The Crying Rocks Page 6

  Even after being married all these years to Vernon, who thinks all religions are frauds that prey on human weakness—”Oh, they pray, all right. They prey and prey,” he says—Aunt Mary Louise has kept up a private belief. She doesn’t attend church anymore, but her faith shows in little remarks like this one about hellfire. Heaven and Hell are real places to her. Angels exist. You can believe in God without necessarily doing anything about it, she told Joelle. God looks down and watches over you. He knows who you are from what you keep in your heart.

  “Does He know where you came from, too?” Joelle asked, back when she was little. “Does He remember, even if you don’t remember yourself?”

  “Well, of course,” Aunt Mary Louise had said. “That’s one of His main jobs. Things get mixed up down here on Earth, as you know. People get lost. Up there it’s all straightened out.”

  “You mean, I’ll meet my Chicago mother up in Heaven?”

  “You will, I’m sure. And I hope she’ll be the better for it.”

  These days Joelle doesn’t believe in Heaven as a real place anymore. The idea of a large, saintly person hanging around in the sky, looking down on her, strikes her as silly. Still, she often has a feeling that she’s part of some larger story, that unseen eyes are upon her, watching what she does. They are accepting eyes, not the critical ones she meets in the halls at school, and they do seem to look from another world, a place mysteriously hidden from her view.

  “Did you know there are giant cliffs near here where you can look out for miles, even into Connecticut?” she asks Aunt Mary Louise when she gets home from doing the errands that afternoon. Aunt Mary Louise is lying on the couch as usual, but she doesn’t look too bad. “I just wondered if you knew, since you’ve lived around here for so long.”

  “Cliffs?” Aunt Mary Louise says. “Could be. I never walked back up there much.”

  “Did you ever hear of some Indian place called the Crying Rocks?”

  “No. I heard of something like it, though. Wailing Bog, I think it is. Down in South Kingstown or somewhere.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Hmm. If I recall, the story is that when folks pass by there, they hear some poor Indian mother wailing for her children, who she abandoned after her husband ran off. This was a while back, a couple hundred years ago. There are a bunch of stories around like that, but there’s nothing to them. A flock of wailing geese is what it probably is.”

  “Why did the woman abandon her children?”

  “Who knows? One story is, the father was a white man.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if he was white, she, being Indian, would have been cast out by her tribe for being with him. Mixing blood brought shame back then. I guess some people still think it does. Anyhow, when the white man left, the woman was caught stranded. Nobody would take her in from one side or the other, and her kids were destined to be outcasts too. So she left them in the bog.”

  “To die? Why didn’t she just go somewhere else with them?”

  “I guess there wasn’t anywhere else to go.”

  “It sounds completely crazy to me. Who would do that to their children?”

  “It’s only a story, Joelle. Don’t get yourself upset.”

  “I’m not upset! It just sounds dumb!”

  “Well, that’s right, it is. And if you went to Wailing Bog, you’d see that it’s probably not even true. No Indian mother is wailing for anything over there. What you’ve got is a lot of honkers floating around the marsh, the same as they’ve been doing for a thousand years.”

  Aunt Mary Louise rolls over and turns her back to Joelle, signifying that this is the end of the discussion. Joelle lets her rest for a while. Too much conversation seems to exhaust her these days. Finally, she has to go and whisper to her, though.

  “Shouldn’t we be doing something about dinner?”

  “Oh, Lord!” Aunt Mary Louise groans. “Is it that time already?”

  “I’ll do it, if you tell me what to do.”

  “No, no. I’m fine!”

  She gets up slowly and lumbers upstairs to wash her face and comb her hair. It’s amazing to Joelle that, old as she is, she still cares what she looks like. Every evening Aunt Mary Louise puts on lipstick and little dots of cheek rouge. She stands in front of her bedroom mirror on tiptoes (Joelle has watched her) and takes a turn to make sure her slip isn’t showing. By the time Vernon arrives, she’ll be in the kitchen cooking, bright and ready to be seen. Not that he notices. Like a robot, he goes to sit on the couch in front of the TV. Or he disappears outside. It’s sad how he takes her for granted, Joelle thinks, and how Aunt Mary Louise pretends not to care but goes on giving him sweet smiles and chatting up a storm. This is on a good day, of course, when they aren’t having one of their fights.

  Today, when Aunt Mary Louise has finished pulling herself together, she comes down with a determined expression on her face and they set to work in the kitchen. They are well along on Swedish meatballs when they hear Vernon’s pickup pull in. Next, instead of the front door opening, they hear the scraping sound of his tailgate going down. Joelle looks out in time to see him take out a cardboard box and carry it around the house to the backyard.

  A minute later he’s returned for another box and, after that, a third and fourth. Aunt Mary Louise has shut off the stove by now, and they both watch.

  “I know what it is. It’s the fertile eggs,” she says at last. “You know, for the chicks. He must have got the heater working out in that new shed.”

  “What heater?”

  “To keep the eggs warm until they hatch. I guess he’s going to do what he said. Be a hatchery for the chicken farms.”

  Over an hour passes before Vernon comes in, via the back door, in his socks. He’s taken off his boots and left them outside, an unusual courtesy toward Aunt Mary Louise’s floors.

  “Well, I got ‘em!” he announces, looking straight at her.

  “So we see.”

  “Real good eggs. Disease free.”

  “I should hope so,” Aunt Mary Louise says.

  “I’m starting up,” Vernon goes on. He hasn’t talked this much in a month. “Three weeks and I’ll have my first batch. It’s all set out there.”

  “Wonderful!” says Aunt Mary Louise. “Shall we celebrate? We could go out to eat if you want. I could put these—”

  “Nah, it’s nothing. Just a beginning.” Vernon waves a dismissive hand. He gets a beer out of the fridge and leans up against the sink.

  “If this works, your Aunt Mary Louise won’t need a sit-down job or any other kind,” he tells Joelle. “She can go on resting up forever if she wants.”

  “Forever! I’m no freeloader,” Aunt Mary Louise protests, but in a pleased voice.

  “Freeloader!” exclaims Vernon, keeping his eyes on Joelle. “She was never one of them. She worked her whole life. She could’ve run that entire chicken plant single-handed if they’d let her. They demoted her back to gutting, you know, for having too many good ideas.”

  “Oh, hush, they did not.” Aunt Mary Louise lifts a pot lid and peers in. “Anyway, that’s ancient history.”

  “It is not, it’s current history. They said she couldn’t go into managing without a high school diploma. That’s what’s ruining her health,” Vernon continues to Joelle, as if Aunt Mary Louise weren’t even there. “She sits around here all day, dwelling on the past.”

  “I do not!” Aunt Mary Louise says. “I certainly do not bother myself with the past. I put my mind on happier things.”

  “Books,” Vernon says disparagingly. “Read, read, read.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Aunt Mary Louise asks, turning up the gas under the meatballs. She swings around to confront Vernon with challenging eyes. Her cheeks are bright pink from cooking, and she looks almost pretty. Vernon stares at her in surprise for a moment, then backs off into the living room.

  “Did I say anything was wrong with it?” he throws over his shoulder.

 
; Aunt Mary Louise gives Joelle a grin and raises her eyebrows.

  When dinner is ready, they all sit down as usual. Vernon reverts to his silent self while Joelle and Aunt Mary Louise carry the conversation.

  “Did you really get demoted?” Joelle asks. She hadn’t heard that before.

  “Long ago, long ago,” she answers. “I haven’t always gotten what I wanted in this world. But I have enough,” she adds, her eyes proudly on Joelle.

  “I’m doing my best, so don’t push it,” Joelle warns her, half kidding, but half not.

  “Don’t have to,” Aunt Mary Louise replies. “I don’t know where you could’ve got it from, but you came ready-built with all the push you need.”

  After supper Vernon can’t contain himself and has to go out and look at the eggs again.

  “Want to take a look?” he asks Aunt Mary Louise eagerly.

  “No, thank you. My legs are acting up.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s no distance out there.” He’s hurt.

  “No, thank you!” Aunt Mary Louise declares. “Ask Joelle.”

  “Want to look?” he asks her.

  “Sure,” she says, and goes with him. He’s like a little kid desperate to show off a new toy.

  The shed is at the far side of the yard. Vernon gets a key out of his pocket and unlocks a padlock on the door. Inside it’s bright and warm. The clean smell of new lumber fills the room.

  “See?” he says, pointing. Laid out on several long tables are rows of white eggs, neatly arranged under strips of low lighting.

  “Nice,” Joelle says. “Come Easter, we can have a regular egg-dying party out here.”

  “Oh, no.” Vernon shakes his head seriously. “These eggs are fertile. They’re worth a mint. See that lock on the door? No foxes in here, not the two-legged or the four-legged kind.”

  “I’ll pass the word,” Joelle says, grinning. Vernon nods, pleased as can be. He walks around a table and stops on the other side, gazing down with satisfaction.

  “Where did you get them?” she asks, more to keep the conversation going than anything.

  “The eggs? A place over yonder. They come from good hens,” Vernon says. “Don’t worry, they’re disease free. I made sure.”

  “How did you do that?” Actually, she’s kind of curious to know.

  “I checked real good,” Vernon says. “I drove over there and looked at the hens they come from, how they live, what they eat. I’m careful that way. Nobody’s going to give me any bad eggs without me knowing.”

  He looks across at her with a fierceness that, as their eyes meet, suddenly gives way to something softer, almost fatherly. Joelle stares at him. It’s so unusual for Vernon to show his feelings.

  “I know about you, too,” he adds abruptly. “I bet you never guessed that.”

  “Know what?”

  “Mary Louise is right. You come from good stock. Don’t listen to anybody that tries to tell you different.”

  “What stock?” Joelle says.

  “Nevermind. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is.” He comes around the table and makes for the door. Joelle follows him out, watches him put the padlock in place and lock up. They start walking back toward the house.

  “When did you find this out about me?” she asks him.

  “Before we brought you home.”

  “What did you do, drive to Chicago or something?”

  “Chicago. Ha!”

  “But didn’t I come from there?”

  Vernon looks over at her. “All I’m saying is, you’re okay, you can hold up your head with anyone. I didn’t even mean to tell that much. Those eggs got me into it. Don’t ask me anymore, and don’t go asking Mary Louise. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “But—”

  “No more, I said!” Vernon strides ahead across the yard. He disappears into the house, letting the kitchen door slam behind him.

  This conversation has a strange effect on Joelle. Afterward, for several days, she finds herself divided in two. Half of her understands clearly what Vernon said and feels an urgent desire to get to the bottom of it. If not Chicago, where is she from?

  The other half is vague and lazy and can’t be bothered to take action. Even odder, whenever the clear half starts to get up steam to do something, the lazy half shuts it down. It has the final say, apparently, and Joelle can lie for a whole afternoon on her bed reading or sleeping, keeping herself vague. Why does she need to know more, anyway? the vague half asks. Chicago is deep in her bones. It’s one of the main facts she’s always depended on, a name she’s attached herself to, and not only that, she’s imagined living there.

  She knows what the tall buildings of her apartment house looked like. She’s seen Chicago on TV, maybe even those same buildings. They’re the kind with layers of little porches going up the outside, a porch for each apartment, one on top of the other. On the inside, elevators take you up twenty, thirty, forty floors to wherever you live. She’s made the trip up in her mind more than a few times, as she probably did in real life back when she was three years old or whatever. These imagined trips are so clear that perhaps something in her really is remembering.

  She may have been young, but she knew how to get around. She could work the elevator buttons. From some corner of her forgetfulness, the button marked “3” always looms up, and she stands on tiptoes and presses it. Then, whoosh, the elevator rises, stops, she gets out and turns right, toward the door at the end of the hall.

  After this things become foggy. She has never actually gone through the door into the apartment beyond. Just as dreams have places in them where the dreamer is repeatedly stopped, Joelle has never been able to imaginatively cross this threshold. What is inside? She has no idea. No feelings about it either, good or bad. Whatever memories were there have been erased. The territory is a blank—terra incognita, as the early explorers’ maps say about land that had yet to be discovered. America, for instance.

  Joelle’s lazy side is persuasive, but as the week goes by it begins to loosen its grip. Curiosity, biding its time on the borders of her mind, finally wins out. After dinner one night she finds herself accosting Aunt Mary Louise, though she feels a deep sense of uneasiness about it.

  “Vernon thinks I didn’t come from Chicago,” she says while Vernon is out tending his eggs.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. Of course you came from Chicago. Maybe not way back, whoever your people were, but you were born there,” Aunt Mary Louise declares with some heat.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s written down.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere.”

  “Well, where? I want to see it.”

  “I don’t know, Joelle! Anyway, the Family Services lady told us. Vernon was there. He heard it too.”

  “Then, why would he say that?”

  “Don’t ask me. He’s acting crazy lately.”

  “So it’s for sure? I came from Chicago?” Joelle feels the lazy side stretch and swell again.

  “It’s as sure as I’m sitting here on this couch. You rode on a freight train. That’s how you got to the depot where the lady kept you in a box. A story like that doesn’t come out of nowhere. Who would think up such a thing if it weren’t true?”

  “I don’t know. No one, I guess,” Joelle says sleepily, lazily.

  “Well, there you are.”

  8

  THE WEATHER TURNS COLD. IN the mornings Michiko waits for Joelle in a hand-me-down snow jacket, limp from a hundred washings, and rubber boots whose toes have cracked and collapsed. She wears grubby wool mittens and no hat. Her breath smokes when she breathes. Joelle tries to get out there fast so she won’t freeze to death.

  “You don’t have to wait for me every day, you know!”

  “I know,” Michiko says through icy lips. She is the least complaining of children. Although they’ve never spoken about it, Joelle knows her family is often hard up. Her father ha
s problems holding down a job and lately seems to have disappeared completely. Now Mrs. Martin, a tiny Japanese woman who never smiles, works at the dry cleaner’s. There are several older kids who do after-school jobs around town. Last spring, when Aunt Mary Louise heard through the grapevine that the Martins were going through a bad spell, she packed up a basket with a twenty-pound turkey from Vernon’s ranch all cooked and stuffed. This was how Michiko first fixed her attention on Joelle, who helped carry the turkey into their house.

  “If it’s cold or snowing or something, you should just go ahead. I’m not always ready,” Joelle tells Michiko now, on the sidewalk.

  “I like to wait,” she says.

  “Where’s your hat? It’s freezing today.”

  “I forgot it.”

  Something has happened to Michiko’s hair. It’s been gathered into two strange clumps that stick out unevenly from either side of her head. Joelle takes a minute to figure it out, then she sees: They’re braids.

  “Did you do those yourself?”

  “Yes. But they didn’t come out too well. I wanted them to look like yours.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “Everybody has them! You’ll see! Penny’s mother did everybody’s hair yesterday.”

  “Except for yours?”

  “No, because I wasn’t invited,” Michiko admits.

  “Why not?”

  “Sometimes Penny doesn’t invite me. You have to wait for her to tell you if you can come. She can cut people out if she wants.”

  “Who else gets cut out?”

  “Well, just me, usually.”

  “Why would she want to cut you out?”

  Michiko shrugs. She blinks her fine-rimmed Asian eyes fast and glances off to one side. “She said I don’t look right,” she answers softly.

  Joelle sighs. “I think Penny is a rat.”

  “No, she’s not. She just thinks everyone in the group should look like a princess. If someone doesn’t, it’s ruined for everybody.”