The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  Mountain water. What she missed most in the desert was the pure, sweet taste of mountain water. She had not tasted truly pure mountain water since she left home.

  Movement. A shifting of shadows down by the river. Deer, probably, come to drink in the evening. Though she liked animals, the mysterious shifting always seemed vaguely disquieting to her. She was glad she could not hear the creatures. She had sat right by the creek once and watched them come to water, and they were silent, utterly silent.

  Skitter-skitter-CRACK!

  Sun Moon jumped. Scrambling to her feet, she banged her knee. Ouch! She nearly stumbled as she whirled around. The words quavered in her mind. Why did a rock clatter?

  “E-e-e-ek!” she squeaked.

  Above her on a boulder loomed Porter Rockwell. His features and figures were black with shadow, but the lowering sun rimed his edges in gold.

  Now she screamed. “AI-E-E-E-O-EE!”

  “Sister!”

  She drew breath for another scream, then held it in. The voice was…?

  “Sister, it’s me!”

  The voice was Sir Richard’s.

  The figure dropped down off the boulder into the shade. Now that he wasn’t lit from behind by the sun, she could see his face clearly. “Sir Richard,” she said, “you scared me.”

  “I’m sorry, Sister. I didn’t see you. I was looking for my own quiet place.”

  “I thought you were Porter Rockwell.”

  Sir Richard regarded her. “You still fear him?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her surprised. “Porter Rockwell is taken care of. Will be for another ten days. He’d never catch us.”

  Sun Moon nodded. She knew that Sir Richard looked at things only with his mind. Though she admired Sir Richard’s brain, which worked fast and accurately as an abacus, she found his heart deficient. Like mine. Unlike Asie’s. Her heart knew about Porter Rockwell.

  She composed herself to answer. “Thank you, Sir Richard, for giving me your protection.”

  “You are very welcome.” A look of inquiry came into his eyes. “Younger Sister, will you do something for me?”

  She waited, still shaky.

  “Tell how me you came here, halfway around the world. Tell it more fully.” Sir Richard looked at Sun Moon with a huge, dazzling, gentleman’s smile, self-delighted, conquering and conspiratorial at once. She felt hesitant. True, during the nights and days of flight she had seen beyond the blackness of his spirit. But only by force of will did he make it serve goodness. She had never seen such indomitable will in a human being. Careful, she told herself. Will is not as trustworthy as serenity of spirit achieved through meditation … She held his dark eyes.

  “Come, Younger Sister, it is time.”

  Trust came hard to her. She wanted to keep her secrets, to control her life, to put nothing in the hands of others. This is my single greatest fault, this desire to control, this willfulness.

  Sir Richard breathed in and out conspicuously. It was one of the tricks of white men to show impatience with women and people of color, their inferiors.

  To begin to correct my fault I will.

  “Yes, Elder Brother, tonight,” she said. “You and Asie only.”

  “I, the insignificant nun Dechen Tsering, was born near Zorgai, a great city on the plains of Kham. My birth name was Nima Lhamo. My parents were Norgay and Pasang Lhamo, and all our family were herdsmen and traders. They traveled far. The men of Kham are nomads, skilled horsemen, known widely for the fierceness of their warrior spirit. My ancestors were Khampas in every way, and I am proud of them.

  “My parents gave me to the convent at Zorgai at the age of nine to be raised to work for moksha, the liberation of all sentient beings, the highest purpose a human being can devote his life to. I took the basic vows—to remain celibate, not to kill or commit other violence, not to indulge in intoxicating drink, not to steal, and not to lie. I began my studies in the Tibetan tradition of the Great Exposition School, Sarvāstivada. Soon I underwent rigorous training in the five academic subjects, logic, canon law, monastic discipline, Mahayana philosophy, and psychology. Later I began study of the Bon tradition and especially their teachings of Dzog-chen, the Great Perfection, and also Mahamudra, the Great Seal. It was my ambition to come to a position as teacher in the college at Zorgai.

  “It is the custom of the monastery to permit monks and nuns to join their families during the summer, if they choose. In the spring of last year, I took leave to travel with my family to Chengdu, in Sichuan. Though it is not customary for women to go on trading trips, this was a journey I asked for, a special treat. I wanted to see the formal flower garden at the monastery in Chengdu. My mother joined us. As usual, the men of our family provided strength against all hazards, my brothers, uncles, and cousins.

  “On the third night the bandits attacked. Normally they would simply have run off our horse herd. However, the leader had an unusual commission, to steal a nun. He was eager. Chinese men think that Tibetan women are especially attractive sexually, easily available, and fond of acts Chinese women will not commit. The idea of a nun being forced into such acts inflamed this man. And he was promised a great deal of money.”

  She hesitated, reluctant. “Though my relatives fought back courageously, we were overwhelmed. I saw them all killed.”

  She looked into the faces of her listeners. And she hated what she saw there, an odd avidity. Even Asie and Sir Richard are greedy to hear what happened to my body, what happened to me sexually. Her breath caught on an angry spot. She made herself breathe in and out, and reminded herself that she owed them compassion. But she didn’t want to go on.

  “You know the rest of the story. I was treated as chattel, shipped against my will to America for purposes of prostitution, transported to Hard Rock City, and sold to Tarim as a whore.”

  She hoped the last word slapped them.

  “I must rest now,” she said. She rose and went to her blankets.

  Made me think of home, that’s what Sun Moon’s words did. I walked over to the wagon and got my drum. Halfway up a hill I found a rock that looked good. If I beat on it light and sang a song soft, or whistled, it wouldn’t wreck nobody’s sleep.

  I sang to that valley I dreamed of. I named the stream Home Creek and called its canyon Peace Valley. I made up a song about how I’d feel if I ever got there. At first I gave it words, but then they seemed not enough to me. Words are clumsy next to what you can say with a melody, a change of chord, a slide on a fiddle string anyhow. So I dropped the words and just made the music. I sung it over and over, half the night. I didn’t know where the valley was, or even whether it was. But I knew how fine it would feel to walk into such a place, breathe the air, and say, “Hello, Home Creek.”

  The Humboldt Sink pleased her companions, Sun Moon could not see why. Here the river followed so tediously for mile after mile after mile—365 miles, the white people said—was gobbled up by the desert. It ran into a hole and didn’t come out. True, the hole was a vast marsh, a low spot in a still more vast expanse of desert, and you couldn’t see from any one place that the water got lost. But it did.

  From here your choices were to cross westward for forty miles across terrible, waterless desert to a river coming from the west, or cross southward across terrible, waterless desert to a river coming from the south, she forgot the names. Apparently, even in recent times the drive had been a formidable jornada, as they called waterless stretches of travel. No more, said Muley, not for light wagons pulled by mules, plenty of water aboard.

  A blue shadow marked the horizon on the west. The mountains of California. The two rivers came from those mountains. Yes, they also ran into the desert and didn’t come out. You could walk up the rivers, though, into the mountains. Grass, trees, birds. Crisp air in the mornings and evenings. Cold, clear water to drink. Wildflowers, some times of year.

  She thought especially of the wildflowers, and felt homesick. She pictured in her mind the Flower-Viewing Festival, the
grasslands spread out like beautiful carpets, green but laced with floral colors. They reached in every direction to snowy mountains under a high, infinitely blue sky. From those mountains gushed water, measureless water, bringing life to the grasslands, supporting plants, birds, horses, yaks, every kind of animal you could imagine. Marshes so fertile with life you could smell it—fecundity, creation, the fruitfulness of life teeming, swarming, bursting, singing its song over and over, I am, I am …

  The Humboldt Sink was marshy, too, but its life was thin and poor, compared to her homeland. Deer, coyotes, foxes, birds that ran on the ground and were good to eat, and pack rats. The one pulse of life was lots and lots of water birds. This virtue seemed to Sun Moon undone, though, by the many vultures, creatures that fed on death. All around lay the signs of their scavenging.

  The trail leading to and from the sink, and around the sink, was littered with thousands of carcasses, now no more than bleached bones and a few pieces of dried, hairy hide, too ruined even to offer anything to the vultures. The carcasses had once been horses, mules, oxen, and cattle. People had crossed the trail to California, but their animals had died of thirst, starvation, or exhaustion. It nearly amounted to killing animals, and it turned Sun Moon’s stomach.

  Mahakala, she said to herself, in your honor I should learn to love these birds that take the flesh of death into their bodies, and live on it. But she could not, not yet. Her homeland was fruitful with life, and her heart still loved it.

  At a stand of stagnant-looking water stood a low, mean-looking hut. Here goods could be bought, all the usual sorts of trading-post items, Sun Moon supposed. Sir Richard and Harold marched in excited as children, to see what they might acquire. She was not interested in buying anything herself. She’d deciding working in Tarim’s store that white people’s interest in things-things-things-things was their most foolish notion. Harold emerged with a compass, and Sir Richard a bottle of whisky. Then they made camp in a spot with good grass a few hundred yards from the hut, near a single emigrant wagon and a single milk cow, grazing.

  There Sun Moon heard it right away, the low moaning, the sound of human misery. She looked at her male companions. They barged on with setting up the camp, aware of nothing but stakes, hobbles, a cook fire, and tasks. She walked across to the other camp, toward the lone wagon.

  A middle-aged man and three youths were gathered at the front of the wagon, shuffling their feet and looking helpless. They brought their eyes up to look at her as she approached, some uncertain, some hard. She slipped around them, pulled the curtain away, and looked inside, knowing what she would find.

  Her eyes took a moment to adjust from the harsh desert sunlight to the shadowed wagon bed. A slight creature who looked just past the age of monthly bleeding, half-girl and half-woman, sprawled on thin ticking. Her legs were spread wide, skirt above her knees, trunk curled forward in pain. She clasped her swollen belly. She moaned like a wounded and angry beast, then suddenly stopped. Her eyes raised toward Sun Moon. Sun Moon felt a pain in her own belly, where the eyes stabbed her.

  “Can you help us, Ma’am?”

  She felt a flash of anger but didn’t look back. These men standing in the sunlight were helpless, all their muscles and their brains weak as damp paper, because a woman was giving birth and maybe in trouble. They assumed that because Sun Moon was a woman, she would know everything—how to bear a child, how to deliver one, how to preserve the life of the mother, how to bring breath to the child, how to clean up, how to make everything safe and healthy, how to bring the goodness of the spirits to this place, this event, these people. But I am a nun. You submit to the endless circle of procreation. I stand outside it.

  She refused to look at the speaker. Her feet wanted to move away, to take her away from this shadowed birth. Before her yawned the grossly corporeal. Another way to put it was, Before her yawned the pain of becoming. Do I want to leap into the sea of blood and birth fluids? Enmeshment, it felt like. Not so much enmeshment in the tortured feelings of all these people as in a process both awful and awe-inspiring, a soul’s strapping onto the Wheel of Life, coming into the world to suffer all the turnings of another incarnation. Her feet wanted out.

  The woman’s eyes held on Sun Moon’s belly. Sun Moon held her breath against the pain the eyes caused. They protruded, as though trying to leap at Sun Moon. They looked straight into her barren belly, yet they didn’t seem to see it or anything of Sun Moon but something beyond her, something invisible to anyone but the becoming-mother. The eyes spoke fear and they spoke pain, great pain, the pain of physical existence itself. Somehow they transported that pain into Sun Moon’s gut.

  I must stay. Compassion. Compassion for all sentient beings, understanding of suffering, a fundament of the Buddha’s way of seeing human existence. Compassion, yes, and something more held her, something … whatever.

  She climbed into the wagon.

  “Can you help us, Ma’am?”

  She turned, blanking the anger out of her face. The voice sounded educated, as she understood American voices, but it was also pathetic. This middle-aged man had fading red hair and a pointy goatee. “I’m Rutherford Swaney of Lynchburg, Tennessee, Marybelle’s husband. I’d be beholden for anything you can do.”

  Sun Moon closed the curtain on him. Husband? That old man? “Marybelle?” she said into the shadows.

  The girl just crouched there. She was slender, wispy, and the deep shadow made her look more insubstantial. Sun Moon wondered whether her hips were so narrow they’d make things hard.

  Sun Moon had never seen a baby delivered. Since she had gone to the convent as a child, she lacked the experience most nomad women would have. The proper mantra had not been said for this birth several weeks ago, as it should have been said. If anything went wrong, life would leak through her hands like blood. But I am not as helpless as those oafs outside.

  She looked into the woman-child’s eyes. Two pairs of eyes met, held, negotiated, reached agreement, recognition.

  Suddenly the eye clasp broke. “Ooh-oh-o-o-oh-oh-o-o-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.” The bearer of life hunched over hard, gripping herself, moaning, endlessly moaning.

  “Marybelle,” said Sun Moon, “get on your feet. On your feet.”

  The bearer hunched motionless, moaning.

  “Marybelle, on your feet, squat.”

  No movement, only endless moaning.

  Sun Moon bent, trying to look directly into the eyes, to make contact. Impossible. Marybelle’s head was down, eyes open but focused on nothing, or something beyond everything.

  Sun Moon clasped Marybelle’s elbows and tried to raise her. No response. She lifted hard. The child-woman was far too heavy. I must get her on her feet. The lying position is too difficult. Another pull didn’t help. Moaning, endless moaning.

  Sun Moon sat down beside Marybelle and hugged her with both arms. The child-woman seemed not to notice. Sun Moon held her firmly, as though forever.

  Moaning, endless moaning.

  Sun Moon thought of the breach through which life would enter. Mahakala dancing eternally, she thought, conveying life into death, and back to life.

  The moaning stopped. Marybelle’s body softened. Sun Moon held her closer. Perhaps Marybelle’s muscles became a little pliable, and her body took a little comfort from Sun Moon’s.

  After a long while Sun Moon said, “You must get onto your feet.” Marybelle stirred. She shifted her feet around. Sun Moon pushed on her shoulders, and the weight rolled forward. “There,” said Sun Moon. “Now we can do it.”

  She made sure Marybelle was steady. Then she opened the curtain and spoke to the circles of males congregated there. “I need a small piece of butter.”

  They looked at her as though stupefied.

  “Isn’t the cow giving milk? I need one bite of butter.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Swaney. He jerked his head at one of the young men, and the fellow ran off.

  Sun Moon was concerned. She knew the nakmar but had never said it. The ch
ild-woman would have no faith in its power. The butter did not even come from a yak.

  She held the soft mound to her mouth and blew on it. Slowly, ritually, she murmured the words of the mantra in her own language, blessing the butter, letting herself feel spiritual power as she spoke.

  She held it out to Marybelle. “Here, eat this.”

  Passively, Marybelle opened her mouth. Sun Moon put the butter on her tongue. Starting to chew, Marybelle made an awful face. “Yech!”

  Sun Moon caught the butter as Marybelle spat it out. “You must eat it,” she said. “It will help the birth.” She put the yellow glob back into the girl’s mouth.

  Marybelle closed her mouth, worked her jaw, swallowed.

  Sun Moon nodded to herself. She wondered whether the butter would pass through the mother and emerge on top of the baby’s head, unmelted, as it should. Or would the mother’s lack of faith undo the blessing.

  I have done what I can.

  Time circled in its forever way. The sun moved from high to low. People walked, stooped, sat, worked, rested. Insects whirred and buzzed. Plants breathed. Animals waited for the cool of evening.

  Outside the wagon under the desert sky a man approaching old age waited, sometimes with companions.

  In the wagon, in the half dark, two young women waited. The older held the younger. Bronze hands helped a white body to rise onto splayed feet, knees askew, and to lie back. Silence alternated with moans, vast laments issuing forth, sometimes sounding like primordial wails, sometimes barbaric yawps. In the silence their breathing synchronized, so the twain were one. During the moans the breathings were two, and Sun Moon could not help.

  The heat eased a little. Trees painted shadows on the white canvas. Sun Moon thought how the air would redden the canvas as the sun set, and then turn it gray-blue as evening came.

  The change came indetectably. Marybelle was squatted, bottom hanging between her feet, moaning. Suddenly she said her first word, or Sun Moon thought she did. The moan changed quality a little, transforming itself from OH to OW. “Now,” thought Sun Moon, she’s saying “now.”