Gee's Calling

I'd known before William did, that when Gee went off to assist at the Pet Funeral and whatever.... she wouldn't be coming back.
I knew because she told me herself.....or to be precise: she told Olive. Gee and I had hardly ever talked directly.

The evening before she left, I was right here in this chair, keyboard in my lap, with my feet up on the footstool and Olive setting beside them and grooming her feathers.
It was already November and I thought I had shut the sliding door to the deck.
Then Gee stepped in.... as if through the glass. And barefooted too.


With a feathery hello, just for Olive - ignoring my feet and the rest of me - Gee swept down and huddled Olive up off the stool, then sat down in the Moris Chair with Olive cradled in her lap. Gee's Garlic Chicken scent sat in the air around me. Gee always smells like Garlic Chicken, not totally unpleasant, but a confusing perfume.
Gee was in her redskin phase, which comes from the sumac and herb baths. You hardly notice her freckles then, but it makes her pale blue eyes look like ice, even as they shoot fire out the sides.

She told Olive that we would definitely not be able to count on Gee being around here any longer for some people to ignore and complain about. She would soon be off to follow her calling,
Back to Bridge house, back to act again with old Missy and the tall animals.
Then she says, Missy would really really LOVE a crowing, singing hen......Olive could be a BIG star with the Review.....wouldn't she like to come along?

Maybe that was a purely rhetorical invitation , but I became temporarily literal-minded, and said something like "nofuggingway!!".... possibly in Capital letters.... but not agressively.
Just very negatively.

Still carefully cradling Olive, Gee stood , set her gently on the chair, then went out the way she'd come.
And I haven't seen her since........ though I occaasionally smell her.

Gee's probably doing a lot of the cooking at Bridge House now, and William is there eating it up.
I don't know how much he is really with the whole project, but Gee had gone through a radical conversion to it in her previous visit....when she had hitched all the way in to pick up some smoked salt for something..... and to just peek in at old Bridge house.




Bridge House is gated and padlocked at the gorge edge. A chain link fence extending fifty feet along the gorge, and it has been that way for many years, including when Gee and William used to resort to it occasionally, but it is easy to duck around one end of the fence and walk along the coon- trail passing just behind it.
According to William, Gee had come sneaking and peeking around the fence, and as she came close by the watch window, a face moved past the other side . The face appeared to her very like the face of Cameo White, in one of the old posters she had seen moldering on the walls of Bridge house . The apparition was so cartoonish that she knew it was only the broad work of her imagination imposed on a faded memory, and the merest glimpse of whomever it had been on the other side. She never did figure out exactly who it was, but inside she found that a few of her old fellow Tall Review travelers, were set up for wintering.
That night they threw a Hoolian especially for Gee..... and before it was over she was sure that she had found her ultimate role. Cameo White .



I suppose she had really had Cameo White firmly in mind well t before that encounter, and I am glad she has moved on with it, but I'm not so sure that Gee is distinguising herself from the role.....which seems important when when playing someone who came to a particularly bad end.

I am in no hurry to describe that bad end, and in fact I will avoid it as much as possible, but I can't much longer avoid covering the subject of Cameo White and her Enterprise ...maybe next time I post, but I have to go out to wrangle the chickens and do the weather.
By the way, as some people are already aware, Olive has not only demonstrated an ability to crow, AND to sing, but recently she actually said her first words : Thank You, when I had just given her three currants.
I expect there will be more words, but there is no way I am going to make a performing animal out of her. Anyway, she can't be commanded, and being taken from Dog's Plot would terrorize her.