But Annie did not wait for the end of his explanation. She was already scrambling up the steep steps to the loft.
As Johnny had said, the loft was the warmest part of the house due to the nature of heat rising. And there was baby Mary, sleeping peacefully in her pine cradle.
Annie stood looking down at her, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Now why, she asked herself, did I think … ?
That bundle. That bundle Daniel Foster left at the rock. It was the right size to hold a baby.
A cold finger of fear traced up her spine.
For the rest of the day, she could not make herself settle to any task. She could not even read. She paced the floor, picked up her sewing and put it down again, half swept the floor and then propped the broom in the corner. Every sound from outside brought her to the door, looking out anxiously.
When at last Liam returned she hugged him even harder than usual.
“I don’t smell dinner cookin’,” he complained.
Annie made an impatient gesture. “I’ll start it in a minute but I have to talk to you first.” She glanced around to make sure Johnny wasn’t listening. “Liam, you’ve lived here all your life; do you know of any children, any babies, who’ve disappeared in Conway?”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Babies. Have any just … disappeared?”
Liam scratched his head. He suspected Annie was going to have to scrub his scalp again with yellow soap. Nits were in his hair, he could feel them. “Ever’ now an’ then some child wanders off an’ ain’t never found,” he said slowly, remembering. “They fall in the river. Or perhaps the Injuns gits’em. It happens. Why?”
“What about babies? Babies like our Mary?”
“Mary’s old enough to toddle. I reckon she could wander off iff’n you didn’t watch after her so good. But you never leave her alone, so I’d say she’s safe, Annie.”
I don’t dare tell him I left Mary alone today, Annie thought. And I’ll never do it again!
But what about those other children? God help us, what about the other little ones who have disappeared over the years?
Every rural community, as Annie knew, had its share of disappearances. Liam was correct when he said children wandered off and were never found. It had happened in Jackson too. And perhaps Indians occasionally did steal an unwatched baby.
But .. , but …
Annie’s mother had loved to tell stories. In her soft, low Irish voice, she had recounted the tales her grandmother told her: Donegal stories, filled with rebel princes and magical women who could assume the shapes of seals. And one tale that had never failed to give Annie a delicious tingle of fear.
Crom Cruach, the terrible pagan stone of Ireland to whom infants had been sacrificed before the coming of Christianity.
Were there such stones everywhere in the world? Annie wondered. Were they thrust up by some violent action of Nature to serve as its avatars? Nature. Pagan, pantheist, Nature.
The same Nature New England farmers struggled with every day of their lives, trying to wrest a living from the grudging land.
“What’re you askin’ about this fer now?” Liam was inquiring. “You seem all het up.”
With a mighty effort, Annie laughed. “Just my never-ending curiosity,” she replied. “Seems like I heard Charity Allen say something at the last quilting bee about some baby that had disappeared, and I got to wondering.”
“I don’t recall no baby disappearin’.’Course, one coulda got lost way out in the country and we might never hear about it. Lotsa folks live in the hills and don’t come inta town from one summer till the next. It’s even a right smart journey for us,” he added.
Annie had expected to be able to tell him he could cut distance off that journey. But she said nothing.
Tardily she busied herself preparing a meal. If Liam was surprised to find his wife uncharacteristically unprepared, he did not say so. He settled happily into his chair and watched her hips as she bent over her pots and saucepans at the hearth.
Might be she’s gettin’ fretful, he thought. Women are mysterious. They take all sorts of vapors. Might be a good idea for Annie to have another baby, give her something more to think about.
Liam smiled to himself, watching his wife’s hips.
For several days, Annie never got beyond shouting distance of the cabin. She even moved the hen boxes from the barn to the dogtrot, so she could gather her eggs without being away from the baby more than a couple of minutes.
But the fear rankled her. At night, when Liam took her in his arms and pressed his mouth on hers, she tried to respond. But her thoughts kept skittering off. Even when he sucked her breast like a hungry baby, his crisp beard brushing her flesh in a way that had always heightened her pleasure, she could not totally surrender to him and forget everything else. Some part of her mind insisted on picturing the boulder on Pine Hill.
“What’s wrong with you?” Liam finally asked one night. He had returned to earth from his usual thundering, cataclysmic climax, only to find Annie lying wide-eyed beneath him, not sharing. She who had always shared, whose sensuality was his greatest joy.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” she said quickly.
But he knew there was.
It can’t go on like this, Annie decided. She felt as if the stone had moved into their house and was lying between them like a rock in the bed. Its shadow seemed to fall over everything she did.
Then the first snowflakes fell. A scattering like freckles in buttermilk, but a precursor of the blizzards to come.
“Reckon I better get on inta town and talk to Dan’l,” Liam announced the morning of that first snow. “Find out how deep it’s gonna be and how long it’s gonna last. Might want to lay up more vittles in the root cellar. Ain’t too late to buy more apples an’ turnips if we need’em.”
“Don’t go to Foster!” Annie exclaimed without thinking.
“What?” Her husband stared at her. “Not go to Dan’l? What’re you talkin’ about?”
But she could not tell him. The complicated layers of imaginings in her mind could not be peeled apart and exposed like the layers of an onion. And without a satisfactory explanation to give, she refused to hang on to Liam irrationally like a whining woman. She had too much pride.
After he had gone, she berated herself. Surely there were ways she could have described what had happened to her, and how she felt about it, without sounding like a fool.
I have to go back to the rock, she thought. I have to know if I imagined all that. Perhaps I did. I’ll know, when I see the rock again.
But she desperately wanted not to go.
“Character is the sum of the choices we make in life,” had been one of her father’s favorite axioms.
She would go, she knew it. She would make the choice and go, rather than cowering at home.
This time, however, she did not leave Mary in Johnny’s care. She dressed both children warmly and took them in the opposite direction from the rock, across fields to the Baldwin farm which lay northwest of the Murphy property. She asked May Baldwin to keep the pair for the day.
“You goin’ inta town, Annie? If you are, I’d’preciate if you’d get me a quarter bolt a’ calico.”
“I’m not going into town.”
“You ain’t?” May’s slack jaw showed her surprise. For what other reason would a woman leave her children in someone else’s care? “You goin’ visitin’ downcountry, then?”
Annie nodded. “That’s it, I’m going visiting downcountry. I’ll be back afore dark and fetch the children. Obliged to you, May.”
“Say nuthin’,” the other woman responded automatically. She stood in her open doorway, listening to the crescendo of noise rising behind her in her cabin as the Murphy children joined into the daylong riot of the Baldwin seven. Her eyes followed Annie back down the path toward the Murphy farm.
“Somethin’ not right about her today,” May said to herself. “Seems like she’s poorly, somehow.”
But Annie was as strong as three cups of hastily drunk strong black coffee could make her. She had been tempted to take a swig from Liam’s jug of hard cider, but decided against it. She might need all her wits about her.
The sky was white with unshed snow. It would start falling again soon, she knew, and not stop. Not stop until the drifts reached the eaves of the house and yard-long icicles hung from the porch roof. Not stop until people huddled inside their houses like a race besieged, listening to the wind howl from distant Mount Washington.
How long? How deep? How cold?
Daniel Foster knew.
How?
Did the stone do things to him, as it had to Annie?
She had to make herself keep going toward it. At every bend, she was tempted to turn and run back. When she climbed the stile between two fields she teetered at the top, a breath away from going back down the steps she had just come up.
But she was Henry McDonnell’s daughter and she kept going.
At last she saw the grim grey stone on the slope of Pine Hill, waiting for her.
But this time the stone was not alone.
Daniel Foster glanced up guiltily when Annie Murphy materialized on the crest of the hill above him. “What’re you doin’ here?” he called out, knowing she could see him.
She hesitated before answering. She must be very careful. She could not simply turn and run away; that would make him very suspicious. But she was dismayed to discover him there, and more dismayed by the fact that he carried yet another burlap bundle.
Foster was equally astonished. No local had surprised him here in all the years he had visited the place.
Of course, Annie Murphy was not really a local. Perhaps that was why she had not been sufficiently intimidated by the legends that kept others away and allowed Foster sole use of the stone.
She angled down the slope toward him. “I have as much right to be here as you. This isn’t your land.”
“Ain’t yours neither,” he pointed out. “And folks don’t usually come here nohow.”
Annie assumed a wide-eyed innocence. “Oh? Why not?”
“You know. You’ve heard the stories.”
“You mean the local superstitions? My father raised me to pay no mind to superstition.” She did not add that her mother had been a most superstitious woman.
“Ain’t superstition,” Foster insisted. “S‘truth. There’s a lotta death happened at this rock. Band o’ dirty savages was killed here when my pa was a boy. That’s why the Injuns in these parts are still hostile. Conway men killed a pack of’em here, same as some men down in Albany once killed an Injun chief called Chocurua. Chased ole Chocurua to the top of his tribe’s sacred mountain and killed him dead,” Foster added with relish.
“I know that story,” Annie interjected. “Chocurua was a gentle man who’d done the white settlers no harm, but a band of hunters killed him for the sport of it. As he was dying he pronounced a curse on his killers and their descendants. That was long ago, but my father still used to go all the way to Albany to treat people down there. They suffered from a strange complaint of the abdomen that eventually killed them. He used to make a long journey down there in his buggy, once or twice a year. The malady intrigued him. But he refused to credit it to the curse of Chocorua.”
“Then your pa wasn’t as smart as he shoulda been.”
Annie bristled. “He was the smartest man I ever knew! He would have been smart enough to wonder why you’re here, Daniel Foster. And just what sort of offering you bring to this pagan stone!” she burst out, too incensed to guard her tongue.
Foster hugged the burlap bundle against his chest. “None o’ your business,” he said sharply.
There was a recklessness in Annie Murphy. Side by side with her studied sensibility was a wild recklessness that had once made her thrust her hand into Liam Murphy’s trousers as they sat courting in her father’s parlor. In all his life, Liam had never imagined a woman would do such a thing. Not a nice woman. He had caught fire from Annie’s fingers.
Now the fire was in Annie. As always, it surfaced when she least expected it. This time it made her grab for the burlap bundle.
Shocked, Foster tried to fight her off. But her small body concealed a wiry strength he did not expect, and an agility abetted by desperation. She wrenched the burlap out of his grasp and dropped to her knees with the bundle cradled in her arms, almost at the foot of the boulder.
Before Foster could stop her, she unwrapped the package.
Then she sat back on her heels and stared.
17
“Maize?”
“Corn. Injun corn,” Foster verified, bending to rewrap the bundle.
“But … I don’t understand …”
“‘Course not. Ain’t none of your business.” As Annie stared up at him, Foster tucked the end flaps of the burlap neatly under the lengthwise fold until the package was secure again. Then he carried it a step or two, and set it down against the base of the stone.
“Selah,” he said.
Annie was still sitting on her heels, watching him in bewilderment. “You give corn? To a rock?”
“A bowl of milk to the good people, the fairies, to keep them from doing us harm,” her mother had once explained. Her mind made the leap from milk to maize.
“I think I understand,” she said slowly.
“No you don’t. And like I told you,’tain’t none of your business.”
“But it is. I mean, I thought …”
Foster’s eyes narrowed. “What did you think?”
“I thought … your wife said the stone eats babies.”
To her embarrassment, Daniel Foster laughed. “‘Course she did! I tell her to say that, same as my ma said it, and her ma afore her. Keeps people away. But you thought …” He glanced at the burlap. It was Daniel Foster’s turn to be shocked. “Lordy, you thought I was bringin’ babies to this thing … ?”
Confounded, Annie dropped her eyes.
“Well, I never,” the man muttered. “Is that all you think of me, Annie Murphy? And I’ve alluz had admiration for you, with your book learnin’ and your hard work and all. Now I come to find out you think I steal babies and give them to the Injun rock.”
“I’m sorry,” Annie said in a strangled voice. “I don’t know what got into me, thinking something like that. I don’t know how to apologize.” She had made a dreadful mistake, she knew. Daniel Foster was the most important man in Conway. Directly or indirectly, almost everyone depended on him in some way, including her Liam.
Conway Feed & Grain was the only such store within twenty miles. If he refused service to anyone, they were effectively ruined. And if Annie Murphy was any judge of character, Foster was mean enough to refuse service to someone who insulted him as badly as she had just done.
How am I going to explain this to Liam? she wondered, sitting there with her head down and mortification burning through her body.
Daniel Foster was equally uncomfortable. He had spoken the truth; he had always admired Annie Murphy. Every man in Conway admired Annie Murphy. She was a breath of fresh air, a bright and laughing spirit. A sharp tongue, but a light foot and a twinkling eye that a man could not help responding to. Foster was horrified to think she believed him capable of so monstrous a crime.
“Ain’t necessary to apologize,” he muttered. “I can see how you thought what you thought, I suppose.”
“But if it isn’t true … I mean, why the corn?”
“You’ve found out my secret,” Foster admitted. “The weather. You alluz wanted to know, didn’t you? Well, now you do.”
“The weather?” Annie was baffled.
Leaving the burlap bundle where it was, Foster came back and sat down beside Annie on the cold ground. He did not feel the cold. It was a warming experience, sitting close to little Annie Murphy. From this distance he could see the way her dark hair pulled loose of its bun and clung in tiny tendrils to the pink shell-shape of her ear. For the pleasure of sitting beside
her—alone in the country, far away from prying eyes and wagging tongues—he would trade his secret. For that pleasure and more, perhaps.
“It started with my grandfather’s grandfather. He was granted the township in return for—”
“One ear of Indian corn annually!” Annie interrupted. “I read it in my Gazetteer.”
“A-yuh, that’s it. But it was a funny sort of rental. The corn was to be paid here, at the Injun rock. Brought here and left.”
Annie raised her eyebrows. She was aware of Daniel Foster’s intense gaze on her, but his words were more interesting. “Paid to the Indians, is that what you’re saying? But I thought the rental was paid to the local authorities, or—”
“Paid to the true owners of the land,” Foster said. “We took their land, y‘see, and we give’em their own back for it. It was somethin’ worked out in Conway long ago, and as long as my family abided by it, the Injuns never attacked us the way they did other places. But then there come a day when we forgot or the man who was supposed to deliver the corn to the rock got waylaid, or somethin’. Nobody knows what. Anyway, the rental wasn’t paid. And the Injuns come outta the forest and attacked the town.
“The men got muskets and drove ‘em off, finally. Chased’em all the way back to this rock. And killed ‘em here. Legend has it that the redskins’ blood splashed on this stone.
“After that there were no more Injun attacks, but people didn’t forget about the corn rental again either. In fact, my grandfather started bringin’ more than just one ear, to be sure. And one day, after he delivered the rental, he came back sayin’ he knew what the weather was goin’ to do. He warned of a great storm fixin’ to blow in on us. He begged people to get all their stock into their barns and prepare themselves, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky at the time.
“And he was right, Annie. A terrible wind blew up. Took roofs off cabins, blew down the front of the hotel, did all kinds of damage. But no one was killed, ‘cause he’d warned people to hide in their root cellars and the storm blew over’em.
The Elementals Page 19
