Stepping Stones (4 page)

We dressed quickly, pulling on our clothes over the long johns
we had worn to bed
.  It took me longer to get ready than Georgie because I had to take a couple new turns of tape around my boots.  I needed a new pair, but there never seemed to be enough money.  Although tape was cheaper than boots, things from the city, even tape, were getting harder to come by.

We
left
the cabin out the back door, Georgie making sure the screen didn’t bang.  With the sun barely peeking over the ridge, we crossed the old wagon road and headed up our shortcut along the creek to the north field.  It was a crisp fall morning, so clear and cold it
stung
my
nose when
I
breathe
d
it in.  A mist hung over the stream, drifting in and
out of the oaks on either side.  The
crows were already up and scolding us from high in the trees, their metallic cries echoing in the still mountain air.

Minutes later a breeze began moving up from the valley below.  Georgie was ahead of me on the trail, a pick in one hand and a heavy oak beam slung over his shoulder with the other.  Although I was only carrying a pair of shovels, I was having trouble keeping up.  “Georgie, slow down,” I called.

“C’mon, Seth, we’re almost there,” he hollered back, his words
filled
with excitement.  I sighed and tried to keep him in sight.

We finally
emerged from the woods, stepping into the field we shared with Abe McClintock and his
two
sons.  Over the years
,
plowed-up stones had been piled in the center, forming a rock wall that divided the acreage.  The two parcels were roughly equal, with one exception:  A gigantic boulder sat right in the middle of ours.  The McClintock clan had been ribbing us Neumans about it for generations.  Pa aimed to change that.

Georgie and I walked to the rock.  As I said,
we had
been plowing around it for years, but now that we were going to try digging it up, I decided
to take a better look.  Most
rock in the valley was shale and sandstone.  The boulder before me was solid granite, with large black crystals peppered throughout.  One side was flattened and appeared to have been smoothed somehow, with shallow
, parallel
grooves cut in
to
its
polished surface.  It stood about my height and was even broader at the base.  Maybe Pa thought we could roll it or something, but I knew different.  It wasn’t going anywhere.

Nonetheless, we dug.

Georgie swung
the
pick and I shoveled, following him around the boulder and digging out the stones and dirt
that
he loosened.  The soil was still damp from the r
ains and had a rich, dark smell. 
Every once in a while I could see sparks fly from the pick when Georgie hit a stone.  We worked steadily, cutting through the alfalfa stubble and topsoil. 
Deeper down
it got rocky and our progress slowed.

By eleven
, with
the sun
now
high in the sky, we were three feet down all around the boulder.  It hadn’t constricted at the base as I’d hoped.  If anything, it had
grown
broader
.

“We’re gettin’ there, huh, Seth?” Georgie asked.

“We’re getting there,” I answered, feeling a renewed surge of anger at Pa for
involving
us
in
another of his hopeless schemes.  Leaning on my
shovel, I checked our progress.  There wasn’t much
.  By then
I had
worked up a good sweat, so I
stripped off my shirt and long
john top.  Georgie kept working.

I sat on the edge of the trench, watching
Georgie
swing
the pick
.  He moved with an easy rhythm, his arms and back rolling with a smooth, animal
-
like grace.  He had a relaxed grin on his face and was clearly enjoying himself.  Georgie was like that. 
He would
get on a job and stick with it till it was done, smiling the whole time.

“Take a break, Georgie.”

He shook his head, never missing a stroke.  “No, Seth.  I want to get done before Pa gets here.”

“Georgie, we’re never gonna move this rock.”

He stopped swinging, a confused frown replacing his smile.  “But Pa said we were.”

“Right,” I backtracked, deciding not to get into it.  Grabbing my shovel, I dropped back into the trench.  “Let’s get to work.”

We dug.  The sun got hotter, the trench got deeper,
and
the rock got bigger.  Pa showed up around noon, a jar of corn liquor in
one
hand.  With stubborn, narrowed eyes, he surveyed the boulder.  I could tell from his scowl that it was larger than he’d figured.

“We tried to dig it up before you got here,” Georgie said from waist-deep in the trench.

Pa stared at the boulder.  “
Damn
,” he said, taking a pull on his jar.

“Bigger’n you reckoned, huh?” I said.

Pa took another pull on his jar.

“Face it, Pa,” I went on.  “It ain’t gonna happen.”

Pa spit on the ground, and I saw that look come over his face. 
I had
seen it plenty of times before.

“We’ll get the goddamned thing moved if it’s the last thing we do,” he
said
.

“Right, Pa,” said Georgie, nodding in agreement.  “We’ll get ’er moved.”

“Shut up,” Pa snapped.  “Gimme that pick.”  Shoving Georgie out of the way, he dropped into the trench, acting as if he were the only one
in creation
who knew how to dig.  Scowling, he attacked the rocky soil.  At the rate he started off, I figured he’d be good for
less than an
hour.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get it done
before you got here
, Pa,” said Georgie.  “We tried real hard.”

Pa stopped swinging.  He glared at Georgie, then resumed digging.  I climbed into the trench
behind him
and shoveled, wondering how things had
ever grown
so bad
between us.

Actually, I knew, but I didn’t want to think about it.  It had started when Ma died. 
She had
been the glue that held
our family
together
.  After
she’d gone
,
things just fell apart
.  Not that things had been
great before that—not by a long shot.  I used to hear Ma and Pa fighting late at night, long after Georgie and I were supposed to be asleep.

Mostly they fought about Georgie.

“It ain’t right, a boy being able to do what he does,” I heard Pa say one night.  “If anybody was to find out, it wouldn’t go easy on us.  They’d probably burn us out.  Maybe worse.”

“What do you want to do, John?” Ma asked softly.  “Turn him in?”

“No, nothin’
like that,” Pa answered quickly.  “But for the life of me, I don’t understand why God saw fit to burden us with an abomination.”

Ma wasn’t partial to the beliefs
some
folks held—especially if those beliefs led to somebody getting hurt—and that kind of talk got her riled. 
Ma and Pa
went at it in earnest after that.

I was eight at the time, but old enough to know they weren’t fighting about Georgie’s being slow.  It was because he could make things move.

Ma said it wasn’t God or Satan that caused it.  It was the poison.  After the war it seeped into the ground and got carried by the water till it was just about everywhere—not just the
big
cities, but everywhere—and odd things began to happen.  I’ve seen pictures in Grandpa’s books of two-headed babies and the like.  Some of the livestock births were even stranger, and there were other things as well.  You’d hear rumors every once in a while about happenings that most of our neighbors considered against God and nature.  Things like what Georgie could do.

One day Pa caught Georgie and me playing a game down by the creek.  We were winging mud clods at an empty whiskey jug on the opposite bank.  Georgie had it floating unsupported a couple feet over the ground.  He was making it jump back and forth so no matter where we threw, we almost always scored a hit. 
We were laughing so hard we didn’t hear Pa approaching
.

Pa came out of the woods and saw what we were doing.  He put the belt to both of us, then dragged us crying back to Ma.

After sending Pa away, Ma sat us down on the hearth.  Sitting didn’t feel especi
ally good after the licking Pa had just
given us, but we sat anyway.  I was mad.  Georgie was crying.  He didn’t understand what
we had
done wrong.

Ma put her arm around him.  I remember she didn’t seem angry, just concerned.  It was as though
she had
been expecting it.  “I’m going to tell you boys a story,” she said, speaking softly like she always did when she had something important to say.  We leaned closer to hear.

“Georgie, do you know what a monkey is?” she asked.

“You mean like the picture in Grandpa’s book?” Georgie sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Right.  A monkey’s an animal that lived a long time ago, long before the Change.”

“Are there any left?” I asked, glad the conversation seemed to have veered from our game on the bank.

“I don’t know, honey,” Ma answered.  “Maybe somewhere.  Anyway, monkeys used to live together in groups.  Each group was big, like our family and all our neighbors put together.  Understand, Georgie?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good.  Now, all the monkeys in the group knew one other, and
they all
got along fine, like a big family.  Then one day some men caught one of the young
er
monkeys in a trap.  They poked and teased him.  When they tired of that, they decided to play a trick.  They mixed up a big bucket of green d
ye and dumped it on him.  T
hey left him in the trap all day.  When the monkey was finally dry, his fur had turned bright green.  T
hen t
he men let him go, laughing at him as he ran back into the forest to rejoin his group.

“Can you guess what happened next, Georgie?  No?  Well, the other monkeys wouldn’t let him come back.  Even his own brothers and sisters wouldn’t accept him.  They drove him out.”

By then Georgie had stopped crying.  “Why, Mama?” he asked.  “Didn’t they know him?”

“Oh, they knew him,” Ma said slowly.  “It was just that now he looked different.  He was different from them, and they didn’t want him anymore.”

“But why?”

“Because they were afraid
, I guess
.  He was different from them, and they were afraid.  That’s just the way things are.  People around here are that way, too.”

“I don’t like this story, Mama.”

“You don’t have to like it, honey, as long as you learn something from it.  Besides, the story’s not
done
yet.”

Ma was mostly speaking to Georgie, but every now and then
she would
gaze over at me.  I’ll never forget her eyes.  They were deep, deep blue shot through
with tiny flecks of gold.  S
ometimes, like then, I felt they could see right
through me and straight
into my heart.  Suddenly I realized her story was also meant for me.  She knew Georgie wasn’t the only one who was different.  Even back then, even before I learned what I could do, she knew.

“So the young monkey was all alone,” Ma continued.  “He lived outside the group and was very
, very
unhappy.  Then one day the rains came.  It rained all day and all night.  It rained so hard that it washed every bit of green from the monkey’s fur.  The
next morning he looked normal.  His
fur
was
a nice brown color once more.  When he returned to his group they were happy to see him and let him come back.”

Georgie sat quietly, thinking about Ma’s story.

“Georgie?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Georgie, nobody else can make things move like you can,” she said.  “You’re the only one.  You’re the one who’s different.”

All at once Georgie understood.  He started crying again.  “I don’t want to be the green monkey,” he sobbed.

“Shhh, honey.  You don’t have to.  Nobody can tell just from looking at you, and we’re going to keep it a secret, okay?  You’ll never do it anymore, and we won’t let anyone know, all right?  Will you promise?”