Fog Magic (2 page)

“So this,” she said to herself,
“this
is what can happen to you in a fog. I always knew that there must be something hidden.”

It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her in her whole life. Rosie, far ahead, was mooing at the pasture bars, and Greta tore herself away to follow. Once inside the barn, she wished that she had stayed and gone closer.

She stood in the barn doorway looking out across the yard. The fog was dense and gray. It blanketed the yard and made the house across the intervening feet as dim as that other one had been. Behind her in the quiet sweet-smelling barn her father sat milking.

“Father,” Greta spoke softly.

“Yes? What is it, Greta?” The milk streamed rhythmically into the pail.

“Father, down where the path to Little Cove turns off the Old Road, is there—is there any old house off in the spruces to the south?”

Her father never stirred on the milking stool, but he dropped his hands quietly on his knees. The barn was very still for a moment.

“There's an old cellar hole off there, Greta,” he said at last. “There's been no house upon it in my day.” His voice was as calm and slow as ever. And then he added something very strange. “Every cellar hole should have a house,” he said quietly.

“Yes, Father,” Greta answered. It was almost as if he'd told her that she should build a house and she had almost promised.

Rosie stirred restlessly. Father cleared his throat and went on milking.

“You'd best go in and help your mother with the tea,” he said. “She'll be fussing. She doesn't know you're back.”

Greta stepped out of the warm fragrant barn into the cool fog. It had always seemed to be whispering a secret to her. Now, at last, the words of the secret were coming more clearly.

Greta did not know what Walter Addington and his wife talked about that night. She went up to bed at her usual bedtime. Her little room with its steep sloping ceiling and its single window faced out toward the high pasture and the Old Road. Tonight you couldn't even see as far as the crooked apple tree by the well. She undressed and slipped into bed. The hushed voices in the room below and the distant rhythmic blowing of the foghorn in the Passage gave her the same warm, safe feeling they had always given her as she drifted off to sleep.

Whatever it was that was said that night, Gertrude was persuaded to let her child wander as she willed in the fog. Father had somehow worked the miracle. Sometimes Gertrude would look so perplexed, so distressed when Greta had finished her stint of housework and was free to go that the girl would come running back to throw her arms around her mother's neck.

“Why, Mother,” she would say, “can't you see the fog is lovely? And I know every stone in the Old Road. I
can't
get lost. Please,
please
don't hate to let me go.”

“Go on, child, go if you must.” Gertrude would even laugh a little at her own vague fears. “It's just that you're so different from what I used to be at your age. We always hated this miserable wet fog. We'd scurry for home at the first sign of it.” It was always the same. They never could understand each other about the fog.

One Saturday morning Greta opened her eyes to see a gray blanket filling the window space. A thick fog, and on a Saturday, too, when there was no school! It was the first really foggy day since the night she had seen the strange house back in the spruces—the first chance she had had to see if she had imagined it all. She hurried through her Saturday work. She thought of every little thing her mother could possibly want done—the usual Saturday errands, the washing up. Her own little room was as tidy as a ship's cabin, her Sunday gloves were washed and hung on the bars over the stove to dry. The collar was pressed on her best dress. Gertrude eyed her sharply.

“I know why you're so light on your feet this morning,” she said shortly. “You're wanting to go off again.”

Greta laughed. Not even her mother's crossness could spoil this day.

“I may go, mayn't I, Mother?” she coaxed. “It's only eleven o'clock, and if I take a sandwich and start now, I can be way over the high pasture before noontime. Please, Mother. I may even find some early berries. At least I'll take a pail.”

Gertrude had been churning. She was pressing the little pats of butter with an acorn stamp. She laid the stamp down and looked at Greta without a word.

“Mother,” the girl said slowly. “Please try just once more to understand.”

Gertrude's “Well?” wasn't encouraging and Greta began hesitantly.

“You—you know the way a spider web looks on foggy days. Strings and strings of the tiniest pearls, all in a lovely pattern. Well, everything else is different, too, when—when once you're inside,” she finished stum blingly.

“Inside?” asked Gertrude sharply. “Inside
what,
I'd like to know?”

“Oh, just inside the fog,” Greta told her. It was no use. She could never get it into words. No one else could see how the fog always seemed to her like a magic wall. You stepped through and walked until your own familiar house was gone. And then, sometime, something strange and wonderful would happen. She was sure of it.

She made her sandwich quickly, and pulled on her old coat and beret.

“Leave the bread tins and the dinner dishes for me, Mother. I'll wash them when I get back,” she said as she opened the door.

“Don't be late,” was her mother's answer. Then, a little more pleasantly, “I'll save a plate of chowder for your tea. You'll like as not be chilled through.”

Greta gave her a loving little squeeze as she slipped out. The day had begun well, and the best part of it lay hidden ahead of her.

“PLEASE let there be a house today on the old cellar hole,” Greta kept saying to herself as she hurried along the Old Road. But how could there be? You could see things, perhaps, in the twilight that were never there at noon. That was it, of course. It was evening when she had gone after Rosie. Nothing like that could happen in the daytime. “
Maybe
there will be!” “There
can't
be.” “
Maybe
there will be.” “There
can't
be.” Back and forth, back and forth the two thoughts went ticking in her mind. Her heart was beginning to thump in time to them.

“I'd better stop and get my breath at the sailors' graves,” she thought. It was a spot where Father often stopped for a moment. Greta had never asked him why. On clear days the village looked its prettiest from there. But Greta thought it was Father's way of paying respect to the shipwrecked sailors who had been washed ashore in the cove years and years ago. Just where the fences met at the corner of the Ezra Knoll, they had buried them. There was nothing to show who they were or where they'd come from—nothing, now, to mark the graves except Father's care that that corner of the hay field was never mowed. Greta leaned on the fence and looked down at the unmowed corner.

“I hope they didn't come from a West Indies port,” she thought. “They'd hate even to be buried here if they loved steady sunshine.”

When she came to the path to Little Cove, Greta drew a long breath and looked over toward the clump of spruces. What she saw set her heart thumping. It was there! Again through the gray mist she could trace the darker outline of a house! For a moment she was tempted to push closer—to explore. Something held her back—and she was always glad that it had. Because the dim shadow of a house there at the fork became, through all the strange months that followed, a sort of magic beacon. When she could see it, she went on. When it wasn't there, she learned to turn back. It was always to be trusted. Disobey its message and there was a long walk, but nothing more. Only when its presence pointed the way was it wise to go full speed ahead.

To avoid temptation, Greta turned quickly into the right hand fork that led to the high pasture. She didn't look back until she came to the burned patch where the berries grew. There, standing in the middle of the road, just where she had stopped a moment before, was the blurred figure of a bent old man. Where had he come from and who was he? No one she knew; she was sure of that, somehow. As she looked down at him, his hand shot up in the friendly gesture that old people in the village always used. Greta took off her beret and waved to him. He seemed satisfied. He moved toward the house and out of sight.

As she climbed on Greta realized suddenly that the words “Old Man Himion” were going over and over in her mind. “Where on earth did I ever hear of ‘Old Man Himion?' ” she asked herself. “Why, of course. It was Old Man Himion who had found the shipwrecked sailors in the cove!” She had heard that name from her grandfather. “And that must be Old Man Himion's house!” she thought. “The very house he had left when he had gone down to the cove on that morning after the big tempest so many years ago.”

“I think I've seen Old Man Himion. And I think I know his house. And this fog is really truly magic,” she sang as she started across the open pasture. The berries were thick and she stopped to pick for a while. Her pail was a good third full when she reached the other side of the open space.

The higher she climbed, the thicker the fog grew. Hurriedly, in great clouds it rolled over the top of the mountain. Then, its hurry spent, it spread out leisurely over the slopes below. Greta had to watch the ground closely to find her way. The rough foundation stones of the Old Road were the only guide. At the upper edge of the pasture the road plunged into the thick spruce woods that covered the top. The trees seemed to hold the gray curtain back. Here the road was like a narrow dim tunnel; gray blanket above, wet green side walls, no sound but the sound of fog dripping from the spruces.

It was so very quiet in the spruces that Greta found herself picking her way cautiously as if she were afraid to turn a stone or make the slightest noise. Once she stopped to listen to the stillness. It was then that she heard the sound of trotting horses! Not the slow plod of oxen that she was used to, not the whir or rattle of a car on the highway, but the sharp rhythmic beat of horses' feet. They were coming toward her! And coming the way she had come! Occasionally she could hear a grating sound as the metal rim of a wheel glanced off a stone. She stepped to the side of the road. Who could possibly be driving on the Old Road? And where had such horses come from? Surely there were none in the village or in the town thirty miles away capable of holding that steady pace up the mountain. Greta was too excited to be frightened. She could only peer down along the dim road she had come and wait. Louder and louder came the clipped “trot, trot!” Around the bend in the road below they came into sight—two smartly groomed horses and a surrey driven by a woman dressed in gorgeous plum colored silk. She was like a picture out of a book. Greta stared in amazement as the carriage came nearer. She hardly realized that the driver had noticed her when the horses were pulled up sharply and expertly swung to the right to cramp the wheels of the surrey.

“Come, come, child!” said a sharp, impatient voice. “Don't stand there dreaming in the fog. Climb in if you're going over the mountain.” Greta climbed in. As she settled into the seat beside the driver, there was a billowing surge and rustle of taffeta, a flick of the whip and the horses were off.

Greta clung to the side of the surrey and stole a glance at her companion. Stiff and straight and elegant she sat, her eyes on the winding road. But at each motion of her arms as she drove there was a swish of costly silk. Greta was conscious of it above the sound of the horses. Who had talked of silk so rich and elegant that it sounded this way? She tried to remember. Oh, now she knew. It was Earl Frosst—the one the children called “The Early Frost.” He had been telling old stories in the kitchen one night when she was doing her home-work. His grandmother had been born on the other side of the mountain in the village of Blue Cove. It had been a rich village once and its women had dressed as few women in that part of the province had dressed. Early had said, “When Blue Cove women came over the mountain, it sounded like a three-master coming up into the wind!” Well, surely this purple taffeta would sound like the sails of a three-master. Greta let a little chuckle escape her. The woman looked down at her sharply.

“Few travel the road to Blue Cove afoot,” she said. “Why are
you
going?”

“I like to walk in the fog,” Greta told her.

“
Walk
in it, yes. But God help the men in boats on a day like this.”

“But, but—as long as they can hear Tollerton blowing, they know where they are.” Greta tried to defend the fog.

“Tollerton? Tollerton?” the woman looked puzzled.

“Yes, Tollerton—the foghorn in the Passage, I mean,” Greta said.

“Well, it's time they had a foghorn in the Passage—with that treacherous current pulling between the Neck and the Islands. But you're talking nonsense, child. I never heard tell of one.”

Greta caught her breath sharply and listened. They were on the side of the mountain toward the open sea and the wind was blowing out of the southwest. Tollerton should have sounded more distinctly here than at home. But
there was no sound of it.
She had passed beyond the reach of Tollerton's warning voice.

The woman was silent. Her driving took all her attention as the road wound down from the level plateau. Greta was too excited to speak. She knew somehow with certainty that when the road swung down toward the sea she would not find the familiar empty beach. She would find instead the once prosperous village of Blue Cove.