Augenbraun - Toadstone

Susan Augenbraun

Toadstone

In the predawn light, Jack heard the landscape rather than saw it. His steps squelched and splashed in the mud. The plants along the banks whispered with the wind. Out on the lake, someone called out, and there was the sound of oars dipped into water. Jack waited, still and silent until he was sure the fishermen and the boat had moved on.

This morning, he would be missed from the kitchen, where his mother served him and Elias their breakfast before they trudged to work. It had become more and more difficult to sit there and eat quietly as his brother grew less able to do the same. Three days before, Elias’s shaking hands had thrown the spoon into his lap. Looking down at it, he wore a look of such pain and frustration that it seemed he might weep.

Jack had looked away, embarrassed. Elias was always the bigger, stronger one. He’d thrown punches. When they were children, he fought off the boys that teased Jack for being odd and quiet. But like the other children, he thought Jack strange for running out to the lake instead of participating in the usual games.

And now, at age seventeen, Jack was at the water’s edge once again. This time, he was looking for the one thing he desperately hoped might help.

He crouched low and stayed still, hoping that if he was quiet for long enough, the life of the shore would continue around him. It had worked that way before, when he was a child. He’d been scolded for muddy clothes then, and he would be again today. He was meant to be working in the hat factory like an adult, like Elias, not fleeing to the wilds.

As he thought of what his mother would say, he fingered the toadstone in his pocket and smiled ruefully at the ground.

Elias was an old man at twenty-one while he, Jack, was protected.

He had to find another.

He had been a child when he found the stone, half-buried underwater, and knew it immediately for something special.

He loved the round, beautiful, sludge-colored marble at once. He took it home and worried at it in his pocket, stuck it in his mouth and sucked on it. He kept it beneath his pillow at night, and hid it from Elias as a precious secret. Years later, in a little-read book pulled from a dusty shelf, he found the word toadstone. He learned of a jewel removed from the forehead of a frog, with the power to detect and repel poison.

Elias had by then already left school for the factory. There he boiled and dyed felt, bathing it in a solution of mercury nitrate. Further down the assembly-line, other boys and men shaped the felt around head-sized molds, trimmed the results into the style of the moment.

Many of them got the shakes before they were twenty-five.

On the lakeshore, dawn was breaking somewhere beyond the trees. Under the paling sky, Jack could better see the task before him. He abandoned any idea of keeping his clothes safe from dirt and knelt down on hands and knees. Beneath his fingers, the ground felt soft, accepting. The water was cold, but he ignored it, and, after a few minutes, no longer felt it.

The mud was mostly smooth and silty, uninterrupted by stones. It was one reason he’d been surprised, so many years ago, to close his small hand around the cool hard object. He knew his was the place where he’d found the toadstone. There must be another. There had to be another.

At thirteen, Jack had gone to work himself, in the same hat factory that was the lifeblood of the town, the source of money and employment. He was assigned to a machine that pressed wool into felt. The workroom was close and steamy, and the mercury solution plumed, gaseous, into the air. Jack rolled the toadstone about with his tongue as he worked, or tucked it into a buttoned breast pocket.

One of the men who worked across from him had to be guided to his place each morning by a fellow factory hand. His arms and legs shook so badly that he could barely hold his tools. He had a quick temper and snapped at everyone, even the foreman. The other boys said that he had once been different—said that anger, too, was part of the poisoning.

They never used that word, but they all knew that they were doomed by the chemicals they worked with.

The man couldn’t have been much over thirty, but he seemed ancient.

This was what waited for them all. The shakes, the rages, old age coming too quickly.

On hands and knees in the wet dirt, Jack grabbed at something in the water. But when he lifted it to examine it, he found only an ordinary stone. He hurled it into the reeds and crawled forward, sending ripples over the still surface. He could see well now. Morning was on its way.

At this hour, he was expected to help Elias with his coat and shoes and to walk with him down to the factory. Elias had adopted an old man’s shuffle to steady his spasming legs, and it took time to make it all the way to work. Without his brother to care for, Jack would have bounded ahead, and Elias knew it.

One morning he caught at Jack’s sleeve, surprising strength coming from his frail body.

“How are you doing it?” he demanded. When Jack, confused, couldn’t answer, he hissed. “You’re well. How?”

When Elias began again to tremble, Jack understood. He pulled the toadstone from his pocket and showed his brother.

His pants were soaked through: muddy, uncomfortable, and cold. The sun was rising in earnest, and he felt instinctively that it would be useless to search much longer. Wild places did not give up their secrets by day. He could give up for now, try again tomorrow—but it would be one more day for Elias to grow worse, for the shakes and the anger to grip him more tightly.

Jack heard a splash and a wet plop behind him. Still on hands and knees, he turned.

There, in the water, sat a massive frog. Its skin glistened a cloudy aquamarine, a color Jack had never seen before. It watched him with yellow eyes. And in the center of its forehead, like a crown jewel, the answer to his brother’s sorrow.

The sunlight hit the frog, and a beam of light seemed to come from the toadstone. Jack shielded his eyes.

“Please,” he whispered.

They were mere feet from each other, but Jack knew he had no chance of lunging forward and capturing the thing. He could only convince it, somehow, to give the stone of its own accord.

“I’m trying to save my brother,” he said, louder.

The frog held his eyes for a long moment, and Jack saw a frightening intelligence. The frog croaked once. It was a sound like a pebble dropping to the bottom of a deep well.

Jack heard his answer clearly.

“But I need it,” he said. “Or—not yours—is there another? You can help me find—I only need—” He tripped over his words, pleading, and suddenly saw himself as though from afar. Dirty, soaked and shivering, talking to a frog. It was comical. He sat back on his legs and looked down at the mud.

The frog croaked again, a sound like a burnt-out log snapping in a fire.

Jack raised his eyes, saw the brown, gleaming stone the toad held between its eyes.

He understood.

There would only be one, even if there were two of them.

In the space of a second, visions hung before him: a brilliant political career, wealth and fame, exotic travel. Jack was meant for something more. He would get out of this town, where the only jobs were in the factories that killed you. And until he could leave, he would be protected.

But then he thought of his brother, wasting away, quaking and irritable. Left behind.

He lunged at the frog.

As it leapt away, he felt that he almost had it, that it slipped through his fingers even as he touched its cold magic. A heat burned his hands where he brushed the wet-leather amphibian skin. Stifling a cry of pain, he plunged his hands into the water. The frog had disappeared.

Jack stood, clutching his hand, but remained ankle-deep in the water for some long minutes. The breeze chilled him where it caressed his wet clothes, and the sun, so brilliant moments earlier, was obscured behind a cloud.

He’d heard something else in the frog’s croak, seen it in the gleam of the jewel.

The stone was meant for him, and if he gave it up he could not expect it back.

He pulled the stone from his pocket and held it up, examining, weighing it in his palm. In a palm striped with pain, but which he could hold steady.

He ran from the shore and down the road, out of breath by the time he caught up with Elias. They were nearly at the factory gates. Elias looked at Jack’s ruined clothes and red, winded face and stopped walking, but said nothing. Jack saw him trembling.

“Here.” Jack shoved a fist at his brother. When Elias held out his hand, Jack dropped the toadstone into it.

“Keep it on you all the time. In your pocket, or have it set into a piece of jewelry, just don’t lose it. Especially when you’re here in the workroom.”

Elias stared at the stone he held. Slowly, so slowly that it was almost impossible to notice, his tremors lessened. He looked up at Jack.

“Are you—”

Before he could doubt—before he could change his mind, turn selfish, snatch back the precious jewel that kept him safe—Jack cut his brother off. “Come, we’ll be late.” He took Elias by the arm and marched him through the gates, too quickly absorbed into the throng of workers to keep talking.

They parted ways for their respective workrooms, and Jack felt different. A weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but a new one was pressing in through the air.