Stone Field

by Christy Lenzi

  I duck down quick as I see him through the cane. Did he see me? Stonefield.

  Catrina, where are you?

  Come find me.

  I hear him step into the clearing by the rock. I laugh and bolt, running toward Roubidoux Spring.

  Where are you going?

  I laugh and keep running out of the field. I hear the crunch of his footsteps in the dried leaves behind me.

  Catrina.

  Come to me.

  I’ve almost got you. His silent voice is closer now—it seems to flow over the rushing current.

  I go upstream along the bank of Roubidoux Creek, duck past the willow tree, the spring, and go around the bend and into the meadow.

  Catrina. Stonefield sees me the same time I see him. He smiles and runs to catch me. I’m crossing the hay meadow ahead of him. The wild wheat grass is almost as high as my hips. It’s the dark golden color of Stonefield’s eyes. He takes hold of my hair and pulls me around, gentle but firm. The world spins blue and gold, even after we stop running.

  Caught you.

  The meadow spreads out between the two hills with the creek behind us flashing silver through the trees. Only the sun sees us. I skim my open palms over the tips of the swaying grass, mimicking the wind that caresses the field in rippling waves.

  Stonefield draws me in by my hair like it’s a net. He lifts his hands to breathe in the scent of my hair still tangled in his fingers.

  I say, “I have an idea for new wild work, but I need your help.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to be the art.” I pull the bottom of his shirt up over his head as he lifts his arms. It billows in my hands, a white flag in the breeze. His body is sun-gold. The muscles in his arms slope like distant hills, like the steep and rounded land I love.

  “Stonefield.” I savor the sweetness of the name on my tongue and the strength of its simple sound.

  “Catrina.” His voice is soft and warm and low. Like a bed of hay.

  “Lie down,” I whisper.

  He lies back in the golden grass and crosses his arms behind his head. I squat beside him, clearing a space free of hay, and pick up a fallen walnut, still in its green hull and large as a ball of yarn. When I cut it open with a stone, the air fills with its sweet, sharp, earthy scent. Inside it, the black substance surrounding the hard nut looks like dark molasses, but it’s thick as butter. I set the open hull on the ground, careful—once the stuff touches the skin, it will stain for weeks or even months.

  “Are you going to feed me that?” Stonefield squints at me, stern. “First frog legs and now walnut mush—are they witchy love potions?”

  I ball up his shirt and throw it at him, but it flies past his head. Keeping one arm behind his head, he reaches back for the shirt and hurls it at me. Laughing, I catch it and toss it as hard as I can over the hay fortress surrounding us. The shirt flutters away like a white dove. Stonefield’s serious expression breaks into a grin. I straddle him at the waist, my knees on the ground. He watches me, his arms still crossed behind his head.

  I take the green walnut and slip a turkey feather from my deep pocket. “This will bind your heart to mine.”

  “It’s already bound.”

  “I’ve thought of a charm—I’ll say it over the ink.”

  Stonefield brings his arms down and rests his hands on my thighs.

  I hold the walnut hull beneath my lips and speak. “Into his skin, over his heart. Take me with you, never to part.”

  He slides his hands to my hips. “It’s already so. The day you came to me in the cane field, you owned my heart.”

  I smile as I dip the quill tip into the thick black ink. “This is for always.”

  “Then I want it.”

  “Lie still as a dead man.” I start drawing the circle design from the field on Stonefield’s chest. I dip the quill back in the hull before sliding it over his skin, re-creating the paths and swirls from memory. Saving the fire rock for last, I paint it carefully over his heart.

  I stop for a moment.

  “Stonefield, one time when Effie and I were little, she read me a story where the last line said that the characters lived ‘happily ever after,’ and Effie said it was an untruth. She said feelings are fleeting and that trying to hold on to happiness is folly—like chasing after the wind. What do you think?”

  Stonefield lifts his chin and closes his eyes. He doesn’t say anything for several moments. When a breeze tousles his hair, he grins. “Maybe Effie is right about the chasing.” The breeze lifts the hair off his forehead, and Stonefield opens his eyes. “We shouldn’t chase after the wind. Or happiness. But it’s folly to run away from them, too. They come to us in their own time—we should pay attention and enjoy them while they’re here.”

  I love that Stonefield thinks the way I do. We should just keep living in the here and now. The past is too painful and the future is too uncertain. I almost wish I had amnesia like him, but just being with him here in the present is like a wonderful, beautiful amnesia. I laugh and tilt my head back, letting the breeze and the happiness flit over my face and through my hair. “I’ll have to tell Effie you agree. But I’m afraid she might think that if I don’t know where you came from or what you’ve been, then I shouldn’t love you.”

  He raises his eyebrows. What do you think?

  I dip the feather in the ink and carefully draw the last flame on the rock with a flourish. “Effie is smarter than anyone I ever met, but she doesn’t know what my heart knows. And even if she could count off a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t be with you, it wouldn’t stop my heart from wanting what it wants.”

  “What if I do find out where I came from and what I’ve been?” His eyes never leave mine, but I can see something different there that makes my heart skip a beat.

  “Is your memory coming back?” I let the quill drop to the grass.

  “At the beginning, right after the fever, it seemed like my life was a book with blank pages until I got to the part where you found me. But now it’s like the lost words are appearing on the pages.” He looks away from me to stare at the shadowy woods in the distance as he lies beneath me in the grass, and I feel him shifting his focus from the present to the past. It sends a cold shiver through me.

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember the day I learned to read—I was maybe four or five. A woman with skin white as paper leaned over my shoulder and pointed at the letters. She smelled like cake and tea. She didn’t know my language and didn’t try to learn it, but she wanted to teach me hers. English—what I speak now.”

  “What was your other language?”

  Stonefield shakes his head, still gazing into the dark woods. “I don’t know its name.” His eyes narrow. “The teacher woman called it a savage tongue and washed my mouth out with lye soap every time I spoke it.” He turns his gaze to the sky. “I remember, but it was so long ago.”

  I take a deep breath. “Yes, it was long ago.” His past seems so far away from me, I want to pull him back from it. “It doesn’t matter now. If you spoke that other language, I wouldn’t know it and we wouldn’t understand each other. See? The past doesn’t matter. The future, either. Just now. Here.”

  He pulls in a deep breath. He’s still staring past me. “It was a mission school—an orphanage. A stranger left me there when my family died of scarlet fever and the mission took me in.” He licks his lips and talks fast, as if he’s trying to catch every single memory that fires at him like bullets. “My mother—when she was alive, she told us stories. I missed them when I was in school, but after I learned to read the stories in the books at the mission, I didn’t feel so alone anymore.”

  I squeeze his hand to bring him back to me, but he pulls his hand away and props himself onto his elbows, staring into the woods.

  “When I graduated, the white woman gave me three volumes of Shakespeare.” His eyes light up with a new memory. “I was a teacher at the mission—I taught children how to read! I rem
ember the smell of chalk as the students wrote on their slates.”

  I squeeze his shoulder. “But now you’re on your own. You don’t need the mission school anymore or those missionaries. You—”

  His brow wrinkles up. “But who am I? How did I get here?”

  “Stonefield.” I find it hard to swallow. “You’re Stonefield. You’re here now, with me.”

  He blinks at me, as if just realizing where he is.

  “And whatever memories are hiding in that head of yours, they can’t keep me from loving you.”

  His eyes sharpen their focus, and he is finally looking at me again. “Promise?” He sits all the way up with me in his lap, and leans forward to kiss me.

  “I promise!” I laugh and push him back down. “You’ll smear my work! It needs to dry a little before we wash it off.”

  “Let me paint you, too.”

  “Your circle design?”

  He nods.

  I hand him the feather and watch his reaction as I take off my shirt. I laugh at the way his eyes widen. I turn and lie on my stomach so he can paint my back.

  He kneels beside me.

  I move my hair out of the way and turn to look at him over my shoulder. “I’m ready.”

  “Wait,” he whispers. “First I want to paint you in my mind so I’ll never forget how you look lying here in the hay. Nymph. Are you human or are you a spirit of the meadow?”

  I smile and close my eyes. “A spirit born from dirt and stones and grass? Maybe I am. And if I lie still long enough, the earth will take me back.”

  When it takes you, tell it to take me, too. He moves onto me, his knees on each side supporting his weight, and brushes the soft part of the feather lightly up my back.

  Lord.

  He turns the feather around and dips the quill in the walnut ink. When he starts drawing the circle design, the smooth slow feel of it makes me want to cry out and arch my back, but I do my best to hold still. When he’s finished painting, I lie there, waiting for it to dry. After a few moments, I glance over my shoulder.

  “How does it look?”

  He smiles. Beautiful.

  I laugh and roll over, shaking him off.

  “Don’t smudge it!” he mimics me.

  “I think it’s ready—let’s wash the ink off so we can see the stain.”

  The springwater’s a deep bluish green where it bubbles up from under the hill, creating a pool below the overhanging bluff. Cool air rushes to meet us as we run toward it. We both already have our shirts off, and Stonefield gets his pants off first. He runs to the edge of the swirling spring and leaps in, hollering like a wild man. I get mine off as he comes back to the surface. When he sees me, he yells, “Jump!”

  The water’s winter cold and swallows me up like a grave. It turns my skin into a thousand cracking icicles. I open my eyes under the water and see Stonefield swimming toward me. We rise together, breaking through the surface at the same time.

  I holler from the icy jolt, but it’s a good kind of shock—like when Jesus was baptized and came up out of the river knowing he was a God who had the power to rise from the dead.

  Stonefield swims in place, grinning. His wet, tangled hair hangs in his eyes, and his skin catches the light and glistens. We’re both naked at the same time for the first time, and close enough to touch. The thought makes me light-headed.

  I tread water, breathless. “It worked.” My teeth chatter as I stare at the dark circle design on Stonefield’s chest. It looks clean and perfect after the thick walnut ink’s been washed away.

  He studies the art on his chest. “The rock—it looks like it’s on fire.” When he moves, his naked body glows like burnished copper in the swirling water. Like a beautiful angel of light.

  “Stonefield, I want to show you something I made.”

  13

  “I want to see it.” Stonefield’s eyes shine like amber held up to the light.

  “We can see it best from my secret place. If we swim under the bluff, we can climb a tunnel up to it instead of walking around and up the hill.”

  “Under the bluff?”

  “Roubidoux Spring starts from under the bluff and flows out here through a space in the rock wall. The opening’s not far from the surface, so we’ll have some daylight shining on the water through the hole, and once we get into the cavern, I know the way through the tunnel in the dark.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  I pause, glancing at the stone face of the bluff where it meets the water. “Well … no. I usually get to my secret place through a cave opening in the woods. But I’ve seen turtles swim under this bluff. And I’ve explored the inside with a candle, coming from the other entrance, and found the cavern and the source of the spring—there’s a little pool right inside. I’ve watched turtles swim through the hole and climb up onto the cave ledge, so I know how to do it.”

  “Well, I’ve watched hawks soar in the sky, so you should let me hold you while I fly off a cliff, since I know how to do it.” He splashes water in my face.

  I laugh and grab his head and shoulders, dunking him under. When he pushes back up, he’s grinning like the sun. If he were to hold me, I would leap anywhere with him and never look back.

  With a shake of his head, he flings the wet hair away from his face. I feel the same way, Catrina. “I’ll go wherever you take me.” The deeper the better.

  Then come with me. I draw in a great breath and dive under the roiling surface, pushing water past me like a bird pushes wind past her wings. I shoot into the bottomless spring until I feel the water throbbing from a hole in the stone wall.

  I’m a minnow swimming through the gap. I glance behind me. Patches of light and shade dance over Stonefield as he follows me into the darkness. As soon as I clear the rim, I stretch my arms out in front of me and rise to the surface slow, so I won’t scrape against the rock wall of the cave pool. I break the surface and take a breath. I can barely see now.

  I hear Stonefield surface.

  “I’m here,” he calls. He makes splashing noises as he pulls himself out of the water and I see the outline of his body as he moves into the cave and disappears into the darkness.

  We made it. I reach for the edge of the pool and drag myself up onto the muddy floor of the cave. A little sunlight travels through the water, lighting up the pool, but the cave is so dark, I can only see vague shapes near the water.

  I call, “Where are you?” My voice sounds strange bouncing off the stone walls.

  “Here,” he calls from a little farther ahead. I feel with my hands in front of me as I creep toward his voice. Thick cold mud squeezes between my toes and fingers. The smell of damp rock tickles my nose. Stonefield’s naked body is slick and wet when I reach him. Lord, it makes something deep inside me flutter like it wants loose.

  His arms slide under mine, steadying me. I smile at the strangeness of grasping hold of him without seeing what I’m doing. His arms are strong enough to carry me. Or crush me. I feel the unspent power in his tight muscles, like an unbroken mustang waiting for the chute gate to open. I start pulling him closer, but make myself let go. I want to take him deeper and higher. “Follow me.” The cave’s blacker than my worst darkness, but a thousand candles are burning inside me.

  Stonefield rests his palm between my shoulder blades so he won’t lose me as I turn to search out the tunnel entrance. I move forward slow with one hand stretched out and one pawing the air above me.

  “Here it is. The ceiling’s low—duck down.”

  The tunnel floor slopes uphill. Stonefield lets go of me to feel along the wall. His hand slides smooth down my back. The caress sends shivers up my spine. Lordy, I want him in my arms. Our way turns steep, and we have to walk hunched over as the ceiling lowers. Soon we’re crawling on our hands and knees in the mud. After ages and ages of climbing, I slow down.

  “Let’s rest.”

  Stonefield’s wet skin touches mine and gives me goose bumps. The sound of our breathing fills the tunnel.
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  Catrina.

  I feel his presence inside me like the Holy Ghost speaking in a still, small voice. He moves toward me, and the slightest touch brushes against my hair. He leans closer, and I feel the warmth of his breath on my cheek. When he whispers, his words tickle my ear.

  “Even when I can’t look at you, I still see you, Catrina. I paint you in my mind with colors that come alive in the dark.”

  “Maybe you’re an artist, too.”

  “I make my own wild work by thinking of you.”

  I lean toward his words. Stonefield’s cheek brushes against mine as he lowers his head. His lips are hot on my neck as he tastes my skin.

  Oh Lord. My heart forgets its rhythm and bangs against my chest like a mad thing. Stonefield must hear how loud he makes my breath come in and out. But I don’t want to stop here. I want to take him to my secret place on the edge of the cliff, the edge of the sky.

  Stonefield. “Let’s keep going.” We’re almost there.

  We start again, crawling until the ceiling rises, then walking bent forward when the floor levels. Finally, we reach the spot where the branch splits and connects to the main tunnel.

  “This way.” I walk faster, running my hands along the familiar walls. A snatch of light shines in the distance.

  Stonefield rushes to catch up and bumps into me. He tries grabbing me around the waist, but I slip out of his hands into the mud. Our laughter fills the tunnel as I get up and we race toward the piece of sky. Almost there. I glance over my shoulder to look at him and stumble to the ground. Stonefield trips over my feet. We land on the mud floor of my secret place and I crawl to the ledge. He catches hold of me, laughing, and we collapse again, our bare arms and legs tangled together. When I look up, all I see is blue.

  In the distance, the sound of voices singing in four-part harmony rises from Reverend Preston’s tent meeting: