WORK IN PROGRESS: King’s Valley

An Incident on the Road to Fez

 We drive east from Rabat making good time up the Bouregreg Valley and through the cork forests of Zemmour. The two-lane highway is smooth and fast. I ride with a couple of other Peace Corps volunteers and Alan Hughes, the corps’ local medical director.

Our driver, M’barak, gray-haired, leather-skinned, leans into the wheel of our big Peugeot, riding the bumper of a slower car and muttering to himself in Arabic. When the traffic clears he pounds the horn, swerves into the oncoming lane and mashes the accelerator to the floor, pushing us into to the backs of our seats. An approaching truck fills our windshield. M'barak passes the car in front of us and dodges back into our lane an eyeblink short of oblivion.

Hughes, a lean Englishman of fifty-some years, glances at M’barak, who pretends not to notice, though he lifts his foot a fraction. Hughes looks over his shoulder at us sitting in the back seat.

“Any of you ever been to Fez?” he asks.

Jill, a young woman with three zircons in her nose, wordlessly shakes her head. The guy from Nevada who calls himself Zephyr, his eyes wide as saucers, can’t even manage that much.

Hughes turns to me. “Richard, you’re the one who has teaching experience, aren’t you?”

“Not much. A little. Back home.”

“Oregon, yes?” He pronounces it Ah-regon in a soft, reassuring voice.

“Eugene.”

 I’m a couple of years older than the others and he speaks to me a little differently.

 Far below, a rock-strewn stream glints like silver in the afternoon sun, the spare landscape so much like, and yet so different from, central Oregon, which is my …  I can’t bring myself to call it home. I will say only that it’s where I’m from.

After we pass through Meknes the road twists into the hills. The stark shadows of the rocky gorges shelter stunted trees, twisted by drought, warped by the sun, refusing to die. Dusty red plains hold wheat fields and groves of olive trees, their green leaves lifting their skirts in the breeze to show their silver undersides.

Life here trembles on the edge of death, making it more intense, distilled to the essential, its aspect like that of a woman who appears unremarkable before you waken to her hidden beauty.

We pass flat-roofed houses, thickly white-washed, their windows and doors trimmed in fading pastels. The road dips and a field of marigolds flashes by, its gold and green a wonder amid the heat and dust. At the edge of the field a dark-eyed little girl in a green dress and white scarf watches us from her world as we rush by in ours.

Morocco. I might fall in love with this land. Nothing can hide in these landscapes or within these people. Of this I’m sure. I sense bold affirmations in the strong, clear light. Deep truths in the spare landscape. Prophets come from lands such as these.

A few kilometers short of Meknes, M'barak brings us around a downhill corner at high speed to find traffic stopped in front of us. Grunting in displeasure, he stands on the brake and we lurch to a stop.

For some minutes we sit silently, the sun beating on the roof, slowly cooking us. The oncoming lane is empty. Alan Hughes sticks his head out the window and peers down the road.

“There’s been an accident,” he says quietly. He takes his medical bag and gets out of the car. I decide to follow.

Two cars have hit head-on, the impact catapulting one of them off the road and spinning the other car around until it blocks both lanes. Steam rises from the shattered radiator of this second car. Its doors gape open. The windshield is shattered where something—someone—has hit it. A pool of water and oil spreads across the pavement and drips into a ditch. The accident appears to have occurred only minutes ago.

A woman’s body lies face down in the road, apparently thrown from the car that blocks the road.

A dozen or so people mill around watching.

An injured man lies on the shoulder of the road. His head rests in the lap of a large woman in a djellaba, her face framed by a coarse green scarf, the sort you can buy for pennies in the souk. In a choked sing-song, she chants a phrase in Arabic over and over, like someone trying to reassure a frightened child. The man—thin, sharp-featured—lies with arms outstretched, panting rapidly. His eyes, wide with fear, dart from one to another of the onlookers, seeing in their gaze how gravely he is injured.

Alan opens his medical bag and takes out his stethoscope. He says something to the woman in French then, when she does not reply, again in Arabic. She can only shake her head. He checks the man’s pulse, listens to his chest then his stomach. The woman begins to wail.

A young man walks up, holding another man by the arm, guiding him gently through the crowd of gawkers. This second man walks unsteadily, unaware of anything around him. Though he seems unhurt, his eyes are wide, unfocused, staring into a deep void that only he can see. I wonder if the man who holds his arm is leading him to us or simply trying to keep him from wandering off.

Turning away from the man on the ground, Alan approaches this second man and puts a hand on his shoulder. He stops. Alan looks into his eyes and asks him something in Arabic. The man does not respond. Alan glances at his companion, who simply shrugs. Alan puts his stethoscope to the man’s chest then says something to the other man. Between them, they try to get the injured man to lie down, but he has gone somewhere we cannot follow and nothing can reach him.

I nod toward the man lying with his head in the woman’s lap. “What about him?”

“There’s nothing I can do for him. He’ll be dead in a few minutes.” Alan’s voice, warm and animated a few minutes ago, is now flat, detached. “This one may live, but we must get him to lie down.”

I look at the woman weeping over the dying man as if her tears might heal him if only she can cry hard enough. It occurs to me that only love can trigger such terror.

I shield my eyes against the sun. The landscape has changed from what it was a few moments earlier. Its allure has vanished. Where I had seen promise in the sunlit landscape, I now find only dark warnings of a million regrets lurking in the shadows of the rocks.

I step past Alan and lift the injured man like a child. He is surprisingly light. I wonder if a dying man weighs less than others. I lay him on the ground. His eyes reach into the sky and I sense his soul will soon follow. His expression remains the same because nothing I have done changes anything.

It is terribly hot and my face drips with sweat. In the distance I hear the wail of a siren.

Chapter One

King’s Valley lies in the western reaches of Oregon, straddling two lands and two ways of life. To the east, a patchwork of small farms forms a green quilt tucked up to the town’s chin. To the west, its head rests against the deep forests of the Coast Range that rise above the homes and churches, schools and stores of King’s Valley’s and its twelve thousand souls.

Over the roughly one hundred and seventy years of its life, the farms have given to the town’s collective persona a humble Protestant dignity, mindful of the seasons, honoring the value of patient husbandry. But King’s Valley has made its living and inherited its truest spirit from the forests and the square-shouldered heedlessness of its loggers, who toil without complaint, harvest without sowing, and affect to take in stride the often deadly hazards of working in the woods.

During its most prosperous years the town boasted three logging companies, two sawmills and three banks. It had more taverns than churches, and barely more schools than logging companies. Of these, the two grade schools were named for half-remembered civic leaders and its middle school for a nearby river. The high school bears the name of the town itself.

Once crowded enough to require a new wing, the high school’s hallways have in recent years grown quieter as timber jobs dried up and families moved away to look for steadier work, leaving the town a little smaller each year and the school a little emptier. A few former classrooms have been converted to storage, while others house the administrative offices after the school district sold off its admin building.

Positions within the diminished faculty still come open on occasion, and on a hot August afternoon Richard Lattimore, who had ten days earlier filled out the requisite forms and gone through an interview, drove up from Eugene to sign a one-year contract to teach English at King’s Valley High.

As the secretary took the signed contract for filing she looked at Lattimore over the top of her glasses. “Oh, Bill Heppner wants you to stop by his office.”

He looked at her quizzically.

“Mr. Heppner. The principal. Main floor, middle of the hallway.”

The shelves in Bill Heppner’s office contained no books, but held two photos of his family and one of him hunting, his red hair sticking out from under a woolen cap, its flaps hanging down like a spaniel’s ears, framing his pale, freckly face. Next to this photo a framed certificate with an embossed seal indicated he had once been a captain in the army.

Through an open window came the sound of a mower and the smell of cut grass—the maintenance man giving the lawn a last trim before classes started.

Heppner, a trim man in his 50s, leaned back in his chair. “We’re mighty glad you were still available this close to the start of the school year. Martha Hillyard didn’t give much warning before she decided to retire. Thirty-nine years here and she gives me two weeks’ notice.” He chuckled at the vagaries of human behavior while he gave an appraising look at the young man before him.

The new teacher sat with one ankle propped on the opposite knee, his head cocked at a frank, relaxed angle. Something very still about him, Heppner thought. Late twenties, he judged, but seemed somehow older. Not tall. An athletic build, though his clothes hung loose on him, as if he had lost weight. Deeply tanned, dark hair a little too long. The junior and senior girls would dream about him. Would he be trouble that way? No, didn’t seem like the sort. Funny, the young man had said almost nothing since coming in, done nothing to ingratiate himself or express his eagerness to get to work. Outwardly, he appeared at ease, yet Heppner sensed something coiled up inside him, some discontent wrapped around the young man’s soul.

The principal tapped Lattimore’s file. “I notice you got your credential four years ago, but you say this is your first teaching position. Where you been keeping yourself?”

Richard Lattimore uncrossed his leg, took a moment to answer. “Did some substituting in Eugene. Then a couple of years in the Peace Corps.” He paused, as if his words had brought up a train of thought he didn’t wish to follow. “Took my time coming back.”

It was the longest speech he’d made since coming into the room.

Heppner noted the “coming back,” not “coming home,” and wondered how much to make of it. “Peace Corps,” he said, embarrassed that he hadn’t looked more closely at Lattimore’s file. “Admirable service. Where were you?”

“Morocco.”

“Morocco,” Heppner repeated. Most people, he reflected, would have taken that as a cue to tell him more about their experience, indulge the universal impulse to show themselves special in some way. This young man seemed to have no interest in that.

“You’re going to find King’s Valley is a long way from Morocco.” Heppner chuckled, pushed his chair back from the desk and stuck his thumbs in his waistband. “But it’s a good thing for a young fella to go off somewhere for a couple of years and find himself.”

Heppner waited, then realized Lattimore wasn’t going to tell him what he’d found.

“You’ll have some mighty big shoes to fill. There’s hardly anyone in this town who didn’t go through Martha Hillyard’s classroom.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Heppner.” He said it as a matter of fact, not to please.

“Call me Bill.” He noticed Lattimore glancing at the deer’s head mounted above the open window. “You do any hunting, Richard?”

“Used to.” Richard Lattimore continued to gaze at the deer as if trying to find its secret knowledge

“You’ll have to go hunting with us come fall—me and a couple of the teachers, sometimes a fella from the town.”

“Got a shotgun at my dad’s place in Prineville. I sold my rifle a few years back.”

“I think I’ve got a spare I could lend you. We’ll get you up in the woods with us.”

Lattimore nodded. “I’d like that.”

Heppner rose and stuck out his hand. “Glad to have you aboard.” He brightened as he looked over Lattimore’s shoulder. “Ah, here’s Carol.”

In the doorway stood a woman in her mid-thirties. Dark blonde hair. Tall and slim. She looked as if she’d once been an athlete.

“Richard, I think you’ve already met Carol Pearson.”

Lattimore nodded. She had been one of the two women who interviewed him for his position.

“With Martha retired, Carol’s our senior English teacher now. She’ll show you around, get you squared away. If you have any questions, any problems, talk to Carol.”

The two men shook hands again, then Carol led Lattimore out of the office and down the wide, empty hallways toward the English classrooms.