Stones

by William Bell

  “I can’t go through with it,” someone hissed. “Let’s go back.”

  “No! No!” came the answer. “We agreed. Keep going.”

  An argument boiled as booted feet trod the path, drawing nearer to the clearing. All eight came to an abrupt halt when the cabin was in sight. The stink of their own sweat and fear was in their nostrils.

  The words were spat out like a curse. “Come on!” and the pack crossed the clearing. The plank door exploded inward under the force of their feet. Three of them rushed inside, then emerged with Hannah struggling and kicking between them, arms pinned behind her, eyes wide with terror. She wore a pendant that bounced on the rough fabric of her nightgown as she struggled, a human face with round holes for eyes.

  “Jubal, help me!” she screamed.

  There was a split second, a frozen moment, when no one moved, as if her terrified appeal had paralyzed them. Hannah, her nightgown torn at the throat, her chest heaving, gasped for air. The men stood poised, balanced on the edge of determination and indecision.

  The sharp stink of urine rose from the ground at Hannah’s feet and broke the spell.

  “Haiti witch!” someone cursed. “Child killer!”

  “Haiti witch,” another hissed.

  “Stones! Get some stones!”

  Several of the men ran to the wall that bordered Hannah’s garden, a wall made from rocks grubbed from the earth and piled in a row. There were so many stones that Jubal and Hannah, like all these men, had built fences with them. Every hand was callused from carrying stones to the edges of fields.

  Hannah’s two captors dragged her screaming across the yard and flung her to the turf by the low wall. Released, she struggled to her hands and knees, frantic to scrabble away.

  The first stone struck her on the back of her head with a sickening thunk. Hannah groaned, rolled over, arms extended uselessly to ward off what she knew was coming.

  “Help me, Jubal,” she pleaded to her dead husband. The second stone slammed into her face, smashing nose and teeth, releasing a gush of blood. The third and fourth hammered her forehead, slashing open her skin, drawing away consciousness. Her blood soaked the earth as stone after stone hailed down upon her.

  The eight men, frenzied by the hot odors of blood and their own terror, snatched up stone after stone. Their arms rose and fell, rose and fell, driving the rocks down onto the unmoving bundle on the ground, breaking bone after bone.

  “Enough!” someone yelled finally, and gradually their mania faded. Only the rasp of breath drawn in and out could be heard as the men looked down. At length, someone found a shovel, and Hannah was carried into her cabin and thrown on the packed-earth floor.

  It took more than two hours to bury her. During that time a cool, damp breeze swept into the clearing, and thunder rumbled in the distance, creeping nearer and nearer.

  When Hannah was in the ground, four men took the excess earth outside and spaded it into her garden as the first of the rain spattered the dry earth. Others stamped the dirt floor flat inside the cabin. Someone rearranged the table and chair by the window. Someone else swept the floor.

  “Why you two doin’ that? We got to burn the place,” another said.

  But the storm had hit by then. Claps of thunder shook the small log building and lightning flashed in violent spasms above them. Drained and exhausted, the eight men fled the cabin.

  The last man pulled the door shut. “God save us,” he muttered, crossing himself, as he followed his companions into the storm.

  2

  When I woke, a hard rain was hammering the trailer roof and the wind howled, but the thin grey light of morning showed in the windows. I had, I guessed, slept all night, but my body was leaden with fatigue, and my gut churned with nausea.

  I got up, stumbled to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. I shook my head to rid my brain of visions of blood and broken teeth, groans and the sickening thud of stones on flesh. When the retching eased, I stood on wobbly legs under a hot shower, willing the rushing water and steam to wash away the foulness that seemed to crawl on my skin. I wished the shower could wash my memory also.

  I towelled off, got into a T-shirt and jeans, put the kettle on for tea to settle my stomach. I fell onto the couch in the living room and stared up at the ceiling. I had witnessed a murder, or rather, an execution, every bit as real as if it had happened on the floor in front of me.

  What commandments had she broken that she deserved that death? They had feared her knowledge and power, and stoned what they couldn’t understand.

  There wasn’t a shred of doubt in my mind that what I had seen — whether in a dream or a vision — had happened. Hannah had been killed and buried in her own cabin. The killers had intended to burn down the building so the community would assume she had been consumed by the fire. But the rain had ruined their plan, and they hadn’t the courage to return and finish what they had started.

  Elizabeth Maitland had discovered that Hannah had not left the area. What a cruel irony that, when she visited Hannah’s cabin, she had stood on her friend’s grave.

  The community would have wondered what had become of Hannah. Did they look for her? Did the men who put her to death walk the woods and fields with the others, pretending to search? Did they carry their guilt with them the way Hannah carried her grief? How many of the locals were secretly relieved that the “Haiti witch” who had brought medicine to their doors or delivered their babies was no longer among them?

  3

  “My god! They stoned her to death?”

  Raphaella and I were sitting on a boulder by the shore of the lake in Tudhope Park. The morning sun had barely cleared the tops of the trees across the green water, and the dew was still on the grass. I had called her as soon as I could, breaking the Rule, and asked her to meet me there.

  “What an awful way to die,” she said.

  I had told her everything I had seen, leaving out no detail. By the time I had finished, she was in tears.

  I was close to tears myself. It was as if Hannah had been my friend, as if I had always known her, and the pain of losing her was sharp. I ached for her, the husband snatched from her by sickness, the children she never had, the terror that must have coursed through her like an electric shock when her cabin door had crashed open.

  I looked at Raphaella, who sat on the boulder with her legs drawn up, her face in her hands, and I wondered if, before I had met her, I would have felt the empathy for Hannah that gripped me at that moment. Raphaella had opened up parts of me like unused rooms in a mansion, thrown open the doors and pulled the drapes away from the windows.

  “You know what I think?” I said finally. “I think the worst thing for her was Jubal’s death. She was lost after that. Just like I’d be if I ever lost you.”

  Raphaella looked straight into my eyes. “You’re not going to lose me. Ever.”

  We got up, took off our shoes and waded into the shallow water. The sand was firm under my feet and the water lapped at my legs. Beside me, Raphaella’s light cotton dress was dark where the water soaked it.

  I took her hand and led her farther out, until we were thigh deep in the lake, squinting against the brightness and bathed in the warmth of the rising sun. I turned to her and took her into my arms. She put her hand behind my head as she kissed me, the way she had done that day at the opera house.

  We kissed again and again, each kiss a promise, while around us the sun danced on the water.

  chapter

  Roy Weeks came home to Silverwood early, putting me out of my job. I didn’t care. He apologized for the change in plans and said I was welcome to stay in the trailer as long as I wanted. I thanked him and told him no. Paying for the dented siding on the rear of the trailer took all the money I had been able to save, and Roy gave me a quizzical look when I explained that a couple of drunks must have done it.

  I was glad to put the African Methodist Church behind me when I turned onto the Old Barrie Road. I moved into the house on Matchedash �
� it was hard to think of it as “back home” — taking the front upstairs bedroom with the balcony and the view of Lake Couchiching.

  “Watch it up there,” Dad had warned with the elfish look on his face that he was never able to hide when he was kidding, “it’s an old house. There might be a ghost or two up there.”

  “Very funny, Dad.”

  I decided to go to school regularly, get my credits, finish the year properly, and graduate. It would make Mom happy. I missed her and wanted her home where she belonged. I was through with disruption, sick of mystery. I wanted things to be normal again. Predictability and routine suddenly seemed desirable.

  A few days later, as I was loading the supper dishes into the dishwasher, the phone rang and shattered my hopes.

  2

  Dad took the call in the living room, where he had lit a fire, even though it was a warm night. He liked the flames for atmosphere, he said. On the phone, his words were fuzzy and unclear from that distance, but his tone was urgent.

  I thought of Mom right away. We hadn’t heard from her for a few days. I ran into the living room. Dad stood by his chair, arms hanging loosely at his sides, the phone still in his hand. His face was white, his mouth a firm line.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “That was Wade, at the magazine. Wade Thompson. It’s your mom.”

  “Yeah? What, Dad?”

  “She’s on her way home. She’s been … She’s been hurt.”

  “Oh, god. What happened? How badly hurt?”

  Dad sat down, in a sort of daze. I pried the phone from his hand and set it on the table.

  “Dad,” I tried again. “What did Wade tell you?”

  He swallowed. His eyes focused again. “She — remember she went in-country to do a piece on the refugees? One of the militia bands grabbed her, held her for a day, and left her at the side of a road. Roughed her up, Wade said, but she’s all right. Nothing broken. I wrote down the flight number … somewhere.”

  There was a notepad beside him on the table.

  “It’s here, Dad. She gets in tomorrow.”

  “Right. Right, tomorrow.”

  I knew what was going through his mind, the question he wouldn’t have asked Wade Thompson. I didn’t ask it either.

  3

  Neither of us slept that night. In the morning we left for the airport far sooner than we had to, only to spend two and a half hours waiting at the terminal, drinking bad coffee from a vending machine. Travelers passed to and fro, walking like zombies, trailing wheeled suitcases behind them.

  We didn’t talk much. Dad kept jumping up and checking the monitors that listed the flight arrivals, and after the first few times I stopped reminding him that Mom’s flight wasn’t due for a long while.

  At last Qantas 1507 appeared on the monitor, flashing to show the plane had touched down. Dad called out to me and we rushed to the wide double door of gate 5B, but it was another twenty minutes before passengers, tanned and laughing and weighed down with carry-on luggage and souvenirs from Australia, began to trickle through the sliding doors. I almost missed Mom. She was in a wheelchair pushed by a steward, almost invisible behind a wide man with a stuffed koala bear under each arm.

  “There she is!” I said.

  When he caught sight of her, Dad groaned.

  The wrinkled scarf on her head covered most of the cut just below her hairline, but not the ugly yellowy-blue bruise that encircled her left eye, which was swollen almost shut. Her left arm was in a sling. When she got to her feet, aided by the steward, she winced when she took her first step.

  When Dad and I approached her, she tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “Annie,” Dad whispered, “oh, Annie.”

  She stepped up to him, put her free arm around his neck, rested her forehead on his chest and began to cry. I put my arms around both of them. I hoped that what she felt was what had filled my mind when I left the place where Hannah walked — the overwhelming relief that things are back to normal and you’re safe.

  “It’s okay,” Dad whispered, his voice shaking. “We’re together again.”

  Mom didn’t say a word on the way home, and we didn’t press her. She would have been impatient with falsely happy chatter. She sat with her eyes closed and her head back on the headrest. As soon as we got home, Dad put her to bed and sat in the armchair by her side all day.

  When I went to bed, he was still there, reading by the small light beside the bed.

  4

  Over the next week or so, I watched my mother closely, after I heard her cry out in her sleep that first night. I stayed with her in the mornings until Dad got home at noon, then went to school.

  She spent her time reading, dozing, visiting friends, watching a little bit of TV. Sometimes I caught her wandering through the house touching things, as if to convince herself that she was safe now. In the afternoons she and Dad went for a long walk. Gradually her limp faded. On the fourth day she threw away the sling. The bruise on her face began to recede. But the look that came into her eyes sometimes scared me.

  She said nothing about her ordeal for a week. Then she let it out — but only to Dad. One evening when Mom had gone up to bed early, he told me.

  “She can’t talk about it,” he began. “She feels humiliated. So don’t ask her anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was like Wade said. A militia band — they’re all over the place, like packs of wolves — grabbed her and her two colleagues. Teenagers with guns, out of control, vicious and unpredictable. They let the two men go right away and took your mother with them. As near as I can figure out — she wasn’t very clear about this — they wanted to punish her.”

  “You mean, for what she wrote?”

  “No. Scum like them had no idea what she put in her articles. They were religious extremists. Fundamentalists who thought females should stay at home, cover every square inch of their flesh with black cloth, hide behind veils and do what they’re told. Seeing a woman in shorts and a T-shirt giving orders to two guys, driving a jeep — they wanted to make an example of her.”

  I was aware of an aching throb at my temples, a wave of unexpressed rage.

  “They mocked her, criticized her in broken English, and when she fought back they slapped her around, kicked her, beat her up using their gun butts. When her colleagues found her the next day she was wandering the road. They almost missed her. The militia had dressed her in a black mantle and a veil. On her forehead they had written a dirty word in red lipstick.”

  Dad’s voice caught in his throat. “She doesn’t even wear lipstick,” he said. He took a deep breath. “For the first time in my life, I think I could kill somebody. That’s what I hate about people like that. They drag you down to their level.”

  “Dad, did they —?”

  “No. But she feels violated. ‘Unclean’ was the word she used. As if they had raped her dignity. Don’t ask her about it,” he repeated. “She needs to heal in her own way.”

  As my father covered his face with his hands I wondered, at another time or in another place, would the militia have stoned my mother to death?

  part THREE

  chapter

  I soon fell into a routine that was unusual for me. My teachers had practically died of shock when I began to turn up every day — well, almost every day — for class. I did my best to catch up, plowed through the daily work, clapped together the assignments, survived the tests. I can’t say I was any more interested in school than ever, but I kept reminding myself that it would be over in a couple of weeks.

  There was one glimmer of enthusiasm supplied by an English essay I had to write, the last one, I hoped, of my life. Paulsen had dreamed up a list of topics — he never let us choose our own; we might actually get interested in something — and when I saw mine, I just about lapsed into a coma on the spot. “Discuss the main conflict in the play Inherit the Wind.”

  “What did you get?” I asked Raphaella in the chaos of th
e hallway outside Paulsen’s room.

  “I have to compare any three stories from Matt Cohen’s collection Café Le Dog.”

  “Cool title,” I offered.

  “Yeah. What’s yours?”

  I showed her. She rolled her eyes and gave me a sympathetic look.

  I made the mistake of telling Mom about the assignment. I knew she was getting back to normal when she started badgering me about it.

  “When’s it due?”

  “I don’t know. A week or so.”

  “You don’t know the due date? How can you plan it out?”

  “Relax, Mom. It’ll be fine.”

  I put off opening the book as long as I could and then, one day when the due date threatened like an unfed dog, I dragged an armchair out onto my little balcony and began to read, making notes as I went along.

  Setting: the 1920s, a small town in Tennessee, the buckle on the Bible Belt. A boring opening, people milling around Hillsboro’s town square, excited about something, with a few jokes about monkeys. But soon I was hooked. The sinking sun was throwing long shadows across Brant Street when I finished. I went downstairs for dinner.

  Back in my room, at my desk, I began to sketch out the conflict. The play was based on a real event, the Scopes trial. Scopes had been an elementary school teacher with progressive views who taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, knowing it was against the law. At first, it looked like just another courtroom drama with a slightly interesting twist.

  On a simple level the conflict was Scopes against the State of Tennessee. But I was going to argue in my essay that the trial was part of a larger issue: Science vs. Religion, the theory of evolution against the creation story told in the Bible.