The Crying Rocks Page 13

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it says.”

  “Well, I have something to ask you about first.”

  “Not now,” Vernon tells her.

  “It’s about Queenie.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the lady who lives in the park and drives around in that red Bug.”

  “Oh, Queenie,” Vernon says. “I guess she finally got ahold of you.”

  “Last night, and she said—”

  “I can bet I know what she said,” Vernon cuts in. “What she’s been waiting to sneak up and say for years. Why she had to come around here, I don’t know. She didn’t want to let go of you and followed us over from New London. At least she left Mary Louise alone, and she better! I told her I’d put the cops on her if she came near us. That’s the only way to get through to her, scare the daylights out of her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Joelle shouts. “I can’t understand one thing you’re saying!”

  “Well, don’t worry, you will,” Vernon replies. At that moment they hear the sound of wheels turning into the driveway. A car door slams shut, and feet start walking up the steps of the porch.

  “Go on, get!” Vernon says, pushing her toward the stairs. “Put on a clean shirt and brush that hair. You want to look like something to them.”

  “Why?” Joelle says, stubborn as she can be.

  “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Queenie told you.”

  “Well, you tell me. I want to hear it from you.”

  Vernon gazes at her a second longer than usual. Then he heaves a kind of desperate sigh, as if he’s throwing in the towel at last.

  “Because they’re your people coming to see you, Joelle. You said you don’t want secrets, and I’m taking it serious. Now go on. I’ve got to let them in the door.”

  She runs up the stairs and tries to see out the window to the driveway, but the porch roof is in the way, so she races into her room to get dressed. By the time she comes out, a chorus of men’s voices is coming up out of the living room: “Hello.” “How ya doing?” “Nice place.” “Where’s the chick house?” “I took the highway.” “Well, I came up Route 2 and crossed on 138.”

  Then another car arrives, more guys come in, and the racket rises another notch. Into this boil of conversation Joelle descends, as nervous as she’s ever been about entering a room. For a few moments nobody notices her standing by the stairs, and she gets a good look at the company. They are who she thought they would be, the tall, dark men she saw crowding around Vernon at the funeral. They’re not in suits anymore. They have on casual clothes that anyone would wear on a Sunday—Levi’s, T-shirts, jogging sneakers. One has boots like Vernon’s. That they’re all related is easy to see, not only because of their black hair and eyes. It’s the way they’re carrying on together—breezy, joking, not afraid to touch.

  “Come on over here, Joelle,” Vernon calls out when he notices her. Before she can even breathe, they’ve turned around and are grinning at her. One of them does a big, fake double take as if he’s never seen her before, and says: “Whoo-eee! How you’ve grown! Who would’ve thought that sad little sprout we knew back then would’ve come out like this?”

  “She’s not done yet, from what I hear,” says another.

  “She’s got Sylvie in her. Look at that pretty complexion,” another declares.

  Then, just when Joelle’s starting to feel her face flame up, a terrible silence descends and no one can think of how to go on. It seems they’ve been putting on a brave show for her. They’re not so sure of themselves after all. Joelle folds her arms across her chest and stares them down.

  Vernon clears his throat. “I guess we all know why we’re getting together today,” he blurts out.

  “I guess so,” somebody murmurs. Others nod, a little sadly now, or thoughtfully. And this is the place where Joelle decides to wade in. Loud and clear, she says:

  “Well, I don’t know! So are you going to fill me in or what?”

  Everybody laughs, except Vernon, who looks as if he’d like to make a swift escape.

  “I guess I’m the one who should start,” he tells Joelle, “because I’m the one that caused Sylvie to have to run off to Chicago. If I hadn’t’ve done what I did, she would’ve stayed right down there at Charlestown and learned to live a quiet life.”

  “Well, she never would’ve done that!” one of the men breaks in.

  “Sylvie was not destined for a quiet life,” another says. “Do you remember how she hitchhiked up to Providence that time . . .”

  “. . . and took a job at a coffeehouse where folks read poetry at night. . . . This was way before you came on the scene, Vern,” a third puts in.

  “At fourteen! She was serving drinks and all. How’d she get hired at that age?”

  “She was tall, that’s how.” (They’re all weighing in now.)

  “She was writing poetry herself! Spirit poems, she called them. She was into her Narragansett Indian heritage. I went up and saw her.”

  “Sylvie was writing poetry on top of everything else?”

  “And reading it to the college kids up there.”

  “Who’d that girl think she was?”

  “Royalty, that’s who. Ready to lead a nation. She took that old Narragansett story Ma told us seriously.”

  “I heard people say she wasn’t that bad. At poetry, I mean.”

  “Until they found out how old she really was, I’ll bet.”

  “I was in Chicago then, working my first yard job. What happened?”

  “Well, the public school caught up with her that time . . .”

  “And she pulls out her little pocketknife . . .”

  “She was a wildcat.”

  “She’d never hurt anybody, though.”

  “The school, you say?”

  “She was dragged home again, for the tenth time. Ma was having a fit!”

  It’s in this way, with everybody jumping on board and cutting each other off and disputing the facts, that Joelle finally meets her mother, Sylvie, and Sylvie’s older brothers, her uncles. All five of them are there in her living room. Not that anybody takes time to introduce himself. Only by listening does Joelle begin to understand: They’ve been nearby the whole time, knowing her, watching her, knowing her mother, and not saying a word to her about it.

  “But why . . . ?” she tries to ask, and her question gets drowned out.

  Jodie and Jerry, the twins, are oldest and the only ones who still work for the railroad—where they all worked, with Vernon, at one time, it seems. Then comes Roger, the tallest at about six three, who’s now at the turkey farm with Vernon. After him is Frank, in the Rhode Island Highway Department. Everyone calls him Franko. And finally, Greg, wearing his hair long and braided like an old-time Indian because, it turns out, he’s a guide at the Pequot Museum over in Connecticut, knows his history inside and out.

  “He used to look normal,” Uncle Jodie says, rolling his eyes at Joelle, “when he worked in the freight yard up in Worcester. That was around the time you came through on the CSX line, and we had to transfer you over for New London.”

  “Me?” says Joelle.

  “Sure, don’t you remember your ride across the country?” Uncle Greg asks.

  “Well, I—”

  “Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the whole way from a brown paper bag? You didn’t half get through them. The leftovers were stiff as a board by the time you hit Worcester.”

  “I think I—”

  “And a couple of screw-top jars full of water. Jerry met you in Cleveland—he was the yard conductor there—and climbed on till Buffalo. Then Jodie came on and brought you down to meet me in Worcester. He was in shipping, like Franko here. They had you fixed up in a special car that was carrying new parts for a nuclear sub down in New London. Good suspension, remember that, Jodie?”

  “Sure do. Better than the paying passengers were getting coming
in on the New England Central. You got a fast ride, too, because New London was in a hurry to take delivery for its sub.”

  “But—”

  “You were five years old,” Uncle Greg says. “Never cried a single drop. A real trooper after all you’d been through.”

  “What—”

  “Can’t you remember anything? That’s how you came from Chicago!”

  15

  NOT UNTIL AFTERNOON DOES JOELLE start to discern the amazing scope of her story, which has lain just over the horizon all this time, waiting to be discovered. The way it comes at her in bits and pieces, she has to fight to put everything together.

  To begin with, Vernon never does tell what he did. Joelle sees it in his face, though: He was caught by love. One night, two nights, however many it was, Sylvie came away with something from him she didn’t want. Her big brother Roger had brought Vernon home from the station at Westerly for dinner one evening, and that was that. They fell for each other.

  “We don’t blame Vernon,” Uncle Greg says.

  “If you could’ve seen Sylvie in those days, she was one fast item,” Uncle Jerry concurs. “Mad at the world for who she was and who she wasn’t. Nobody was telling her what to do.”

  “Vern was the one needed protection,” Uncle Jodie declares.

  “Where was Aunt Mary Louise?” Joelle asks.

  “At the chicken-packaging plant,” Vernon answers glumly. “We were just meeting up. No, that’s not true, we were together.” He lowers his head in shame. “Not married yet, but together, the same as being married. I lost my head with Sylvie. For about one week, that’s all it took.”

  “So then what?”

  Then, Vernon recounts, Sylvie went off, not telling anybody anything. Disappeared. She was twenty-two by then, long out of high school, working in an office and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. For a while she was just gone, and nobody heard from her at all. Then a note came from Chicago saying that she’d landed there.

  “A few months later comes another postcard announcing that she’s had a baby,” Franko says, shaking his head. “Ma could’ve died. She said, ‘Now my girl’s started making a mess of her life. She’s not even married!’ Of course, what we didn’t know then was that the family tradition had got carried on and she’d had twins.”

  “Twins!” Joelle says. “Well, that wasn’t me.”

  Franko looks at her.

  “So Ma decides to go and visit her,” Roger continues. “I was living at home still, commuting up to the Providence station for yard work. That’s when you and Jodie and me started going to the ball games in Pawtucket, remember, Vern?”

  Sitting beside him, Vernon nods. “Roger and me were pals from way back, in school,” he tells Joelle. “He helped me get my first job on the railroad.”

  “Just like Vern helped me land the turkey-ranch job I’ve got now,” Roger says. “Anybody who tried to pull the old ‘Where’s your tomahawk, Squanto?’ stuff, Vern would knock his block off. He never prejudged anybody, back then the same as now.”

  The living room has emptied out a bit. Uncles Greg and Jerry have taken a break. They’re out looking at the chicks. This story has been going on all through the cold cuts and sodas of a late lunch and now is into midafternoon, when people have got to get out and stretch.

  “Anyway, I had Ma all set up with a discount first-class sleeper ticket that would’ve taken her down to New York and then to Chicago,” Roger goes on. “I was proud of handing her that ticket. But at the last minute she gets sick and can’t go.”

  “That was the start of her heart troubles,” Uncle Franko says.

  “And then nobody goes,” Vernon says with a groan. “If somebody had just gone out there, we might’ve known what was what.”

  “It’s not as if Sylvie asked for company,” Roger says. “She knew whose those babies were. She could’ve asked for help if she needed it.”

  “I should’ve gone,” Vernon moans. “I let her go, is what I did. I just never even thought . . .”

  “He just never even thought those babies were his!” Roger turns to tell Joelle. “We didn’t know either, not even Ma. See, Sylvie was a proud one. She didn’t want to be caught pregnant by somebody she hadn’t planned on, especially someone who’s, you know . . .” Roger looks over apologetically at Vern.

  “White,” Vernon supplies. “Might as well say it,” he declares. “I wasn’t up to her standards.”

  They all fall silent for a minute to delicately acknowledge this truth. From outside in the yard, Joelle hears voices, laughter. The shed contingent is making its way back from viewing the chicks.

  “Anyway, three years go by . . . ,” Jodie starts up again.

  “I finally persuade your Aunt Mary Louise to marry me,” Vernon tells Joelle.

  “Yeah. From Sylvie, we get telephone calls, a couple of letters,” Roger says. “We find out she’s got two babies up there, not just one. Ma thinks Sylvie’s thinking of going to college, or maybe even is going; but, of course, Sylvie being Sylvie, we don’t know for sure. She never wanted to let anyone in on her business. It would’ve been like her to try to pull off a stunt like that. Go to a fancy, white college with a couple of babies on her hands, and working, and by herself.”

  “You think she was by herself? A girl who looked like that?” Jerry asks. He’s just coming in through the kitchen with Greg.

  “She would if she was smart,” Franko says. “She had enough babies to take care of without some big lug hanging around. No offense, Vern.”

  Vern flashes an all clear with his hand.

  “And smart is one thing you’ve got to give her,” Franko goes on. “Did you know,” he adds, turning to Joelle on the couch, “that Sylvie was ranked number one at her high school? Head of the class her graduating year. An Indian girl. Made people sit up and take note, I can tell you.”

  “And that was after she’d been absent for most of the whole year before, when she took off and went down to Florida with Queenie,” Jerry says.

  “What?” exclaims Joelle. “What did Queenie have to do with Sylvie?”

  “Queenie’s her aunt,” Franko says.

  “Your great-aunt,” Jodie adds.

  “Well, our aunt too,” Jerry has to admit. He’s just drawn up a chair. “She’s Ma’s crazy sister who came up from Barbados thirty years ago. And never recovered, I guess. Kings and queens on the brain. That’s why they call her that. Her real name is Florence.”

  “She’s got a grand sense of herself, all right,” Franko says. “I’m beginning to think it runs in the women of this family. I hope you didn’t catch it,” he adds, winking at Joelle.

  “Well, as to kings and queens, even Ma did say—” Roger begins.

  “Hush up with that nonsense,” Jerry cuts in. He glances at Joelle. “Don’t put it in her head. We’re no more related to the royal Narragansetts than the queen of England. It’s been three centuries, folks.”

  To Joelle, he says: “Ma grew up down there in Barbados. The way the story is, her family’s the offspring of Narragansett Indians who were sold out of Boston after losing to the English in the seventeenth century. When Ma came here to Rhode Island as a kid, she met up with our dad, who’s got Narragansett heritage from way back.”

  “Or had it,” Franko says. “He’s been dead awhile. He was proud of his blood. And he was a good railroad man. Showed us the way.”

  All five brothers sit quietly for a minute, gazing into one another’s faces and remembering their father.

  “Well, what happened next?” Joelle asks impatiently. “Did you ever find out if Sylvie got through college in Chicago? There’s another thing, too—when did I get born?”

  Now there’s a big silence, a different kind from the first embarrassed one that morning when they were all just meeting and no one knew what to say. This is a silence, Joelle detects, made out of everyone knowing exactly what to say and no one wanting to say it.

  Greg is sitting closest to Joelle on the couch. He reach
es over and touches her softly on the arm.

  “You’ve been born, Joelle. Didn’t you understand that?”

  “How could I have been born?” Joelle replies. “So far, she’s just had Vernon’s twins. What were they, by the way, girls or boys? You haven’t said yet.”

  Vernon takes a swallow of the Coke he’s drinking.

  “Girls,” he says, gazing at the carpet. All the uncles keep quiet.

  “Well, what were their names?”

  “She called one Sylvia, after her, and the other was Sissie. I never knew the names until later, you understand, after the accident.” Vernon sounds weak, as if he’s run out of breathing power.

  Joelle is about to yell What accident? when her mind does a little loop around Sylvia and Sissie, and she stops. She knows who they are. They are her being born, right there in front of her eyes.

  “I’m already here, aren’t I?” she asks Uncle Jerry, sitting across from her, just to make sure.

  He nods.

  “Well, which one am I?”

  “Sissie,” he says. “Sylvia was the second one, born too small.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she’s got things missing,” Vernon jumps in to say. “So she’s slow. She’s the slow one who wouldn’t grow. We only found this out later.”

  Uncle Jodie is nodding. “Now we know what our sister Sylvie was up against. Not only trying to make her way on an uphill road she’s determined to take, stubborn as she is, not only dealing with two little children all by herself, but one of them is handicapped. With problems we don’t even know. Not only that, the child gets sick as she gets older. This little girl begins to get real sick.”

  “And Sylvie doesn’t want to leave her with strangers,” Uncle Franko says. “You can guess she wouldn’t want that, being who she is.”

  “Sylvie was in trouble,” Uncle Jerry says with a nod. “We know that now, thinking back to what she wrote in her letters.”

  “The problem was, we weren’t paying attention,” Uncle Jodie says. “Ma was ailing and . . .”

  “And then Ma dies,” Uncle Roger takes over, with a sigh. “I was still living with her. Vern and I had moved over to working on the turkey ranch. So Sylvie comes home for the funeral, bringing you and Sylvia, age about what? Three?” He looks around at the others for confirmation.