The Elementals (26 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: The Elementals
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At last Annie put her down in the almost-outgrown cradle. For once Mary did not complain. She snuggled down gratefully as if returning to the security of the womb.
Annie busied herself preparing a meal. She went into the barn and used Liam's grindstone to put a fresh edge on her household ax. Then she went out into the yard and caught a hen that had grown too old to lay. She swiftly beheaded the bird, plucked and cleaned it, and had it in the pot in a matter of minutes. She was soon floured to the elbows as she made dumplings to go with the chicken.
“Sweet corn would be good with this,” she decided. “And some green tomatoes, sliced thin and fried the way Liam likes them.”
She whistled softly to herself as she worked. From the depths of the cradle Mary could not see her mother, but she heard the familiar, comforting sound, and relaxed. By the time her father and brother came home she was fast asleep.
Annie was putting the final touches on the meal. When she heard the thud of familiar footsteps on the porch, she called out, “There's dry towels there by the door. You men dry yourselves off before you come in my house, hear?”
The door creaked on its hinges. Annie turned around with a smile to welcome her menfolk.
There was a gasp of total horror.
Liam Murphy dropped the armload of firewood he was carrying in from the porch. The split logs fell to the floor with a clatter. At once Mary screamed from her cradle.
“What's wrong with you?” Annie demanded of Liam. “Listen to that, you've woken the baby when I just got her to sleep a while ago!”
Then she realized that both her husband and son were staring at her as if they had never seen her before. Johnny shrank back, putting his father's bulk between himself and his mother.
“What's wrong with you?” Annie asked again.
In a strangled voice, Liam replied, “What's wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come over to the mirror, Annie.” He took hold of her arm and
led her across the room to her mother's oval mahogany-framed mirror, hanging in a place of honor between the two front windows.
“Look,” Liam said.
Annie looked.
The rainy light coming through the windows fell softly on her face. But even its gentleness could not soften the image reflected in the mirror.
Bright, merry Annie Murphy was gone. In her place was a woman with the seamed and fissured face of a person twice her age. The eyes were ageless, and haunted.
Instead of sleek dark hair, the face peered from beneath hair as snowy as the peaks for which the White Mountains were named.
Annie's mind struggled to reconcile what she had expected to see with what she was actually seeing.
She raised a trembling hand to her head.
The figure in the glass did the same.
“My hair's gone white,” Annie said in a disbelieving whisper. She turned toward Liam, seeking some sort of reassurance. “What happened?”
He could only stare at her. “I don't know! Don't you know? Good God almighty, woman, don't you know?”
Annie swung her incredulous gaze back to the mirror.
Her eyes locked with the haunted eyes in the glass.
In one dizzying moment she was sucked out of herself and plunged into a whirling vortex that spun her among a kaleidoscope of images. Incredible heat, the universe exploding, incredible cold, a sense of vast space, spinning, slowing, cooling, an infinity of time passing. A wrenching upheaval. Destruction, reformation. Great sheets of ice, grinding inexorably. Warming, melting. A swarm of motion on the surface. Crystalline shapes rising in clusters to sparkle in the sun.
Then cataclysm. Change.
Ice melting, seas rising. More motion, other construction. Volcanoes erupting like giant pustules. Lava flowing, seas boiling. Cataclysm. Change.
Faces! Faces that seemed to surface from somewhere deep inside Annie herself and imprint themselves over the images spinning past.
She saw, for one clear moment, a large tawny woman holding a seashell against a misty green background. Then she was gone. Countless other faces sped past, blurring. Hundreds, thousands.
Then another figure etched itself sharply on Annie's awareness. She saw a slim bronzed man with an abnormally small waist and almond-shaped, tilted eyes. He stood on the brink of a flaming abyss.
She wanted to shout a warning to him, but before she could he turned away, only to reappear against the misty green backdrop that had framed the tawny woman. Then he faded and was gone, to be replaced by another succession of figures rushing by in a measureless stream. Men, women. Faces. Faces with features Annie began to recognize. One had a familiar width of browbone. Another had a certain set to the shoulders. A third had, like herself, tilted eyes.
Family features, developing over the centuries.
Intuitively Annie understood. She was seeing connections. The people she was glimpsing as they were swept along by the river of time were her people. She was as much a part of them as sand and pebbles and boulders were part of the mountains.
The mountains! Suddenly they rose triumphant in her vision, brushing all else aside. Mount Washington, Mount Katahdin, Chocurua's mountain; vast and massive ranges whose names she did not know. The mighty mountains, enduring. Witnesses to the antediluvian past and the unimaginable future. Time viewed from the mountaintops. Eternity in stone.
“Some people worship mountains,” Annie heard herself murmur in a faraway voice. “Some people see no difference between mountains and God.”
Then she fainted in Liam's arms.
It was the first and only time in her life that Annie Murphy fainted.
Eight months later, when the Murphys' second son was born, people attributed the startling change in her to her pregnancy.
“Takes some women like that,” Nellie Smith confided at the church's box supper. Nellie's husband was the local doctor. “My Zebediah says being in the family way changes a woman's whole system.”
May Baldwin disagreed. “Not like that, it don't. It don't turn a woman's hair pure white between sunup and sundown.”
“I don't think this is a proper conversation for a church social,” Felicity Osgood said primly, pretending she was not listening avidly.
Ignoring her, Nellie went on, “Miz Murphy's doing fine now, my husband says. She's back on her feet and taking up her chores. Her hair's still white, but when he was out there the other day he said her wrinkles were softening. Nursing a baby softens a woman, you know. It was just such a big strong baby that having it was a shock to her body.”
“I should think so!” Agatha Dalrymple exclaimed. “Having a sixteen-pound baby would be a shock to any woman!”
The Widow Mason giggled. “I alluz knew that Liam Murphy was a strappin' big man.”
The others, except for Felicity Osgood, laughed outright.
Tabitha Foster commented, “The Murphys are gonna need a lot o' strong sons, the way things are goin' out to their place. That farm used to be piss poor, you know. Then last autumn Liam Murphy brought in the biggest harvest in these parts, and he's doubled his order for spring seed. Seems like he cain't put a foot wrong.”
May Baldwin agreed. “That's true. He's alluz ahead o' the weather these days. How you reckon' he does that, Tabitha, when your husband ain't sellin' weather predictions no more?”
The question was asked with gleeful malice, as all present understood. Tabitha Foster kept her burning face lowered to her sewing as she replied in a low voice, “Don't know. Just lucky, I guess.”
The others resumed their gossip. According to Elizabeth Wheeler, whose husband Matt owned the hardware store, “Liam Murphy's ordered a special new indoor pump all the way from Concord, to put by Annie's sink. Reckon there's gonna be more celebratin' when that comes.”
“take more than a new pump or a new baby to make a woman get over havin' her hair go white,” Susan Mason said.
May Baldwin gathered spittle in her mouth and licked the ends of the thread she was trying to push through the eye of her needle. “I'd be right happy to see Annie perk up a mite,” she told the others, when the thread was safely through. “She alluz used to be whistlin' or singin'. Sometimes when the wind was right we could even hear her over to our place. But ever since last summer—long
afore she got big with that baby—she's gone quiet. Turned in on herself, like.”
The other women continued sewing without comment.
Tabitha Foster did not think to remark that her husband's demeanor had changed at about the same time, as if some burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
The two had no connection in her mind.
Everything that is, is alive.
Life did not come into this world. The life forms of the earth are a natural product of the earth, as the living planet is a natural product of the living universe.
Life in any form is part of life in every form. One, indivisible. The terrestrial spark is connected to the most distant star, just as the collective consciousness of the earth is one cell in the infinitely greater creative intelligence of the universe.
It is said, no one can know the mind of God.
Yet we are the mind of God.
And so we dance for joy.
We dance to the music of life, which ripples and shimmers across the universe. Even in the coldest depths of space, something is dancing the dance. Something is part of the music.
Every molecule of air on earth has its part to play in the whole. Myriad life forms dance in what appears, to human eyes, to be empty air.
Air is not empty.
Air is alive.
The angels of the air sing the songs of the spheres.
A hot wind was blowing the White People away. In the gathering silence, the Real People met to dance the Ghost Dance and their dead came alive again. Their land was repeopled by ghosts.
One of the ghosts was George Clement Burningfeather, who went to the reservation because he had no better place to go.
Throughout his life George had been suspended between two worlds. His name was indicative of his dilemma. His mother liked to claim that her paternal ancestors came over on the Mayflower, which was a lie. The Clements had been in New England for generations, however, as had her maternal ancestors, the Murphys. George's mother didn't talk about the Murphys very much. They were hard-working Irish farm folk and not suitably patrician from her point of view.
George's father was also a New Englander, but of considerably older stock. He was a relict of the all-but-extinguished tribe of Pennacook Indians, and when he had had too much to drink he claimed to be a prince of the tribe.
When she had had too much to drink at a cocktail party in Boston, Samantha Clement met him and believed him.
She thought he was exotic, and was soon showing him off to her friends in Manchester and Concord, expounding on the romance and hinting at the virility of the noble savage.
In point of fact, Harry Burningfeather was neither noble nor savage, and once his virility was blunted by familiarity, he tired of the white woman who had seduced him into marriage. He skipped out for parts unknown, leaving her pregnant with George.
Although the birth certificate said Burningfeather, Samantha raised her son to be George Clement. Period. She reverted to her maiden name and stripped the house of anything that could possibly remind her of her Indian interlude.
Except George.
Who had a questioning mind.
One look in a mirror was enough to assure the boy that his Amerindian features came from somewhere other than Mayflower stock. When he started going to school, other children who had listened to their parents' gossip were happy to tell him about his origins.
He came home crying, dirt-smeared, with a bloody nose and a black eye, and vehemently informed his mother, “I'm George Burningfeather and you shoulda told me!”
Samantha tried to spank it out of him. But there was a stubborn
streak in the boy. The more she spanked, the more Indian he became. When her back was turned he sneaked into her room and used her lipstick to streak his face with warpaint.
From that point on, there was war between Samantha and her son. She provided him with a good education, smart clothes, a decent secondhand car when he entered college, and an icy reception whenever he was foolish enough to appear at home with his father's features stamped on his face.
Inevitably, he escaped as soon as he could.
George Clement Burningfeather attempted to escape to the stars.
Metaphorically speaking.
But by the time George graduated, the space program as such had run out of impulsion. With NASA as his goal, George had acquired a thorough grounding in the sciences, but no one was sending manned missions into space anymore. There were too many problems demanding attention on earth.
George had to settle for being an earthbound meteorologist, his only extraterrestrial explorations taking place among the wind currents and isobars in the atmosphere. His job was to try to figure out why the climate was going belly-up. Metaphorically speaking.
“We'll lick this thing, of course,” his immediate superior assured him. George hated that term. It implied that he was T. Dosterschill's immediate inferior, which he was not. Except on payday.
“There's nothing science can't accomplish,” Dosterschill frequently insisted with a bland arrogance that set George's teeth on edge. “Improved recycling techniques, improved substitutes for toxic chemicals. We'll get a handle on this. We have to. No one's willing to give up the way of life technology's made possible. Hell, I don't intend to start keeping my beer cold in a wooden icebox with a cake of ice either, know what I mean?”
George knew what he meant. What George did not know was how to make mankind's tardy efforts have any meaningful impact on a problem that was rapidly escalating. Recycling was not enough. Neither was cloud seeding nor improved methods of nuclear-waste disposal nor writing endless papers on the Greenhouse Effect.
Nothing science could do made an appreciable difference.
When the question was of academic interest only and there were very few academics left to ponder it, George went to the reservation.
It wasn't a Pennacook reservation. There weren't enough Pennacooks left to need one. It was simply the nearest Indian reservation George could discover through a cursory search in the deserted library, but it would do.
“Fuck you, Dosterschill,” he said the day he hung up his identity badge for the last time in the echoing locker room. Dosterschill wasn't there to hear him. He had been one of the earliest casualties in their particular department.
The two black men, Hill and Webber, were still there, as was scrawny little Gerry Gomez, the one they called Whitesox. A couple of the women too—Mary Antonini and the blond with the long legs, the one the guys never believed was a natural blond. She was still at her desk when George walked for the last time toward the big glass double doors. “I won't be back,” he called to her over his shoulder.
“Have a nice day,” she said. The words sounded foolish but there was nothing else to say.
Given all the electronic information available, finding a reservation had been easy. Finding a bus that was still running in that direction was the hard part.
Finding any public transportation at all had become very hard indeed. But George didn't want to drive a car. He felt it would be curiously inappropriate to take a car with him in his flight to his chosen world.
All his life, George had had a strong sense of what was appropriate.
The bus rattled down an empty superhighway between expanses of parched earth. Heat waves shimmered on the pavement ahead. When George boarded the bus, there were two other passengers, but they soon got off. George moved up to sit behind the driver and stared over his shoulder at the mirages. If the driver saw them, he didn't say.
He didn't say much of anything, though George tried several times to start a conversation. At last the bus driver growled, “Look, fella, you got your troubles and I got mine, okay? I don't wanna hear yours, and I don't wanna talk about mine.”
What happened to the friendly, courteous driver on the TV ads? George wondered.
For that matter, what happened to TV?
Not enough people around to produce television anymore. Not enough people to watch it, either, or buy the products it tried to cram down their throats, the glossy, elaborately packaged, outrageously trivial necessities that people had come to believe they could not live without.
Gone with the wind, George thought. The few of us who remain don't need the tube anymore.
The few who remain. Myself and the bus driver.
The great empty yawned beyond the smeared windows of the bus.
At last the vehicle shuddered to a halt. “Your stop,” the driver said.
Shouldering his duffel bag, George got out. He hadn't brought much with him. A closetful of suits he would never need again had been left behind, along with the stereo and the CD and a superb collection of jazz. And an avalanche of polyethylene grocery sacks trapped between the refrigerator and the wall.
In George's duffel bag were two pair of clean jeans, T-shirts, socks, underwear, a Levi's jacket, a pair of cutoffs, a canteen, a compass from L. L. Bean, a Swiss army knife, matches, a dog-eared copy of
The Martian Chronicles
and another of
Tomorrow the Stars,
a small cache of emergency rations, a flashlight with spare batteries, a dop kit containing toiletries, and a string of rosary beads.
The rosary had been passed down through the generations of his mother's undiscussed Murphy ancestors, then buried at the bottom of Samantha Clement's cedar chest, out of sight and mind. When she died and George was going through her things, he found it and pocketed it on an obscure impulse.
He had briefly considering putting a packet of condoms in his duffel bag, then laughed ruefully.
How ironic, he thought. AIDS and contraception have both become irrelevant.
For a while he played a dark game with himself. Spot the Irrelevancies. Mink ranches. Renewal notices for magazine subscriptions. Sunlamps. Politicians' promises.
Insurance.
The broken line down the center of the highway.
When the game became too depressing, he stopped.
He stood on the heat-shimmered highway and watched the bus dwindle into nothingness. He doubted if the driver would bother to finish the run. For miles, the man had been driving with one hand and using the other to scratch furiously at the bleeding back of his neck.
George started walking. According to the directions, the reservation lay some two miles west of the highway. He squinted at the brassy sky. The glare was so pervasive he could not tell west from east. He paused long enough to take the compass out of his bag, consult it carefully, and clip it to his belt before starting off again.
He soon came to a road, of sorts; two deep ruts carved in the now hard-baked earth. The ruts were deep enough to break a man's ankle if he stepped wrong.
Sweat trickled down the back of George's neck.
He was thankful for his hat, a fine old silver-pearl Stetson from his college days, when he was a country-music fan. He had long since abandoned both hat and country music, but he had resurrected the hat again from the back of his closet. A Stetson kept a man's face and neck in the shade.
He shifted his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, trying to remember if he'd put the Vaseline back in the bag. He'd smeared himself liberally with it before getting off the bus, covering all exposed skin … but had he left it on the seat when the driver called out his stop?
Feeling suddenly panicky, he threw down the duffel bag and began pawing through it. Must have done, must have done, must have put it back, wouldn't dare go out without it anymore … ah! There! He gave a great sigh of relief. The petroleum jelly was in his dop kit, with the white gunk for his lips and a bottle of aspirin in case he got too hot.
George put the white ointment on his lips and applied a second coat of Vaseline to his face and the backs of his hands. It wasn't as good as a real sun-block, but those had disappeared from drugstore shelves months ago.
When the reservation finally appeared on the horizon, it proved to be a disheartening straggle of ramshackle buildings with the dreary look of a place where dreams were born dead.
Well, what did you expect? George asked himself.
As he got closer he made out two rows of army-type wooden barracks sagging beneath unmended roofs. There was a store, of sorts, with rusted gas pumps in front, a porch, and a screen door permanently ajar, since the screen was too torn to be of any use anyway. Beside the store a few goats bleated in a barbed-wire pen, and some scrawny hens, half-denuded of feathers, scratched in the dust.
Beyond the barracks were some individual shacks with roofs of corrugated tin. The temperature under that tin must be enough to cook a roast, George thought. Surely no one tries to live in there, at least during the day.
So where is everybody?
His guts twisted. There might not be an “everybody.” There might not be anybody.
He had just assumed this would be one place where …
George began to run forward in spite of the heat.
“Hallooo!” he shouted. He could hear the desperation in his voice.
There was a muffled response from inside the store. A tall, lean man came out onto the porch, shading his eyes with his hand. “What do you want?”
George squinted up at him. “My name's George Burningfeather.”
“Burningfeather.” The man came to the edge of the porch to get a better look. “Take off your hat.”
George complied.
Instantly he was aware of the unshielded sun beating down on him like a weapon.
The man on the porch studied his features. “What tribe?”
“Pennacook. Well, half,” George added, knowing dishonesty would be inappropriate at the end of the world.
“Half. Yeah. Well. I never heard of the Pennacooks.”
“New England tribe. All gone now, or almost.”
“'Cept you?”
“I'm the only one I know of.”
“And you're just half.”
“Yeah,” George agreed, “but I'm alive. And I don't have any skin tumors.”
The man said, “Then you better put your hat back on quick. At least until you get up here on the porch.” He turned away and went back into the store.

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