The Elementals (21 page)
Authors: Morgan Llywelyn
Annie gave herself a furious shake. “Foolish woman! Anyone would think I didn't have the sense the good Lord gave me. I'm as bad as the Conway people, believing wild stories.” She glared at the boulder. “You're nothing but a rock. A great big ugly dead-forever rock. Now that I see you, I can stop worrying about you. Be shut of you. I can tell Liam to come home this way any time he pleases, he'll just be under our roof that much sooner.” She fixed the stone with a determined look. “Indians indeed. For good measure, we might just cut that stand of pitch pine and make some money out of it!”
To emphasize her words she gave the stone a defiant slap.
When her palm touched the rock, a jolt went through her body from her head to her heels.
Annie reeled backward.
Dazed, she struggled to keep her balance. She threw up her
hands, palm outward, toward the rock, as if to ward off ⦠A wave of force hit her like an invisible wind, and she found herself hurled through the air to fall heavily into a clump of sumac some yards from the boulder.
hands, palm outward, toward the rock, as if to ward off ⦠A wave of force hit her like an invisible wind, and she found herself hurled through the air to fall heavily into a clump of sumac some yards from the boulder.
She lay facedown in the sumac, smelling its drying, dying dustiness. Lights were flashing behind her eyes.
I've been struck by lightning, was her first thought. But there was no storm. The day was characterized by a soft grey overcast like mountain mist sinking into the valleys.
Annie swallowed hard. If not lightning, what â¦
Then she heard, or felt through the earth, approaching footsteps. Someone was coming toward the rock from its southern side, climbing the gentle slope of Pine Hill, pushing his way through the undergrowth.
The clump of sumac and the boulder itself concealed Annie from whoever was approaching. She could hear him, though. She heard the masculine grunt with which he deposited some burden at the base of the stone.
“Selah,” she heard Daniel Foster's voice say, enunciating the Indian word clearly. It was a word Annie knew. It was both a greeting and a term of respect.
There was a pause, then Foster's footsteps moved away again, back down the hill, toward Conway.
She had been shocked, perhaps injured. Surely any woman in such a circumstance would have called out for help to a man she knew. But Annie Murphy did not call out. She lay as still as she could, hardly daring to breathe for fear he might discover her. She could not have said why. But she waited until he was long gone before she cautiously gathered herself and got to her feet.
Emerging from the sumac, she felt herself for bruises or broken bones, but there were none. She had been stunned but not hurt.
Stunned by what?
She advanced a few wary feet toward the stone. Nothing happened. It was as inert as it had first appeared to be.
She did not want to go any closer, but she walked around it in a wide, wary circle, watching it every step of the way.
On the downhill side she found the burden Foster had put down there. A bulky bundle wrapped in burlap lay at the foot of the stone.
She started to reach toward it. Then she drew back. Her curiosity was not strong enough to make her go close to the stone again, not now, not with her body still bruised and tingling from whatever it had done to her.
She started to reach toward it. Then she drew back. Her curiosity was not strong enough to make her go close to the stone again, not now, not with her body still bruised and tingling from whatever it had done to her.
It had done.
The stone did it, she thought, not wanting to believe.
Believing.
She stared at its weathered face. “But I meant you no harm,” she heard herself say in an aggrieved voice like a little girl's.
The stone watched her.
She knew, now, that it was watching her.
Her feet began backing away.
When they had carried her beyond a certain point, she whirled around and ran for home.
She did not stop running until she had almost reached the porch of the cabin. Then she slowed, stopped, stood half bent over with her hands on her knees and her heart hammering against her ribs, trying to catch her breath.
I can't believe I ran away from a rock, she thought.
I can't believe that rock flung me through the air either.
But it did.
It did.
Annie straightened slowly and squared her shoulders. Let whoever ⦠whatever ⦠was watching, see that she was in control of herself again.
With steady tread, she mounted the porch and went into the cabin.
Johnny lay curled up on a rag rug in front of the fire, sound asleep.
But there was no sign of baby Mary.
Annie saw again the burlap-wrapped bundle at the foot of the boulder.
That there rock eats babies.
Tabitha Foster looked up eagerly when her husband entered the feed store.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He shook his head.
She came out
from behind the counter, wiping her hands on a none-too-clean apron. “Did you see anybody?”
from behind the counter, wiping her hands on a none-too-clean apron. “Did you see anybody?”
“I told you. Nobody.”
“But people keep askin'!”
“Don't you think I know that?” he snarled at her. “I'm doing all I can. If you think you can do better, you try it.”
“Ah, no.” She shrank back. “No, Dan'l, don't say that.”
“Then shet your mouth and don't criticize me.” He shrugged out of his heavy jacket and went to take Tabitha's place behind the counter. “Anyone come while I was out?” he asked her.
She stood timidly in the middle of the room, looking as if she would dodge behind the nearest barrel at any moment. “Only Zeb Bigelow.”
“What'd he want?”
“Same as the rest of âem. He wants to know how bad the winter's gonna be, should he be orderin' ⦔
“What'd you tell him?” Foster interrupted.
“To wait till you got back and ask you.”
“You tell him where I'd gone?”
“'Course not!”
Foster sighed tiredly. “Long trip for nothing.” He adjusted the suspenders that held up his heavy woolen trousers, then looked down, frowning. He stooped to brush bits of dead stem and leaf from his lower legs. “I'm tired, Tabby. Fetch me a cup of coffee.”
She scampered away, relieved to be out of his immediate presence.
Foster sat staring into the dark shadows in the corner of the feed store. His thoughts were far away. He did not even notice when Tabitha came back and set a cup of steaming coffee down beside him.
“Here, Dan'l,” she said, waiting for him to become aware of her and dismiss her. She did not like to be around him when he came back from the boulder. Trouble sat on him then like a blackbird on a fence.
Tabitha knew her husband feared and hated the Pine Hill boulder. All local people did. It was not merely a focus of superstition. A real and bloody history was attached to it.
When Daniel's and Tabitha's parents were small children,
growing up in the Foster and Gray households a mile from one another, local men had fought off a band of marauding Indians. They had chased the savages to Pine Hill and the great boulder. There the white men had killed the Indians, every one. And scalped them for good measure, some claimed.
growing up in the Foster and Gray households a mile from one another, local men had fought off a band of marauding Indians. They had chased the savages to Pine Hill and the great boulder. There the white men had killed the Indians, every one. And scalped them for good measure, some claimed.
It was common knowledge that ever since, vengeful descendants of those Indians lurked in the wilderness beyond the town, never forgetting, never forgiving. A danger even when most other Indians in New Hampshire were long since pacified. Sometimes, it was rumored, they even returned to their sacred stone on Pine Hill to conduct blasphemous heathen rites.
People did not talk about it very much, not openly, anyway. Only Daniel Foster had the courage to drive his chestnut mare and his buggy out to Pine Hill on a regular basis.
Conway, as everyone knew, was the Fosters' town. Always had been. Even the massacre that had taken place on Pine Hill was not sufficient to make a Foster give up what was his, something his father and grandfather had claimed before him: the right to visit the stone and have prophetic visions of the weather.
So Tabitha's husband made his trips to the boulder, and from time to time returned with valuable knowledge. But it cost him. It cost him dear.
Tabitha gazed sorrowfully at his withdrawn, haggard face, then went back upstairs, unable to bear his presence any longer. When he had been to Pine Hill it seemed as if he came back poisoned, she thought to herself.
Foster continued to stare into the shadows. The cup of coffee cooled unnoticed beside him.
Meanwhile, at the Murphy cabin Annie's shriek of horror had awakened her son abruptly. He sat up on the rag rug, knuckling his eyes. “Mama?” he said fuzzily.
“Where's the baby!”
“Baby?” The boy gazed vacantly around the room. Then awareness returned. “The baby. Oh! I got sleepy, so I took her cradle up into the loft where it's warm and put her in it up there. Even if she got outta the cradle I knew she wouldn't try to come down those steps and get too close to the fire. She cried a while, then she went to sleep. I guess I did too.”
But Annie did not wait for the end of his explanation. She was already scrambling up the steep steps to the loft.
As Johnny had said, the loft was the warmest part of the house due to the nature of heat rising. And there was baby Mary, sleeping peacefully in her pine cradle.
Annie stood looking down at her, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Now why, she asked herself, did I think ⦠?
That bundle. That bundle Daniel Foster left at the rock. It was the right size to hold a baby.
A cold finger of fear traced up her spine.
For the rest of the day, she could not make herself settle to any task. She could not even read. She paced the floor, picked up her sewing and put it down again, half swept the floor and then propped the broom in the corner. Every sound from outside brought her to the door, looking out anxiously.
When at last Liam returned she hugged him even harder than usual.
“I don't smell dinner cookin',” he complained.
Annie made an impatient gesture. “I'll start it in a minute but I have to talk to you first.” She glanced around to make sure Johnny wasn't listening. “Liam, you've lived here all your life; do you know of any children, any babies, who've disappeared in Conway?”
“What are you talkin' about?”
“Babies. Have any just ⦠disappeared?”
Liam scratched his head. He suspected Annie was going to have to scrub his scalp again with yellow soap. Nits were in his hair, he could feel them. “Ever' now an' then some child wanders off an' ain't never found,” he said slowly, remembering. “They fall in the river. Or perhaps the Injuns gits'em. It happens. Why?”
“What about babies? Babies like our Mary?”
“Mary's old enough to toddle. I reckon she could wander off iff'n you didn't watch after her so good. But you never leave her alone, so I'd say she's safe, Annie.”
I don't dare tell him I left Mary alone today, Annie thought. And I'll never do it again!
But what about those other children? God help us, what about the other little ones who have disappeared over the years?
Every rural community, as Annie knew, had its share of disappearances. Liam was correct when he said children wandered
off and were never found. It had happened in Jackson too. And perhaps Indians occasionally did steal an unwatched baby.
off and were never found. It had happened in Jackson too. And perhaps Indians occasionally did steal an unwatched baby.
But .. , but â¦
Annie's mother had loved to tell stories. In her soft, low Irish voice, she had recounted the tales her grandmother told her: Donegal stories, filled with rebel princes and magical women who could assume the shapes of seals. And one tale that had never failed to give Annie a delicious tingle of fear.
Crom Cruach, the terrible pagan stone of Ireland to whom infants had been sacrificed before the coming of Christianity.
Were there such stones everywhere in the world? Annie wondered. Were they thrust up by some violent action of Nature to serve as its avatars? Nature. Pagan, pantheist, Nature.
The same Nature New England farmers struggled with every day of their lives, trying to wrest a living from the grudging land.
“What're you askin' about this fer now?” Liam was inquiring. “You seem all het up.”
With a mighty effort, Annie laughed. “Just my never-ending curiosity,” she replied. “Seems like I heard Charity Allen say something at the last quilting bee about some baby that had disappeared, and I got to wondering.”
“I don't recall no baby disappearin'.'Course, one coulda got lost way out in the country and we might never hear about it. Lotsa folks live in the hills and don't come inta town from one summer till the next. It's even a right smart journey for us,” he added.
Annie had expected to be able to tell him he could cut distance off that journey. But she said nothing.
Tardily she busied herself preparing a meal. If Liam was surprised to find his wife uncharacteristically unprepared, he did not say so. He settled happily into his chair and watched her hips as she bent over her pots and saucepans at the hearth.
Might be she's gettin' fretful, he thought. Women are mysterious. They take all sorts of vapors. Might be a good idea for Annie to have another baby, give her something more to think about.
Liam smiled to himself, watching his wife's hips.
For several days, Annie never got beyond shouting distance of the cabin. She even moved the hen boxes from the barn to the dogtrot, so she could gather her eggs without being away from the baby more than a couple of minutes.
But the fear rankled her. At night, when Liam took her in his arms and pressed his mouth on hers, she tried to respond. But her thoughts kept skittering off. Even when he sucked her breast like a hungry baby, his crisp beard brushing her flesh in a way that had always heightened her pleasure, she could not totally surrender to him and forget everything else. Some part of her mind insisted on picturing the boulder on Pine Hill.
“What's wrong with you?” Liam finally asked one night. He had returned to earth from his usual thundering, cataclysmic climax, only to find Annie lying wide-eyed beneath him, not sharing. She who had always shared, whose sensuality was his greatest joy.
“Nothing's wrong with me,” she said quickly.
But he knew there was.
It can't go on like this, Annie decided. She felt as if the stone had moved into their house and was lying between them like a rock in the bed. Its shadow seemed to fall over everything she did.
Then the first snowflakes fell. A scattering like freckles in buttermilk, but a precursor of the blizzards to come.
“Reckon I better get on inta town and talk to Dan'l,” Liam announced the morning of that first snow. “Find out how deep it's gonna be and how long it's gonna last. Might want to lay up more vittles in the root cellar. Ain't too late to buy more apples an' turnips if we need'em.”
“Don't go to Foster!” Annie exclaimed without thinking.
“What?” Her husband stared at her. “Not go to Dan'l? What're you talkin' about?”
But she could not tell him. The complicated layers of imaginings in her mind could not be peeled apart and exposed like the layers of an onion. And without a satisfactory explanation to give, she refused to hang on to Liam irrationally like a whining woman. She had too much pride.
After he had gone, she berated herself. Surely there were ways she could have described what had happened to her, and how she felt about it, without sounding like a fool.
I have to go back to the rock, she thought. I have to know if I imagined all that. Perhaps I did. I'll know, when I see the rock again.
But she desperately wanted not to go.
“Character is the sum of the choices we make in life,” had been one of her father's favorite axioms.
She would go, she knew it. She would make the choice and go, rather than cowering at home.
This time, however, she did not leave Mary in Johnny's care. She dressed both children warmly and took them in the opposite direction from the rock, across fields to the Baldwin farm which lay northwest of the Murphy property. She asked May Baldwin to keep the pair for the day.
“You goin' inta town, Annie? If you are, I'd'preciate if you'd get me a quarter bolt a' calico.”
“I'm not going into town.”
“You ain't?” May's slack jaw showed her surprise. For what other reason would a woman leave her children in someone else's care? “You goin' visitin' downcountry, then?”
Annie nodded. “That's it, I'm going visiting downcountry. I'll be back afore dark and fetch the children. Obliged to you, May.”
“Say nuthin',” the other woman responded automatically. She stood in her open doorway, listening to the crescendo of noise rising behind her in her cabin as the Murphy children joined into the daylong riot of the Baldwin seven. Her eyes followed Annie back down the path toward the Murphy farm.
“Somethin' not right about her today,” May said to herself. “Seems like she's poorly, somehow.”
But Annie was as strong as three cups of hastily drunk strong black coffee could make her. She had been tempted to take a swig from Liam's jug of hard cider, but decided against it. She might need all her wits about her.
The sky was white with unshed snow. It would start falling again soon, she knew, and not stop. Not stop until the drifts reached the eaves of the house and yard-long icicles hung from the porch roof. Not stop until people huddled inside their houses like a race besieged, listening to the wind howl from distant Mount Washington.
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