The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  When he hurriedly told them about the bear, saying that they should follow it, not everyone agreed. “A wounded bear is too dangerous,” said Aahrens the barber. Charlie Benbow added, “I seen what a hurt bear can do to a man. It’s suicide, doc.”

  Bret Hammersmith said, “Why don’t you go after it? Take a look see. Then come back for us.”

  Matthew looked into the hollow eyes and gaunt faces etched with the madness of hunger. He knew they would not wait for him to return with news of the bear, that they only wanted to get rid of him. “I am weak,” he said, and it was the truth. “I can make but one more walk through the snow and then I will be done for. I ask all of you to make that trek with me. I shot that bear good. He won’t live long. And where we find him, we’ll find food. And we will survive. Here,” he looked around at the hell they had descended into, “even if our bodies survive, our spirits will die.”

  But Emmeline was also terrified to leave the camp. He took her by her frozen hands and said, “You have to have courage now, Emmeline. For the others. If you go, they will follow.”

  “But I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll see to it that we’re all right. Don’t worry, my darling.”

  In the end, they followed him, starved people holding onto one another, carrying loved ones on their shoulders, staggering through snowdrifts, half dead from hunger. They carried only a few possessions—blankets and quilts, cooking pots, and carefully protected hot embers from their fires. Several times they wanted to give up, for it seemed they were lost in a blinding white limbo. But Matthew found the drops of blood, scarlet in the snow, and he urged his ragtag group onward, promising them a feast of roast meat at the end. He described fat sizzling in a pan until they all smelled it, and their saliva ran. Emmeline joined in, taking each person by the arm, lifting them up from their knees, telling them how she had seen the wounded bear—a lie—and that she was sure by now it was dead. It was just up ahead…a few more feet…a few more steps…just one more step…no, no, don’t stop, don’t fall, here take my arm….

  Ruth Hammersmith sank into a snowdrift and lay there like a dead-weight. Her husband dropped by her side and told the others to go on. He stared up at them with sunken eyes circled with dark shadows.

  The half-dead people pressed on, not even really thinking now, barely hearing Matthew’s words of encouragement, plodding mindlessly through snowdrifts, hands and feet frozen numb, faces white with extreme cold.

  More fell, holding their children in their arms. Emmeline tried to raise them up, but was too weak herself, having only just enough strength to follow Matthew.

  And when it seemed even to Emmeline and Matthew that their trek was a hopeless one, they found the cave, the bloody trail going inside.

  While the others waited at a safe distance, Matthew and Manfred Schumann went cautiously inside, listening, sniffing the air, rifle cocked and ready. They found the bear inside, and it was dead.

  Manfred and Osgood Aahrens found the strength to plunge knives into the animal’s belly and slice it open. At the sight of tender raw innards spilling to the cave floor, the others came straggling in, falling upon the steaming, bloody morsels in a mindless feeding frenzy. They glutted themselves on warm, raw bear meat and blood, and then, feeling strengthened, went back along the trail to retrieve the people who had fallen behind. The Hammersmiths were both dead, but everyone else was brought back, packing the cave with their human warmth, filling their bellies with grizzly bear.

  That night they slept exhausted against the carcass, children crawling inside to get warm. And when they awoke, they built a fire from the embers, offered a prayer of thanks to God, and began to butcher the bear.

  They ate directly from it, throwing chunks of meat onto the fire, but then also began cutting long thin strips and hanging them over the smoke until it dried, in this way preserving the bear meat for the cold weeks to come. They buried the bones and skull, to discourage wolves, and then used the stiff hide, which nearly covered the cave floor, as a rug for warmth.

  Six more people perished, despite the food and warmth, but when it appeared the rest would survive, Matthew took a count of the company: there were now fifty-five men, twenty-four women, and fifty-three children. Forty souls fewer than had left Ft. Bridger.

  And one day when the sun felt warm for the first time, and they encountered the first snowmelt beside a stream, Matthew turned to Emmeline and, taking her face between his hands, said with passion, “I love the sound of your voice, Emmeline. Don’t ever stop talking. Don’t ever be silent. When we started this journey, I was gloomy and much too serious. And I thought you smiled too much. But your buoyancy kept me from sinking. I grew up among the dead and the dark, but you brought light and cheer into my life.”

  “And you keep me from flying off the earth, dear Matthew, for I was frivolous and overconfident. You are my rock and my stability.”

  The rescue party from Sutter’s arrived in the middle of March, led by one of the men who had run off with Amos Tice. Once they had reached civilization, the man had been stricken with a guilty conscience and told the authorities of a stranded party of emigrants up by the last pass. Volunteers had immediately signed up, loaded with arms and provisions, and had made the trek in record time.

  Of the 172 men, women, and children who had left Ft. Bridger in August, fewer than 120 had survived.

  Everyone told the rescuers that it was Doc Lively who had saved them, through his courage and wisdom to make the right decision in the face of extreme adversity.

  Not one of them mentioned the incident over Helmut Schumann’s corpse.

  When they came at last into Sutter’s Mill and they saw it was a place of growth and new starts, with gold fever everywhere, Matthew took the Blessing Stone out of his pocket one last time. “I don’t see it,” he said decisively.

  “What don’t you see?”

  “The Guiding Spirit. Do you see this clouding at the crystal’s core? Like diamond dust. It changes shape when you turn the stone in the light. My mother said it was a spirit, but I see only mineral deposits.” He handed it to Emmeline. “What do you see?”

  She peered into the heart of the crystal and said, “A valley. The lush green valley where we are going to settle and start new lives.” She handed it back to him.

  “I wonder,” he mused, trying to see Emmeline’s valley in the Blessing Stone. “All this time I thought it was the crystal telling me what to do. But perhaps it was me all along, I was the one making the decisions, not the stone. I wanted to go west, so I spun the stone eleven times until it pointed west. And when Ida Threadgood left you at the river and you needed someone to ride with”—he turned a smile to her—“I had already made my decision to ask you to join me. If I hadn’t wanted to, I never would have consulted the Blessing Stone in the first place. But I did not have enough confidence in myself to make my own decisions. The stone was my crutch. I don’t need it anymore.”

  “Don’t be too hasty in your judgment,” she said, having given a great deal of thought to the miracle that took place at the mountain lake. “It was the Blessing Stone that led us to the bear tracks. Without it, we would all surely be dead now.”

  He nodded, deep in thought for a moment, then he said, “I have been thinking, Emmeline, that Lively might be a strange name for an undertaker, but it’s a perfect name for a midwife.” Then in all seriousness: “I know you vowed never to wed, but—”

  She placed a fingertip on his lips and said with a smile, “Of course I shall marry you, my darling Matthew, for we do make a perfect pair, midwife and undertaker. I help folks into the world and you escort them out of it.”

  She took the Blessing Stone from him once again and held it to the sunlight. “I wonder about all the people who have held this crystal, who looked to it for guidance or protection or luck. And I wonder if they were like you, Matthew, blind to their own strengths, giving credit to an inanimate piece of mineral. But you discovered your own power in the end, the spirit that is in all of u
s, the spirit to overcome adversity. People are strong, Matthew, I know that now. We can meet whatever trials are put in our path, and we can be triumphant.

  “You’re right, we won’t be needing it any more,” she said, slipping the stone into his pocket. “But perhaps someone in the future can use the Blessing Stone and let it help them to find their own inner strength, wisdom and power.”

  Matthew kissed Emmeline, then he snapped the reins and got the wagon moving, toward their future in the green valley, toward new hope.

  Interim

  The Livelys bought land, invested in gold mines and railroads, and grew rich. Matthew became a leader in his community, and in his later years ran for state congress, and was a powerful and commanding figure. When asked what advice he would give to future emigrants taking the Oregon and California trails, Matthew said, “Don’t take shortcuts.” Both he and Emmeline lived to old age and were buried in Livelyville, California.

  The Blessing Stone was inherited by their eldest son, Peter, who passed it to his daughter, Mildred, upon her graduation from medical school. Dr. Lively carried the good-luck crystal with her to Africa where she spent thirty years in medical missionary work before returning to the United States to undergo treatment for a rare disease she had contracted while on safari in Uganda. As Mildred Lively had no children, she bequeathed the crystal to the woman who was her dedicated nurse in her final months, a Japanese-American woman named Toki Yoshinaga.

  Toki and her family were removed from their San Francisco home after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and sent to live at a place called Manzanar. After the war, the family was forced to sell whatever valuables they had left in order to get back on their feet. The blue crystal fetched a hundred dollars, considered quite a sum in 1948.

  The buyer was an accountant named Homer whose hobby was gemology, and when he examined his new purchase at the workbench in his garage, he realized with a thrill that he might have found a new mineral. Subjecting the crystal to its first scientific scrutiny since a Dutchman named Kloppman analyzed it in Amsterdam in the year 1698, Homer found it to be a hard stone, 8.2 on the Mohs’ scale, with a sharp luster and very low cleavage. The blue reminded him of varieties of topaz and tourmaline, but it had a “star” at its center as sapphires sometimes did. Feeling excitement for the first time in many years, he packed the stone along with others and took it to a gemology convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he hoped to confirm his new find, with the possibility of naming the new gem after himself— “Homerite” had a nice ring to it. One day into the convention, Homer met a young lady who was very interested in precious stones, and he was persuaded to take her back to his hotel room to look at his collection. Unfortunately, the unworldly accountant mistook the intentions of the buxom young lady and, in anticipation of sexual intimacy, suffered a massive coronary.

  Homer’s collection lay neglected in the garage by his widow until, deciding to move to a retirement village in Florida, she sold the “whole worthless lot” to a free spirit named Sunbeam, who made beaded jewelry and antiestablishment paraphernalia for the head shops on Hollywood Boulevard, which was how, in 1969, the Blessing Stone ended up in a place called Woodstock, wired into the handle of a marijuana roach clip owned by a hippy named Argyle. After Argyle’s death in an undeclared war in Southeast Asia, his sister went through his possessions and, finding the clip, cut the thin wires to set the blue crystal free. Thinking the stone nothing more than a piece of glass, she gave it to her eight-year-old daughter who, using aluminum foil and glue, made a crown of it for one of her dolls.

  When the little girl came of college age and moved out of the house, she donated all her old toys to the Salvation Army, where the blue crystal was rescued by a woman who regularly scoured thrift shops and rummage sales for items of worth that were overlooked by less keen eyes—in her opinion, anyway. She saw possibilities in the crystal, for she was a New Age believer, and felt definite vibes when she clasped it.

  And thus the blue stone that had sailed through galaxies and nebulae to land on a primordial Earth—a cosmic crystal that had given a protohuman named Tall One the wisdom to know when to lead her people from danger, that had comforted Laliari, and enlightened Avram, and bestowed Lady Amelia with faith, and had given Mother Winifred the courage to stand up to an abbot’s order, and Katharina the hope to search for her father, and channeled Brigitte Bellefontaine’s buried passion into practical use, and finally made Matthew Lively the master of his own destiny—thus did this blessing stone come to reside in a small shop in a California beach community. It sits today in the window in an unpretentious display of healing crystals, Tarot cards, and incense. If you do not walk by too fast, or are not too distracted by your Palm Pilot or newspaper or cell phone, you will see it.

  And if you feel you need to find your inner strength, or courage, or wisdom, go inside the shop, look at the stone, hold it in your hand, and see what it tells you. The proprietor is willing to sell it at a reasonable price…to the right person.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE BLESSING STONE

  What do you think of the time periods the author chose to write about in The Blessing Stone? Were there any you liked more than others? Were there any you would have liked to see? Which came the most alive for you?

  In Tall One’s story, there is no actual dialogue. Did you notice this? Were the characters’ motivations and intentions still clearly delineated?

  What aspects of the ancient Middle Eastern section do you think still have resonance today?

  Have your ideas about fate and destiny changed after reading this book? If so, how? If not, why?

  What do you think the author is trying to say about superstitions and the power we give objects?

  Did any historical fact or idea in The Blessing Stone surprise you? If so, how?

  Which character in The Blessing Stone did you find the most heroic? The most villainous?

  The author compresses time in the “interludes.” How did the use of compressed time work for you in the story?

  How did the book make you think about the history of seemingly ordinary objects? For more reading group suggestions visit www.stmartins.com

  For more reading group suggestions visit www.stmartins.com

  THE BLESSING STONE. Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Wood. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wood, Barbara, 1947–

  The blessing stone / Barbara Wood—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-27534-1

  1. Meteorites—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O5877 B57 2002

  813'.54—dc21

  2002068364