THE SOWING
It was chill in the darkness before sunrise when the wind blew down from the mountain slopes and swept across her meadow to buffet the house. In half sleep, R.J. liked the wind sounds as long as she was snug; she was awakened by burgeoning daylight and huddled under her warm double quilt and thought long thoughts until she forced herself up and out, to turn up the thermostat and jump into the shower.
Her period was several weeks late, she realized as she toweled, and she frowned at a possibility that pushed its way into her consciousness: premenopausal amenorrhea. It forced her to confront the fact that now, or soon, her body would be slowing and changing as obsolescent organs began to shut down, presaging the permanent disappearance of menses; and then she pushed the thought from her mind.
It was Thursday, her free day. As soon as the sun rose fully, it warmed the house, and she turned down the thermostat and built a fire in the stove. It was nice to build wood fires again, but they dried the air and caused an efflorescence of thin gray ash to settle on every surface, and the heartrocks that were everywhere made dusting her house an Augean task.
She found herself standing and staring at a rounded gray river stone. Eventually she set down her dustcloth and went to the closet where she stored her knapsack. She put the gray stone into the knapsack and began to walk about the house, collecting the heartrocks.
When the knapsack was almost full, she lugged it out the back door to the big construction wheelbarrow and let the contents clatter and thump into it. Then she went back into the house and collected more. She kept only the three heartrocks Sarah had given her, and the two stones she had given Sarah, the crystal and the tiny black basalt.
It took her five trips with the knapsack to clear the house of the stones. She dressed for winter—down jacket, stocking cap, work gloves—and went out and grabbed the wheelbarrow handles. The big barrow was more than a third full, and the aggregate of the stones weighed a lot more than she could move in comfort. It took effort to bull it across twenty-five feet of lawn, but once she entered the wood trail, the ground began to dip toward the river, and the barrow seemed to move of its own accord.
The little sunlight that came through the canopy of branches beautifully dappled the rich, deep shade. It was cold in the woods, but the trees broke up the occasional wind gusts, and the wheelbarrow’s balloon tire hissed over the damp packed pine needles and then thumped over the spaced boards of the Gwendolyn Gabler Bridge.
She stopped pushing as soon as she reached the river, which was brisk and burbling from the autumn rains. She hadn’t emptied the last knapsack load into the barrow, and now she took the knapsack and began walking along the trail. The riverbank was lined with trees and brush, but there was access between the tree trunks, and every now and then she would pause and take a heartrock from the knapsack and throw it into the water.
She was a woman of practical method, and she quickly realized a pattern of dispersal: the small rocks were carefully thrown into the shallows at the edge, while the larger specimens went into the depths, mostly in the occasional pools. When she had emptied the knapsack she went back to the barrow and pushed it along the trail, upstream. Then she filled the knapsack and continued to throw away heartrocks.
The heaviest rock in the barrow was the large one she had rescued from the construction ditch in Northampton. Back straining, shoulders hunched, she carried it to the deepest pool, just downstream of a tall and wide beaver dam. It was too heavy to throw; she had to try to carry it out along the brushy dam, to the middle of the pool. At the outset her foot slipped, and she got a boot full of icy water, but slowly and gradually she made her way to a place that satisfied her and dropped the stone heart like a bomb, watching it sink to the bottom and settle in the sand.
R.J. liked to see the rock there, where soon it would be covered with ice and snow at the winter’s coldest. In the spring mayflies might lay their eggs on it, and trout could suck up the larvae and then shelter from the current behind the heart. She imagined that in the secret silence of summer nights, beavers might hang suspended over the rock and join in the clear moonlit waters like birds coupling in midair.
She made her way off the beaver dam, and in similar fashion she emptied the remaining contents of the barrow into the river that flowed through her land, like the funerary scattering of ashes. She had turned half a mile of beautiful mountain river into her memorial to Sarah Markus.
It had become a river where you could find a heartrock when you needed one.
She pushed the empty wheelbarrow home and put it away.
She took off her outer garments in the mudroom, and her shoes and sodden socks. Barefoot, she walked to get dry woolen socks and put them on. Then in her stockinged feet she started in the kitchen and dusted every room in her house.
When she was through, she went into the living room. The house was empty and polished, silent but for the sound of her own breathing. There was no man, there was no cat, there was no ghost. It was solely her own house again, and she sat in the living room in the silence and the gathering darkness, waiting for what was going to happen to her next.