Swallowing Stones (24 page)

j
enna rides her bike along the trail through the dark forest of the Great Swamp while the cool night air numbs her earlobes, and never once does she think of tangled vines grabbing her.

She understands what the dream has been trying to tell her, and she knows why she is making this journey. She needs to put things to rest. She also knows her way of doing this might not seem like reasonable behavior to some. But she doesn’t care. She has begun to think that maybe the mind has different ways of knowing.

She knows now that it was Michael MacKenzie who fired the shot that killed her father. She knows this in a way that she isn’t used to knowing. But she trusts her instincts. The knowledge doesn’t weigh nearly as heavily on her as she had thought it would. She doesn’t hate him, as she had expected to. She no longer wants to make him pay for what he’s done. She understands, intuitively, that he has been trying to tell her all along. And she has already decided that the next time she sees him sitting on the church steps, she will walk right up to him and give him his chance.

When Jenna finally comes to the Ghost Tree, she sees how the moon, full and ripe, lights the space around the tree more brightly than any streetlight, so that she will not stumble in the dark. Then she leaves her bike by the side of the trail, climbs into the cradle of the ancient sycamore, and waits.

In spite of the cool air, she feels the same warmth and comfort, sitting in the old tree, that she knew on that frosty winter afternoon when her father brought her here to feed the deer. She leans back against one of the upper trunks and gazes up through the branches. If the legend is true, her ancestors are
there beside her, and so is her father. It doesn’t matter that she can’t see them; she welcomes them anyway.

She understands that her mind has been trying to show her a way in which to begin to heal herself. That is what the dreams have been about. They have reminded her of a place that she shared with her father. A place that held a special meaning.

On this night she will see her father again. She will tell him how much she misses him, how she wishes she could have saved him from what happened. She needs to tell him these things. She needs to let go.

And perhaps the ancient ones will dance around her, chanting their wisdom. But most of all, she wants to believe, as she huddles closer to the tree, that this place, as her father once told her, is a place of healing.

m
ichael drives down Main Street. Fluorescent lights spill their cold white glow through the store windows onto the sidewalks outside. He can’t take his eyes off the metal gates that protect the storefronts. They remind him of steel prison bars, and his body shudders involuntarily.

He turns up Jenna Ward’s street. His plan is to wait on the church steps until morning, and then he will knock on her front door. He wants to talk to her first, before he goes to the police. Because once he turns himself in, he knows he might not have a chance to see her alone.

He will also tell the police about Joe. He will say he swore his friend to secrecy. He will tell them Joe did what he did out of loyalty, because this is true. And maybe that will count for something.

Michael pulls the car up in front of the church. There is at least another hour until dawn. He wonders what will happen if the Hangman drives by again and sees him sitting on the steps at this hour. He will probably ask him to move on, or charge him with vagrancy. Maybe he will want to search the car. Michael looks over at the Winchester, trying to decide what to do.

Then he stares across the street at Jenna’s house. Even though it’s still night, the moonlight reflects off the second-story windows, making it seem as if there is a light on inside.

There is no place else to go at this hour. Not even Amy’s house. And he is beginning to grow nervous at the thought of what the morning holds. He decides it is better just to drive around for a while. It will keep his mind occupied. The last thing he wants to do is back out. He has to get through this somehow. That’s when he remembers the Ghost Tree.

When he gets to the Great Swamp, Michael parks the car in the lot by the information center. Then he takes the rifle and follows the trail that leads to the Ghost Tree. He knows why he has come. He is testing his courage.

The moonlight, brighter than he can ever remember, lights his way along the path, as dark shadows leak from tree stumps like oil spills. In the background he hears the owls calling to each other. Their mournful hoots echo as far as the sound will carry. Michael is reminded of sounds flowing through telephone lines. This is how the owls stay connected, he thinks. This is how they remind each other they are not alone in the forest.

As he rounds the last bend he can just make out the tree up ahead. And when he is only a few yards away, he is stunned to find Jenna Ward curled into its cradle, sleeping soundly.
Nothing in his experience has prepared him for this. Because such things simply do not happen.

But as he stands there, pressing the rifle to his chest, he wonders if, just maybe, he is supposed to be here, that he has been coming here to meet Jenna Ward all along.

He wonders if, like him, she has come to confront her own personal ghosts. And as he watches her sleeping so peacefully, with just the slightest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, it is hard for him to imagine the pain she must have endured these long weeks. Yet he does not try to fool himself; he knows she has suffered. Still, he clings to that trace of a smile on Jenna’s lips, because he knows that their meeting, when she awakens, will be the hardest thing he has ever done in his life. This is what swallowing stones is all about.

Michael lets the soft, mellow hooting of the owls wash over him as he sits down on a large boulder a few yards from the tree. He waits. The rifle lies across his knees like the gift he intends it to be; then, worried that it might alarm Jenna, he lays the gun on the ground behind the rock. For this is the only thing he has left to give: the truth. And Jenna Ward will be the first one to hear it. Then he will take the rifle and his story to Ralph Healey.

Michael is glad that it is almost dawn. He wants them to meet in daylight, so that Jenna can see his face. He owes her that. And as he waits, he begins to think that maybe coming to this place isn’t about old legends or proving how brave you are. Maybe it is about facing the things that haunt you.

So as the early-morning sunlight sends its first rays across the horizon, Michael keeps watch over Jenna, just as he did on those other evening vigils when he sat across from her house on the church steps. Only this time, when she awakens, he will be there waiting.

Joyce McDonald received bachelors and master’s degrees in English from the University of Iowa. After working in publishing for fourteen years, she returned to the academic life and earned a Ph.D. in English from Drew University; she taught at both Drew and East Stroudsburg University for several years. She is the author of three children’s books, including the critically acclaimed novel
Comfort Creek
. Joyce McDonald lives in northwestern New Jersey with her husband.

A
LSO BY
J
OYCE
M
C
D
ONALD

For more than two hundred years the town of Bellehaven has harbored a sinister secret. Then one night Simon Gray crashes his Honda into an ancient oak—a tree the kids at school call the Hanging Tree—and strange events begin to plague the town. Could Bellehaven be cursed?

Trapped in a coma, Simon is unaware that the police are investigating a possible computer hacking incident at the high school and he is a suspect. Meanwhile, in his comatose state, Simon makes a few discoveries through conversations with a man who was hanged for murder two hundred years ago, from the same tree Simon smashed into. What could a two-hundred-year-old murder have to do with Simon’s accident?

Lately I have taken to reading poems to dead boys in the Benevolence Baptist Cemetery
. They don’t walk away before I have finished the first sentence, like most of the live boys I know. When I read to them, their eyes don’t wander to something, or someone, more interesting. I can pretend these boys are listening. I can pretend they hear me.

On Friday afternoons like this one, right after seventh period, I head straight for the cemetery. I like to sit beneath the Austrian pines in the cool shade, reading lines from Tennyson or Wordsworth, listening to the whisper of the wind through the branches—listening to the trees making up their own poems. Soft words in the language of wind and pine needles.

Miss Delpheena Poyer, my English teacher, is the reason I am sitting in the Baptist cemetery reading poems to dead boys. This marking period we are studying poetry. All kinds of poetry. A few weeks back Miss Poyer sent us on a mission to find interesting epitaphs on gravestones. That was our homework assignment. I went to three church cemeteries in Benevolence looking for verses. My favorite epitaph is engraved on the headstone of Rowena Mae Cunningham, who died in 1871, wife of Cyril Cunningham.

I think that says all that needs to be said about the Cunninghams’ marriage.

This afternoon I am reading to Charles Henry Colewater, “Beloved son of Emily and Carter Colewater,” who died at the age of fourteen in 1903. He was only a year younger than I am now. His parents’ graves are to the right of his. Sometimes I have this eerie feeling their spirits are hovering over my shoulder, making sure I don’t read anything they’d disapprove of. This is, after all, a Baptist cemetery.

I lean my shoulder against Charles Henry’s headstone. If I close my eyes, I can imagine I see his face, a friendly face dotted with light freckles across his nose and cheeks, like little muddy footprints left behind by ants.

My mom’s grave is only a few yards from Charles Henry’s. All it says on her headstone is
Caroline Winfield Alderman
,
1922–1947
,
wife of Lucas Alderman
. It doesn’t say a word about her being mother to Dove Alderman. I was barely four years old when she left this earth, so I don’t remember her very well. But it makes me a little sad that nobody took the time to write an epitaph for her.

This week in Miss Poyer’s class we are studying sonnets. I flip through the
Selected Poems of John Keats
, pick out one of his sonnets, and start right in reading it to Charles Henry. Only, the first line stops me cold: “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” I know those fears Keats is talking about. Sometimes I lie awake half the night, worrying that Mr. Khrushchev and those Soviets might decide to drop an atom bomb right smack-dab in the middle of Florida before I know what a real kiss feels like. Not those slobbery head-on collisions after the bottle stops spinning, with everybody looking on. I mean the real thing. Although I’m a little vague on what that might be.