The Stones of Riverton

Down East Books/Rowman and Littlefield - September 01, 2023

The Stones of Riverton is a collection of linked short stories and novelettes inspired by the gravestones in a small Maine town. The stories are bound together by place and ancestry spanning over 200 hundred years. They un-bury an often shameful history of unexplained deaths and deeply held secrets in a town that is divided both economically and culturally. While fictional, the stories are grounded in the lore, rumors, and fables that were told to the author by parents, grandparents, and local storytellers.

• We meet a mother who is forced to give up her eldest daughter to a tradition that is not hers.
• A young and talented woman is promised to a farmer who physically and mentally abuses her until the death of one of them becomes inevitable. Her efforts to poison her abuser backfire, ending in her own death, although the community is certain he was the murderer.
• Three children find the body of a young boy in their favorite swimming hole, and the discovery puts a town on alert, deepening a long-existing cultural divide. The children learn the truth, but they can never speak of it. That truth would put an impoverished part of town in even more peril than they have already endured for a hundred years.
• A debutante from the city marries a local woodsman against the wishes of her family, only to learn that love is not enough to quell the ferocity of a harsh Maine winter. The real story of how the family perished that winter in 1924 is discovered after sixty years, and it is not at all what townsfolk had assumed.
• In a story that spans four decades, we meet two closeted gay men who fall in love in the ‘60’s amidst the social unrest of the time. As their political careers grow and diverge, one decides to come out while the other is horrified by what it might do to his future. An argument grows into a physical fight, resulting in the death of one and thirty years of guilt for the other.

There are fourteen stories and a prologue. Some of the voices speak from the grave in search of resolve. Others struggle with the conflicts and the sweet-and-sour of life in a town where everyone knows you and your mistakes. But most importantly, these stories are about the secrets of both the living and the dead that reveal the prejudices and the shameful pasts that often exist in rural communities.

Excerpt from the Stones of Riverton

Prologue

            This land is not majestic. The mountains and rivers don’t inspire from afar. They’re beautiful, yes, but they’re humble. They grow beneath us and we grow with them. They roll and heave and dip like the living things they are, as if they’re made of the same flesh as the people who live here.

            If we were crows, we could fly above this valley and its twelve miles of river, get a clear sense of its lushness and simplicity. We’d see how the thin band of water winds with no apparent urgency between mountains and hills, nearly bending back on itself in places, splitting around tiny islands in others. We could see how it gathers its strength from the hundreds of streams and lesser tributaries that join its journey, flowing off green peaks and bubbling out of granite cracks. It gushes with frigid clarity from places too deep for even a crow’s eye to see. There are pools of melting snow and ice that have hidden in hollows until nearly summer, eventually giving in to their nature and to the heat. They’ll melt slowly and then dribble down to the mother.      

            From this height of a crow’s flight, we would see the dozens of villages, clusters of humanity that have grown all along this river named Carrabassett—Abenaki for “One who turns quickly.” Each town speckles its banks, then yields to miles of woods before the next town trickles in. The pattern repeats itself over and over before the river empties into the larger Kennebec which will grow stronger and deeper until it surrenders to the Gulf of Maine.

            But let’s not linger with the clouds when there is so much below. Let’s swoop down on a town, say on this town called Riverton. It’s like most of the others, a village that grew from a need to be close to water and woods. There’s a lumber mill down there where men and women turn entire forests—the logs of which have travelled down the river from the north—into tables and chairs that are sent to cities south. There’s a post office near the center where the mail has been delivered, along with the best of the town’s gossip, every day but Sunday for the past two hundred years. And a general store, the only store in town, where folks can buy anything from apples to axes, beans to boots.

            Most importantly there is a cemetery, the Riverside Cemetery. This is where we will land, since all crows know that the cemetery is where any small town worth its soil keeps its history and its secrets. The stories are written between the lines of names, dates, and epitaphs. It’s a narrative of a town’s past, its divisions, the injustices that it sanctioned, and the questionable deaths that have gone ignored.

            What follows are just a few of the secrets of Riverton—an ordinary Maine town with a buried history that has been writ in stone.

Lucy May

Lucretia May French

1692-1705

Taken but Not Forgotten

            The mother can see the torches clearly from the kitchen window now. Six of them moving as one, like a fiery reptile up the steep switchback that ends at the settlement on the hill. There will be more than six men, of course. It sometimes takes a dozen to deal with a family that is foolishly reluctant. She squints into the moonless night and can imagine the others: dark hunched-over lumps linking the flames together, creating a solemn and single-minded chain.

            She had seen it nearly an hour ago. At first, they were just a few tiny dots of yellow in the valley, specks that flickered in and out of visibility. If she hadn’t been looking for them, she wouldn’t have noticed. But she had been looking. Every mother of a child of gifting age would be. It is a night for mothers to stand at windows and pray.   

Her eyes ache from the squinting. Still, she can’t discern if the specks are moving. The night is so dark that there’s no point of reference, no darker tree line or hillcrest to judge distance or movement. She can only see a fire in the village’s center and the pinpoints of light that either move away or toward her, she can’t be sure.

“Are they coming toward the mountain?” Her husband has refused to stand by her, suggesting that watching and fretting is a womanly manner of worry. But he’s been checking with her every five minutes or so, as worried as she but unwilling to show it.

“I can’t tell if they’re moving or if they’ve stopped. They’re too far away and it’s so dark.”

The husband is at the stove, and when he’s finished, he brings the woman a cup of something hot. “Drink this. You need to relax. You’ll give yourself a headache staring into the dark like that.” She takes the cup and he returns to his post at the fire.

“Thank you,” she says, but doesn’t drink. She sets it on the sill, and when it steams the glass she moves it to the floor.

Eventually she’s able to determine that they are moving away from the town, toward the mountain. The moon is rising now, and it emits just enough amber light that she can make out the curve of where the mountain dips toward the town. With that edge as a reference, she can see that the dots of light are indeed getting closer.           

            A half-hour later, when the line of torches disappears behind a hill, she still can’t take her eyes away. It’s the only window in the small cabin, and it faces south toward the town and toward the path that she’s taken at least once a day for most of her life. She knows every step of that skinny trail as well as she knows the floorboards in her house. She could run it in the dark if she wanted. So why does that line of greedy men move so slowly? Why can’t they get to wherever they’re going and be done with it…be done with this torture of mothers.

            Nearly an hour after the last torch had moved below the edge of the mountain, she can see a glow off to the left as the first comes back into view. Then the second is quickly followed by the third until all six are visible: a line of flickering flames with six dark lumps connecting them.

            There are only three houses on the hill: The Thompsons who had given their middle girl the year before, the Ellis family who had a child a few months short of gifting age, and her own family, the Frenches, with one, Lucy, who had just become old enough at thirteen. The mother holds her breath as the procession of light and dark approach the entrance to the first house. It’s Ella Thompson’s home, a woman with whom she has grown and has loved like a sister. She closes her eyes and says a prayer that is not generous toward her dearest friend. In fact, it offers no remembrances of their sisterly bond. It is the prayer of a desperate mother, a plea to whatever god would allow such a process. It’s a selfish prayer, but it’s the only one she has. When she opens her eyes, she can see that the prayer has not been answered. The line is still moving, still progressing as one.

            “Netty. Come away from the window,” her husband says.  “Please. Watching won’t change what’s already done.”

            She knows he’s right. The name has already been drawn. But still, she can’t stop herself.

            “Where is Lucy May?” She doesn’t take her eyes from the dark.

            “I sent her upstairs to be with her sister and brother. I told them to pray.”

            “As if it could do any good.” She says it more to herself than to her husband. “Why do we even do this? It’s not our tradition. As if a river could curse a town.”

            “But it’s our tradition now. We all agreed to it,” the husband says. “And it’s our river.”

            “Still, why do they have to come at night?” she whispers into the glass. “Why do they have to creep up on us like a ravenous serpent?” It’s the torches that she hates the most. And now, as they round another corner and come straight up the hill she can see that there are actually seven of those flames, two at the front, probably to light the path better or to scare away animals. And as they continue their slow progression, those two front torches are like eyes. Two fiery and hungry eyes. She cowers into the curtain.

            The line stops in front of the Ellis house, and the mother feels shame at her relief. She relaxes the fists that have been clenched so tightly that her nails have created bloody crescents in her palms. She licks at them unconsciously as she peeks from behind lace, watching with hope as the door to the Ellis home opens. First a crack, then all the way. She can barely make out the shape of Irma Ellis as she steps onto the porch, holding a lamp up to the men, listening, then shaking her head.

            Is she pleading? Arguing? Her heart goes out to Irma, a dear woman who has already given two. But she hopes she won’t shame herself and her family. After all, giving is an honor. Everyone understands that.

            “Do it quickly, Irma, so we can get on with our lives,” she whispers aloud, but not so loud that God or the river or the torches can hear. Even she, in her fear, knows that pleading is wrong.

            But then, as if a plug has been yanked from inside of her, what little compassion she feels for her neighbor drains out. She watches as the woman turns with the lamp held higher and points a long arm toward the next and only house at the top of the hill. The fiery line turns as one, following the arm’s direction. And then it slithers forward. 

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