UP FERGUSON WAY
By Louis Bromfield...
and a little geocaching
In this novel Louie tells the story of Zenobia Ferguson. "She was a kind of vague relation of my father's and mine because her grandfather and my father's great-grandfather were brothers."
Even before that her ancestor had married an Indian woman of the Delaware tribe. That's my lady Sue (above) on the site of the Ferguson home high in the hills of what we know today as Malabar Farm.
Louie was just a youngster that day long ago when he and his father paid Zenobia a visit. Their team of horses pulled their rumbling wagon through the forested tunnel that climbed generally east, past today's Pugh Cabin and scratched its way on up to the meadow where the "earth met the sky" as that young boy told it.
"We started downhill again along the wild road and, as we rounded a clump of flaming sumach (sic), we came full upon a pair of woodchucks and an extraordinary thing happened. They did not scamper off...they merely sat up on their hind legs like two plump little old people and stared at us and chattered a little" in a scolding fashion.
Birds were so plentiful they would swarm in a huge mixture of species with a friendly welcome to the unfamiliar visitors and their noisy contraption of a wagon.
"Then as we pulled up to the hitching rail a strange figure opened the door and came down the path toward us," Louie explained.
She was tall and thin and ramrod straight of posture with the black hair of her Indian heritage. Her mother had died earlier and her father was gone too, a victim of Cholera that had swept the area when she was a young woman.
Folks in the valley far below wanted the young woman to move in with them but she preferred her home high on that hill where the "earth met the sky," where she was at peace with herself and all the animals of the forest.
After lunch as Louie's dad napped, the youngster went for a frolic down by the pond where ducks floated about and a new-born calf, on teetering legs followed its mother down for a drink. The young Louie sensed becoming a brother with the calf, he sensed being part of something that day other people did not understand.
He sensed an enchantment with being in this whole world apart from human toil.
Soon he felt someone was watching him and the sensation became so intense he turned and discovered Zenobia standing near the spring house in an old-fashioned purple dress. "For a long time we stared at each other," he said.
Then she introduced a squirrel named John who scampered up her dress and sat on her shoulder with its tail curled upon it back. The young boy was "teched" as Zenobia mused, sharing that day the true meaning of her love for the land where "the earth met the sky".
As she aged she was quite a spectacle when, on her occasional visit to town, she was attired in a colorful gown with a bonnet trimmed with that day's wildflowers, gathering those few supplies she couldn't produce alone, then returning to her hilltop seclusion.
There was a young man named Aaron in her life and the valley was atwitter in speculation of their romance. Then Aaron went west to seek a fortune and future for the two of them. Meanwhile a trio of ruffians began to terrorize the area and Zenobia armed herself.
Sure enough, in the dark of a future night she was awakened by the barking of her dog and the sound of footsteps. She screamed a warning--then waited--then heard the sound of a man's "low laugh" and pulled the trigger. The next morning she found Aaron laying facedown, dead on her doorstep.
As it turned out the local sheriff was the leader of the band of ruffians which led to the tragedy.
Aaron was buried in the old orchard up there on the hill and later Zenobia was acquitted in a brief trial. She went home but, ...she no longer lived in this world at all but in a world of fancy up there, high above the woods close to the sky and there she lived until she died.
* * *
In the lead photo Sue is holding a picture of the Ferguson homestead at the time of this story. We found it in the geocache hidden along the perimeter of the homesite and, of course, returned it to the cache--which is the rectangular, brown ammo can near her right elbow in the background.
She is pictured behind the steps (in the lower photo); all that remains of the homesite's structure. Dangling from her left hand is the Garmin Oregon GPS we use to find geocaches by their published latitude and longitude coordinates.
