The Elementals (24 page)
Authors: Morgan Llywelyn
He heard their laughter below him.
Chocurua knew some of those men. He had sold them otter skins and beaver pelts, and made them welcome among his people as was the custom of his tribe. In hard winters, he had taken some of his own provisions to the white settlers, who seemed to have little gift for providing for themselves from the natural bounty around them.
On this day he had encountered the party of hunters by the lake, as he was stalking a deer. Although the chief of his tribe and a man with grandchildren, he was proud that he could still bring down a deer quicker than any man of his age.
But the deer he had chosen for his arrow had a fine set of antlers. The white hunters had seen it, too, and were in hot pursuit. They fired their guns but did not hit the deer and it bounded safely out of range. Then, seeing Chocurua, in their frustration they accused him of driving their quarry off on purpose.
When he protested his innocence they turned on him and attacked him in place of the deer.
They would kill him. He had no doubt. He had seen it in their eyes, hot with baffled bloodlust.
Knowing they would kill him, he had fled up the sacred mountain. Perhaps he might have eluded them if he had set off in a different direction, but he did not think so. They were young, some of them mere boys, and they had stamina and speed. So he had chosen to come to the summit to die; to give his life's blood to the mountain his people recognized as holy. It would be Chocurua's last and greatest gift to the spirits.
He could go no farther. The hunters were coming up behind him, shouting their triumph. At bay, he turned to face them. He lifted his head and began to sing.
The first shot slammed into his body. He staggered with the impact. He kept on singing. His voice rose through the clear air, chanting the song of the mountain.
The second shot hit him. It took all his strength to stay on his feet. He swayed, then felt the reassuring solidity of stone at his back. Gratefully, he let himself lean against the stone.
The song continued.
The hunters gathered around him in a circle, jeering. “Crazy old fool, stop that godawful racket!” one shouted at him.
The guns spoke.
His right foot was shattered. At the same moment a sheet of white-hot pain enveloped his left leg.
The hunters laughed. They meant to kill him by inches.
Chocurua had reached the end of the chant for the stone. According to custom, he should have begun again, singing through a precise number of repetitions. Instead he drew a deep breath and turned his head slowly, from one side to the other, so he could look each man in the eyes.
In a voice that did not quaverâwith the stone at his back supporting himâChocurua pronounced his curse. Upon his killers, their posterity, their habitations, and even their possessions.
Then he closed his eyes and, with a calm face, resumed the song of the mountain.
The shot that killed Chocurua blew his belly open.
Annie Murphy, in the dream that was not a dream, felt the impact of the shot that had passed through him as it thundered into the stone.
She felt his hot blood splashed across her face.
She screamed.
“Wha'? Wha'?” Liam sat up in bed, befuddled by sleep but already fumbling for the rifle he, like all farmers, kept within reach at night. There was always a chance of some predator attacking the stock.
Annie grabbed Liam and clung to him. She was shaking.
“What is it?” he asked more clearly. “Annie?”
“A nightmare,” she mumbled. “Just a nightmare.”
Liam was surprised. His wife was not given to having nightmares. In fact, if one asked him, he would have said she was the least fearful of women.
“What kinda nightmare, sugar?”
She shook her head and would not answer. What can I say? she thought. Can I tell him I became a rock and an Indian was shot against me?
Can I tell him how I became that rock?
Annie was an intelligent woman. She knew, in the year 1855, there were only two explanations. Madness, or witchcraft.
Neither was acceptable.
“It's fading already,” she lied. “I don't remember. I s'pose I was just too tired, Liam. Lie back now, let's sleep. I'm all right, truly.”
He lay down beside her again, but he was still troubled. There was something wrong with his wife, no doubt about it.
But what?
For the rest of the night, Annie fought off sleep. She was terrified of finding herself in another of the dreams that were not dreams. The memories of stone.
The morning came at last. She got up, red-eyed, the inside of her head feeling scraped out by weariness, and took the bellows from the hearth to blow life into the banked embers and build up the day's fire.
Liam was unusually reluctant to leave the house that morning. He kept finding small chores to do that enabled him to keep a watchful eye on Annie. Aware of this, she went out of her way to make everything appear normal. She kept her emotions under iron control and showed him a cheerful surface.
At last he had no option but to go out and tend the stock, fetch the water, chop the firewood.
Annie stood listening to the reassuring sound of his ax as he split logs in the barnyard.
She was surrounded with familiarity. The fire crackled merrily. The smell of good cooking permeated the cabin. Her children's playful chatter was peaceful music.
Everything was normal. She was Annie Murphy, flesh and blood and bone.
And stone.
It came upon her so suddenly she had no time to prepare. One moment she was reaching for the broom to sweep the floor, the next moment she was a slab of rock on the floor of a riverbed scoured by the sand the rushing water drove across her surface. She lay in cold and darkness as she had lain for centuries; as she might lie for centuries more. Or forever. Cold. Still.
She was back in the warm bright cabin, paralyzed with horror.
Johnny was tugging at her arm. “I ast can we have some buttermilk?” he said in a tone that told her he had already asked the question several times, to no avail.
With a guilty start, Annie recovered herself enough to pour out buttermilk for the children.
She was appalled to realize this could happen to her at any time, with no warning and no protection.
Was it a curse put on her by the stone?
If so, why?
What had she done?
She tried to think of her possible crimes, but could find none that would merit such a punishment.
Perhaps it wasn't meant to be a punishment.
Perhaps it was something that just ⦠happened. Like the Fosters being able to touch the stone and predict the weather. Perhaps she, too, had a gift for communicating with the stone. With stones.
Just a thing that happened.
Suddenly she recalled a madman who had lived in the tiny village of Bartlett when she was a child. Her father had occasionally driven over to Bartlett to care for him when he injured himself. Annie remembered Dr. McDonnell saying at the dinner table the night after one of those visits, “It's like he lives in another world. Some of the time he's with us, some of the time he's simply somewhere else.”
Was that man mad? Annie wondered now.
Or did he, like herself, truly have a terrible and unwanted access to a world beyond ordinary human senses?
She gazed in horror at her children. Foster had claimed the gift of dealing with the stone was passed down through his family. If so, would Annie's children inherit the curse that had befallen her?
Suddenly she grabbed up the baby, who had been happily playing at her feet, and pressed little Mary to her breast with such hungry urgency that the child began to cry.
“Mama, you're hurtin' Mary!” Johnny protested.
Annie quickly set the child down. “I was just hugging her,” she said. She could not meet her son's worried eyes.
For the rest of the day, nothing untoward happened, to her vast relief. There were no more of the flashes of altered consciousness she dreaded. She couldâalmostâconvince herself they might have been dreams.
Almost.
For the evening meal she decided to open one of the jars of preserves she had put up the preceding year. Preserves were stored
in a cupboard in the dogtrot, where they would stay cool but were protected enough to keep from freezing. Annie loved opening the cupboard doors and looking at row upon row of glass-encased fruit, ruby and purple and amber, gleaming like the jewels of summer.
in a cupboard in the dogtrot, where they would stay cool but were protected enough to keep from freezing. Annie loved opening the cupboard doors and looking at row upon row of glass-encased fruit, ruby and purple and amber, gleaming like the jewels of summer.
She chose a jar of sweet mountain blueberries, Liam's favorite, and took it back into the cabin. When she had pried up the disc of paraffin wax that sealed the jar, she held the preserves under her nose and took a deep sniff. Her senses flooded with memories of hot summer days shrill with cicadas, and long dark shadows sleeping under leafy trees.
“Mama!” Johnny, who had watched her alertly throughout the day, was scandalized. “You told us never to smell our food!”
Embarrassed, Annie put down the jar. She had felt an irresistible desire to enjoy a human memory. Stones could not appreciate the fragrance of blueberries; could not reminisce about sunny afternoons spent berrying with a small, freckled boy who put more fruit into his mouth than he ever put into his basket.
That was an Annie Murphy memory.
While she was preparing the boiled mutton and potatoes that would be their meal, Liam appeared in the doorway, clapping his mittenless hands together. “It's jus' startin' to get cold,” he reported. “Been mild for a mighty long time now. Reckon we might not see snow till after Thanksgiving, for a change. Might be able to order a little less feed, make up for it with grazin'.”
Annie turned toward him. Her eyes did not seem to see him, however. “No,” she said in a strangely hollow voice. “Order the feed. Order extra.”
“What're you sayin'?”
“The snow will start by the end of the week and not stop. Blizzard after blizzard.”
“Where'd you hear that?”
She did not answer.
The next morning, Liam left his chores undone and went into Conway. His first stop was the feed store. Money was tight; he did not want to order extra feed if he did not need to, but he would spend the required fee to get advice from Daniel Foster.
Foster, however, refused him. “Cain't tell you, Liam,” he said succinctly.
“Tarnation, Dan'l, cain't you give me some idea?”
“Nope.” Foster's face was as closed as a spring trap.
“Why not?”
“Don't know,” was the unhappy reply.
Daniel Foster had been giving that same reply to other farmers for days. By this time of year, he was usually able to make a surprisingly accurate prediction of the winter to come. But since Annie Murphy's first visit to the boulder on Pine Hill he had had no prophetic visions.
“Waal ⦔ Liam Murphy drawled, rocking back on his heels, “reckon I better listen to Annie, then. She says we're gonna have one helluva blizzard afore the week's out. Then another and another, right on up to April with no letup at all, hardly. She says I oughta get all our feed and supplies in now, and I should order extra corn, bran for mash, blackstrap molasses ⦔
He went on, ticking off the list on his fingers while Foster listened with growing alarm. The feed-store owner was glad of the order, but dismayed to hear that Annie Murphy was now predicting the weather.
He had a dark suspicion as to how she was doing it.
Three days later a monster blizzard hit, well in advance of its usual season. By that time Liam had his stock in the barn, his loft crammed with feed, his firewood cut, additional flour and salt and thread purchased, carrots and turnips and potatoes snugly bedded in fresh hay in the root cellar, and was just doing a final check of the shingles on his roof when the first flurry began.
By the time he had come down off the roof and put his ladder away in the barn, the howling wind was so full of snow it was impossible to see more than a few feet. He returned to the cabin through the dogtrot and settled down in front of the fire with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Just made it, Annie. Thanks to you,” he said. If she had been acting strange lately, it was forgiven and forgotten in the relief of the moment.
Other farmers were not so fortunate.
The exceptionally early blizzard caught most people unprepared Livestock was trapped in the open and frozen. Great drifts blocked roads. Supplies ran low. People huddled together in snowy siege, measuring
the level of oil in their lamps and food in their larders and worrying.
the level of oil in their lamps and food in their larders and worrying.
At last the snow abated, but only briefly. During that period men hurried into Conway from outlying districts, telling harrowing tales of blizzard losses and clamoring for supplies.
An angry band descended upon the Conway Feed Store. “Why didn't you warn us, Dan'l?” they demanded to know. “Any time afore this, when there was a major storm a-comin', you've let us know.”
“I didn't know myself, this time,” Foster protested. But they were in no mood to be lenient.
“You've cost me!” Nathan Nesbitt accused. “You've cost me a heap o' money in dead livestock, Foster, and I won't forget it! Any other man wants to set up a feed store in this area, he'll get my business afore you!”
There was a mutter of agreement.
Grudgingly, the men placed feed orders with Foster against the winter to come. But he could feel the resentment in them. Three generations of Fosters had prophesied local weather with uncanny accuracy. Until now.
They would not trust Daniel Foster again. That source of income had suddenly dried up.
Yet Annie Murphy had known about the blizzard.
“Annie Murphy robbed me,” Foster growled to his wife.
“How'd she do that?” Tabitha wondered. “She ain't even been in town since harvest.”
“She robbed me,” he repeated stubbornly. “And I ain't one to forget.”
Yet how could he prove it? he asked himself. How, without revealing his own involvement, could he accuse Annie Murphy of knowing the weather through ungodly means? Any mention of witchcraft on her part would bring the same accusation down on himself.
Besides, he was not certain it was witchcraft. His father had told him, “It's a curse, boy. A curse on the Fosters for what my pa helped do to them Injuns. That there stone calls us out to it from time to time to remind us o' what we done, and at the same time it makes us see things we got no business seein'.
“But when a man is faced with two evils, he'd be a pure fool not to try to make a profit outta at least one of'em,” the elder Foster had concluded.
Throughout his manhood Daniel Foster had made a good profit, indeed, from the visions the stone caused. Now that profit looked like it was being taken from him by a woman from another place entirely, a woman with no claim to it at all that he could see!
He raged silently, wondering how to get his own back. His wife, noticing that his mouth had become a thin, hard line, avoided him. She knew her man. As Annie Murphy had said, Daniel Foster could be mean.
He had a whole long, hard winter to brood on his loss. The weather was too unrelentingly savage, the roads too badly drifted to allow him to go out to the boulder on Pine Hill. But once mud season set in with the melting of the snow, he would. He vowed to return to the stone every chance he got, until he caught Annie Murphy there, stealing from him. Stealing his visions. Then he would ⦠he would â¦
He was not sure what he would do. He had the whole long winter to brood about it, though. And if he forgot for a moment someone was bound to come into the store and remind him. “You sure messed up this time, Dan'l,” some man would say with the ill-concealed pleasure people take in pointing out the failings of others. “Lookit that snow out there. Heaviest since'45. And the earliest. How come you didn't know, Dan'l? Eh? How come you didn't know?”
Then his questioner would laugh a sly laugh at his obvious discomfort. And Foster would promise himself anew to be revenged somehow on Annie Murphy, when the snow finally melted and he could catch her sneaking out to the stone.
But Annie had no intention of ever returning to the boulder on Pine Hill. There was no need. From day to day, she knew what the weather was going to do before she opened her eyes in the morning. Her bones knew. The message was carried through them by the same energy that hummed through the granite of New Hampshire.
With the knowledge, came the visions.
Days might pass without one. Then, horrifically, just when she had begun to relax a little, she would find herself bonded with stone. With a mountain or a pebble or, occasionally, with the entire chain of the White Mountains themselves. In and of and with the mountains, her soul unwilling witness to geologic history.
“Annie's got very strange,” a worried Liam at last confessed to his nearest neighbor, Ezekial Baldwin.
“How so?”
“She goes off, like. Into some sorta daze. Don't seem to hear me when I speak to her, don't seem to know what's goin' on for the longest time. Then all at once she's back.”
“She's broody,” Baldwin declared with the authority of a man who had sired seven children.
But though Liam watched Annie's waist hopefully, it showed no sign of thickening.
The long winter passed, punctuated by Christmas and New Year and the first eager references to sugaring-off. “When the sap rises,” Daniel told Johnny, “we'll sugar-off.”
The prospect was almost more exciting than Christmas. The boy remembered from former years the sound of metal tubes being banged into the sugar maples, the clank of buckets as they were carried around and suspended from the protruding metal, the slow drip of the running sap into the buckets, the incredibly sweet fragrance of the boiling sap. And best of all, the thrill of dropping a ladle full of hot sap onto unmelted snow and then eating the confection thus formed.
“When, Papa?” the child asked almost every day. “When is sugarin'-off gonna be?”
“Not yet, boy, not yet. Not till the thaw starts and the trees begin warmin' up.”
“When will that be?”
“It's in God's hands,” Liam said.
But Annie knew. She knew almost to the exact moment. Liam returned to the cabin from the barn one morning to have her meet him at the door, with one word on her lips.
“Thaw,” she said.
“Not yet, Annie. It's fixin' to blow up another blizzard out there!”
She shook her head. “Thaw,” she repeated.
The blizzard the sky had threatened never developed. A wind blew up the spine of the mountains, driving the clouds before it like strayed sheep. In the wake of the wind's passage the sun shone, the earth warmed.
Water dripped steadily from the melting icicles along the eaves.
It was the earliest thaw in a decade.
Liam looked at his wife with wonder in his eyes.
“Go into town as soon as the road's passable,” Annie told him.
“Order your seed, you'll be able to plant. Mud season's not going to last long this year.”
“Order your seed, you'll be able to plant. Mud season's not going to last long this year.”
She could feel it; could feel the heat in the stone underlying New Hampshire, knew the snow would melt and run off and the earth would dry early, ready for the seed.
When Liam entered the Conway Feed Store a surprised Foster greeted him with, “Didn't'spect to see you for a while yet, Murphy.”
“Wanna order seed now,” Liam replied. “Brought the wagon. Gonna be plantin' soon.”
The men gathered around the potbellied stove laughed. “You're soft in the head,” one told him. “It's way too soon, we'll be wadin' in mud a while yet.”
“Nope. Annie says get ready to plant.”
Foster did not laugh. He sold Liam the seed. There was something cold and angry behind his eyes, however.
The viscous New Hampshire mud firmed, and in that brief but glorious season between the mud and the coming of the black flies and mosquitoes, Liam Murphy planted his crops before anyone else. His harvest would be the first to market, commanding the best prices.
No one would laugh at him anymore.
“I reckon I'm gonna be able to build a regâlar second story on this house,'stead of just a sleepin' loft,” Liam told Annie proudly. “Have us a coupla bedrooms up there. Mebbe even put a pump inside so you can have runnin' water indoors for your cookin'.”
She smiled wanly. “That'll be nice.”
“Nice! It's what I alluz meant to do, give you as good a house as your pa had in Jackson. Better, even. Give you the finest house in the Saco Valley, you'll see.”
“That's nice,” she said again.
She was not the same Annie. The change was deeply troubling to Liam. Yet the change included an uncanny ability to predict the weather, an ability that was worth more than gold to any farmer.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Liam concluded.
He never suspected his wife of witchcraft. She was Annie.
It was high summer before she visited the boulder on Pine Hill again. She did not want to; would have given almost anything not to go. But Liam's crops were in the ground and the rains had not
come. With the passing of months, her tormenting vision had faded. Sometime around midsummer she had ceased to be certain of the weather.
come. With the passing of months, her tormenting vision had faded. Sometime around midsummer she had ceased to be certain of the weather.
Liam stood on the porch of the cabin and gazed out at the sky. Hot, blue, shimmering. Cloudless.
“You reckon we're gonna have rain soon, Annie?” he called over his shoulder to his wife. It was a question he was asking with increasing urgency. The dirt was powder dry. Crops were visibly wilting.
Annie stood behind him in the doorway. “I don't know.”
“You've known all year, why don't you know now?” He turned to look back at her. For the first time, he noticed streaks of silver in her dark hair.
“I just don't.” Annie went back into the cabin.
Liam took Johnny to the fields with him that day. As soon as he was out of sight, Annie bundled up the baby and carried her to the Baldwins' farm. “I need her tended for a while,” she told May Baldwin, who responded with a lifted eyebrow but a willing nod. Folks did for one another. Raising barns or tending babies, folks did for one another.
Annie set out for Pine Hill with a pounding heart. I can't let Liam down, she thought.
Perhaps the stone would speak to her again, and in the speaking renew its gift.
Or it might kill her. She accepted the possibility. Anything with so much power might kill her. The journey on which it sent her might be enough to stop her heartâor leave her trapped forever this time, inside stone.
Yet Annie went on.
The stone eats babies.
Daniel Foster had said that was a lie.
But the stone had claimed victims; Indian victims. As the mountain in Albany had claimed Chocurua.
Maybe the stone will want my blood this time, Annie thought.
She tried to make her feet stop walking. But they were on the path now. They walked on in spite of her.
Up the hill that sang with summer. Toward the crest, then down. Toward the stone.
It waited for her.
It had no choice. No particle of earth, whether loose sand or compacted rock, could move by itself. An outside agency was required.
So the Pine Hill boulder must wait as the earth itself waited, for the action of wind and fire and water, for lightning and glacier and earthquake.
For Annie.
Annie Murphy was a better conductor for its petrified thought than Foster men had ever been. The aura of her energy was strong and clear, easily used to forge a connection with other cells of the earth. Mountains, rocks, pebbles, sand. Annie's energy could link the whole.
The stone, solitary, waited.
Annie stopped a few yards short of its weathered face. “I'm here,” she said aloud as if to announce her presence to a sentient being. A sovereign being, with the power of life and death.
The stone waited. It could do nothing else.
Step by reluctant step, Annie moved closer. “Help me,” she said.
The stone had no comparable concept for “help.” To help implied physical action.
The stone could only wait.
“I should have brought you something, shouldn't I?” Annie said, tardily realizing. “Corn, maybe. But we don't have any crops yet. Be a while. Maybe not at all, if we don't get the rain. I need to know about the rain.”
She took a last step forward, until she was close enough to touch the stone if she merely reached out her hand.
“I need to know about the rain!” she pleaded.
“I knew you were doin' this!” cried a triumphant voice.
Daniel Foster came running toward her. His face was as black as thunder.
“Stealin'!” he shouted. “that's what it is, Annie Murphy. You're stealin' money outta my pocket! The stone don't talk to me no more. It talks to you. You gotta make it stop, you gotta make it talk to me again. You don't need them visions!”
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