Stones (21 page)

“It seems so, well, normal here now. But I won’t miss the place, that’s for sure.”

I stood quietly and looked at the only reminder that the men who had chased Raphaella and me away had been here. The thrown stones, which had been plowed up by Jubal and Hannah after they had cleared the land of trees, lay where they had fallen. I picked one up — it was cool and rough against my skin — and thought about the irony: with the man she loved, Hannah had labored to pull from the ground the instruments of her own murder. It seemed wrong to leave them scattered chaotically around her yard.

“There’s something I want to do before we go,” I said.

“I’ll help.”

“No, I’d rather do this by myself.”

Raphaella nodded, sloughed of her pack and sat down on it, watching me. She smiled.

One by one I gathered the stones and returned them to the wall, arranging them in as orderly a fashion as I could to make the wall the way it had been. It didn’t take long. When I had finished, I took Raphaella by the hand and we walked back through the woods.

The black settlement in Oro Township in the nineteenth century and the African Methodist Church are part of the historical record. However, this remains a work of fiction, and names, characters, incidents and places are either products of my imagination or are used fictitiously.

Thanks are gratefully offered to my three children, Brendan, Megan and Dylan, and to Rachel McMillan and Leanne Dwinnell for reading the manuscript and offering suggestions; to John Pearce for support and guidance; and to Ting-xing Ye for comments, suggestions, love and inspiration.

In doing background research for this novel, I found these books helpful:
Men of Colour
, by David French (Kaste Books, 1978) and
The Oro African Church
by Tim Crawford (Township of Oro–Medonte, 1999).

The persons in my dedication, Irene and William (“Ding”) Bell, are my late parents. They were the model for the three couples at the center of this book.