The Arrangement: Part Two
In January of 1918, Will and Ada left their 80-acre mountain property for one night to attend a wedding in the valley, and when they came back there were two sets of tracks in fresh snow leading from the tree line straight to their cabin, a handprint on the window glass higher than Will could reach, and the shed door standing open. Will wrote one sentence about it on the inside cover of his first notebook, and nobody in his family left that house empty overnight again for the next 23 years.
Part two of Jimmy's story covers the 20 years that followed, from 1918 through the mid-1930s, and it's the stretch where the family stopped finding things out and started learning how to live with what they knew. Jimmy's grandfather Thomas, who was 14 when the snow came, grows up on the mountain, sees a young Sasquatch looking around a chestnut tree at the upper spring, follows its tracks one winter morning and finds out it's been walking beside him the whole time, and watches his father confront it at the chicken coop by lantern light before something in the tree line puts a stop to that.
He marries a girl from the valley, builds the house Jimmy still lives in, and raises Jimmy's father in it.In November of 1924, Will writes out seven rules on a sheet of lined paper and hands them to his son. Don't follow them. Don't shoot unless it's your life. Don't go near the young ones. Don't leave food near the house. Don't bring strangers up here looking for them. Don't go past the upper spring after dark. If the woods go quiet, leave. That sheet hangs in a frame in Jimmy's hallway today.
The Depression brings hungry men with rifles into the woods, a brother-in-law loses a hunting dog on the north ridge and never asks what happened to it, and a man from the valley named Lester spends a night sitting against a tree with something standing 40 feet off in the dark, and comes down at daylight without his rifle. Will tells him it was a bear. In May of 1934, Will and Thomas find a torn-up gravel bar along the creek with hair, blood, and a drag mark leading into the rocks, and for four nights the mountain fills with a low pulsing call nobody in the family had heard before.
It ends in October of 1936, with Thomas coming down from the upper spring at dusk and finding his father standing at the creek bank without his rifle, looking across the water at the enormous gray-headed male on the far bank, and understanding for the first time how many evenings his father had been doing exactly that.
Part three begins with Will's death in the fall of 1941.
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