Too Many Stones (eBook)

One

The Coulee, Summer 1930

Just a few miles west of the farm, over the ridge, the storm begins to form. Evelyn, intent on her hike, doesn’t notice the darkening horizon on this pristine Sunday in July. She and her dog wind along the hillsides and the cow paths that cut along three narrow valleys to the east. The coulee ridges rise some two hundred feet above them. Her father said the hand of God had stayed the glaciers, making driftless southwest Wisconsin equal to that giant hand, covering fifteen thousand square miles, their own coulee included.

Streams run from shallow springs trickling up in deeply cut veins. They begin as undefined dampness at the back of each valley’s crease, somehow take form, then start to flow. All these are further carved over a million years of water receding toward the Mississippi gorge and eroded by a half century of grazing cattle.

The dog runs ahead on the cow path, then stops and looks back at her.

“What’s wrong, Sport?”

He answers by chewing on a tuft of grass.

“Oh, not feeling well?”

He jumps out of her way as she marches past him on the path, then sprints ahead again. “I know. I’ll never outrun you.” Evelyn’s laugh is crisp and flashes large teeth beneath a sharp nose framed by high, well-defined cheekbones that angle to a vital chin just now emerging from the undefined roundness of childhood. Her tanned, pulsing complexion makes her teeth seem whiter than they are.

They reach a grove on a knoll where small-leafed ash and birch trees flutter the sun across them as they run beneath the trees, then into occasional clearings where it splashes full. Their bodies light up against a goldenrod patch. The smell of early pollen gives the air a mustard taste and gathers yellow in the corners of Evelyn’s mouth. Then the light and scent flicker again as they run back under the porous canopy.

In a final surge, they step deliberately up the crest of the last long hill. She bends her strong, thick torso, pushing off each knee with large hands as she steps upward. Her face is vibrant in the heat. The hem of her cotton dress sways in time to the motion and her calves ripple against the steepness.

At the top a large oak tree stands alone in front of the forest, pushing out as a sentinel, nearly touching the denser woods from behind. Somehow it has survived a century of fire, drought, insects, disease, lightning, and man. The wide trunk slopes into massive roots extending underground and its angle flattens enough to climb. She lunges for the low limb that juts back toward her and pulls her husky frame into the tree in a single, powerful motion.

The dog wanders off through the undergrowth while she soaks in the summer afternoon looking down the hill into the first valley and then across the coulee. Coulee, she thinks, coulee. Her father told her it was a French word for valley. He’d never thought about it, only learned it was French when he was sent there, a stretcher-bearer in the war. “It’s always been the coulee to me,” he’d said. “Right here with all us Scandinavians.” Then he asked her, “Why do you think we use that term, Evelyn?” She’d shrugged and he’d smiled.

The main creek on the coulee floor, where all the streams empty, shimmers in the sunlight. It travels southward a dozen miles to Nelsenville, where it joins another stream and runs freely past the village’s two hundred inhabitants. Back upstream, it winds into the coulee, bends first this way, then that along the dirt road five miles before dead-ending at a steep concave hillside, half a soup bowl, where farmers coax small grains, hay, and pasture into the sunlight from the south-facing fields. Evelyn smiles and lets the shade of the tree settle its satisfaction onto her.

Back down on the coulee floor, in the house, Evelyn’s mother’s hands begin to shake, and she nearly drops the porcelain doll. It is one of four in the collection, two boys and two girls. She holds the brown-haired girl with the red kerchief-covered head in quaking hands and sets it down, tottering momentarily, next to the pig-tailed blonde. She runs outside looking for her husband and glimpses him out of the corner of her eye sitting at the end of the porch.

“Olav, I don’t feel good about letting Evelyn run off like this by herself. What if something happens?”

Olav looks up from cleaning the tractor’s spark plugs. “What could happen to her out there? She’s been going by herself all summer. Besides, Sport is with her.” He sighs.

“But I’m worried. She’s only eleven and-and what if it rains?”

“Look at the sky, Louise. Completely clear.” He sets down the spark plug, wipes his hands on the cleaning rag and takes out a cigarette paper.

“But-but storms come up so quickly in July. And-and I feel something.” Louise shifts from side to side. She struggles to quiet her legs.

Olav sighs again. “And getting wet won’t hurt her either. You see how much she likes going for hikes in the coulee. And she needs some time just to do what she wants. Lord knows she doesn’t get much free time with all the chores around here.”

“Still, well, okay, okay; I’ll just keep watching for her.”

“Suit yourself.” Olav pulls the tobacco tin from under the flap in his shirt pocket and begins rolling a cigarette. Louise looks toward the south and up into the bluff. She sees nothing and goes back into the house.

She sits in the slender chair, rocking back and forth. Her motion becomes increasingly deliberate and faster. Then she moves to the armchair and looks out the parlor window. Her hands begin to shake involuntarily, and she folds them as if in prayer. Finally, she rises and goes back outside. “Olav. Olav.”

He shakes his head. “I know. You’re worried she’ll get lost or hurt or run into something dangerous up there. Louise, she knows every tree for miles around and this isn’t the wild country you think it is.” He puts his cigarette out on the porch bench and tosses the butt into the yard.

“No, it’s not that. I think it’s going to storm. Really. I can feel it now. You know I’m-I’m right about storms.” Tense fingers leave white marks where they’ve pressed on the backs of her folded hands.

The heat at the top of the hill builds in the later afternoon and Evelyn listens to the choir of tree frogs increasing their pace. As the sun lowers on the farthest ridge, an animal materializes well down the hill below her in the mix of light green trees and the beginning brownness of summer prairie grass. She cannot make out what it is and imagines first a ghost, then an angel. Then she sees the neck. The head is low to the ground, and it walks. Sniffing? Eating? Yes, and moving uphill in her direction. Angels don’t graze. She wonders if she should be afraid but cannot imagine malice in its pure white form, so instead studies it until, “deer,” she says in a whisper. “A deer.” It has all of the deer parts – legs, narrow head, antlers – but no black nose or hooves and no white tail, or at least not one that is discernible against the albino whiteness of its body.

Evelyn watches, breathless. It raises its head, looks around searching the valley with its nose and ears instead of its weak, pinkish eyes, turns and bounds off. Then she hears a faint bark, then another, louder, another. Her dog emerges from the woods behind her and runs, wagging his tail, to the tree where she is already sliding from her perch. “Hi, Sport. Did you see him?”

The rumble begins. She almost can’t hear it at first. It grows until a deep tremor crosses the coulee. Evelyn looks at the western horizon and sees the distant multicolored grey sky, layer upon layer of clouds rushing toward her. The nearly white thunderheads now loom over the lip of the distant bluff, followed by light grey wisps blowing beneath the blackening ceiling. A lightning bolt sears the earth in the distance.

“We better run, Sport.” Her eyes grow large as a sharp wind stabs out of the heavy heat and raises goose bumps on her arms. She and the dog begin the risky downhill–uphill run toward home.

Olav finishes putting the cows in the barn as the draft horses, Duke and Bob, snort and trot off into the valley along the small stream. He has no time to go after them. He closes the upper half of the split door and runs to the house, chased by a dust devil swirling in the space between the buildings, a warning as the thunderheads pass over them. The wind blows cold from the west, then changes direction and blows warm from the south. “This is going to be a big one,” he says. Evelyn’s two younger brothers appear from behind the toolshed and run toward the house.

“What about Evelyn?” Louise’s face is twisted, her small forehead knit tightly against dark eyebrows. Her shoulders slouch.

“John, Peder, did you see your sister?” Olav asks.

“Yes,” spurts John.

“No-I mean not for a while,” Peder answers. Lightning flashes: a sharp, painful thunderclap explodes and its aftermath rattles through them.

“Where did you see her?”

“She was heading for the big ridge. You know the one.” Peder jumps at the second crack that follows his words.

“The one where you can see both the church and the school?”

“Yes, up where she sits in that big tree. Sport was with her.” The wind whips the giant cedars in the front yard. A wave of dust blows through the house in a roar as the now...