Touchstone

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Jacob sighed. “Lissa, you’ve been up the mountain. If people know that, they’ll expect to know your calling. And if you were to tell them what it was, who would know if you were truly called or not?”

  I had to let the words simmer in my mind for a moment before I understood them. Lie? Was that what he was suggesting? Lie about my calling?

  “Lissa, who knows if all the rest of them are lying or not? Does the touchstone tell one person what another is called? No. Does the touchstone ever speak to us but the once? Have you ever heard the touchstone complain that someone misunderstood?”

  It seemed a long time since I had stared into the touchstone’s blackness. “Maybe no one has ever misunderstood,” I said faintly.

  “Or,” said Jacob, “maybe they all have.”

  I couldn’t speak. I had moved from utter depression to possibility, hope. And it burned. How it burned!

  “Lissa, choose whatever you wish. No one will doubt you. How can they, unless they doubt themselves?” His eyes looked sharply into mine.

  It was a temptation unlike any other. If I had known what I had wanted to do, if I had not been terrified by the thought of choosing something once and for all, finally, for all of my life, I might have decided to do what he asked.

  But then again, if there had been anything that suited me, no doubt the touchstone would have called me already.

  I was about to tell him no when Jacob said, “Lissa, before you decide, I have something to show you. Something I’ve never dared to show to anyone else.” He stared at me. “Not even my brother.”

  “Why?” I whispered. I was frozen.

  “Because you’re the only person in this town I truly think of as my friend,” he said. “You’re like me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked behind him, up the long stretch of road that led to the other side of Zicker, then forward towards the trees and Mama’s restaurant. Then he looked back again.

  “Do you remember I told you I had a secret?”

  I nodded, my lips numb. I didn’t have to say that we both knew he had lied before, about my beauty.

  “The touchstone,” said Jacob. “It never called me.”

  I gaped at him. If I had not already been so close to the ground, I would have fallen. Slowly, I grasped at bits and pieces here and there, in my memory. I tried to put them together, into one picture, but it was like trying to guess at the size of an oak tree from looking at an acorn.

  “I pretended it had,” Jacob went on. “I heard my brother wake in the night. I saw him leave. I knew it must be to go up the mountain. He was a sound sleeper. There could be no other reason. So I followed him.

  “He walked with no awareness of the path. His hands were at his sides. His feet shuffled. And yet, he never stumbled. He never lost his way, though it was not yet dawn through the worst of it. By the time we reached the touchstone, it was light enough. I tried to be quiet, but I fell twice and he never noticed. He could only hear the voice of the touchstone, I think.”

  I felt as though he had dragged me along with him up the mountain a second time. His words made me live with him, agonize at his choice.

  “He pushed away the thorns, not feeling the pricks of pain, not bothering to wipe at the drops of blood. They must have fallen to the touchstone as he leaned forward and put his hands on it.

  “When he came out again, I saw his face. It was like looking into the face of an angel. He knew perfect joy. And I did not. You can’t blame me for going through the bush after he was gone. Can you?” asked Jacob.

  A long moment passed. “No,” I said at last.

  “No,” he echoed. “I went forward and touched it. That cold, bright stone. You know what it’s like, Lissa. To touch it and feel nothing, see nothing. To know that you have not been called. It was unbearable. John had always been the perfect older brother. There had never been any doubt that he would be called as a farmer. I could not go home to be the younger brother, not anymore.

  “I told myself there was no reason I shouldn’t have the same calling that he did. I knew I could do it as well, if not better.” Jacob lifted his arms out and gestured around the farmhouse. “Come. See it. Tell me where you see any difference in my work and John’s. Tell me that I was not meant to be a farmer.”

  I felt how hard the ground was around me. I looked at Jacob’s fields and saw the straight lines, the rich color of the new plants poking through the ground. I had never looked closely at his brother’s farm, though. And what did I know about farming?

  But perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was no difference in the two of them, no need to be called.

  Jacob offered me a hand.

  I took it, steadied myself.

  “You’ll come? You’ll see what I have hidden, the other half of my secret?”

  I nodded and stepped forward. He was more a friend than I had known. “What is it?”

  “It’s what I’ve given up, to be a farmer,” said Jacob.

  What he’d given up? What did that mean?

  But he said no more until we had walked to the door of the farmhouse and stepped in, gone past the silent kitchen and up the rope ladder, to the hot and stifling attic. It was dark there, despite the bright sun outside. There were no windows, so Jacob lit a lantern he had left on a hook by the door.

  It seemed suddenly as if it were night and the stars shone all around me. I turned slowly to take them in. And slowly, I realized they were not stars, but paintings filled with light and brilliance.

  Many were of the mountains or the woods or the river in Zicker. Others were of the people of Zicker. I could see one of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, their wary expressions captured perfectly, as they glanced away from each other while they walked together, he struggling with his size and she taking slow steps to keep at his side.

  Another showed Mama’s face, very close up, so that the mole on her left cheek was plain, and the longing in her eyes for my daddy.

  Then I saw the one of me. Jacob had painted me a year or two ago in Mama’s kitchen. I was watching the stove carefully, and there was longing in my eyes, just like in Mama’s. But it wasn’t longing for a person. It was for myself.

  “This was the last one I did,” said Jacob, tapping the painting of me.

  “But why did you stop?” Why shouldn’t this be his calling? Surely this was something that should have been out in the light, where all could see. Not hidden up here. Not made into a secret.

  “I was afraid. If I did more of these, eventually I would have to show them. And then—”

  And then everyone would know that farming was not his true calling.

  “Also, I knew that I couldn’t keep spending the time painting and be as good as—” he gulped as if he were trying to drink an entire bucket of water in one draught. “John,” he finished at last.

  “The painting wanted all of me, not just the time I gave it at night. I thought that if I stopped, it would bother me less and less each year. I thought that I might someday have a family, as John does, to share my life, to cut my pain. I thought maybe even your mother, when your daddy—” He stopped.

  “But that isn’t what happened,” I finished for him.

  He shook his head and stared at his paintings.

  I did the same, taking small steps here and there so that I could see from different angles. I got close enough to a painting of the woods to see the texture on the canvas. It begged to be felt, to be compared with the real thing. Were those real twigs? Would I feel the smoothness of the stone if I ripped it from the paint? I was in awe.

  “Jessie,” I said suddenly, as if the thought had been popped out of my head. The place it came from swelled with fear.

  Jacob’s hands twisted. “No,” he said. “No—that doesn’t matter.”

  But what if it did matter? What if the farm he had taken was the one that should have been lying fallow all these years—for her?

  I said nothing. There was no need.

  Jacob put down the lantern and sat
with his hands wrapped around his knees. His shoulders began to shake and I knew he was weeping.

  “No one knows. They’ll never guess. And what is Jessie to me, that I should give up everything I am for her?”

  But he wouldn’t give up everything, I thought. He would only give up the farming. Not his paintings. And his paintings mattered most.

  He had had two callings, I thought. A real one and a false one. Two more than I had had.

  I couldn’t help but be even more angry at him than I was at the others.

  And he thought he should tell me what to do?

  “It’s time to go,” said Jacob. He blew out the lantern and we were in pitch black again. “Can you feel the rope?” His hands passed it to mine.

  I went down, rung over rung. My feet hit the floor at bottom with a thunk and I stifled a moan at the sting that ran up my legs into my back, reverberating all the way up to my neck.

  Jacob came down after me.

  Together we walked back down to the front room where the sun nearly blinded us.

  Without a word, I left him.

  My head pounding dully, I went back to the restaurant that afternoon and told Mama only that I had been to visit Jacob for the morning. She took my scrapes as evidence of helping him in the barn.

  I helped her serve dinner to the Donalds, celebrating an anniversary together. And then we went to sleep.

  I had terrible dreams, of blood streaking canvases.

  #

  Jessie came and woke us up far too early the next morning. I heard her calling out at the door and I stayed in bed. I thought of Jacob, who was giving up his farm for her, and I couldn’t face her.

  When Mama came to get me, she looked gray around the mouth and her eyes were old. I’d never seen Mama look old before.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Jacob Wright,” she said.

  “No,” I whispered. There was something wrong and I couldn’t help but think it must be my fault. I shouldn’t have told him about Jessie. I shouldn’t have left him like that, without a word yesterday. I shouldn’t have been angry with the one person who knew the truth and could still be my friend.

  But I had.

  I was crying even before Mama started telling me the rest.

  “Lissa,” said Mama. Then she took a breath. “Jessie came to say that John Wright was found dead. In Jacob’s house.”

  I choked.

  It wasn’t what I had thought it would be. It was worse.

  Jacob? Kill his brother John?

  Impossible.

  But before yesterday I would have said it was impossible for anyone to lie about a calling.

  Impossible for someone to have two callings instead of one.

  “Jacob is to be judged today for the crime,” Mama went on. “We all have to go.”

  “No,” I said. “It can’t be.”

  “Lissa, it is,” said Mama.

  I shook my head.

  She went on.

  “You were with him yesterday morning. Did he say anything—odd—to you? Did you see anything?”

  I wanted to think of something that would help, some proof that Jacob couldn’t have done it.

  “Does anyone know when John was killed?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Jessie might,” said Mama. “Do you want to come down and see her?”

  I did.

  So I went down and saw Jessie sitting at one of Mama’s tables, at the only chair that had been put up. She was sipping Mama’s coffee and picking at fresh biscuits. I thought about her on Jacob’s farm. Had the touchstone told her it would be hers?

  “Lissa wanted to hear it from you herself,” said Mama. “She’s terrible broken up over it.”

  Jessie nodded eagerly, proving she didn’t care. “Of course she is. Everyone knows she was friends with him.”

  She told me what she knew. It wasn’t much. John Wright’s body had been found in Jacob Wright’s house, after his wife had been searching for him through the night.

  “Where in the house?” I asked.

  Jessie looked at me with her head tilted to one side. “Why does it matter?”

  “It does,” I insisted.

  “In the kitchen,” she said.

  I breathed. Not in the attic, then. Not with the paintings.

  “He was stabbed through the heart with one of Jacob’s knives. It’s still there, on the floor. He didn’t even try to hide it.” Jessie’s mouth twisted and I thought there was something wrong with what she said, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “And then?” I said.

  “And then his wife called for a judgment.”

  “What about Jacob?” I asked. “What does he say?”

  “That he’s innocent,” said Jessie.

  And if he said that, it was good enough for me. “When is the judgment to be?”

  “Today,” said Jessie. “At the house. John Wright’s body is still there. You’re all called to see it, to make your own judgment.”

  I nodded. I was going, I knew that much. Even if I wasn’t allowed to vote yet. I was going to make sure Jacob had justice. Somehow.

  “That will make two farms that will need working on,” said Mama. Her voice sounded far away, but I felt as though the force of them were pressing me back, back.

  I clenched my fists hard. How nice for Jessie, I thought.

  “Will there be sharing afterwards?” asked Mama. She was thinking ahead, to the end of the day. To people needing to eat, and wanting something good after a day of bitter judgment.

  I didn’t want to think ahead.

  “Can you bring some more orange marmalade chocolate cake?” Jessie asked.

  “I will,” said Mama. “If I don’t have too much to do.”

  “I’ll help,” I said heavily.

  Jessie jumped to her feet. “Thank you, thank you!” She kissed me on the cheek and for one moment, we were back to where we had been before she was called. But the moment faded and slowly the knowledge of her calling seeped back into Jessie’s eyes.

  “I’ll see you then,” she said with a nod.

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  Then Mama held the door open for Jessie to leave.

  “Lissa, I’m sorry. I know he was your particular friend,” said Mama softly.

  “He didn’t do it,” I insisted.

  Mama didn’t say anymore then, but went directly to the kitchen. She started on an enormous batch of dough first.

  “You’re going to whip those eggs to froth and let them float away,” Mama said, taking the fork away from me.

  I handed the bowl to Mama and she poured them into the batter.

  Then it was time to cut up chicken for filling. I brought her celery and onions and pickles to add in, but Mama didn’t ask me to chop and I didn’t offer. I’d probably have chopped straight through her best cutting board and broke her best knife in two.

  “Do you remember Jessie on her touchstone day? She was happier about your cake than being a farmer. It’s not right for her. Anyone can see that,” I burst out.

  But Mama wouldn’t agree with me so easily. “You can’t say what is right for other people, Lissa. That’s for the touchstone alone.”

  #

  That afternoon, the Johnsons came to get me and Mama and her food. As we drove on through the woods, I kept expecting to hear the noise of people ahead of us. But it came all at once, like opening a door. One moment we were still in the forest and the next, we were twenty feet from Jacob’s front door. What had been Jacob’s front door.

  No one was called to be judge in Zicker. It was a task we all had to do together, everyone who was called, that is. Children were exempt from the duty, and all around they were playing, running and chasing each other. Except for me.

  Mr. Steel stood beckoning us up the porch steps.

  “You don’t have to come,” said Mama to me. “No one will think anything if you don’t.”

  “Because I’m still a child,” I said. “Uncalled.”

 
Mama shrugged and walked forward. I did, too. I was not a child, even if I had no calling, and I was going to be part of this judgment.

  The smell once inside was overpowering. It was like a piece of wood hitting you in the head. Hot and fetid. I breathed through my mouth and still it was there, clutching at my throat.

  The kitchen was only steps ahead.

  Mama was waiting for me.

  Then there he was. The smell was worse, but it wasn’t that I gasped at. It was the sight of John Wright lying on his side, tumbled onto the floor in the corner, a hand over his stomach as if trying to keep away the knife. It hadn’t worked. The knife was still in his chest, gored in black blood that spilled over his neatly ironed plaid shirt.

  “What a shame,” said Mama. “He was a handsome man.”

  Perhaps, but he looked so little like his brother that it was hard for me to believe it was true. And Jacob was the only one I had ever cared about. John was so stern, so unforgiving. He had never spoken to me that I recall and his relationship with Jacob had always seemed strained.

  “Where’s Jacob?” I asked.

  We walked around the kitchen to the sitting room and found him on a sofa by the back window. He wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even see his chest rising and falling to breathe. He could have been one of his own paintings.

  “Jacob?” asked Mama.

  It was Jacob’s chance to say anything he wanted to in his own defense. But I could see he was so upset over his brother’s death, he wasn’t going to say anything at all. He seemed so trapped inside his own grief I didn’t know if he even saw us there.

  I went over closer to him. I didn’t touch him or try to get him to talk to me, just stood there at his side so he’d know I wasn’t afraid of him even if others were.

  While I was there, I heard him muttering to himself so softly I didn’t think anyone else would hear. “Got to burn the paintings,” was what he said.

  Burn the paintings? The thought made me sick inside. All that work, all that beauty—destroyed? I had to think of a way to save them.

  “Lissa, you ready to go now?” Mama asked.

  I nodded and stepped back from Jacob. He still didn’t look at me.