Annie nodded. Indeed it does. A mn must be out from dawn till dusk, breaking his back with a mule and a plow and a sledge for the stones. And even then you can’t be certain anything will grow. What if the spring is too cold or the summer too hot or the rains don’t come? What if your crops survive, only to be destroyed before you can harvest them by an early frost or an early snow?
How did the Indians manage to do so well here? Annie wondered. They prospered effortlessly, compared to our endless labors. And they begrudge us the land still. This would be a good place if the soil was more fertile and the fields weren’t full of stones and the forests didn’t conceal lurking Indians.
“There are in this town 5 hotels, 10 stores, 1 lathe manufactory, and 1 paper mill,” she read on. “The Congregational church was established here in 1778. The Baptist church was formed in 1796. There is also a society of Freewill Baptists.
“On the 1st of October, 1765, Daniel Foster obtained a grant of this township on condition that each grantee should pay a rent of one ear of Indian corn annually.”
Annie shook her head. Daniel Foster’s ancestor and namesake had been as tight with a penny as the current feed-store owner himself. One ear of Indian corn. Fine rent for a whole township.
“Number of legal voters in 1854, 458,” the Gazetteer further informed her. “Value of lands, improved and unimproved, $171,597. Number of sheep, 1017. Domestic stock, 1660. Domestic horses, 267.”
There ended the description of Conway. Annie gave a sarcastic snort. Five hotels, ten stores, and a paper mill sounded more impressive than it was. “It’s easier to acquire a grand name than it is to keep freckles off it later,” Annie said to herself. “People who read this book and come to Conway expecting to find a city are in for a shock.”
She gazed out the window again, recalling how splendid the town had sounded when Liam described it to her during their courting days. But the hotel where they spent their honeymoon, which he had made sound like a palace, was cold and drafty and had one two-seated backhouse to accommodate all its patrons.
She had promised herself then that life would get better. She had dreams for herself and plans for the children she hoped to bear. “You’ll have to push that young man of yours,” her father had warned her. “Liam has a good heart, but he’s too slow to catch snails.”
Annie had pushed. She was still pushing. She urged Liam to consider new crops and new ways of planting them, she did her full share of farmwork and still found time to keep an immaculate house and braid bright rag rugs for the floors. She had persuaded her bemused husband to build an imposing pine bookcase for her growing collection of books.
She was not a woman to be intimidated by stony fields or lurking Indians. Or heathen idols disguised as boulders. No.
All at once, Annie was tired of worrying. She closed the book abruptly, stood up, and went to take her cloak from the peg.
“You, Johnny, mind your sister while I’m out. Keep her away from the hearth, and if she gets hungry give her a bit of buttered bread and some of that buttermilk.”
Annie slung the cloak around her shoulders and gave a last look around her house, making sure everything was in order as she always did before going out the door.
“Where you goin’, Ma?” the boy asked.
“I’m going to look a problem in the face, so I’ll know it’s not sneaking up behind my back. Now, you busy yourself counting the dried apples in those baskets while I’m gone. When I come home I expect you to tell me how many tens of apples we have.”
The freckled lad nodded eagerly. He thought he was helping. Annie knew he was learning.
As she walked away from the cabin, she noticed the day was relatively warm in spite of its overcast skies. “Almost like Indian summer,” she remarked to herself. But the phrase brought a chill. It referred to a season of terror, the warm dry days that often followed harvest; days when hostile Indians swooped down to slaughter hapless farmers and steal their provisions.
“Such things wouldn’t happen,” Annie’s father had firmly believed, “if the white men had tried to establish amicable relations with the Indians from the first. We treated them badly, though, so how could we expect them to respond except with savagery and hatred? Hatred is too often the result of knowing only one side of another person, Annie. Remember that, and be tolerant.”
The only daughter of Jackson’s only doctor, Annie had adored her father and taken his word as gospel. Then one spring day, two young men from the distant town of Conway arrived in the area to attend a wedding—and Annie met Liam Murphy and Ben Osgood. Within a year, she had left her father and Jackson behind.
How strange that such a trip, no more than a day’s buggy ride, could make such a difference in one’s life!
“Bad Injuns still come outta the forests to visit a big rock on Pine Hill,” Foster’s frowzy wife Tabitha had confided to Annie at her first Conway quilting bee. “They bow down to it like a heathen idol. Don’t you never go near it, and when your children start to come, don’t let them near it neither.” She had dropped her voice to a whisper. “That there rock eats babies.”
Annie had responded with a burst of disbelieving laughter, making an enemy of Tabitha Foster.
In the years since, however, Annie had realized just how thoroughly locals avoided the boulder on Pine Hill. In time an amorphous fear had begun to infect her, as if transmitted subliminally; fear of the rock she never saw, fear of the close-crowding forests, fear of the wind howling with an inhuman voice from atop distant, brooding Mount Washington.
In a way no one could express, Conway seemed haunted by some malign montane presence as the village of Jackson had never been, though Jackson was a remote community high in the mountains and Conway was a bustling farming town in the Saco River valley.
Annie had grown accustomed to the local paranoia, yet some part of her mind never ceased to question and resent it. Annie McDonnell Murphy had not been raised to be a fearful person.
On this grey autumn day she was at last marching resolutely to face what she perceived to be the source of the fear, and put it to rest. Her spine was ramrod straight with determination. She crossed two stubbled fields, climbed over a stile, then made her way along a meandering livestock trail winding through dense stands of brittle, dying sumac.
Pine Hill lay between the Murphy farmstead and Conway town. Deliberately avoiding the vicinity of the stone made the journey to and from town longer.
With the loving attention of one who is delighted by scenery, Annie had explored most of the area beyond the farm before her babies had started coming. But she had never visited Pine Hill. Still, she knew where it was: a short distance above the Portland road.
The path she was following disappeared in a trampled mire of dried mud and cow dung. She paused and cocked her head, relying on an inborn sense of direction that was her pride. “This way,” she decided, and set off again, briskly, whistling to herself.
Right where she expected it, Pine Hill rose above her, its slope crested with a mane of dark pines. She climbed the north side, picking her way through briars, and looked down from the top.
The boulder waited below. Its identity was unmistakable.
Annie stared down at it, impressed in spite of herself. The solitary stone had a presence. It appeared to be as tall as two men and as big around as a very large haystack. She started down toward it. She had stopped whistling.
The closer she got, the bigger it looked.
The boulder was as dull as the sky. Its weathered surface was grey and harsh, though as Annie picked her way toward it through clumps of sumac, she thought she glimpsed a lightning streak of quartz or mica, glittering.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Annie said aloud in a no-nonsense voice. “Just a granite boulder, like the book says. New Hampshire’s full of granite. What makes you special?”
But the question had been asked for the sake of hearing a human voice speak. Anyone, looking at that particular boulder,would think it was special.
>
The boulder stood in solitary splendor. No granite outcropping supported it. The earth at its base was beaten flat, devoid of rocks or even pebbles.
What had the Gazetteer said? “… doubtless owes its present position to some violent action of Nature.”
Not God, no. Nature. “Heathen idol,” Annie said scathingly. “God had nothing to do with you. Sitting there like Mount Washington itself, glowering at me. Ignorant savages might think you’re special, but I know you’re just a rock, and a rock can’t do anything but sit.”
Emboldened by her own words she ventured closer, until she was standing beside the stone. The nearer she got, the larger it seemed to be. The surface of the boulder was abraded and pitted like an incredibly ancient face, but it was clearly inanimate. Harmless. Just, as Annie said, a rock.
Her lips quirked at the corners. “If that isn’t like Conway people,” she remarked, as her father would have done. “Scared silly of a rock.” She could almost feel Dr. McDonnell standing beside her, though he’d been dead for five years. She could almost hear his practical, no-nonsense scoffing at pagan superstition.
Her mother, however—her mother with her Donegal-blue eyes and her fey sensitivity, her mother who secretly put a bowl of milk outside the door on All Hallows’ Eve, for the “good people”—her mother would not have scoffed at the stone. Her mother would have signed the Cross the moment she saw the thing, something older than Protestantism rising in her. She would have known the stone for what it was: angry, aware. Malign …
Annie gave herself a furious shake. “Foolish woman! Anyone would think I didn’t have the sense the good Lord gave me. I’m as bad as the Conway people, believing wild stories.” She glared at the boulder. “You’re nothing but a rock. A great big ugly dead-forever rock. Now that I see you, I can stop worrying about you. Be shut of you. I can tell Liam to come home this way any time he pleases, he’ll just be under our roof that much sooner.” She fixed the stone with a determined look. “Indians indeed. For good measure, we might just cut that stand of pitch pine and make some money out of it!”
To emphasize her words she gave the stone a defiant slap.
When her palm touched the rock, a jolt went through her body from her head to her heels.
Annie reeled backward.
Dazed, she struggled to keep her balance. She threw up her hands, palm outward, toward the rock, as if to ward off … A wave of force hit her like an invisible wind, and she found herself hurled through the air to fall heavily into a clump of sumac some yards from the boulder.
She lay facedown in the sumac, smelling its drying, dying dustiness. Lights were flashing behind her eyes.
I’ve been struck by lightning, was her first thought. But there was no storm. The day was characterized by a soft grey overcast like mountain mist sinking into the valleys.
Annie swallowed hard. If not lightning, what …
Then she heard, or felt through the earth, approaching footsteps. Someone was coming toward the rock from its southern side, climbing the gentle slope of Pine Hill, pushing his way through the undergrowth.
The clump of sumac and the boulder itself concealed Annie from whoever was approaching. She could hear him, though. She heard the masculine grunt with which he deposited some burden at the base of the stone.
“Selah,” she heard Daniel Foster’s voice say, enunciating the Indian word clearly. It was a word Annie knew. It was both a greeting and a term of respect.
There was a pause, then Foster’s footsteps moved away again, back down the hill, toward Conway.
She had been shocked, perhaps injured. Surely any woman in such a circumstance would have called out for help to a man she knew. But Annie Murphy did not call out. She lay as still as she could, hardly daring to breathe for fear he might discover her. She could not have said why. But she waited until he was long gone before she cautiously gathered herself and got to her feet.
Emerging from the sumac, she felt herself for bruises or broken bones, but there were none. She had been stunned but not hurt.
Stunned by what?
She advanced a few wary feet toward the stone. Nothing happened. It was as inert as it had first appeared to be.
She did not want to go any closer, but she walked around it in a wide, wary circle, watching it every step of the way.
On the downhill side she found the burden Foster had put down there. A bulky bundle wrapped in burlap lay at the foot of the stone. She started to reach toward it. Then she drew back. Her curiosity was not strong enough to make her go close to the stone again, not now, not with her body still bruised and tingling from whatever it had done to her.
It had done.
The stone did it, she thought, not wanting to believe.
Believing.
She stared at its weathered face. “But I meant you no harm,” she heard herself say in an aggrieved voice like a little girl’s.
The stone watched her.
She knew, now, that it was watching her.
Her feet began backing away.
When they had carried her beyond a certain point, she whirled around and ran for home.
She did not stop running until she had almost reached the porch of the cabin. Then she slowed, stopped, stood half bent over with her hands on her knees and her heart hammering against her ribs, trying to catch her breath.
I can’t believe I ran away from a rock, she thought.
I can’t believe that rock flung me through the air either.
But it did.
It did.
Annie straightened slowly and squared her shoulders. Let whoever … whatever … was watching, see that she was in control of herself again.
With steady tread, she mounted the porch and went into the cabin.
Johnny lay curled up on a rag rug in front of the fire, sound asleep.
But there was no sign of baby Mary.
Annie saw again the burlap-wrapped bundle at the foot of the boulder.
That there rock eats babies.
16
Tabitha Foster looked up eagerly when her husband entered the feed store.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He shook his head.
She came out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on a none-too-clean apron. “Did you see anybody?”
“I told you. Nobody.”
“But people keep askin’!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he snarled at her. “I’m doing all I can. If you think you can do better, you try it.”
“Ah, no.” She shrank back. “No, Dan’l, don’t say that.”
“Then shet your mouth and don’t criticize me.” He shrugged out of his heavy jacket and went to take Tabitha’s place behind the counter. “Anyone come while I was out?” he asked her.
She stood timidly in the middle of the room, looking as if she would dodge behind the nearest barrel at any moment. “Only Zeb Bigelow.”
“What’d he want?”
“Same as the rest of ‘em. He wants to know how bad the winter’s gonna be, should he be orderin’ …”
“What’d you tell him?” Foster interrupted.
“To wait till you got back and ask you.”
“You tell him where I’d gone?”
“’Course not!”
Foster sighed tiredly. “Long trip for nothing.” He adjusted the suspenders that held up his heavy woolen trousers, then looked down, frowning. He stooped to brush bits of dead stem and leaf from his lower legs. “I’m tired, Tabby. Fetch me a cup of coffee.”
She scampered away, relieved to be out of his immediate presence.
Foster sat staring into the dark shadows in the corner of the feed store. His thoughts were far away. He did not even notice when Tabitha came back and set a cup of steaming coffee down beside him.
“Here, Dan’l,” she said, waiting for him to become aware of her and dismiss her. She did not like to be around him when he came back from the boulder. Trouble sat on him then like a blackbird on a f
ence.
Tabitha knew her husband feared and hated the Pine Hill boulder. All local people did. It was not merely a focus of superstition. A real and bloody history was attached to it.
When Daniel’s and Tabitha’s parents were small children, growing up in the Foster and Gray households a mile from one another, local men had fought off a band of marauding Indians. They had chased the savages to Pine Hill and the great boulder. There the white men had killed the Indians, every one. And scalped them for good measure, some claimed.
It was common knowledge that ever since, vengeful descendants of those Indians lurked in the wilderness beyond the town, never forgetting, never forgiving. A danger even when most other Indians in New Hampshire were long since pacified. Sometimes, it was rumored, they even returned to their sacred stone on Pine Hill to conduct blasphemous heathen rites.
People did not talk about it very much, not openly, anyway. Only Daniel Foster had the courage to drive his chestnut mare and his buggy out to Pine Hill on a regular basis.
Conway, as everyone knew, was the Fosters’ town. Always had been. Even the massacre that had taken place on Pine Hill was not sufficient to make a Foster give up what was his, something his father and grandfather had claimed before him: the right to visit the stone and have prophetic visions of the weather.
So Tabitha’s husband made his trips to the boulder, and from time to time returned with valuable knowledge. But it cost him. It cost him dear.
Tabitha gazed sorrowfully at his withdrawn, haggard face, then went back upstairs, unable to bear his presence any longer. When he had been to Pine Hill it seemed as if he came back poisoned, she thought to herself.
Foster continued to stare into the shadows. The cup of coffee cooled unnoticed beside him.
Meanwhile, at the Murphy cabin Annie’s shriek of horror had awakened her son abruptly. He sat up on the rag rug, knuckling his eyes. “Mama?” he said fuzzily.
“Where’s the baby!”
“Baby?” The boy gazed vacantly around the room. Then awareness returned. “The baby. Oh! I got sleepy, so I took her cradle up into the loft where it’s warm and put her in it up there. Even if she got outta the cradle I knew she wouldn’t try to come down those steps and get too close to the fire. She cried a while, then she went to sleep. I guess I did too.”
The Elementals Page 18
