The Crying Rocks

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  This remark so sickens Joelle that she stops Michiko in the middle of the sidewalk, whips off her gloves, and says: “Stand still, so I can do your braids.” Then, working as fast as she can in the freezing cold, she unsnarls Michiko’s clumps and braids them properly all the way down, fastening them neatly with the elastics on the ends.

  “You know, I’m not what you think I am,” Joelle tells her fiercely when she’s finished. “If you want to know the truth—”

  Michiko has taken off her own mittens and is feeling her braids with her bare hands. “Wow, these are great! Thank you so much!” she interrupts. “Now maybe Penny will invite me again. Guess what? Two more people joined our club!”

  “What club?”

  “The Secret Princess Club. That’s what it’s called. Elizabeth Glass even quit ballet so she could come. Her mother didn’t want her to, but she did anyway. Penny is the president. She thinks she might be adopted too, like you. She can remember some things that happened to her before, in another land.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “She can! She remembers that she lived in this castle with a lot of horses. She thinks she learned to ride, and that’s how she knows how to ride now.”

  “Does she know how to ride?”

  “Yes!” Michiko says. “She knows everything, even though she’s never taken riding lessons. She wants to, but her mother won’t let her.”

  “Have you ever seen her ride?”

  “No, because she hasn’t ridden here,” Michiko says, exasperation entering her voice. “She rode before, when she lived in the castle with her other family, before she was adopted!”

  For a moment Joelle is tempted to clue Michiko in to the real world. She’ll have to find out sometime, not only about nasty manipulators like Penny Perrino, but also about adoption itself. I was rescued from a crate at the railroad station, Joelle wants to tell Michiko. I don’t even know who my real parents were.

  But when she looks down at Michiko’s thin jacket and cracked rubber boots, Joelle sees she can’t tell her that. Michiko doesn’t need to hear that story, not yet. There’s enough hard fact in her life already. When you’re young, you need to believe in something magical, like secret princesses. Something with possibilities. For whatever reason, maybe only because they both look different and seem to come from “somewhere else,” Michiko has chosen to believe in Joelle. It would be mean to tell her the truth.

  They pass the road that Carlos lives on, and both turn their heads at once to look. Sometimes he’s far down, just a dark blot coming; sometimes he’s close. But he’s usually there, walking with his methodical gait along the sidewalk.

  Today he’s not in sight. Michiko looks up to see how Joelle is going to take this, but Joelle is determined to show her nothing—as if there were anything to show! She makes her face stiff and impenetrable until Michiko glances away. They plod along silently, side by side, through the cold.

  * * *

  The truth is, out of sight of her legion of worshippers, Joelle and Carlos have met fairly often during the past few weeks. It has nothing to do with romance, at least in Joelle’s view. The two of them have been studying Narragansett Indians. They’ve even gone arrowhead hunting after school, sneaking out the side gym door while the Secret Princesses stupidly waited in front.

  Last Saturday, despite the cold snap in the weather, they’d gone hiking in another wilderness area on the other side of Marshfield. Carlos had showed off the cave he’d been talking about, which looked disappointing at first, a shallow dip in a rock wall, nothing like the real cave Joelle had been anticipating.

  “Where are the Indian markings?” she’d demanded.

  They were nearly invisible, reddish scratchings on the stone that she never would have noticed by herself. But once seen, they jumped out at her with an almost magical clarity. One was of a long-legged deer pausing and listening, its head tilted in a most lifelike way. A second showed a chunkier animal, perhaps a beaver or a woodchuck, hunkered down self-protectively. Behind them the shape of what was clearly a human figure stood upright, both arms raised toward the sky.

  “How old are these?”

  “My father said they could be anywhere from five hundred to a thousand years old,” Carlos answered. “He showed me this place a long time ago, and I’ve kind of kept track of it. Not many people know it’s here.”

  “What do the animals mean?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. It could be something like what the Sioux thought. Their belief was that they were only borrowing the lives of the animals they killed. All creatures were their brothers and sisters, with souls that had to be protected and kept alive. The Sioux had to eat, though, so before a hunt they’d draw pictures like these of the animals they were going to kill. Then, afterward, they’d bring back some of the animal’s blood, or part of the body, and put it on or near the drawing. That way, the dead animal’s soul could reenter its old form and live again.”

  “A sort of life-recycling operation,” Joelle had joked.

  “And a way of saying thank you.”

  She’d nodded. “I like that. It’s a good way to think. Respectful of living things.”

  The following Saturday the temperature rises and another hike seems possible. Then, about midmorning, the sky darkens and rain begins.

  “You can come to my house,” Carlos suggests on the phone. He has actually dared to call her.

  But Joelle doesn’t want to. Though she doesn’t say so, she’s afraid that going over there would make things too personal. He’s never been to her house, either, and she doesn’t plan to invite him.

  “Can’t we meet somewhere else?” she asks him.

  “How about the library?” Carlos suggests. “We can do some more research on the Narragansetts.”

  “Okay. Hold on a minute while I check for royal spies.”

  “The Princesses? Don’t they ever give up?”

  “Saturday is their big day. They run relay races to the front door. Uno momento.”

  Joelle puts aside the beaded headband she’s been weaving on the living-room floor, gets up, and peers through a front window. Out near the street she spots a huddle of wet and miserable-looking girls under a tree, taking instruction from Penny Perrino. Michiko is not among them, she notices.

  “They’re here,” she reports back to Carlos. “In the rain. They all have Indian braids lately, have you seen?”

  “Way to go, Weetamoo. Now you have a tribe.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “Can you vamoose out the back door?”

  “No problema. I’ll disguise myself as a paraguas and be there in half an hour.”

  “What’s a paraguas?”

  “An umbrella, estúpido. In Spanish. Did you miss it on the test?”

  “Oh, that paraguas. I certainly never heard it pronounced that way. Mrs. Correja would go into meltdown if she heard you.”

  “Your accent isn’t so hot either!”

  “Peace, amigo. I’ll see you at the library. Adiós.”

  “Au revoir, Tonto!”

  * * *

  Back in the stacks, near the long mural of the Narragansett Indians, Carlos and Joelle sit on the floor, whispering and reading. Open books are spread around them. They are continuing their research.

  “So they weren’t short, they were tall,” Carlos says in a low voice. “Look at this passage. Eyewitnesses who first saw the Narragansetts said they were taller than any of the white men.”

  “Hmm.” Joelle takes the book from him and reads to herself the report of the Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano, in 1524:

  We saw about twenty boats full of people who came around our ship, uttering many cries of astonishment. . . . This was the finest-looking tribe, and the handsomest in their costumes that we have found on our voyage. They exceed us in size. . . . Among them were two kings more beautiful in form and stature than can possibly be described. . . . Their skins are of a tawny color. Their faces are clear-cut, their hair long and black; the
ir expression mild and pleasant. . . . They are very generous, giving away whatever they have. We formed a great friendship with them.

  “See?” Carlos says when Joelle looks up.

  “See what?”

  “Well, you have to admit, it sounds like you. Tall, black hair. And now, with that headband . . .”

  Joelle scowls at him.

  “Except maybe for the mild and pleasant expression,” Carlos tells her, mildly and pleasantly. “I think you’re generous about giving away what you have, though.”

  “What could possibly make you think that?”

  “I heard you gave Michiko a necklace.”

  “Just a stupid thing I made out of beer-can tabs in fourth grade. I had to. Penny Perrino told her she didn’t look like a princess.”

  Carlos smiles a knowing smile. “You’re a softy,” he says. “Read this!”

  Joelle reads:

  Native Americans showed unusual fondness and tenderness for children, a practice criticized by early Puritans who believed their liberal approach to child-rearing undermined discipline. Early New England observers were constantly astonished, however, by the uniform good health and high intelligence of native youngsters, among whom deformities, handicaps, and disease were rarely seen.

  “Beautiful people,” Carlos says when she’s finished.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  He shakes his head, smiling.

  Joelle puts up a good front, but she never really feels angry at Carlos. He’s an interesting person, with a lot of knowledge stored away in his mind and new facts always pouring in. Admittedly, they are facts about weird things—seventeenth-century Native Americans, arrowheads, woodland trails, and so forth—but you have to admire his spirit, not to mention his powers of retention. He remembers everything he reads, down to the tiniest details. For instance:

  “I keep looking at that mural and wondering what’s true and what isn’t,” Joelle says. “Do you think Native Americans had dogs back then?”

  “They had them,” Carlos replies. “They were wiry and quick, like small wolves.”

  Joelle, addressing the mural: “So much for you, Mr. Stereotyping Artist. Your dog up there looks like an overfed Pekingese!”

  Carlos, doing his best not to laugh out loud: “The Narragansetts loved and respected their dogs. They trained them to lie in the bows of their canoes and to leap out after geese or ducks they’d shot.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I read it in Indian New England Before the Mayflower, page fifty-seven.”

  “Come on! You remember the page number?”

  “It might have been fifty-eight.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Carlos looks at her with a teasing grin.

  He may joke around, but he never insults her. Somehow he’s become aware of, and learned to avoid treading on, her sensitivities, including those she hardly admits to herself. Aunt Mary Louise’s tiredness, for example. And how Joelle doesn’t like to talk about herself. He’s careful about intruding on her, too, knows that she doesn’t want him hanging around all the time. She needs her space.

  Carlos doesn’t even seem to care that he’s shorter than she is. (He is, but only by about an inch and a half, it’s now been established.) If someone doesn’t mind that he’s shorter than you are, and maybe even likes it, you know he probably won’t betray you behind your back.

  “Read this,” Carlos says now.

  Joelle reads:

  On December 18th, 1675, General Josiah Winslow and an armed company of some thousand colonial troops took by surprise a large encampment of Narragansetts in southern Rhode Island.

  On a five acre island in the midst of a great swamp, a primitive wooden palisade enclosed the Indians’ winter quarters, a village of some five hundred wigwams. In this place, which was not a fort though later it was called one to justify events, were gathered old men, women, and children, and a few warriors, most having gone to council elsewhere.

  With little trouble, the English gained entrance across the frozen swamp, and soon set fire to the mat-and-rush-covered wigwams. A holocaust resulted. More than a thousand Narragansetts perished, many burned on the spot. Others, including children, fled under heavy gunfire into the icy swamp.

  Later, Narragansett warriors returning to the scene of the massacre wept piteously for their families, running their hands through the ashes that remained. They sought especially the children who had fled, and called for them on many nights to appear out of hiding, but none were found. How they perished, whether from cold or hunger or some more ruthless hand, was never thereafter known.

  Joelle looks up, shaken. “ ‘Some more ruthless hand’! How horrible! Do you know where this happened?”

  Carlos nods. “Down in South Kingstown. The place is still called Great Swamp. There’s an old monument that tells the location of the battle, for anybody who’s interested. Not a lot of people go there.”

  “No wonder. It sounds so bad, as if the English went after this village on purpose to wipe out the Narragansetts’ families.”

  “Things were pretty ugly by then, on both sides. The Narragansetts were threatening white settlers too.”

  “Still, setting fire to a village of women and old men. Shooting the people who ran out, even small children. Then tracking them down, it sounds like . . .” Joelle pauses. “Wait a minute! Could this have anything to do with the Crying Rocks?”

  “Shush!” Carlos looks over his shoulder. Joelle’s voice is booming out around the quiet library. “It could,” he whispers, turning back. “I thought of that too.”

  “Maybe they tracked the children there and killed them.”

  “In one of the legends my father heard, some mothers were so afraid their children would be caught and killed by the English that they jumped off the rocks with them and killed them themselves.”

  “But that’s horrible! How could they?”

  “It’s probably not true. There are a lot of stories about why those rocks cry.”

  “I want to go see them! You’ve got to find out where they are!”

  Joelle’s voice has risen again. She is almost shouting. Carlos puts a hand over her mouth to stop her, and just as he does two girls from school walk around the end of the aisle. He snatches his hand away, but too late. The girls come to a halt and trade knowing glances.

  “Well, look who’s here, Erin Wolf and Jennifer McTeer . . . in the library, of all things,” Joelle says, trying for some damage control. Erin and Jennifer are not known for their great intellectual curiosity.

  “We were actually looking for the bathroom,” Jennifer admits, giggling.

  “Of course, what else?” Joelle stands and points with a flourish. “This way, ladies.”

  Erin’s eyes narrow; she’s picked up on Joelle’s sarcastic tone. “What are you two doing back here?” she asks.

  “Studying,” Joelle snaps. “Do you know that word?”

  Jennifer giggles again, but Erin’s face hardens.

  “Studying? Really? Well, don’t let us bother you,” she says in an insinuating voice as they pass by.

  “We won’t,” Joelle sings out, to have the last word. She glances triumphantly at Carlos. His face has turned a dark red.

  “Don’t worry about them,” she says. “They’re total morons. I know because they’re in my homeroom.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Why are you so embarrassed? We weren’t doing anything. Are you leaving? Come on, Carlos, don’t go.” He is gathering up his books.

  “We’ll stare them down when they come back out,” Joelle says. “What can they do to us, anyway?”

  “Tell everyone.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “You can stay if you want. I’m not going to be here when they come out,” Carlos announces grimly, and heads off down the aisle. Joelle packs up fast and scrambles after him.

  “What is wrong with you?” she cries. But nothing will stop him. He gallops p
ast the children’s section, through the Reading Room, flings open the front door, and is about to race through when a large, ungainly figure looms up in his path. Queenie! She’s just making her way inside, out of the rain, a bulging shopping bag in one hand.

  “Sorry,” Carlos says. He politely holds the door open until she passes, then dashes out. Following behind, Joelle sidesteps Queenie with some swift footwork but catches a heavy whiff of wet wool as she goes by. Or is it wet hair? Joelle stops and looks back at the old woman. It’s so familiar, that odor. Where has she smelled it before?

  There’s no time to think.

  “Wait up!” she calls to Carlos. He is already heading away down the street. “Carlos, wait!”

  He slows, glances back. At last he stops. But when she catches him, he won’t look at her.

  “I guess I might have overreacted,” he admits.

  “I thought you were taking off for Mars.”

  “I just didn’t want to be there when . . .”

  “I know. It’s okay,” Joelle tells him. “I guess I have a thick skin against people like that. They’re always looking for ways to make you feel bad.”

  Carlos nods dismally.

  “Listen, I have the perfect solution. We’ll take a day off from school tomorrow. By the time we come back, the Dynamic Duo will be on to somebody else. They need live specimens or they lose interest.”

  “What do you mean, take the day off?”

  “We just won’t be there. No big deal. It can’t rain tomorrow if it’s raining today. We could go on a much longer hike. We could even go to . . . you know.”

  Carlos gazes at her and understands. The Crying Rocks.

  “I can’t cut school. My parents wouldn’t like it.”

  “You only do things your parents like?”

  “No. But they’d be really upset if they found out.”

  “How will they find out? Listen, I’ve done it a hundred times. You forge an excuse and bring it to the office the next day. Everybody does it. Your parents used to do it.”

  Carlos lowers his head and swallows. “I can’t.”

  “Coward,” Joelle snaps.

  “It’s not that.”

  “Well, what, then?”