This Rock

by Robert Morgan

  “Let me help you,” I said.

  “Needs a little more water,” Muir said. I lifted the bucket and sprinkled the cement just enough to make it glisten.

  When Muir started sorting through the piles of rocks to find those to lay atop the foundation, he found it hard to choose the right thickness. A wall of creek rock is rough, and every rock has a different shape. Some rocks stick out farther, but you want an overall smoothness and straightness to the wall. It’s a part of the beauty of rock-work, to have the roughness and the smoothness at the same time. Good masonry has a look of crispness and exactness, even if every rock is shaped different.

  Muir picked a rock of white quartz and lifted it to the top of the foundation, and then he slapped a tongue of fresh mortar down with the trowel and set the rock in the mortar. But one corner of the rock stuck out too far. He took his light mason’s hammer and knocked off the point. But the rock still had to be turned a little in the bed of mortar to make it fit. There was fresh cement smeared on the white quartz and he had to wipe that off.

  “Don’t want no cement on the rock face,” Muir said.

  After he got the white quartz in place, Muir picked up a gray flint that sparkled like sandpaper. He twisted it till he found a way to fit the flint against the white quartz.

  “Every rock has its own color and shape,” Muir said. “And it’s like they have their own heat and flavor.”

  I thought of the way every apple on a tree has a slightly different taste, a different ripeness and firmness. I touched a rock and seen what Muir meant. I moved the board closer so he could reach the mortar.

  After Muir laid four or five rocks, he got out his level and placed it on the new work to see if it was straight up and down. A piece of iron rock stuck out too far. He got the hammer to chip it but seen it was the whole end of the rock that had to be broke before it fit perfect.

  “Ahhh!” Muir said and pulled the rock from the wall and flung it to the ground.

  “Don’t be vain,” I said. From the time he was a little boy Muir would get riled if his building didn’t go right and fling his tools into the weeds. And then he would calm down and go look for them.

  “Rocks don’t want to fit,” he snorted. He looked around for another rock and found a piece of granite that had been washed by the river to the shape of a big button. The rock was round as a wheel. Muir fitted it up against the other rocks, but it was too thin to be flush with the wall. He had to put the round rock down and place two littler rocks behind it. That made the button rock fit in the wall like a big black medallion.

  I helped carry rocks close to where Muir was working until my hands got rough. My fingerprints got picked like they was yarn. I didn’t have no gloves. The lifting tired out my back, and many of the rocks I brought was not the ones Muir wanted to use.

  “You can stir the mud again,” Muir said.

  I sprinkled a little more water on the mortar that was drying in the sun, and pulled the hoe back and forth through it. I mixed the drying batter with water until it was wet and easy to spread again. I stirred the mess like it was stew or gravy that had set. It smelled like bitter lime, so strong it burned my nose. Bubbles winked and crackled in the mortar.

  Almost every rock Muir put on the wall had to be chipped or took down and traded or rearranged. It was slow business, more than he had expected. I could see he was getting irritable. It was heavy hard work, lifting and hammering, lifting again.

  My back was tired before the morning was half over. I had not worked so hard since I worked with my husband, Tom. But I was happy to be working on the church.

  We are moving the bones of the earth around, I thought. We are changing the shape of the mountain.

  SOME DAYS I helped Muir with the masonry, and some days I didn’t. The work went slower than he expected. It was harder to keep the wall in plumb than he expected. Several times he had to chip off the face of a rock to make it right for the thickness of the wall. He used the hammer and chisel more and more.

  I think Muir give the building everything he could in the weeks after Moody’s funeral. He worked to forget his own grief and to make his own peace. He got one side of the wall almost up to the eave, and it looked like good rockwork. And I think he would have finished the church if he could have kept working then.

  But in April the plowing had to be done. It was already late for breaking the fields. It was almost time to plant corn and peas, and it was past time for the fields to be turned and harrowed. It was time to work the land, and there was nobody else to do it.

  “After we put in the crops I’ll help you with the church,” I said.

  Muir seemed glad to stop the rockwork for a while. I guess it had wore him out more than he let on. And he knowed the fields had to be broke if we was to eat. The next morning Muir hitched up Old Fan and started breaking the bottomland. It was so late weeds was already beginning to green the stubble. Where he turned the dirt the furrows looked like long ropes across the fields. Fresh dirt shined and birds gathered to peck the worms. Took him three days to turn all the fields, and another day and a half to drag-harrow them. When he finished circling with the harrow, the ground looked like it had a big thumbprint on it.

  We dropped corn and we dropped taters. And we planted peas in the garden, for it was already past time to plant peas. Muir plowed up the land in the orchard to put in sweet corn and then beans, and to set out sweet taters. He could have worked some days, or at least some afternoons, on the church, if he had wanted to. But what happened was the church up at Blue Ridge give him the call to come preach a revival. I reckon word had got out about him preaching Moody’s funeral and giving such a powerful sermon. The people at Blue Ridge couldn’t afford no preacher except somebody close by, and George Jarvis had told them what a fine sermon Muir had preached on top of the mountain that day.

  You should have seen the life that come into Muir the day he got the invitation to preach at the little church. He was like a different person. His irritableness was gone, and he moved slow and cautious as he worked. But his face was lit up. He was like a new person. I seen how hard it had been for him not to be able to preach. I seen how the call to preach was in his bones and breath, in his blood, as I had prayed it would be.

  Instead of going back up on the ridge to work, Muir started studying the Bible for the sermons he would preach. He took his Bible out to the pine grove and I knowed he was practicing on his sermons. I heard him up there talking to the trees when I went to the milk gap. Every free moment Muir was reading his Bible and making notes on a tablet. He wrote down things and he throwed the sheets in the fire. I don’t think he thought of a thing except the revival he was going to conduct.

  Now, if the meeting at Blue Ridge had gone bad that might have been the end of Muir’s ministry. But the preaching went better than you had any right to expect, given that he had preached only two times before. I went there the first night with him in the car, and I was surprised how good he talked. His voice was young, and he wasn’t practiced at speaking. But you could see he had something. He had a spark in his voice that connected with the congregation. And he got the rhythm of speaking, which is the best sign of a true preacher.

  I was so proud of him standing up there reading from Scripture and saying what was on his heart in the plainest way, my face got hot. I was proud of his sincerity and his gift for words. He had the call, no doubt of it. No matter how many mistakes he made, you could tell he had the call. It was my oldest dream for a son, to go out into the world and preach the gospel. It was my oldest dream for myself, for my flesh and blood, to answer the Great Commission.

  In that little church at the head of the river four people was saved that week, and three was reclaimed. The church didn’t hold more than thirty people. Muir preached in his shirtsleeves, and he preached for an hour and a half. He preached with the sweat streaming down his temples by the end of the sermon. He started out calm and simple and he found his own rhythm for preaching.

  Soon as the reviva
l at Blue Ridge was over and the converts baptized in the river, it was already May. And Muir had a call to preach one Sunday at Mount Olivet, and then the next week at Crossroads. He kept up with all the fieldwork, and he studied the Bible every night he was home. It was what he wanted to do. I’m not sure he even thought about the building on the mountaintop.

  THE HALF-FINISHED building was mostly hid by the trees in summer. The steeple had never been built and the roof was about level with the oaks and poplars on top of the mountain. But in winter, with the leaves gone, you could see the frame and roof looming up there against the sky as if somebody had drawed it there with a black pencil. It looked like something in a storybook, or in a dream.

  Maybe that’s how rumors got started that the half-built church was haunted. On a moonlit night you could see the roof and gables against the sky. Coon hunters told of hearing noises there at the building site. Some said it was the voice of a preacher hollering about fire and damnation. Others said it was voices singing like a choir from long ago still harmonizing from the grave. Where there is old buildings and ruins, people will imagine anything.

  But I will admit the church was a spooky-looking place. I went up there once late in the evening looking for herbs. I was hoping to find yellowroot which I remembered growed up there. It was late and I was so busy looking in the brush and undergrowth I didn’t notice the sun had gone down. I was standing between a rock pile and a stack of rotting lumber with my eyes on the weeds when I heard a laugh. The snicker seemed to come from inside the weathered building.

  “Who is there?” I called.

  The only answer was another laugh. I froze where I stood, for it sounded like Moody. It was the way he laughed when you asked him to do some work. It was the way he laughed to show how bad he was.

  “Moody!” I hollered before I could stop myself. There was no answer except a breeze coming up the mountainside and whining in the eaves of the building. A bird flew out of the half-finished top, and I felt foolish. I shivered and started walking down the mountain.

  It wasn’t too long after that that Florence Shipman said she seen the ghost of Moody walking around the half-finished church. She was up there picking blackberries in the old clearing and it got late in the evening. She said she seen Moody walk out of the church building and go on down the mountain. He had a big bloodstain on his chest. I didn’t believe a word she said, but that’s the way stories get started. After that lots of people said they seen the ghost of Moody around the ruined building. It was just talk, and I don’t reckon it hurt nothing.

  But one bad thing did happen up there at the old building place after the clearing growed up. I can’t deny that. A young couple was up there late one Saturday evening. I won’t say what they was doing, for I don’t want to judge them. They was a young courting couple and it was early spring, one of the first warm evenings.

  I reckon they was laying there in the leaves between two of the rock piles, and I don’t know if it was the noise they was making or the heat of their bodies. But there was a nest of rattlers in one of the rock piles that had wintered and was coming awake. Maybe it was the warm weather that woke them up, or the stir the young folks was making. I won’t call their names.

  The rattlesnakes woke up and they was hungry after sleeping all winter, and they was riled to be disturbed. There must have been a hundred that was knotted together and coming awake.

  The boy heard the girl cry out in the dark, and he thought it was a love cry until she screamed, “Don’t scratch me. Something clawed me!” In the dark he couldn’t see nothing, so he thought she was just carried away.

  “Ain’t clawing you,” he said. She screamed again and kicked and scratched and pushed him away. Something stung him in the dark and he jumped back.

  By the time he found the matches in his pants and lit one, the girl was covered up in rattlers. They was buzzing with their awful singing tails and striking her in the dark. They bit her face and eyes, and left fang marks on every part of her body. He tried to kick the snakes away and just got bit again hisself.

  The shock and the poison must have killed the girl, for by the time he got his clothes and lit another match she was laying there still with her eyes open. A snake crawled over her eyes and stuck its head in her mouth. Snakes was crawling all over her body. He started stumbling down the mountain to the Richards place and told Hank what had happened.

  Hank got a lantern and he got his gun and climbed to the top of the mountain. There was three snakes still laying on the girl’s body, I reckon for the warmth, and Hank raked them off and killed them. But all the other snakes, the dozens of rattlers, had slipped off into the woods and he never found them.

  After that there was talk of fencing off the church on the mountaintop like it was a milksick holler or a devil’s acre, but we never got around to doing it. I will say this, though, people tended to stay away from the top of the mountain, especially after dark, because of the haints or the snakes, or both. Younguns dared each other to go up there on Halloween, and they come back out of breath and pale. I think people want to believe there is places in the world that is cursed. It reminds them there is things they can’t see with their eyes wide open in broad daylight, and makes them feel other places may be blessed.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2001 by Robert Morgan.

  All rights reserved.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE FOR A PREVIOUS EDITION OF THIS WORK.

  eISBN 9781565128958

  ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN

  Fiction

  The Blue Valleys

  The Mountains Won’t Remember Us

  The Hinterlands

  The Truest Pleasure

  The Balm of Gilead Tree

  Gap Creek

  Poetry

  Zirconia Poems

  Red Owl

  Land Diving

  Trunk & Thicket

  Groundwork

  Bronze Age

  At the Edge of the Orchard Country

  Sigodlin

  Green River: New and Selected Poems

  Wild Peavines

  Topsoil Road

  Nonfiction

  Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry