over. Mothers and fathers ran to the Sunday school to gather their children. Some dozen and a half parents found their kids to be absent.
They looked from the Sunday school teacher, who said they never showed up, to the mountain, and then to each others’ faces. In an incoherent scream of their various offsprings’ names, they went charging for the trail at the end of the street.
A second tremor threw them to the ground just before they had reached it, and they looked up to the peak itself, which seemed mired in gloom, a bank of clouds hovering about its tip.
Only two parents didn’t meet their kids on the way up. They went on up the trail to the ridge, over it to a bubbling brook, where they heard a voice. It belonged to their boy, Henry. He was calling desperately for help. But it wasn’t for himself he was calling. He was vainly struggling to push a four foot boulder off of the body of his sister, Francine.
The funeral was two days later. The clouds went away from the peak and the weather was fine and sunny for two weeks. There were no more tremors from the mountain, but everyone lowered their heads as they walked toward it, and some glanced quickly over their shoulders as they walked away from it. It took on a new name: Blackamon, and then just Black Mountain or simply It, and conversation began to arise in separate bubbles around what to do about It. There seemed no real answer . . . until someone again repeated what the children had been whispering for weeks: “The mountain’s alive and it wants something.”
“Well, the mountain got something,” muttered one of them, saying what no one else dared. Eyes widened but no one protested the conclusion. His words were quickly taken up by others, though only in whispers.
B.F. Stokes, self-appointed protector of Fairfield, had not been able to let the matter rest. He continued to inquire into the matter of the mountain’s origin. Perhaps it was his passion for historical accuracy that drove him. He sent letters of inquiry to Aubrey, Wyoming, to ask them if there had ever been, in living memory, a mountain near their town. The officials of Aubrey thought it was a prank and did not bother to answer, so Mr. Stokes went there himself. He knew the town had a library and museum and he was very skilled in obtaining oral histories from people, so he felt confident that if there was anything to be learned he could learn it.
Aubrey, as it turned out, was a country of bluffs - nothing approaching a mountain stood anywhere near it. The dull little stream that gave the town water came from a range of mountains a hundred miles away - out of sight, except as nubbles on the horizon to the East. The name of the stream was the West Fork of the Puckett River.
Stokes had a hard time remembering why he had come there, but he had brought his atlases with him and they reminded him. He took them to the town library, and matched them to atlases there. They confirmed his findings. When he pointed out the discrepancy to the librarian and then the Mayor they acknowledged that it was odd, but the idea that a mountain had been there and then moved seemed so preposterous that they simply concluded it was a mistake by the original surveyors - a misreporting of a geographical location. This sort of thing happened all the time. One had but to look to see that there was no mountain there.
Their argument made so much sense that even Stokes had started to accept it, and after a few days found himself ready to return to Fairfield. Before he’d left, though, he’d taken oral histories from several old timers. One of them, Mrs. Dooley, who’d gotten particularly excited about his interest in their town, had pressed a shoe box full of old photographs into his hands. Stokes, who had happened to bring a camera of his own that day, took a picture of Mrs. Dooley standing on the porch of her house. Behind it, over her right shoulder, was the top of a windmill and beyond that was a wide, flat butte covering the horizon frame to frame.
It wasn’t until months later that he took the time to look at her photographs closely. One of them in particular held his gaze, though he didn’t know why at first. It was a black and white brownie snapshot, torn and faded, showing a toothy, mud-smeared young man (“My uncles was miners,” she’d explained) standing in front of her house. He saw a windmill peering over the roof of the house, just over the man’s right shoulder. But there was something else...
He got out the photograph he’d shot of Mrs. Dooley himself and set them down side by side. Both photographs were taken at virtually the same angle and distance, and even at the same time of day - you could tell by the shadows coming down from the porch and its pillar. There was a person on the porch in both photographs, and a windmill over their shoulder beyond the house, but beyond that things were very different. In the one he’d taken there was a large, flat bluff. In the older print there was a white-topped mountain ... a familiar looking white topped mountain.
It struck him as odd. Logically if it was the same view of the same place from the same angle, the background should be the same. But it wasn’t. But then again, so what? He stood poised between finding it drably ordinary and inexplicably strange.
“So what if the mountain isn’t there anymore?” he said to himself, and seemed contented. But some dim, swimming part of himself uttered back, “So...mountains don’t just move.”
It finally settled onto him that he had the evidence he’d been seeking in his hands, though he couldn’t remember for what, and should show these photographs to someone.
A year to the week after the earthquake the town began to grow nervous and agitated. It had been a good year for both the farmers and merchants, but there was a sense of luck running out, of a warranty expiring, of the fence about to fall over and let the cows out, of a contract needing to be renewed.
A town meeting was held - in as much secrecy as was possible. It was late night, after all the kids were in bed. The shutters on the town hall were closed. Words to be spoken that night were not to escape the building.
“A year has passed,” said Mayor Duffy, “since the terrible tragedy.”
Heads bowed. Silence reigned.
“A year,” repeated the mayor.
The word grew significant in the silence. It was like the clock had just started to chime twelve.
“If we are to avoid another tragedy,” we must act swiftly, put in Stokes, whose esteem in the town had risen since the terrible day. He had come to seem like the prophet who had tried to warn them. And now they listened with the redoubled intensity of the repentant.
“What do you suggest?” asked another appointed official with the authority to engage in this important debate. The average citizens were afraid to speak, letting their elected officials do the talking for them, saying the dreadful things that everyone was thinking, the terrible things that must be said.
“What else is there?” replied Duffy. “We know what will happen if it doesn’t get what it wants. I suggest a lottery.”
A woman wept. Most of the women joined her. Some of the men did, too.
“Why don’t we just move out?” said one man, a grandfather, in a thin, strained voice.
“And leave our homes?” cried another.
“It’s a small price to pay for the Mountain’s bounty throughout the year,” chimed in a third.
“A small price,” echoed Duffy.
“Not for...the family.”
“No, but small for the community. For the safety of the community. For our continued prosperity and well-being. And the family will be well compensated. We will set up a trust fund...”
And so it was settled by lottery. The children’s names all went into a hat and a blindfolded man picked one out. But not before someone stopped them with a keen observation.
“Wait! Don’t you see?” he said, “The tragedy fell on the Martin girl, not the Martin boy.”
The blindfolded man put the slip of paper back in the hat.
“The mountain has spoken,” he said.
It became a catch phrase that rang through the ensuing decades: The Mountain has spoken.
And so the names were emptied out onto the ground and
all the boys’ names torn up. Back in the hat went the names of all the girls in town between six and fourteen.
Melissa Eldridge, age twelve, was drawn. Mrs. Eldridge fainted. Mr. Eldridge swore - mostly at the mountain, then at the council, then at the town, and he vowed to leave the town with his family and never return, but he was restrained and then consoled.
“What’s done is done,” said Duffy. “Her name will be forever held in honor.”
And so Melissa Eldridge’s name was the first to be put on the list of Town Saviors. Work was begun that week on a special monument for the city park.
A special place was found to complete the job: a place high up on the mountain, just at timber line, at a lake below the peak’s nearly vertical slope. It took two full days to hike up to the spot. Melissa, drugged and blindfolded, was carried up on a bower. Words were spoken and a ceremony performed at the lake that henceforth became known as Red Lake. The deed was done at sundown, and the doers stayed the night on the mountain, returning the next day with an empty bower, greeted in silence by the waiting townspeople. The three days became known as the Renewal Time.
There was no earthquake that year.
Or for a generation of years thereafter.
B.F. Stokes was getting tired of the pig-headedness of his fellow citizens. For years he’d been bringing a simple fact to their attention and