He looked about his land and it seemed to be dying. The pale hills and fields, the dust-grey sage, the naked stones frightened him. On the hills only the black pine grove did not change. It brooded darkly, as always, on the ridge top.
Elizabeth was very busy in the house. Alice had gone home to Nuestra Señora to take up her rightful position as a sad woman whose husband would return some day. She carried the affair with dignity, and her mother received compliments upon Alice’s fine restraint and decent mourning. Alice began every day as though Juanito would return by evening.
The loss of her helper made more work for Elizabeth. Caring for her child, washing and cooking filled her days. She remembered the time before her marriage only hazily, and with a good deal of contempt. In the evenings, when she sat with Joseph, she tried to re-establish the fine contact she had made before the baby was born. She liked to tell him things that had happened when she was a little girl in Monterey, although the things didn’t seem real to her any more. While Joseph stared moodily at the spots of fire that showed through the little windows of the stove, she talked to him.
“I had a dog,” she said. “His name was Camille. I used to think that was the loveliest name in the world. I knew a little girl who was named Camille, and the name fitted her. She had a skin with the softness of camellias, so I named my dog after her, and she was very angry.” Elizabeth told how Tarpey shot a squatter and was hanged to the limb of tree on the fish flats; and she told of the lean stern woman who kept the lighthouse at Point Joe. Joseph liked to hear her soft voice, and he didn’t usually listen to her words, but he took her hand and explored it all over with his fingertips.
Sometimes she tried to argue him out of his fear. “Don’t worry about the rain. It will come. Even if there isn’t much water this year, there will be in another year. I know this country, dear.”
“But it would take so much rain. There won’t be time if it doesn’t start pretty soon. The rain will get behind in the year.”
One evening she said, “I think I’d like to ride again. Rama says it won’t hurt me now. Will you ride with me, dear?”
“Of course,” he said. “Begin a little at a time. Then it won’t hurt you.”
“I’d like to have you ride up to the pines with me. The smell of pines would be good.”
He looked slowly over at her. “I’ve thought of going there, too. There’s a spring in the grove, and I want to see if it is dried up like all the rest.” His eyes grew more animated as he thought of the circle in the pines. The rock had been so green when he saw it last. “That must be a deep spring, I don’t see how it could dry up,” he said.
“Oh I have more reasons than that for wanting to go,” she said laughing. “I think I told you something about it. When I was carrying the baby I deceived Thomas one day and drove up to the pines. And I went into that central place where the big rock is, and where the spring is.” She frowned, trying to remember the thing exactly. “Of course,” she said, “my condition was responsible for what happened. I was oversensitive.”
She glanced up to find Joseph eagerly looking at her.
“Yes?” he said. “Tell me.”
“Well, as I say, it was my condition. When I was carrying the child, little things grew huge. I didn’t find the path, going in. I broke my way through the underbrush, and then I came into the circle. It was quiet, Joseph, more quite than anything I’ve ever known. I sat in front of the rock because that place seemed saturated with peace. It seemed to be giving me something I needed.” In speaking of it, the feeling came back to her. She brushed her hair over her ears, and the wide-set eyes looked far off. “And I loved the rock. It’s bard to describe. I loved the rock more than you or the baby or myself. And this is harder to say: While I sat there I went into the rock. The little stream was flowing out of me and I was the rock, and the rock was—I don’t know—the rock was the strongest dearest thing in the world.” She looked nervously about the room. Her fingers picked at her skirt. The thing she had intended to tell as a joke was forcing itself back upon her.
Joseph took up her nervous hand and held the fingers still. “Tell me,” he insisted gently.
“Well, I must have stayed there quite a while, because the sun moved, but it seemed only a moment to me. And then the feeling of the place changed. Something evil came into it.” Her voice grew husky with the memory. “Something malicious was in the glade, something that wanted to destroy me. I ran away. I thought it was after me, that great crouched rock, and when I got outside, I prayed. Oh, I prayed a long time.”
Joseph’s light eyes were piercing. “Why do you want to go back there?” he demanded.
“Why don’t you see?” she replied eagerly. “The whole thing was my condition. But I’ve dreamed about it several times and it comes often to my mind. Now that I’m all well again, I want to go back, and see that it is just an old moss-covered rock in a clearing. Then I won’t dream about it any more. Then it won’t threaten me any more. I want to touch it. I want to insult it because it frightened me.” She released her fingers from Joseph’s grip and rubbed them to ease the pain in them. “You’ve hurt my hand, dear. Are you afraid of the place, too?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not afraid. I’ll take you up there.” He fell silent, wondering whether he should tell her what Juanito had said about the pregnant Indian women who went to sit in front of the rock, and about the old ones who lived in the forest. “It might frighten her,” he thought. “It is better that she should lose her fear of the place.” He opened the stove and threw in an armful of wood and turned the damper straight, to set the flame roaring. “When would you like to go?” he asked.
“Why, anytime. If the day is warm tomorrow, I’ll pack a lunch into a saddle bag. Rama will take care of the baby. We’ll have a picnic.” She spoke eagerly. “We haven’t had a picnic since I’ve been here I don’t know anything I love more. At home,” she said, “we took our lunches to Huckleberry Hill, and after we’d eaten, mother and I picked buckets of berries.”
“‘We’ll go there tomorrow,” he agreed. “I’m going to look in at the barn now, dear.”
As she watched him leave the room, she knew that he was concealing something from her. “Probably it’s only his worry about the rain,” she thought, and from habit she turned her eyes to the barometer and saw that the needle was high.
Joseph stepped down from the porch. He moved close to the oak tree before he realized that it was dead. “If only it were alive,” he thought, “I would know what to do. I have no counsel any more.” He walked on into the barn, expecting to find Thomas there, but the barn was dark and the horses snorted at him as he walked behind them. “There’s plenty of hay for the stock this year,” he thought. The knowledge comforted him.
The sky was misty clear when he went back across the yard. He thought he could see a pale ring around the moon, but it was so faint that he could not be sure.
Before sunup the next morning Joseph went to the barn, curried two horses and brushed them, and, as a last elegance, painted their hoofs black and rubbed their coats with oil.
Thomas came in while he was at work. “You’re making considerable fuss,” he said. “Going to town?”
Joseph rubbed the oil in until the skins shown like dull metal. “I’m taking Elizabeth to ride,” he announced. “She hasn’t been on a horse for a long time.”
Thomas rubbed his hand down one of the shining rumps. “I wish I could go with you, but I’ve work to do. I’m taking the men down to the river-bed to dig a hole. We may have trouble finding water for the cattle pretty soon.”
Joseph stopped his work and looked worriedly at Thomas. “I know it. But there must be water under the river-bed. You should strike it a few feet down.”