Windfall by Erika Bolstad

Author:Erika Bolstad
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

THE MYSTERY BABY-MAKING BOULDER OF LIBERTY, ILLINOIS

September 2014

North Dakota crude: $87.66 per barrel

I COULDN’T BEAR ANOTHER LONELY JOURNEY TO NORTH DAKOTA BY myself, so I invited my husband to come along with me on my next road trip. We mapped a 2,000-mile route that would take us along roughly the same path as the Lewis and Clark expedition, across Nebraska and north through the Badlands of both North and South Dakota.

Chris can’t drive, but he’s skilled at finding restaurants and roadside attractions from the passenger seat. There was another consideration: it would be impossible to have a baby if Chris and I spent too much time apart.

As we approached the Mississippi River near Hannibal, Missouri, I asked Chris to poke around on his phone. Find us something quick and fun to do there, I told him. A writer ought to pay homage to Mark Twain, even if it is just to visit the town’s Tom and Huck statue. I also wanted ice cream.

His online search unearthed something even more intriguing than Hannibal.

“There’s the Mystery Baby-Making Boulder about a half an hour away,” he told me.

“Go on,” I said, laughing a little nervously.

Chris read out loud the description found on Roadside America, written thirteen years earlier by a man who said he lived in Liberty, Illinois: “It is a glaciated granite boulder, found in a local farmer’s field, and dragged here as a conversation piece about 50 years ago. I have heard many stories about it—the most interesting is that long ago it was used by the Indians of the area in fertility rituals. Any new bride climbing up and sitting on the stone would become pregnant within a year! I can testify that it has worked for my wife and two other local ladies!”1

“Should we go?” I asked.

“That’s up to you,” Chris said. “You’re driving.”

The mystery boulder beckoned for a few exits. I was bored by the sameness of the day’s drive, which had as its aim to cover as many miles of the Midwest as possible by sundown. We crossed Ohio, Indiana, and much of Illinois, where the only stop Chris could find with any charm was Abe’s South Side diner in Springfield, an Abraham Lincoln–themed restaurant with a gravy-laden menu. Its specialty was the Horseshoe open-faced sandwich, a Springfield invention. The Horseshoe started with two slices of bread as a base, topped with a layer of meat, followed by hash browns, two eggs, and a cascade of sausage gravy. Chris ordered one, of course, if only to honor his own Midwestern roots.

We planned to spend the night in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the drive to Liberty would add at least another forty minutes to a nine-hour day of driving. As we drove, I considered what it meant to stop in Liberty—and not just the additional time on the road. Our journey from Washington, DC, to North Dakota was supposed to give me time to reclaim the story I set out to tell a year before, before the logistics of infertility overtook me.

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