Where We Are Now:

Natural Bone

 

Remarkably, no one but its original founder Noah Davey really knew how the village of Natural Bone got its name, and Noah Davey was so old that he should have long since been dead, but still had his store there, although not one of the village residents patronized it and Noah Davy was not a generous source of information. Davy’s store was near the spot where the acid red Oswegatchie River flowed off the granite and ate through the limestone for a ways through a maze of caverns, the main chanel of which popped up in a spring hole not far from the store. The initial section of the caverns could be traveled by a poled boat, and in the past Davy had hired boys to conduct tours for a few people at a time. But no more.

The going businesses of Natural Bone were the talc mine, The Long Horn Saloon, MeKewen’s Barber Shop / Luncheonette, and three Mink Ranches.

Augustus Reader owned the first of the Mink ranches. He was a World War I vet who lost both legs in France and never talked about it. He had a wife who died, and he never talked about her either, or even said her name.

That left him with his daughter Cynthia who stayed home to help, and a son Kurt, who had gone to Korea and managed to return with all his body parts, but with a mind like a jig-saw puzzle dumped in a box. Kurt helped on the Mink Ranch, but without much enthusiasm, and he would wander off into town most every day. He liked to sit in the Long Horn Saloon at the Natural Bone Hotel, drinking the watered beer they gave him, and listening to conversation or talking to himself if there was nobody to listen in on.

Strangers from out of town seldom enterd the Long Horn Saloon, to say nothing about Noah Davey’s vestigial store. But one day the Bus stopped in front of the McKewns Barbershop/Luncheonette, Outside of which Homer Mckewen was asleep in a chair, beside his Saint Bernanrd Benjamin the third who was also asleep, curled up into a large mound unrecogizable as a dog.

Out of the bus a grey woman struggled alone with a small, belted suitcase and a lidded knitting basket in whch Homer would not have been able to see the very small dog shivering there; but Homer and Benjamin the third did not wake up when the bus stopped anyway.