“Let’s get going,” Joelle says. “I can’t wait to see the rocks.”
Carlos nods, but he still won’t move. He gazes off into the forest. “I remember this,” he says. “I know where the spring is. We came this way before.”
“Well, where is it?” Joelle asks, hoping to nudge him forward.
“Up ahead, to the right.” He stows his bottle, and they walk to a place where the ground is mushy, then farther along to where clear water is bubbling between two rocks. “Fresh water,” Carlos says. “Better than the stuff in this store-bought bottle, probably.”
Joelle reaches out a cupped hand, traps a bit, and tastes it. “Not bad,” she allows.
She has never thought of fresh water actually pouring out of the earth. If she’s considered water at all, it’s as a thing that lies around in reservoirs and lakes, or comes down in rain to form rivers that eventually make it into the kitchen faucet.
“Okay, I’m ready now,” Carlos says. “I’m just remembering so much more about this place than I thought I did.”
He leads the way toward the pines, whose trunks are tall, thin, and largely without branches below. Overhead, however, their green-needle boughs have grown into a thick mesh that blocks out what there is of the day’s light. They pass into this dim cavern of trees and, walking vaguely downhill for perhaps a quarter of a mile, come out the other side surrounded by outcroppings of giant rocks. And now, Joelle sees, they are at the edge of a real swamp, a vast area of woodland marsh that stretches off to their right. Along this edge a wall of massive glacial boulders rises into view, high over their heads. Carlos has stopped again. His eyes travel up the steep sides of the boulders to take in the hulking gray mass of the monolith above.
“I remember this,” Joelle hears him say faintly.
“Is there a way up?”
“On this side,” Carlos answers in the same distant voice. He walks across a rocky section of ground. “We went up here.”
They climb up, up, between boulders and around them, coming out at the top, where there is now an even broader view of the swamp.
“Which ones are the Crying Rocks?” Joelle asks.
“All of them!” His hand sweeps out to indicate the whole outcropping. “We’re here! My father was so excited. I remember he started digging everywhere.”
“For what?”
“Bones. He wanted to find evidence of what had started the crying legend, I guess. Daniel was helping him, but they didn’t find any bones up here. That’s why my father went down to the swamp. He thought he might find some below the rocks.”
“From the mothers who supposedly jumped with their children?” Joelle glances around. She rejects that story. It’s not believable.
“I guess so. Daniel kept searching up here,” Carlos says. “I was pretending to look too, but I wasn’t really. I was listening for the ghost children’s crying. My father had told me it was probably just the wind blowing through crevices in the big stones. That day I was walking around and listening in different places to see if he was right.”
“But you didn’t hear any crying. You said you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” Carlos pauses. Joelle has taken off her knapsack and is beginning to rummage in it for her water bottle. “Not that kind,” he adds.
“You heard another noise?”
He turns his head toward a group of boulders lying off to one side, back from the main ledge.
“I remember something. I was over there,” he says, so softly that Joelle barely hears. He walks over to the boulders and hunches down among them, and there is something about the way he crouches, with his knees bent double and his head and shoulders low, that reminds Joelle of the way a little boy might hunch who is wrapped up in his private world, apart from and oblivious to the business of grown-ups. As she watches, Carlos reaches up and puts his hands over his ears. He flattens his hands hard against the sides of his head.
Joelle drops the water bottle on the ground and walks over. She crouches down beside him.
“Is this where you heard a noise?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Well, what was it?”
Carlos shakes his head.
“Was it . . . ?”
“No wind could make that kind of sound.”
“Well, what . . . ?”
“I thought it was the Crying Rocks.” He looks up at her. “I was sure it was. It came from there and sounded like them. But . . .”
“It wasn’t?” Joelle feels a coldness spread over her.
“I think it was Daniel,” Carlos says with his hands over his ears.
“Daniel?”
“He’d fallen and was crying for us. But my father couldn’t hear him because he was down below, and I thought it was the crying ghosts and ran away and hid.”
Carlos sits down on the ground and gazes up in horrified amazement at Joelle. “I remember now,” he says. “I ran into the forest and covered my ears and hid.”
* * *
It was later, perhaps thirty minutes later, that he heard his father calling his name and crept out to find him. The rocks had cried terrible cries, he said. They had moaned and wailed. The stories were true. It was not the wind. He was frightened and wanted to go home.
His father smiled. He said he’d fight off any ghosts that tried to come near them. In any case, he’d finished digging and was ready to head home. They could leave anytime. Where was Daniel?
They called and there was no answer. He’d gone off somewhere, it seemed. Perhaps he was visiting an outcropping he’d spoken about before, located farther along the edge of the marsh. They waited patiently for a space of time. When he didn’t return, a disturbing thought entered his father’s mind. He walked to the rocks’ edge and peered over. He came back and asked Carlos a question.
“Where were you when you heard the Crying Rocks?”
Carlos pointed to the boulders.
“And where did the crying come from?”
Carlos pointed.
His father then walked to that place, on the top of another massive bulge of rocks, and called out loudly over the edge: “Daniel? Are you all right? Daniel!”
A faint sound came from below. In an instant Carlos’s father disappeared between the boulders, and Carlos could hear him talking to Daniel. He told him to hold on, he was coming. Carlos crept forward and peered over. He saw that his brother was lying wedged into a sharp rock crevice about a third of the way down. His father had found a route and was in the process of climbing there.
Then he was lifting Daniel’s head, talking to him, though Daniel was too weak to answer. The fall had opened a broad gash that ran down the left side of his head. He was still bleeding. Blood had pooled in some of the rock fissures around him.
Carlos watched his father take off his own shirt, tear it in pieces, and devise a bandage to wrap around Daniel’s head. He watched his practiced doctor’s hands feel Daniel’s neck and his back, his legs and his arms for broken parts. He then saw his father perform the seemingly impossible task of lifting Daniel’s large body and carrying it up the nearly vertical side of the rocks.
When he reached the top, they set off immediately through the woods, in silence. His father was carrying Daniel in his arms like an enormous, long-legged baby. It took an interminable amount of time to reach the road. They stopped often to rest because Daniel was so heavy. The sodden bandage came undone and had to be rewrapped around his head. Daniel was unconscious by then. His eyes were closed and his skin was ashen.
When they got to the road, no car would stop at first, until they walked out and stood together in the middle and Carlos’s father cried, “Help us! Help us!” Someone stopped at last and took them to the hospital, where Daniel was rushed away down a long corridor on a wheeled bed and their father made a series of frantic phone calls. He then disappeared into the hospital himself, leaving Carlos alone in a crowded waiting room.
Carlos’s mother came at last to wait with him. After a long time his fathe
r emerged from an elevator, still in his hiking shorts and boots. The three of them drove home. Daniel, who had been so large and alive four hours before; Daniel, who had never fallen in his life and prided himself on his sure-footing; Daniel, who was to report to football camp in two weeks to prepare for his first year on the high school varsity team, remained behind in the hospital and died that evening. Carlos never saw him again.
These are the facts that Joelle gradually begins to glean from Carlos’s disjointed recounting of the accident. Sitting there by the boulders, he remembers in patches, not in sequence. The scene at the road stopping cars comes before the picture of Daniel’s blood pooling into the rocks. The sight of Daniel carried like a child through the woods presents itself to Carlos after he recalls their arrival at the hospital. It seems that Carlos’s brain, to protect him from the single crushing burden of the tragedy, has contrived a way to divide the weight into pieces, then has further disconnected and obscured them by hiding them under other memories from intervening years. It’s only now, returned to the actual site of the accident, that he can begin to excavate. For the first time he believes he understands the part he played in the drama, the unthinkable part his parents must have known all these years and have studiously avoided speaking about.
“I could have saved him,” he says to Joelle. “All this time I never knew. Or maybe I did know and never wanted to believe it.”
“You didn’t know,” Joelle says. “Just leave it at that.”
“Why did I hide?” he begs her to tell him. “If I was scared, why didn’t I look for Daniel instead? I could have run to my father. He would have come in time, and Daniel might be alive.”
“You were a little boy,” Joelle reminds him. “The ghosts were real to you. It isn’t your fault.”
“My father cried that night after the hospital called. He must hate me. That’s why he never took me hiking again.”
“He doesn’t hate you. He understands why you ran.”
“How can he? I don’t understand it myself. How could I have done this? Why didn’t I remember all these years?”
Joelle shakes her head. She can no longer answer. In her throat and behind her eyes she feels a strange pressure, an unwanted tide that threatens to rise and burst into the outside air. She clenches her teeth to force it back.
For a long time they sit where they are, together, saying nothing, listening to an endless concert of tree sounds and bush sounds, bird sounds and wind sounds, swamp sounds and, after a while, the comforting patter of rain falling quietly on the glacial foreheads of the rocks around them. The showers, it seems, have finally arrived.
10
NOT UNTIL THE RAIN BEGINS to slant hard into their faces does Joelle notice it. She pulls the hood of her jacket over her head and looks around belatedly for shelter. Overhead the sky has blackened. Gusty swirls of wind rush past them, carrying a new cold.
Beside her Carlos stirs. “Come on, I know where we can go.” He stands up and runs to get his knapsack.
They walk fast toward the edge of the rocks and retrace their steps to a place near their base where it’s possible to climb a little and crawl in under an overhanging ledge. Here they are protected and can sit in relative comfort while the rain, now edged with ice, slams down on all sides.
“I noticed this spot on the way up. I thought we might need it,” Carlos says in an empty-sounding voice. He still looks shocked.
“Carlos the Careful Camper,” Joelle jokes, but he’s beyond humor and stares at her bleakly.
Sitting on the earth floor, her back against a wall of stone, she surveys the surrounding landscape. Their view is of the swamp, a soupy tangle of dead brush and reeds, black mud and yellowed grasses. Whenever an especially heavy curtain of precipitation travels across it, a thunderous rattle of husk and stalk drowns out all other noise, even their voices. What did the Narragansetts do in this kind of weather? Joelle wonders. Caught out in such a storm, did they come here, to this very rock niche, to wait it out as she and Carlos are waiting? Faintly, she hears a low growl of sound ricochet through the downpour.
“Sounds like thunder,” Joelle shouts. “Did you hear that?”
Carlos shakes his head.
The wind is tuning up, fortunately blowing the sleet away from, rather than into, their hollow. It’s cold, though, and Joelle keeps her hands in her pockets. She’s hungry but doesn’t mention the sandwiches, which are in the knapsack beside her. Somehow this is not the time for food. Carlos has pulled up his hood and sits huddled against the rock.
While they wait for the storm to subside, Joelle thinks back to her earlier fantasy in the woods, the flight of the children from the English. Now that she’s here, in the very middle of the Crying Rocks, she sees that their massive formations would never have provided good hiding. There are no caves or caverns of any depth. The vegetation is sparse above and an impassable swamp cuts off escape from below. If this was really a place of retreat, the people who came here would soon have been trapped. And then what? Joelle presses her body closer to the rock. A low windy moan echoes in the distance.
“There it is again, that noise,” she says.
Carlos isn’t listening. He’s dealing with the weather in his head.
Hoo . . .
“And again. Now it sounds like an animal.” She crawls out from under the overhang on her hands and knees and stares up. A muffled cry reaches her ears, perhaps from the rocks above, though it could be issuing from the swamp.
Or has she invented it? Straining to hear, she crawls even farther forward from the niche, and as she does, her hand comes in contact with a hard object rising up through the swampy earth. It’s shaped like a large shell with a crusty surface that, though black with muck, shows streaks of gray white underneath. As she turns it around in her freezing fingers she realizes that it’s not a stone or some oddly bleached piece of wood. The substance is bone.
“Carlos, what is this?”
The rain is changing over to ice now and Carlos can’t hear her through its crashing descent, though he’s only a few feet away. Joelle scrambles back under the ledge. She reaches out to touch his arm and holds her discovery up before him with a shaky feeling that she already knows what it is.
“Carlos, look.”
His distant eyes focus and widen, and he jerks away. The sleet has washed off more mud, enough to see a skeletal scoop of a head and a pair of empty eye sockets. The jaw is missing.
“Where was it?”
“Out there.” Joelle points.
“It’s human.”
“I think so too.”
He gazes with loathing at the muddy swamp in front of them and again at the dripping thing in her hand. The wind gusts past, and from above, there is the sound of rocks falling. A small boulder crashes down nearby, making them both jump.
“We aren’t safe here,” Carlos says.
“But where can we go?”
“Somewhere else. I don’t like it here.”
“What about—”
Carlos reaches out and grabs the skull from her. Immediately, he is up on his knees, his arm drawn back, and before Joelle can stop him, he hurls it full-force back into the swamp.
“That was evidence! Why did you throw it away?” Joelle shouts at him.
“I don’t want any more evidence!” Carlos yells as a great rumble comes from the outcropping above them and more boulders shoot past. “This place is crazy,” he screams into the wind.
And so it seems, for now another noise is making its way into the mad cacophony around them. From somewhere above, a single piercing shriek is mounting above the wind’s roar. Louder, it comes. Louder and louder. This cannot be confused with imagination. Joelle cowers against the rock. Carlos crouches beside her, looking up. As they listen the shriek broadens into a half-strangled scream that whinnies out across the swamp. Abruptly, it ceases. But a few seconds later another cry begins, its pitch climbing again into that ghastly, throttled wail.
Without waiting another seco
nd, Carlos grabs his knapsack and begins to run. Joelle leaps up and races after him. They sprint away from the dark face of the rocks and head for the shelter of the pine forest they passed through before. But even here, under the safe awning of the trees’ high branches, they continue to run without looking back. Behind them another frightening scream is mounting, higher, louder, flying after them through the forest like some angry, bodiless monster seeking its prey.
* * *
What could make such a noise?
Joelle asks Carlos this question on the telephone that night. They are safe in their own houses, their day away from school having apparently gone unnoticed. The hike home was cold and tiring but uneventful. Outside the driving sleet of the afternoon has abated and been replaced by a light snow that, as they speak, falls with calm determination on the roads and houses of Marshfield. Not enough to interfere with school tomorrow, unfortunately, but a bona fide announcement of a new season. The ground is white. The arms of trees are gently chalked. Winter has come at last.
Carlos is not very talkative. He was truly scared, but won’t acknowledge it. Joelle knows he’s thinking not only about the screams at the rocks, but about Daniel’s desperate cries. They are a single horror in his mind now. His parents are home, bustling around in the background. She hears the scrape of a chair, pots banging, conversation—the sounds of a family preparing for dinner.
“You should tell them that you remember what happened,” she urges him.
“How can I?” he asks. “I know what they must think.”
“Tell them. You’ll feel better. It really wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was. It was! I’m sure it was!”
What can she say? There’s no way to get through to him. He’s alone, unreachable. Like the Narragansett boys left all winter in the forest, he’ll have to work things out for himself.
The Crying Rocks Page 9