A FEW DAYS LATER, AFTER school, Joelle drops by the public library. She has a report to do on the history of the vanilla bean. Don’t ask why. It’s for science. Everybody in class has been assigned an herb or a spice. They’ve been told to research its Latin name, locate the country of origin, trace the trade routes by which said herb or spice was introduced around the world. Joelle was handed vanilla by pure chance. She doesn’t even like it, never orders vanilla ice cream (too boring) and doesn’t bother adding the one teaspoon or whatever that the brownie mix calls for. Nobody knows the difference whether it’s there or not.
It’s while she is trying to copy, freehand off the computer screen, an image of a vanilla bean living in the wild—a wild vanilla bean, no less—that she remembers what Carlos said in the park a few days before. A painting at the library. Of Narragansett Indians that supposedly look like her. Which can’t be right because, from everything she’s heard, Native Americans were short. On TV they look compact, thick-necked, muscular, the exact opposite of her. Admittedly, this perception comes mostly from old Hollywood movies, but scriptwriters do research, don’t they? They consult old photos?
Anyway, it’s time for a break, so she gets up from her workstation, stretches, and takes a stroll around.
She finds the painting almost immediately: a long mural, dark with age, spread across the back wall between the bathrooms. It’s composed of stiffly painted Native American figures busy with various conventional occupations: weaving baskets, harvesting corn, fishing, offering a visiting white man something . . . tobacco leaves? Well, there’s a disease bomb waiting to explode.
Other scenes include Native American children playing with a dog—did Indians even have dogs back then?—and a woman carrying a papoose on her back. From the forest’s leafy gloom, a group of men is just returning from a hunt with a couple of dead deer slung on their backs. Balancing this scene, four smiling Pilgrim fathers are striding up another path, holding a document that probably has to do with land sales. As everybody knows, Native Americans were tricked by the white man into giving up their territory.
She yawns. The whole mural is a cliché, something out of a textbook. There’s nothing real about it, and certainly no one who looks like her. Except . . . She steps closer.
In the mural’s dark background, off to one side where she missed her at first, she sees an Indian girl standing straight and tall as a young tree. Her black hair is plaited in two thick braids that fall below her shoulders. She is holding the hand of another, smaller girl, also wearing braids, half hidden by bushes. With grave expressions, the two are watching the bustling village scene before them, their faces so alike they could be sisters.
Joelle takes a step closer and stares up. A spark of recognition flashes inside her. There’s something about the two figures she seems to recall. It doesn’t last. Even as she gazes, the figures flatten, become a painted abstraction. Joelle retreats a few steps, looks up again. The girls’ identical faces reform, then flash! That spark again.
What is going on?
Whatever it is, Joelle doesn’t like it. A shadowy memory is moving inside her, coming up from some place she never knew existed and doesn’t want to investigate. Time to leave. Yes, it’s late. She should be getting home for supper.
She turns away and walks fast back to her table. She slips the vanilla bean drawing into a notebook, loads her backpack, and slings it over a shoulder. A minute later she is outside in the crisp October air, striding on her long legs down the sidewalk, leaving the library and its stereotypical Native American scene in the dust. Never has she seen such a fake and stupid painting. There should be a law against allowing dumb pictures like that in a public place, she tells herself.
* * *
It’s after 5:30 p.m. when Joelle gets home, and she can see Vernon’s pickup sitting in the driveway. He’s a manager at the big turkey ranch outside of town, in charge of feeding and watering and raking up droppings under the flocks, which live in uncomfortable-looking wire cages hung high over the ground. He puts in a long day, but he’s always back by 5:30 p.m. If he wants to go out, he goes out later, after supper, which is nice of him, respectful of the trouble Aunt Mary Louise goes to to make his dinner every night.
Nearing the house, however, Joelle hears angry voices. In recent months some bone of contention has risen between them. What it might be, she can’t guess because they never argue main issues. They wrangle over small things that rub them the wrong way.
“Shut up yourself and take off those boots before you go in my kitchen!” she hears Aunt Mary Louise yell.
“Get off my back!” Vernon shouts. “You’ve always got some complaint.”
“You bring the whole turkey ranch back here with you every day. Whew! What a stink! It’s making me sick.”
“You’re always sick. I’m sick of you being sick!”
The minute Joelle comes in, they stop. Vernon goes out the back door into the yard with a hangdog look. Aunt Mary Louise tries to smile and asks her how her day went. She doesn’t listen to Joelle’s answer, though. She’s too steamed up to concentrate.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. We’re not really that mad at each other,” she says, doing her best to smooth things over.
She goes and lies down on the couch, then asks Joelle if she’ll set the table and finish cutting up the green beans for supper, to give her time to get her wits back. Luckily, the rest is cooked and ready—fried chicken, potato salad—because Vernon might get worked up all over again if they don’t eat by six.
Not that he’d normally get worked up about something dumb like that. He’s quiet most of the time, soft-spoken and polite. It’s just that when he’s already in a bad mood, the Irish in him comes out. Then everyone has to tiptoe around. Once he threw an iron frying pan out the kitchen window into the backyard. The window was open but there was a screen in it, and the frying pan sailed right through the screen with no trouble at all.
“You see that high color Vernon’s got? The blood of the Irish runs closer to the surface than in other people, so it comes to a boil quicker,” Aunt Mary Louise told Joelle one time when she was little.
This was an old wives’ tale, of course, but at the time Joelle was stupid enough to believe it. She’d kept a close watch on Vernon’s color after that. If he looked red, even if it was just from being out in the sun, she’d get nervous. Boiling blood came to be something she worried about. That a human body could explode from getting angry became a scientific fact in her mind, right up there with nuclear bombs and water freezing into ice.
It was a few years before she saw through to the truth. Now she has more reliable predictors of Vernon’s temper. For instance, when he stops moving, just suddenly stops dead in his tracks and stares at you—when he does that, watch out.
After supper Vernon gets in the truck and leaves. Aunt Mary Louise goes back to the couch, and Joelle washes up at the sink.
“Are you feeling tired again?” she asks over the running water. She doesn’t have to raise her voice to be heard since the living room is just through the door of the kitchen. Everything is close together in the house because it’s so small. The ceilings are low. The rooms are stuffed with furniture. Maybe it’s her recent growth spurt—she’s now a full five inches taller than Aunt Mary Louise!—but lately, Joelle has begun to feel cramped in this place, like a dinosaur in a dollhouse.
Aunt Mary Louise sighs. “Seems like I don’t have energy for anything these days.”
“You should get out more,” Joelle says over her shoulder. “You need exercise and to quit sitting around.”
“I guess I do,” Aunt Mary Louise agrees.
Until a year ago Aunt Mary Louise went to work along with Vernon. She did a day shift at the chicken-packaging plant south of town, which meant no one was home when Joelle got back from school. She’d open a bag of chips, get a can of soda from the fridge, and have the place to herself for a couple of hours. She’d settle down on the couch and do her homework, slowly and neatly, from beginning to end, with no interruptions. Embarrassing to admit, but she liked doing homework. She enjoyed memorizing history dates and making math problems come out right. Tests weren’t that hard for her. Somehow she always knew the answers. She actually felt steadier, more orderly when she took them, though she kept this to herself. It would just be another weird thing about her for people at school to fasten on.
Unfortunately, Aunt Mary Louise lost her chicken plant job. She was laid off because her legs started hurting and she couldn’t stand up all day and gut chickens. She put in for a sit-down position, but never heard if she was even in the running. Now, whenever Joelle gets home from school, she’s there, lying on the couch, smoking the place up and reading a novel. She keeps stacks of them on the floor of her closet, worn-out paperbacks she picks up at yard sales with titles like Dark Side of Desire and Jailbirds Don’t Sing.
“I’m serious. You have to take better care of your health,” Joelle says, sitting down beside her after the dishes are finished.
“I know,” Aunt Mary Louise murmurs. You can see she’s not about to change anything.
“Are there any Indians that you heard about in my background?” Joelle asks her suddenly.
“Indians? You mean like warpath Indians?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-uh. Not that I was ever told,” Aunt Mary Louise says. “You came from Chicago.”
“I know.”
“On a freight train, they said.”
“I know that. I just wondered if—”
“Which always seemed strange to me. I mean, why a freight train? Why didn’t you come on a regular passenger train or by bus like everyone else?”
“How do I know?”
“Did I ever tell you about that first day you came to live with us?”
“You did.”
“About what you said when we brought you into your room here for the first time and showed you your bed?”
“I heard,” Joelle says more loudly, but Aunt Mary Louise doesn’t register. She is bright-eyed and far away.
“Me and Vernon had you by the hand, one on each side, and we brought you into your room, which we’d got all fixed up for your arrival, and you said, ‘Do I get my own pillow?’ ”
Joelle doesn’t say anything. She focuses her eyes on the floor and keeps them there.
“Remember? It was so cute. ‘Do I get my own pillow?’ you asked, in this teeny-weeny voice. Because you’d always had to share it, I guess, like with your crazy mother who threw you out the window. Or maybe you just never had a pillow at all. Can you imagine that? A child who never had a pillow to lay her head on?”
“You told me that before.”
“I guess I have,” Aunt Mary Louise says.
“About a hundred times.”
“You should tell me to shut up.”
Joelle looks at her. She feels helpless, as if she’s caught in a net. Half of her is angry, furious even, that Aunt Mary Louise would tell her this, over and over, without thinking how it might make her feel. There’s no more pathetic thing than a little child asking, “Do I get my own pillow?” as if she’d never been anything to anybody her whole life, as if she were a throw-out. Who needs to be reminded of that?
But the other half of Joelle knows that Aunt Mary Louise is telling her this story because she loves her. It’s one of the precious memories that Aunt Mary Louise hoards, that she brings out to make herself feel better. Because things in Aunt Mary Louise’s life haven’t always been so great. And they especially aren’t great right now.
“So nothing about Indians that you can remember?”
Aunt Mary Louise shakes her head.
“Somebody said I looked like one.”
“An Indian?” Aunt Mary Louise snorts. “You’ve got South America in you, that’s what I think. Vernon said something about the West Indies one time. He did some research on you but never found out much. How you made it up to Chicago to get yourself born, I don’t know.”
“Someday I’m going to that office in Badgerville and check things out for myself,” Joelle says, standing up.
“You won’t find anything there. That office was closed. I know because I wanted medical information about you a few years ago and there was no sign of the place. Then I heard you could contact a state agency in Hartford, but when I called up there, you weren’t in the records.”
“There must be information written down somewhere. Maybe they didn’t want to tell you. They could have been trying to protect people who didn’t want me to find out about them.”
“Maybe.” Aunt Mary Louise heaves a distracted sigh. Her hand finds its way to the cigarette pack on the coffee table. “There was a bunch of Indians living down around Westerly that Vernon used to know when he worked for the railroad,” she muses. “They’d all drive up to the ball games in Pawtucket on weekends.”
“Hmm.” Joelle glances at her watch.
“And then there’s Queenie.”
“That old black lady in the park? She’s Indian?”
“There’s a mix there, I’d guess. People say she’s a descendant of one of the early tribes around here. She can’t live indoors, that’s one thing.”
“When’s Vernon getting back?” Joelle asks.
“No telling. There’s no telling with him lately.”
“Well, I’ve got homework.”
“You go on, sweetie.” Aunt Mary Louise glances up fondly. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just going to lie here and rest my bones. I’ll be tip-top by tomorrow.”
* * *
Carlos, coming face-to-face with Joelle in the hall the next day, says: “Buenos días. Have you been over to look in the library yet?”
“No!” Joelle says.
Carlos drops his eyes and gets ready to go on by, but then Joelle changes her mind and says, “Okay, yeah, I went.”
“You did?”
“The Narragansetts don’t look like me.”
“Not exactly, I know, but—”
“They’re shrimps, for one thing.”
“Oh,” says Carlos. “I just thought there was something about—”
“And they’re not even real!” Joelle adds in disgust. “The artist didn’t care what anyone looked like, he was just painting types. Black hair, beads, peace pipes. They could be anyone. You’re the Indian around here. . . . Do they look like you?”
“No,” Carlos says quietly.
“Do I look like a type?”
“No.”
“I was born in Chicago!” Joelle shouts angrily. “I don’t even come from around here!”
She glances away. She’s never told anyone any of her facts. Here she is sounding off in a public hallway. She steals a look at Carlos, who appears to be suffering under her barrage.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It’s okay, don’t worry about it. People always get me wrong. I’m not what anybody thinks.”
Carlos nods without looking. He really isn’t that much shorter than she is, Joelle notices. He must have been standing on low ground before. She likes the way he doesn’t try to defend himself by getting angry back.
“I was thinking about that Indian council place,” she finds herself announcing a second later. “You know, the place in the woods you were talking about?”
“You want to go?” Carlos gazes at her in surprise.
“No. But I might change my mind.”
“We could go tomorrow. This afternoon I’m driving with my mother to pick up my father at the airport in Providence.”
“Where’s your father been?”
“To California, for a medical conference. He’s an orthopedist.”
“A what?”
“He specializes in bones.”
“Big deal.”
Carlos nods thoughtfully, as if he’s really considering this. “How about if I meet you outside school tomorrow?” he goes on.
“In back,” Joelle says. “The posse is out front.”
“Oh, right.” Faint lines of what may actually be a smile appear on Carlos’s long face. “Why are they after you, anyway?”
“Because I’m royal.”
“What?”
“And lost.”
“Huh?”
“They want to rescue me.”
“From who?”
“I’m kidding.”
“Cariño mio!” exclaims Carlos. “When will I learn?”
They walk in opposite directions down the hall.