The Crying Rocks

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “How?” Joelle had asked. “Where is she?”

  “There.” Queenie pointed vaguely behind her. “In the forest. She cries with the others.”

  “At the Crying Rocks?” Joelle asked. Queenie had turned away and hidden her face in her hands.

  But another time, about the rocks themselves, she had suddenly burst out: “It’s a place the earth keeps for us, our people. In ancient times a mother who had to leave her baby brought him there—a child born sick or unfinished or damaged beyond repair. She knew what she must do, but she was sad, so sad. Can you imagine?”

  “When you say mothers left their children, what does that mean?” Joelle had asked. “The mother abandoned the child?”

  Queenie had grown confused at this. Shaking her head, she’d answered a different question. “No, no, not Sylvie. Sylvie couldn’t leave her girl. She wasn’t crazy, like they said. She wanted to stay with you, but she had to go with the little one.”

  “With my sister?”

  “Yes. Sylvie was very brave.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Yes,” Queenie had whispered. “And I hear her cry.”

  Now, as Joelle approaches the park with her troop of feathered princesses in tow, Queenie’s dark shape can be seen in the distance, moving through the trees. She is usually here at this time, gathering wood for her evening campfire. Subject as she often is to confrontation with the local police, she stockpiles supplies in hidden places near the barbecue pit. Only late at night, after the patrols have passed, does she light her blaze to cook, as Joelle knows now, having been out a few times to sit with her.

  “Look!” Joelle tells the Secret Princesses, and their eyes widen, for here comes Queenie in her many-layered outfit, wild hair streaming, not at all what they expected, but certainly something to be reckoned with. Tall and wide, she is a force of nature.

  “Sit down and wait,” Joelle tells her tribe when they reach the old barbecue pit, and they do, removing their headdresses, which have a tiresome way of falling into their eyes. After some hesitation Queenie approaches and sits too. This is her parlor, after all, and she’s become used to seeing Joelle at this hour.

  For a while there is nervous silence as Queenie eyes her visitors warily. Finally, Michiko, unable to contain herself a second longer, raises her voice.

  “Are you really an Indian queen?”

  Immediately, the old woman relaxes. She gives Michiko a wide, tobacco-stained smile and answers, with immense pride.

  “I am related to kings and queens. To kings and queens, that is what they say. And to her,” she adds. “It was a secret. Did you know?”

  When Queenie points, all eyes turn toward Joelle with sparkling new interest.

  * * *

  The forest, when Joelle and Carlos enter it off the busy road, welcomes them with pungent scents of both decay and new growth. Beneath trees bright with June leaves, last fall’s castoffs lie in various stages of boggy digestion, already too far gone to be raised by even the strongest wind. The North– South Trail is clear and dry. They pass along it silently, barely disturbing the ongoing beat of life around them.

  “Look,” Carlos says in a low voice as two red foxes on the hunt pad across the trail a short distance in front of them. A little while later, coming up on the chattering flow of Cowaset Brook, a wiry doglike creature with a yellowish coat bounds away, sneaking one sharp glance over a shoulder.

  “That was a coyote,” Carlos says. “You didn’t use to see them, but now they’re moving in from other areas.”

  “Why?” Joelle asks.

  “Too many roads and houses, I guess. They need uninterrupted territory to live.”

  The Narragansetts had a similar need, Joelle recalls from her reading. Never rooted to a single place, they moved with the seasons, depending on where the best food supplies could be found. Their villages could be dismantled and packed up in a few hours, and they traveled light, carrying the barest minimum of possessions.

  Hefting her knapsack on her back, Joelle tries to imagine how it would feel to live with the land this way, bound to nature’s rhythms. Bound to its mysteries as well, the uncertainties and anomalies of the spirit universe, whose relation to the human mind is still far from understood, she thinks suddenly. For as they cross the brook and head away, following the trail’s incline, she is aware of a disturbing black mass looming up in her mind’s eye. She can’t see or hear them, but somewhere to the west, from the edge of their disreputable swamp, she feels the Crying Rocks send out a warning.

  She and Carlos are hiking to the high council place. It’s a pleasant Saturday morning. They’ve brought sandwiches and bottled water. School will close for the summer in a week, and they have a plan to make a much longer hike with Carlos’s father, over several days, up through southern Massachusetts. The walk today is a preliminary expedition to build stamina.

  “Do any of your uncles like to hike?” Carlos asks over his shoulder.

  “Greg does. He did a survey of original Native American trails in southern New England for the Pequot Museum. He told me he was out there trying to trace the routes along highways roaring with traffic, in fear for his life half the time.”

  Carlos laughs. “Maybe he’ll come with us on our long hike. We’re not going on any roads if we can help it.”

  “I’ll ask him. Vernon would like that. He’s always worrying about me these days.”

  “Well, that’s a change,” Carlos says. “What’s up with him?”

  “Don’t ask me. He says his good luck has moved over from Aunt Mary Louise to me, so he has to keep an eye on me. It’s kind of a pain, but . . .” Joelle shades her eyes against a shaft of sun that’s broken through the foliage. For a moment she’s blinded, and then: “What was that?” she asks Carlos.

  “What?”

  “I thought I saw people. Over there, through the trees.”

  They come to a halt and look, but all is quiet and unrevealing. As they listen the forest around them seems to deepen, to spread away into miles and miles of whispering greenery.

  “Nothing moving that I can see,” Carlos tells her cheerfully. “What did they look like?”

  “I’m not sure,” Joelle says, though she knows very well what she saw. The warrior hunters are here, watching them from just beyond the border of time. Their tall, dark forms are woven into the shadows of the trees. Their eyes are spangles of light between the leaves. As she and Carlos set off again the hunters turn silently on their own trail and veer away toward their village, a place so well concealed in the folds of the forest that Joelle knows she will never be able to find them. Like the deer and the coyote, they have slipped through the encroaching ring of highways and towns and come here to hide. Only occasionally, on such hikes as this, will her path cross theirs for one flash of a moment.

  Ahead of her Carlos looks over his shoulder and slows a bit, so she can catch up.

  “Almost there,” he says, bringing her back to solid ground.

  The trail rises steadily now, and for a few minutes they push on without speaking. From somewhere to their right, the high rasping screech of a bird rings out, answered by a second screech, much closer by. Joelle glances up, but the foliage above them is too dense to see anything.

  “Where are the Crying Rocks from here?” she asks.

  “About a mile south,” Carlos answers between breaths. They are in the final steep climb toward the ledge, both panting. “Nothing to worry about,” he adds, knowing what she’s thinking. “There’s not even any wind blowing today.”

  And then they are there, at the high council place, stepping out on top of the world. To Joelle, it’s a shock all over again, the long sweep of the view across the valley, the blast of sun in their faces. The trees far below form a carpet of light and dark greens. In some places the leaves are late in coming and the brown scalp of the earth shows through. In another area silver spires of dead wood poke up from a dense cover of low-lying vegetation.

  Carlos has taken
out a pair of binoculars and begun to look around. He points to the silvery section. “You can see where the swamp begins,” he says. “I’ve never been able to tell where it was before. Later on it’s hidden by growth.”

  Joelle nods. While he stands on the brink, peering here and there through the glasses, she keeps herself well back. For one dizzy moment she’d felt the emptiness below drag her forward with its insistent grip. Now she is released and in charge of herself again.

  “What can you see?” she asks.

  “I’m looking at the edge of the swamp,” Carlos answers. “Somebody’s walking down there.”

  She follows his gaze and picks out the dead trunks again. Farther to the left, she’s just able to make out a gray outcropping of rock, and she is looking at this, wondering if it could possibly be what she thinks it is, when a long, shrill cry echoes across the valley.

  Beside her Carlos jerks the binoculars away from his eyes and goes absolutely still. This is no bird. It’s a sound they both recognize, though removed now from its stormy context. Into the sunny silence of a June morning comes that wild, pure, grieving shriek again. And once more.

  “Let me see,” Joelle says. She takes the binoculars, and focusing on the Crying Rocks, since this is certainly what they are, she catches sight of a tiny human figure moving slowly, with a familiar gait, up one side. As she watches, the cry rings out again, piercing and unearthly, an elemental wail of sorrow and loss.

  Below, the lone figure has stopped walking and turned a face toward the outcropping above.

  “It’s Queenie,” Joelle breathes to Carlos, “but I can’t tell if . . .” She peers harder into the binoculars. “I can’t quite see . . .”

  The old woman begins to move upward again. She passes into the shadow of the rocks and, with infuriating finality, disappears from sight. Joelle turns to Carlos.

  “I couldn’t tell if she was listening or crying.”

  About the Author

  Janet Taylor Lisle’s books for young readers have received the Newbery Honor Award (Afternoon of the Elves), the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction (The Art of Keeping Cool), Holland’s Zilveren Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Andersen, among other honors. A graduate of Smith College and former journalist, she lives in Rhode Island and often draws on Rhode Island history in her work.

  Simon & Schuster • New York

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  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Afternoon of the Elves

  The Art of Keeping Cool

  Black Duck

  The Dancing Cats of Applesap

  Forest

  The Great Dimpole Oak

  Highway Cats

  How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

  The Lampfish of Twill

  The Lost Flower Children

  Quicksand Pond

  Sirens and Spies

  The Investigators of the Unknown Books:

  The Gold Dust Letters

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  A Message from the Match Girl

  Angela’s Aliens

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2003 by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Cover illustrations copyright © 2017 by Shana Torok

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Also available in an Atheneum paperback edition

  Book design by Lauren Rille and Tom Daly

  Cover design by Lauren Rille

  The text for this book was set in Meridien LT Std.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lisle, Janet Taylor.

  The crying rocks / Janet Taylor Lisle.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Richard Jackson Book.”

  Summary: Thirteen-year-old Joelle has always wondered about her life before being adopted by the woman she calls Aunt Mary Louise and her husband, Vernon, and she makes some surprising discoveries while researching a seventeenth-century Indian tribe.

  ISBN 0-689-85319-X

  [1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Indians of North America—Rhode Island—Fiction. 5. Rhode Island—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7 .L6912Cr 2003

  [Fic]—dc21 20020151484

  ISBN 978-1-4814-9697-1 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-7976-9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-7977-6 (eBook)