As it scorched his skin, awe bubbled through his blood. An ancient heritage came alive in him. His grandmother’s voice sang to him in the hiss of the flames.
“Yes,” Meriones whispered. “Yes.”
Suddenly he knew, beyond thought, beyond question, what elemental power had been unleashed when Thera exploded. In the flames he saw, for one heart-stopping instant, the face of the old priest who was Ebisha’s grandsire.
“Yes,” Meriones said a third and final time. He arched his back and pressed his knuckles to the Palace of the Brain in salute. Then he stepped back to safety.
“The gold is gone,” he told his companions. “We have given it to the fire.”
The stone sat on its hillside and thought. Its thoughts were not cerebral. It had no cerebral cortex. Nor were they visceral. Stones do not need viscera. The thoughts of stone are the thoughts of earth, compacted, weighed down by the eons, thrust upward by cataclysm, encased in ice. Immobile for millennia. Then pushed, shoved, dragged, dropped.
The stone sat where the glacier had abandoned it. The surrounding landscape slowly changed. Vegetation appeared, softly mantling the ice-scraped soil. Trees grew. Great lizards came. And disappeared. Mammals rubbed their itching sides on the stone to rid themselves of parasites.
Rain poured over the stone; rain from its cousins the mountains, who helped shape the weather, controlling wind currents and influencing the amount of precipitation.
Sun shone.
Change followed change.
Two-legged mammals arrived. They recognized the stone as fearsome and holy and bowed in worship before it. In what served as its consciousness, the stone thought this behavior just and proper. It was part of the sacred earth.
Then different, paler, bifurcated beings arrived, and began slaughtering the worshipers of the stone.
14
Annie Murphy sat in the twilight of her fine frame house with the book on her lap. It had grown too dark to read unless she lit a lamp, and Annie did not like to waste oil. There would be God’s daylight tomorrow and she could read more. Meanwhile, her thin fingers stroked the leather cover of the book. The smell of new leather drifted up to her. Her fingers caressed the gold stamping on the cover. It read: NEW HAMPSHIRE AS IT IS. A GAZETTEER. And the date, brand-new, gleaming gold: 1855.
Annie Murphy sighed a contented sigh. She was a wealthy woman, by her reckoning. She had a fine new book to read that would last her through the hard New England winter to come and well into spring.
“No bigger than a bar of laundry soap after a hard day’s wash,” was the way she described herself. Tiny, meticulous, she ruled the Murphy household with an iron hand. There was only one way—her way, and nothing less than perfection would suffice. But her eyes twinkled as easily as they snapped, and her fine-boned face and slim little body radiated good humor.
She had peculiar eyes for a descendant of Irish immigrants, almost almond in shape, dark, exotic.
“My Annie’s family had someone born on the wrong side of the blanket sometime,” her husband said to his cronies down at the feed store. He, Liam Murphy, was as Irish as they came, there could be no doubting his pedigree. His blazing red hair and freckles were indisputable proof. “I come from the Murphys of Wexford,” he loved to boast. “The Boys of Ninety-eight.”
But the heroes of the most recent doomed Irish rising against English oppression meant nothing to hard-bitten New Hampshire farmers gathered around a potbellied stove in the feed store at Conway. What mattered was the oppression of the oncoming winter and the anticipated depth and duration of the snow it would bring, which would shape all their lives for the next six months.
“You reckon it’s gonna be next May again, afore mud season?” Benjamin Osgood was asking Daniel Foster.
“Don’t know yet,” the other replied. “Ask me next week.”
Daniel Foster was the local weather prognosticator. He had an uncanny record for accuracy, as well as owning Conway Feed and Grain. The two combined to make him an important personage indeed.
Ben Osgood sighed and tugged at his lower lip. A balding farmer, he had courted Annie McDonnell, as she was then, before Liam Murphy married her. Annie’s forebears had emigrated from the glens of Antrim in the north of Ireland back in 1719, seeking religious freedom. As good Presbyterians they had been welcomed into strongly Protestant New Hampshire.
But Annie had a blot on her escutcheon. One afternoon she had entertained her new beau by reading to him from her family Bible and Ben had discovered, to his dismay, that her mother came from a long line of Donegal Catholics.
The religious tolerance of the Osgood family did not extend to Papists. Ben married someone else, and Annie eventually married Liam Murphy, who adored her and was clearly happier with her than Ben Osgood ever was with his wife, a repressed and judgmental Freewill Baptist.
When Ben was in Liam Murphy’s company, he was inclined to suppress an envious sigh from time to time.
Liam was saying, “My wife Annie’d sure like to know how you predict the weather, Dan‘l. She’lows as how it’d be a right valuable skill for me to have for my ownself. Lord knows it’s hard enough to make a livin’ when the weather’s with you. When it’s agin you, a man can starve to death.”
Daniel Foster smiled thinly. “Weather prediction is a valuable skill,” he agreed, “and I make too much money sellin’ my predictions to farmers like you, to start givin’ away the secret. But that’s just like Miz Murphy; alluz thinkin’, ain’t she?”
Liam glowed with pride. “She’s got a good head on her. Reckon it comes from all those books she reads. I fetched her home a new one when I was down to Moultonborough. Thing called a Gazetteer. Tells about soils and crops and towns and history. Annie’s interested in all that.”
“Cain’t think why,” Ben Osgood interjected. “Woman oughta be interested in her house and her children.”
“Annie is interested in’em,” Liam told him. “She plans to teach our children outta them books. But she says this here Gazetteer has a lotta information in it that’d be useful to a farmer. She’ll read those parts out to me in th’ evenin’s. She’ll read every word in that there book. She loves to read anything about New Hampshire and the mountains. She purely loves this part of the country.”
Ben Osgood snorted. “Don’t set much store by bookish women, myself,” he said contemptuously. “My wife now, she’s a good Christian woman and she puts up good preserves. That’s what a man needs.” He tilted his cane-seated chair back and laced his fingers over his belly as if he were the final authority on women.
To himself, however, he was thinking, I wonder what it would be like to be married to Annie McDonnell? That busy little way of walkin’ she has. And the quick smile on her. She’s alluz thinkin’ of somethin’ to help Liam. Liam Murphy’s not much of a farmer. Never been much of a farmer. He couldn’t grow rocks in a field if Annie didn’t keep a fire lit under him.
Bet she lights a fire under him in bed too.
His mind far away, Ben tilted his chair back farther, crucially misjudging the weight-to-angle ratio. The back of the chair grated against the wall, then the legs shot forward and deposited Ben Osgood, chair and all, on the sawdust-covered planks of the feed-store floor.
The other two men guffawed.
Ben, red-faced, scrambled to his feet. “There’s a devil in that thing!” he said of the chair.
“Ain’t no devil,” Foster retorted. “You lean back too far, you fall. It’s a natural law, and cain’t no one go agin natural law.”
With a sullen scowl, Osgood shrugged into his coat and stomped from the store.
“Man ain’t got no sense of humor,” Daniel Foster remarked.
Liam Murphy gave a lazy grin. “You ain’t exackly famous for your sense o’ humor either,” he told Foster. “My Annie says you’re as mean as a ruptured goose.”
Lean and irascible, Foster was not inclined to take an insult from any man. But he was not offended by Annie Murphy’s statement. Everyo
ne knew she had a twist to her tongue. She also had exotic dark eyes that tilted up at the corners, and a ready laugh. Foster was perversely pleased to think she had spoken of him at all.
“Mean as a ruptured goose,” he repeated, mouthing the words to get their full flavor. “Happens I am, I reckon. To them as gits crosswise of me.” He sounded proud.
Unconcerned, Liam Murphy yawned and ran his thumbs under his suspenders, easing the pressure they were bringing to bear on his flannel shirt. Liam was easily the tallest, strongest man for twenty miles in any direction, and another man’s temper didn’t worry him much.
Nothing worried him much, as long as he had Annie. She did the thinking and the worrying for both of them.
“Reckon I better get on home myself,” he remarked. “Days’re closin’ in. I like to be with the wife when the light’s gone.”
Such open acknowledgment of fondness for one’s spouse was rare among Conway people. Privately, Foster thought Murphy was tied to his wife’s apron strings. But just as no one wanted to make an enemy of the man who owned the feed store and predicted the weather, so no one would make fun of big Liam Murphy.
“Give the missus my regards,” Foster said.
Liam got to his feet, stretched, scratched himself in both armpits, retrieved his heavy coat from its peg, then vocalized the all-purpose New England “A-yuh” and left the store.
Murphy had been the last man in the feed store that evening, aside from the proprietor himself. When he had been gone a suitable time, Foster ambled over to the front door. He looked up and down the dirt road that was called, rather grandly, Main Street.
No one was approaching from either direction. Lamplight glowed from the windows of the false-fronted hotel across from the store. Off in the hills, a hound bayed at the cloud-shrouded moon.
The darkness crouched among the mountains, waiting.
Foster shivered, crossed his forearms over his chest, and rubbed his upper arms to warm them. Then he stepped off the porch and walked around the store, fastening the heavy wooden shutters, known as Indian shutters, tightly over the windows. He went back into the store, shut and bolted the door, and barred the Indian shutters from the inside. A second set of interior shutters was then also closed and barred.
He took his rifle down from the rack behind the stove and lovingly cleaned it, squinting down the barrel, wiping the highly polished stock with a soft cloth, working the mechanism to be certain it was in firing order. Overhead he heard the creak of the floor that told him his wife was moving about in their apartment over the store. She would be putting his supper on the table. It was time to go.
He made a final round of the store, checking both shutters and door again.
Then he shouldered his rifle and climbed the stairs.
Meanwhile, Liam Murphy reached home. Home was a cabin that had been built by his neighbors, according to custom, the week after Annie agreed to marry him. Not a town house, it was constructed of pine logs, well chinked, with two rooms and a sleeping loft. The house was connected to the much larger barn by an enclosed dogtrot. The barn had been raised first, of course, being the more important structure.
Liam lifted the latch, pushed the door open, and called a cheerful, “Annie! Where’s my girl?”
“Ssshhh, you great ox, you’ll wake the children.”
“They abed already?”
“Of course they are. I put the baby to bed before the sun goes down. She’s fretful without lots of sleep.”
“I thought Johnny might still be up,” Liam said hopefully. Seven-year-old Johnny was his father’s pride and joy.
Annie bent to the fireplace, lowering the cast-iron pot on its chain to heat up stew for Liam’s meal. “I couldn’t keep that boy up forever, waiting for you.” Her voice was brittle.
“Aw now, Annie, I was just down to the feed store, talkin’. No harm in it.”
“No harm? Sometimes menfolk stay talking at Foster’s till all hours.”
“Not me,” he assured her. He tried to put his arms around her. She pretended to avoid him, then yielded, letting him pull her tight against his chest. The bottom of his red beard brushed the top of her head, where the glossy dark hair was sleeked back into a bun.
With her nose pressed against Liam’s body, Annie inhaled the familiar, beloved smell of him, the smell of male sweat and wool flannel and, on a deeper level, the fragrance of the stony soil he worked, permanently absorbed into his flesh.
Her voice muffled against his chest, she asked, “What way did you come home?” and immediately bit her lip.
“Same as I alluz do,” he replied with the infinite patience of one who has been asked a question too many times. “Up the orchard road to Mason’s top field, then’cross Dalrymple’s meadow.”
“You didn’t see any Indians? You didn’t go near the rock?”
Liam laughed, a comforting earthquake of a laugh that rumbled out of his chest and into Annie’s bones. “’Course not. I told you afore, I ain’t scared of Injuns but I know better than to go near their sacred rock.”
“That’s good,” Annie murmured.
But she knew her man. She knew Liam Murphy would not let anything dissuade him if he ever took it into his had to come home by way of Pine Hill. And he might just do it sometime, to prove he was not afraid.
As he sopped up the last of the stew with the last of Annie’s buttermilk biscuits, Liam remarked, “Mason got a mighty fine lot o’ hay outta his top field this year. He had a good barley crop too. Got the rain just right, and a dry spell for harvest. That man has all the luck. Wish I was him this year,” he added wistfully.
Annie shook her head. “If everyone had to hang their troubles on a clothesline for the world to see, and you were told to pick one, you’d pick your own.”
“Meanin’ what?” Liam asked, amused as ever by his wife’s sayings.
“Meaning Susan Mason told me in town last market day that her husband has a tumor in his belly Dr. Smith can’t fix,” Annie said. “She sat right there in her nice shiny new cut-under buggy, with me sitting waiting for you in our old spring wagon, and told me with tears in her eyes. So don’t ever wish to change places with anyone else, Liam. You don’t know what you might get.”
When they lay in bed later, Liam’s healthy snores shook the rope supports that held the ticking mattress. Annie lay open-eyed beside him, but it was not his snoring that kept her awake.
She was reproaching herself for mentioning the stone. If she kept on reminding him of it, sooner or later he would be perversely tempted.
“Keep your mouth shut, Annie Murphy,” she whispered angrily to herself, drawing the patchwork quilt up under her chin. “You just keep your mouth shut.”
But she was afraid she could not, any more than Liam could stop snoring.
15
In the morning, Liam went off to help the Burbanks mend a section of their fence. Johnny dutifully recited his letters for her, then Annie set him to work sorting strips of rag to be woven into rag rugs. Each pile of strips was a different color, and he had to study the colors and match pale blue with dark blue, bright red with dull red. She gave Mary a sugar-tit and settled the little girl at a safe distance from the fire to play. Then she opened her book again.
Annie sat close to the window, letting the dull light of a grey autumn day fall across the page as she read: “During the long and distressing war with the Indians it required all the energy of the people of New Hampshire to save themselves from utter destruction. But the glad return of peace brought with it a desire to develop the resources of the infant state.”
“Return of peace,” Annie muttered to herself, glancing out the window to a stand of pitch pine beyond the house. Pitch pine was a valuable commodity; tar and turpentine were manufactured from such trees. But Conway people did not cut pitch pines. According to local legend they were protected by the Indians, who would be angry. The Indians supposedly made some sort of medicine from them.
Annie stared at the trees and thought of
the income they could bring, an income that would enable her to enroll Johnny in one of the new academies springing up farther south. “Learning is power,” had been one of Annie’s father’s axioms.
His words came back to her. She returned to the book. Perhaps within its pages she might find some sort of power to use against the persistent menace that—in spite of boasts to the contrary—continued to influence life in parts of New England.
She had intended to read the book straight through, as was her custom. Books were scarce and expensive and each one a joy to be savored and prolonged. But now she found herself skimming through the pages, looking for something … something …
Her eye was caught by an entry on page 172 and she stopped to read: “CONWAY, Carroll County.” Annie’s eyes danced. “That’s us,” she murmured to herself. “Right here in this book.” She read on, learning that Conway was 72 miles from Concord, and the Saco River in this region was about 12 rods wide and an average of two feet deep, though it had been known to rise 27 feet, and in a few instances 30 feet, in 24 hours. The largest collections of water were Walker’s Pond and Pequawkett Pond, the latter being 360 rods in circumference. Pine, Rattlesnake, and Green Hills were the most considerable elevations in the town, situated on the northeastern side of the river.
Then Annie tensed. She put her finger to the exact line and read more slowly, her lips shaping the words. “On the southern side of Pine Hill is a detached block of granite, or bowlder, which is probably the largest in the state—an immense fragment, but which doubtless owes its present position to some violent action of Nature.”
There it is, she thought to herself. There’s the rock.
But the Gazetteer gave no further information, none of the strange and bloodstained history of the stone.
Annie’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. But she read on. “Considerable quantities of magnesia and fuller’s earth have been found in various localities. The soil is interval, plain, and upland. The plain land, when well cultivated, produces crops of corn and rye. The upland is rocky and uneven, and to cultivate it with success requires long and patient labor.”
The Elementals Page 17
