The Crying Rocks Read online

  Carlos is over on one side of the park, the really overgrown side near the swamp. He’s alone, except for a dark, lumpish figure seated at the old barbecue pit across the way. This is Queenie, the town vagrant and free spirit, who camps out there whenever she can get away with it. Her ancient red VW Bug is parked nearby, stuffed with newspapers and old clothes. Out of habit, Joelle gives her a wide berth. She could avoid Carlos, too, but at the last minute she veers over to him.

  “Buenos días, amigo! What are you looking for now?” she asks in a loud voice.

  He whirls around like the last time.

  “Buenos días,” he echoes. After this a silence develops while he shifts his weight nervously. He’s worse in English than Spanish, it seems. Generously, Joelle decides to help him out.

  “So tell me about these Indians who were supposedly around here,” she says, as if she’s never heard of Indians before. Which is laughable. Half the names of places in Rhode Island are Native American. There are statues of important chiefs in the parks and plaques that tell where this treaty was signed or that attack happened. Everyone has studied these first American people, they just don’t think about them that much now.

  “Narragansetts,” Carlos says, bending down again, possibly to avoid looking at her. “They’re interesting.”

  “Why?” Joelle asks.

  “Because their artifacts are still turning up everywhere.”

  “Arrowheads,” Joelle says. “Sounds like constant warfare back then.”

  “They used them to hunt, too,” Carlos says, warming up a little. “The Narragansetts were a great people. They were the largest tribe in New England, but they used their power to keep peace. Back in the woods there’s a place where they used to meet. A high council place. There are trails, too. You can tell they’re old Indian paths because of how deep they’re worn down. It would take hundreds of years of feet to wear down a path like that.”

  Carlos looks to see what Joelle makes of this.

  “Hundreds of years of feet?” she says. “Give me a break.”

  “A thousand years, even. Some artifacts are that old and more. What’s amazing is how their whole culture got wiped out when the white man came. Fifty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, most of the Narragansetts were gone, thirty or forty thousand people who lived right around here.”

  “What happened?” Joelle asks, in spite of herself.

  Carlos stares at her. “Disease, first, then they were killed off. A lot were sold into slavery down in the West Indies. It’s one of those histories people don’t like to remember.”

  “But you do?”

  “I’m part Native American.”

  “Really?”

  Carlos stands up straighter and looks at her defiantly, as if she might have a problem with this. She registers again his gray eyes, his brown hair, his long, thin face.

  “You don’t look—”

  “Just a small part,” Carlos says quickly. “Like about one sixteenth or something. My grandmother never told anybody, but after she died, my father found out from an old birth certificate that her father was part Sioux. From out West, not around here.”

  Suddenly Joelle feels out of her depth. Maybe Carlos’s long root of identity is too much to handle. Also, he’s talking easily now, acting too friendly. Another minute and he might start asking her about herself.

  “Well, I have to go,” she says, moving off. “I’m on a top secret mission, one step ahead of the law.”

  “Somebody’s on your tail again?” Carlos asks, glancing around. He examines the hunched form of Queenie at the barbecue pit with complete seriousness.

  “I was kidding!”

  “Oh.” He looks deflated. “Bye,” he calls, looking after her. He bends down to start artifact hunting again, then abruptly stands.

  “If you ever want to see the council place, let me know. I can show you where it is,” he calls.

  Joelle doesn’t answer. She’s walking away fast, not about to be lured back into conversation. Carlos tries again:

  “Hey! You know, you kind of look like them.”

  “Who?” she yells over her shoulder.

  “The Narragansetts,” Carlos yells. “Check it out in the library. There’s a painting.”

  This is so clearly a last desperate effort for attention that Joelle laughs. She is now sprinting, past Queenie’s red Bug (she sees the old woman’s sharp eyes watch her go by), along the road, toward the grocery store. She pulls out Aunt Mary Louise’s grocery list and reads it between jogs to get herself back on course.

  Hamburger, milk, frozen peas, paper towels. This guy Carlos is a total fruitcake. You could be one-sixteenth anything, raccoon or great white whale, and it wouldn’t mean a thing, she thinks. By one sixteenth there’s almost nothing left of the original. One-sixteenth drop of blood in water probably wouldn’t even show up.

  “I could be one-sixteenth lost royal princess, for Pete’s sake!” Joelle calls angrily to the passing traffic as she runs. “Wait till Michiko hears that! She’ll go bananas!”

  * * *

  Joelle has been with Vernon and Aunt Mary Louise for as long as she can remember, which is over eight years now, she’s been told. From time to time, she’s tried to imagine what it must have been like to live in a wooden crate.

  She’s looked back in her memory and tried to see the kind of crate it might have been. Was it like the big wooden packing case Vernon brought back from the dump to use for storing fertilizer? Or was it smaller, like the cardboard box the new washing machine came in? Their old washer overflowed for the last time and was kicked out the kitchen door. Things that break down get on Vernon’s nerves. He’s not a fixer, Aunt Mary Louise has explained. Some men are and some aren’t, she said, contrary to public notion.

  In her mind Joelle has placed the crate, at times one kind, at times another, beside some tracks near a busy train station. The story goes that the crate was located “near a depot,” which is a kind of small freight station, according to Aunt Mary Louise. She isn’t Joelle’s real aunt, of course. Joelle has no aunts that anyone knows of. She has no uncles or cousins or grandparents, either. She was a lost child. Lost and found by the railroad tracks and then rescued by Vernon and Aunt Mary Louise at the Family Services Center in Badgerville, Connecticut.

  “Can I see it sometime?”

  “What, Family Services? There’s nothing to see. It was an office.”

  “So who found me first?”

  “The police, I suppose.”

  “At the railway depot?”

  “One day in late September. It was getting cool.”

  “What was the old lady’s name who had me?”

  “No word on that. She probably didn’t know herself. Imagine keeping a small child in a box!”

  “Was there a bed in the box? Did I sleep there at night?”

  Joelle used to ask such things, back when she was still dumb enough to think they were important.

  “A bed!” Aunt Mary Louise snorted the way she does whenever something is completely the opposite of what someone thinks. Her cheeks quivered. She’s older than other kids’ mothers. Her hair is gray and her legs are fat. Nests of wormy blue veins bulge out behind her knees.

  “You slept on a pile of greasy rags that wasn’t fit for rats, let alone you,” she told Joelle one time. “And dirt? Whew! The Family Services woman said you were the grimiest little child they ever picked up. You hadn’t had a bath for a year. Can you imagine that? A year!”

  Recently, Joelle has quit asking direct questions about her past. She figures she has more than enough information already. She has eight years’ worth of information, assuming that Aunt Mary Louise is right about when she was adopted. She’s not always exact about facts, Joelle has noticed. This depot Joelle was found in, for instance—sometimes she says it’s outside New Haven and sometimes up near Hartford. Vernon could probably clear this up, but he isn’t a talker and doesn’t like questions.

  It’s annoying enough
to be told the same story over and over. What’s worse is when you can’t depend on the story being right. It’s happened too many times that just as Joelle begins to feel comfortable about her facts, Aunt Mary Louise will change something. She’ll come out with some new detail that messes everything up.

  The pile of greasy rags is a good example. Before Aunt Mary Louise told her about it, Joelle had imagined the crate by the railway depot as being kind of an interesting place. It had a clean wooden floor and a sleeping bag, or at least a few blankets folded in a corner. When she finished looking for cigarette butts, the small child who was Joelle would snuggle down into the sleeping bag. She would look out the door of the box house at the lights of the trains that rumbled by at night. She would nibble on some crackers she kept hidden in a secret hole, and the way Joelle imagined it, she wouldn’t feel too bad.

  Aunt Mary Louise’s sudden addition of the greasy rags upset this notion. They were so disgusting. The mention of rats made Joelle’s skin crawl. She stopped thinking about the box and started concentrating on what might have been happening outside it in the railway depot. It wasn’t easy at first. What did she know about train stations? They went everywhere by car. The only station she’d been in was for the bus one time, to go to Providence, when Vernon’s truck broke down. Then, it seemed she did know things. Her mind loosened up.

  Trains rumbled into the depot. People waiting there hugged one another good-bye, then bent to pick up their suitcases. Engines screeched to a stop, blowing out humid air. The old woman who kept Joelle in the box was impressed by the number of butts Joelle found every day. One time the woman handed over a whole Snickers bar for a reward. A homeless dog came up and watched while Joelle ate it. She shared the last bite with the dog, and they became friends.

  After this, in her imagination, Joelle always had the dog with her when she went out butt hunting. What was her name? Silver Girl or something like that. The dog slept with her at night, too, came inside the box with her because she was a small dog and afraid to be alone.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. Stay with me. We’ll be safe,” Joelle told her.

  The pile of rags was still there, somewhere, but the memory of sleeping with that dog, close up against her hot, furry side, spread over it. Gradually, the rags shrank in importance. The rats disappeared. Joelle took the box back, away from them, and made it the way she wanted.

  3

  A FEW DAYS LATER, AFTER school, Joelle drops by the public library. She has a report to do on the history of the vanilla bean. Don’t ask why. It’s for science. Everybody in class has been assigned an herb or a spice. They’ve been told to research its Latin name, locate the country of origin, trace the trade routes by which said herb or spice was introduced around the world. Joelle was handed vanilla by pure chance. She doesn’t even like it, never orders vanilla ice cream (too boring) and doesn’t bother adding the one teaspoon or whatever that the brownie mix calls for. Nobody knows the difference whether it’s there or not.

  It’s while she is trying to copy, freehand off the computer screen, an image of a vanilla bean living in the wild—a wild vanilla bean, no less—that she remembers what Carlos said in the park a few days before. A painting at the library. Of Narragansett Indians that supposedly look like her. Which can’t be right because, from everything she’s heard, Native Americans were short. On TV they look compact, thick-necked, muscular, the exact opposite of her. Admittedly, this perception comes mostly from old Hollywood movies, but scriptwriters do research, don’t they? They consult old photos?

  Anyway, it’s time for a break, so she gets up from her workstation, stretches, and takes a stroll around.

  She finds the painting almost immediately: a long mural, dark with age, spread across the back wall between the bathrooms. It’s composed of stiffly painted Native American figures busy with various conventional occupations: weaving baskets, harvesting corn, fishing, offering a visiting white man something . . . tobacco leaves? Well, there’s a disease bomb waiting to explode.

  Other scenes include Native American children playing with a dog—did Indians even have dogs back then?—and a woman carrying a papoose on her back. From the forest’s leafy gloom, a group of men is just returning from a hunt with a couple of dead deer slung on their backs. Balancing this scene, four smiling Pilgrim fathers are striding up another path, holding a document that probably has to do with land sales. As everybody knows, Native Americans were tricked by the white man into giving up their territory.

  She yawns. The whole mural is a cliché, something out of a textbook. There’s nothing real about it, and certainly no one who looks like her. Except . . . She steps closer.

  In the mural’s dark background, off to one side where she missed her at first, she sees an Indian girl standing straight and tall as a young tree. Her black hair is plaited in two thick braids that fall below her shoulders. She is holding the hand of another, smaller girl, also wearing braids, half hidden by bushes. With grave expressions, the two are watching the bustling village scene before them, their faces so alike they could be sisters.

  Joelle takes a step closer and stares up. A spark of recognition flashes inside her. There’s something about the two figures she seems to recall. It doesn’t last. Even as she gazes, the figures flatten, become a painted abstraction. Joelle retreats a few steps, looks up again. The girls’ identical faces reform, then flash! That spark again.

  What is going on?

  Whatever it is, Joelle doesn’t like it. A shadowy memory is moving inside her, coming up from some place she never knew existed and doesn’t want to investigate. Time to leave. Yes, it’s late. She should be getting home for supper.

  She turns away and walks fast back to her table. She slips the vanilla bean drawing into a notebook, loads her backpack, and slings it over a shoulder. A minute later she is outside in the crisp October air, striding on her long legs down the sidewalk, leaving the library and its stereotypical Native American scene in the dust. Never has she seen such a fake and stupid painting. There should be a law against allowing dumb pictures like that in a public place, she tells herself.

  * * *

  It’s after 5:30 p.m. when Joelle gets home, and she can see Vernon’s pickup sitting in the driveway. He’s a manager at the big turkey ranch outside of town, in charge of feeding and watering and raking up droppings under the flocks, which live in uncomfortable-looking wire cages hung high over the ground. He puts in a long day, but he’s always back by 5:30 p.m. If he wants to go out, he goes out later, after supper, which is nice of him, respectful of the trouble Aunt Mary Louise goes to to make his dinner every night.

  Nearing the house, however, Joelle hears angry voices. In recent months some bone of contention has risen between them. What it might be, she can’t guess because they never argue main issues. They wrangle over small things that rub them the wrong way.

  “Shut up yourself and take off those boots before you go in my kitchen!” she hears Aunt Mary Louise yell.

  “Get off my back!” Vernon shouts. “You’ve always got some complaint.”

  “You bring the whole turkey ranch back here with you every day. Whew! What a stink! It’s making me sick.”

  “You’re always sick. I’m sick of you being sick!”

  The minute Joelle comes in, they stop. Vernon goes out the back door into the yard with a hangdog look. Aunt Mary Louise tries to smile and asks her how her day went. She doesn’t listen to Joelle’s answer, though. She’s too steamed up to concentrate.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. We’re not really that mad at each other,” she says, doing her best to smooth things over.

  She goes and lies down on the couch, then asks Joelle if she’ll set the table and finish cutting up the green beans for supper, to give her time to get her wits back. Luckily, the rest is cooked and ready—fried chicken, potato salad—because Vernon might get worked up all over again if they don’t eat by six.

  Not that he’d normally get worked up about something
dumb like that. He’s quiet most of the time, soft-spoken and polite. It’s just that when he’s already in a bad mood, the Irish in him comes out. Then everyone has to tiptoe around. Once he threw an iron frying pan out the kitchen window into the backyard. The window was open but there was a screen in it, and the frying pan sailed right through the screen with no trouble at all.

  “You see that high color Vernon’s got? The blood of the Irish runs closer to the surface than in other people, so it comes to a boil quicker,” Aunt Mary Louise told Joelle one time when she was little.

  This was an old wives’ tale, of course, but at the time Joelle was stupid enough to believe it. She’d kept a close watch on Vernon’s color after that. If he looked red, even if it was just from being out in the sun, she’d get nervous. Boiling blood came to be something she worried about. That a human body could explode from getting angry became a scientific fact in her mind, right up there with nuclear bombs and water freezing into ice.

  It was a few years before she saw through to the truth. Now she has more reliable predictors of Vernon’s temper. For instance, when he stops moving, just suddenly stops dead in his tracks and stares at you—when he does that, watch out.

  After supper Vernon gets in the truck and leaves. Aunt Mary Louise goes back to the couch, and Joelle washes up at the sink.

  “Are you feeling tired again?” she asks over the running water. She doesn’t have to raise her voice to be heard since the living room is just through the door of the kitchen. Everything is close together in the house because it’s so small. The ceilings are low. The rooms are stuffed with furniture. Maybe it’s her recent growth spurt—she’s now a full five inches taller than Aunt Mary Louise!—but lately, Joelle has begun to feel cramped in this place, like a dinosaur in a dollhouse.