and looked a little like a wooly head wrap of some sort. Seth was what people would call black. The truth was that he was more the color of a mink shawl. His eyes were just a little darker than his skin and were sharp and alert. He was growing fast and already stood just under six feet. He was broad in the shoulders and for fifteen years old he was ahead of his time mentally. His father was educating him in as much math and English as he knew, but other than that he was not well educated. The other things one might say about Seth were that he was young, strong and hungry. Mostly hungry. His mother died in a failed attempt to deliver a sibling he never met, and he and his father had been alone ever since. Other than crop farming, mining was all his father, Dexter Jackson, knew. It scarcely made enough to keep them alive, so any extra money Seth could make was a welcome thing. Today his father was on a river bar about one mile upstream from where the cemetery was. Seth had left him there in the early morning just as the sun was getting ready to make its grand appearance over the mountains to start warming things up. Seth looked back one last time as the river gained more light. He was rounding a bend in the river with his spud bar and shovel in hand. There were other men on the same bar, but his father stood out from all the rest and was easy to spot. He was six feet eight and weighed over three hundred pounds. Dexter could use a gun and kept one handy, but up till now, he had gotten by with his fist. He was an easy-going man, but when you’re a black man at the turn of the century and you travel alone, you better be good at something, and he was. He looked like he could kick-start a freight train, and he was as quick as a wild pig. He was working the edge of the bar in his worn-out coveralls and red Johnny top. His hat, which had no definable shape to the brim, was pulled down in the front to block the rising morning sun and his badly worn boots were already wet. Dexter had not touched his face with a razor since the day he was born. He cropped his beard with a sharp knife when it got long enough to get in his way. That was what Seth remembered and was thinking about when he raised his spud bar for one more almost fruitless stab at the hardpan under his feet. It was a clay-like substance with the constancy of concrete. He was thinking of what he could buy for an evening meal for him and his father, with the money he would make from his work. Just as he was about to throw the heavy steel tip into the pan, he noticed something in the sky over town, something that caught his attention and caused him to put the bar down for a better look. A huge cloud of smoke was racing upward down in Cougar Rock. It was rolling the way smoke does when it’s being chased by a lot of hot flame in a rather large fire. He watched it a little and thought that he would like to go see what was going on, but he only had a few more inches to go so he decided to stay and finish. No point in making two trips when one would do. If someone had been watching Seth that day they would have seen a very strange thing indeed. The prairie grass was moving slightly in a southern breeze. The pine trees were starting to sway a little, and a strong young man was digging a hole. His head and the top of his shoulders could be seen sticking out of the ground. There were grave markers, most of wood, that were scattered up the sloping hill behind him. To see it, things appeared as they should. The mound of dirt he had created was on the other side of the hole from town. He watched as the heavy smoke rose higher and faster. Without taking his eyes off the column of smoke in the distance, his arms lifted the spud bar. Every muscle in his upper body flexed as he threw the twenty-five-pound shaft of steel as hard as he could into the bottom of the hole. Guiding the bar as it slid through his left hand he let it fly at full speed to a spot in the corner of the hole. The sharp sound it made told him he had hit something even more solid than hardpan. And then, without another sound, Seth disappeared. The world didn’t seem to notice at all. The meadow grass and wildflowers swayed gently in the breeze as if keeping time to some old gospel tune. The pine bows moaned quietly on the hill as little gusts of wind slipped through their needles and a meadowlark sang out from some hiding place in the distance. It was as if Seth had never existed in the first place. He was gone, and nobody knew.