The Crying Rocks

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Hey, look over here!”

  “Can’t you even speak English?”

  “Where’s your tiara? Did you leave your jewels at home?”

  Michiko has long been banned from their meetings.

  On the telephone Carlos is apparently trying to decide whether he’ll come out or not. “Well . . . ,” he says finally.

  “You don’t have to. I’d understand,” Joelle says.

  “It’s not that. I want to, but . . .”

  “Your padre y madre are on guard, no? They no like you to leave,” Joelle says in a thick Spanish accent that makes him laugh.

  “Yeah. I mean, si.”

  “Well, make a getaway down the drainpipe or something. They’ll never know. They probably—”

  “Did it when they were young. I know.”

  “Well, they probably did.”

  “Okay. Give me a half hour. I’ll try making a break for it. If I’m not there in forty-five minutes . . .”

  “I’ll notify the morgue.”

  “The morgue!”

  “To let them know you’ll be arriving shortly. S.T.T.E.”

  “What’s S.T.T.E.?”

  “Shot Trying to Escape.”

  “Oh, thanks. That gives me confidence.”

  They both have a morbid chuckle over this and hang up.

  The night is cold and blazing with stars when Joelle steps out into it twenty minutes later. The streets are dark, lit only by occasional passing headlights or, behind fences and hedges, the glow of individual homes. As she approaches the park, however, streetlamps illuminate the sidewalk, and around a corner, adjacent to the old barbecue pit, she spots the familiar rusty red dome of a VW Bug. A campfire’s flickering glow comes through the trees. Queenie is there, cooking a late dinner for herself, apparently. The smoky-sweet smell of grilled meat wafts into Joelle’s nostrils, and before she can stop herself, she’s heading over in that direction.

  “Pssst!” Carlos flags her down from behind a scraggly bush.

  “Hey, Tonto! You made it. Any bullet wounds?” She feels amazingly happy to see him.

  He grins. “It was easy. My parents were watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  “That’ll paralyze them for hours.”

  “If you can believe it, they were asleep!”

  They both laugh. It’s good to be together again. The late-night air gives off a wildness that makes Joelle feel almost delirious.

  “What’s going on over there?” She points toward the barbecue pit.

  “Hamburgers, from the smell. Want to take a look?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They sneak up on the fire, which casts a merry glow on nearby trees. Queenie is crouched over the flames, a stick in each hand, prodding two mounds of meat on a tiny grill. Her face is ruddy and alert with interest. Between the crackles of fire, Joelle hears her humming loudly to herself a private melody that seems to have no beginning or end. Though her clothes are grubby and her hair falls over her face in an untamed curtain of grayish black, she appears thoroughly contented, as fully at home in this wall-less, roofless place as any inhabitant of Marshfield’s surrounding houses. Watching her, Joelle is filled with a longing to join her there by her cozy fire. After a minute or so, though, Carlos grows impatient.

  “Come on,” he whispers. “I’m freezing standing here. Let’s walk around.”

  “Just a little longer,” Joelle whispers back. “I want to see what she does next.”

  Her meat lumps cooked, Queenie deftly scrapes them onto a flat square plate that may be no more than a discarded house shingle. She rifles in a plastic bag at her side for a piece of sliced bread and, wrapping the bread around the meat, begins to eat hungrily, still sitting in her crouch beside the fire.

  It’s at this point that Carlos, shifting his weight restlessly from one leg to another, loses his balance and stumbles a bit, cracking the twigs beneath his shoes.

  Instantly, Queenie’s head comes up and she is on her feet, her sharp eyes probing the night. She leaves her dinner on the ground and, without a word, walks swiftly toward their hiding place. In a short few seconds (or gasps, in Joelle’s case) she has discovered them and is pushing aside the thin arms of the bush they’re cowering behind. She stares at them, her dark glance moving from face to face. Then, as if they are of no more interest than some predictable woodland phenomenon—a pair of rabbits out of their hole or two old tree stumps—she releases the branches and trudges back without comment to her campfire. There she nestles down in her previous spot, takes up her food, and continues to eat, not bothering to look at them again.

  Two minutes later, her supper finished, she lights the stub end of an already well-smoked cigar and, rocking slowly back and forth, begins her loud humming song again. Joelle touches Carlos’s arm.

  “I want to talk to her,” she whispers. “Do you think she’d let us?”

  Carlos shakes his head. “She’s too crazy.”

  “How do you know? Have you ever tried?”

  “She won’t talk. She’ll run away. That’s why she’s out here, to get away from people.”

  “She didn’t run away when she saw us.”

  “She probably thought we were statues. Who knows what she thought?”

  “I’m going to try,” Joelle whispers. “Will you wait for me? I might need some backup.”

  When Carlos reluctantly nods, she steps around the bush and begins to walk slowly toward the fire.

  14

  QUEENIE GLANCES UP IN ALARM as Joelle comes toward her through the trees. Her body tenses, ready for flight. But when Joelle stops on the other side of the fire and sits down cross-legged, she resumes her place, though her eyes follow Joelle’s every movement.

  Joelle doesn’t speak to her. Instinct tells her to keep silent. She allows several minutes to pass, leaning occasionally toward the fire to nudge a wayward piece of wood into a better position. She feels Carlos’s steady gaze on her back.

  Across the fire Queenie smokes her cigar stub and examines her visitor. Joelle lowers her head and allows her to look, unchallenged. She’s comfortable sitting by this fire, stars overhead, cold breath of night on her cheeks. She feels as if she’s been here before, and she’s not surprised when Queenie clears her throat and, half rising from her crouch, turns and spits on the ground behind. This, too, seems familiar in a distant way.

  “Thanks for letting me sit here,” Joelle says.

  Queenie looks at her and says nothing.

  “I’m Joelle. You’re Queenie, right? You know how to make a good fire,” Joelle tells her. “You must camp out a lot.”

  Queenie puffs her cigar.

  “You go into the woods sometimes too. I’ve seen your car over there by the North–South Trail.”

  She’s just talking, trying to make conversation, but at the mention of the trail Queenie responds. She smiles.

  “My friend Carlos and I have been hiking there,” Joelle continues. “You know, my friend who’s back in the bushes? You saw him just now, right?”

  Queenie’s smile fades. “I know you,” she says gravely. “I’ve been watching you for a long time. You won’t tell, will you?”

  “That you’re camping here? No, of course not. My friend won’t either. Is it all right if he sits with us? It’s cold where he is.”

  Queenie says nothing, but she doesn’t protest, so Joelle stands up and calls to Carlos, and he comes and sits by the fire. When Queenie eyes him warily, as if she might be thinking of bolting, Joelle tries to distract her with more conversation.

  “Somebody said you’re a descendant of Indians who used to live around here. We’ve been studying the Narragansetts. Were those your people?”

  Queenie’s dark eyes come back to her. After a moment she takes the cigar out of her mouth and smiles again. Her teeth are yellowed with tobacco stain. “My people were kings and queens. That is what they say, kings and queens. Do you remember that I know you?” she asks.

  “From the library?” Joell
e guesses. “That’s right, we passed in the library. That’s where my friend and I have been doing our research. We’re interested in what happened to the Native American tribes around here. There’s a place out in the forest called the Crying Rocks. Have you ever heard of it?”

  At the mention of the Crying Rocks, Queenie’s smile vanishes. She glances over her shoulder, then back at Joelle and Carlos.

  “That is a sad place,” she whispers. “Don’t go.”

  “Why?” Joelle asks. “What have you heard about it? Was there a massacre there?”

  Queenie shakes her head. “Sad,” she repeats. “Many ghosts and spirits live there. People who go come back scared. They can’t speak of the sadness they feel. And some do not come back.”

  Carlos glances up. “What do you mean?” he asks sharply.

  Queenie grasps one of her cooking sticks and probes the fire. A fresh blaze springs up, lighting the flat, broad planes of her brown face. Leaning closer to the fire, she begins her slow rocking motion, the one that accompanied her humming before.

  “Can you tell us a little more?” Joelle asks her. “Please. We’d like to know.”

  With her eyes on the fire, Queenie keeps rocking and rocking. Once again she makes the fire leap with her stick. Then she begins to speak in the same humming drone as before when she sang her song.

  “If you go near this place, the Crying Rocks, you will hear them, the baby ghosts: Woo-woo! Woo-woo! The mother ghosts: Scree-scree! They make these sounds, and many others. Some say, ‘Oh, that is the wind,’ but they are wrong.”

  “So what is it?” Carlos asks.

  “Ghosts, like I said.”

  “Yes, but why are the ghosts there?”

  Queenie draws herself up and stares off into the dark. “Never you mind.”

  “Is it true that, long ago, Indian children born sick or crippled were abandoned there?” Carlos asks straight out. “My father heard that. He said there are other places like this, that many ancient cultures had them, in many parts of the world. They’ve come down to us as weeping bogs or wailing cliffs. Ghosts are guilty consciences, he says.”

  “Carlos, be quiet!” Joelle murmurs.

  Queenie is glaring at him too. “A ghost is a ghost,” she tells him. “It is real and can do what it wants.”

  “Then how—” Carlos begins, but Queenie cuts him off.

  “The story of the Crying Rocks is for our people, not for you,” she tells him angrily. “Only our women can tell their daughters. Only we can understand. Isn’t it so?” She looks around with bright eyes at Joelle. “Do you remember?” she asks. “It is your story too.”

  “Remember what?” Joelle replies. “That was hundreds of years ago.”

  “Listen—” Carlos starts to protest. Maybe he wants to bring up his one-sixteenth Indian blood, or maybe he’s going to point out that the Crying Rocks story is no longer a private Narragansett legend. It’s gone out into the world and joined up with other stories from human history. Its events can be proved or disproved by the excavation of real bones. Whatever Carlos intends to say, Joelle lays her hand on his arm to stop him.

  “Don’t. You’ll upset her.”

  And he stops. They all sit still, watching the fire jump and spark. In the distance several cars can be heard passing on the street. From overhead, the roar of an airliner crossing the sky drifts down to them. As it fades Joelle feels the shimmy of a memory. Glancing at Queenie, she is suddenly aware of another fire, one that burned long ago and far away, so far away that it was lost all this time and she’s just now caught sight of its flames through the dark.

  The air was chilly then, as it is now. The fire was well made and warm. The sound in the distance was not of cars on a street or a plane in the sky. It came from train wheels speeding along a track. Clackety-clackety-clackety, the train races past Joelle and fades out of sight into the night.

  She turns to Queenie and says, “I do remember now. I know you, too. You were my friend, weren’t you? We cooked out . . . somewhere. Where was that?”

  Queenie smiles her wide tobacco-stained smile.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she says proudly. “We’ve all been watching you. But, shush! We must not speak.”

  “People have been watching me?” Joelle says.

  Beside her Carlos leans forward with interest.

  “What people?” he asks, but Queenie presses a finger to her mouth and shakes her head.

  “I promised,” she says to Joelle. “We all promised. You won’t tell on me, will you? You were so little then. Now you’re big and look like her.”

  “Who?” Joelle says, barely breathing.

  “Like Sylvie,” Queenie says. “She was very tall, like you.”

  * * *

  It’s past 1:00 a.m. and Vernon is already home when Joelle lets herself into the kitchen through the back door. The house lights are all out. At the top of the stairs she hears heavy breathing coming from Vernon’s room and guesses he never noticed she was gone. It’s not his habit to check up on her. Aunt Mary Louise was the person who looked in, to close a window or pick her clothes off the floor. One of the changes Joelle has had to get used to is that Vernon doesn’t intrude on her this way. He’s made no attempt to take Aunt Mary Louise’s place, and maybe it’s just as well. Joelle isn’t sure she needs that kind of attention anymore.

  When she gets in bed, she can’t sleep at first. Queenie’s campfire burns in her brain, and whether she wants to or not, she finds herself groping for other memories to connect to the amazing facts unearthed tonight.

  “You had a nice bed. A box like a house,” Queenie had said when Joelle asked her about the depot. But “I don’t allow no dogs near me,” she’d announced, so perhaps the little dog and the story of the shared Snickers bar were Joelle’s own inventions.

  “They brought you in by a freight train, scared they were going to get caught,” Queenie said.

  “Who?” Joelle demanded, and Queenie wouldn’t tell. She shook her head and patted her closed mouth like a naughty child.

  They’d lived outside, near the tracks, and had eaten “from the hamburger place or cooked out.” “Summer living,” Queenie called it, and “I never made a kid hunt cigarettes for me. I did my own hunting.”

  “Did I sleep on a pile of smelly rags?”

  “Rags? You had blankets. Everybody brought you things—clothes, toys. The whole yard was looking after you. Don’t you remember?”

  “What yard?” Carlos asked, and Queenie had laughed.

  “The railroad workers. At the station.”

  “Why were they looking after her?”

  “She knows why,” Queenie said, gazing at Joelle with solemn eyes.

  “Do you know?” Carlos said.

  Joelle had shaken her head.

  To listen to Queenie was to realize that the old woman had not been some lone crackpot taking advantage of an abandoned child, as Aunt Mary Louise had described her. There was an order to the way she lived then, just as there was now. She’d cared for Joelle, along with others, apparently, and had watched over her, even after Joelle was adopted and moved in with her new family.

  “What did Queenie keep thinking you remembered?” Carlos had asked her as they’d walked home. “It had to do with the Crying Rocks.”

  “Nothing. She was confused, I think.”

  “She didn’t look confused. She knows something else about you. And who is—”

  “Don’t talk about that!” Joelle had rushed to stop him.

  “You don’t want to find out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? It’s so strange.”

  “Maybe I already know enough,” she’d replied, and then, feeling the pinch of invaded territory: “Anyway, what do you care? It has nothing to do with you!”

  “That’s a good question,” Carlos had said. “Why do I care? And here’s another one. Why did you call me up tonight?”

  He’d stood facing her on the dark street while Joelle cast ar
ound for a mean reply. But none would come to her, for some reason, and in the end, he’d walked away without saying good-bye.

  Now, as she drifts closer to sleep, Joelle puts Carlos and his question in a well-guarded place in her mind where she can consider them later. She thinks back once more to Queenie’s campfire, hardly daring to look again at the most important artifact that’s risen up out of the Marshfield town park that night, the one she’d felt a need to protect from even Carlos’s friendly gaze.

  “Sylvie.”

  She whispers her mother’s name once, in the dark. It’s enough for now.

  * * *

  They are expecting visitors. This is what Vernon tells Joelle when she appears downstairs late the next morning, still in her nightgown.

  “When?”

  “Now. Soon. I don’t know,” Vernon says. “Go get dressed.”

  He’s jumpy and mysterious and has already been out to the store to buy supplies: beer, soda, chips, some sliced cold cuts and bread.

  “Are they coming for lunch?” Joelle asks in disbelief. They’ve never had anyone for lunch. The only people she can think of who would barge in like this on a Sunday morning are Aunt Mary Louise’s Tiverton relatives, but they’ve written her off now, once and for all. Aunt Mary Louise’s ashes are buried here, on this side of Narragansett Bay, not in Tiverton with them.

  “If they want lunch, they can have it,” Vernon declares.

  The next thing Joelle knows, he’s carrying out a pile of newspapers that’s been accumulating in a corner by the front door for about four months—ever since Aunt Mary Louise died. Then he’s getting out the vacuum and running it over the living-room rug and onto the bare linoleum of the kitchen. He pushes the TV back against the wall and brings down a couple of chairs from upstairs.

  “How on earth many are coming?” Joelle demands, which makes Vernon stop and look at her.

  “Everybody,” he answers. “They’ll all be here. You’re going to get an earful, so go up and dress.”

  When she stands there, not moving, her arms folded stubbornly across her chest, he says: “Scoot! This is a big day in your life, you just don’t know it yet. You might not want to live here anymore when this day is over.”