QUEENIE GLANCES UP IN ALARM as Joelle comes toward her through the trees. Her body tenses, ready for flight. But when Joelle stops on the other side of the fire and sits down cross-legged, she resumes her place, though her eyes follow Joelle’s every movement.
Joelle doesn’t speak to her. Instinct tells her to keep silent. She allows several minutes to pass, leaning occasionally toward the fire to nudge a wayward piece of wood into a better position. She feels Carlos’s steady gaze on her back.
Across the fire Queenie smokes her cigar stub and examines her visitor. Joelle lowers her head and allows her to look, unchallenged. She’s comfortable sitting by this fire, stars overhead, cold breath of night on her cheeks. She feels as if she’s been here before, and she’s not surprised when Queenie clears her throat and, half rising from her crouch, turns and spits on the ground behind. This, too, seems familiar in a distant way.
“Thanks for letting me sit here,” Joelle says.
Queenie looks at her and says nothing.
“I’m Joelle. You’re Queenie, right? You know how to make a good fire,” Joelle tells her. “You must camp out a lot.”
Queenie puffs her cigar.
“You go into the woods sometimes too. I’ve seen your car over there by the North–South Trail.”
She’s just talking, trying to make conversation, but at the mention of the trail Queenie responds. She smiles.
“My friend Carlos and I have been hiking there,” Joelle continues. “You know, my friend who’s back in the bushes? You saw him just now, right?”
Queenie’s smile fades. “I know you,” she says gravely. “I’ve been watching you for a long time. You won’t tell, will you?”
“That you’re camping here? No, of course not. My friend won’t either. Is it all right if he sits with us? It’s cold where he is.”
Queenie says nothing, but she doesn’t protest, so Joelle stands up and calls to Carlos, and he comes and sits by the fire. When Queenie eyes him warily, as if she might be thinking of bolting, Joelle tries to distract her with more conversation.
“Somebody said you’re a descendant of Indians who used to live around here. We’ve been studying the Narragansetts. Were those your people?”
Queenie’s dark eyes come back to her. After a moment she takes the cigar out of her mouth and smiles again. Her teeth are yellowed with tobacco stain. “My people were kings and queens. That is what they say, kings and queens. Do you remember that I know you?” she asks.
“From the library?” Joelle guesses. “That’s right, we passed in the library. That’s where my friend and I have been doing our research. We’re interested in what happened to the Native American tribes around here. There’s a place out in the forest called the Crying Rocks. Have you ever heard of it?”
At the mention of the Crying Rocks, Queenie’s smile vanishes. She glances over her shoulder, then back at Joelle and Carlos.
“That is a sad place,” she whispers. “Don’t go.”
“Why?” Joelle asks. “What have you heard about it? Was there a massacre there?”
Queenie shakes her head. “Sad,” she repeats. “Many ghosts and spirits live there. People who go come back scared. They can’t speak of the sadness they feel. And some do not come back.”
Carlos glances up. “What do you mean?” he asks sharply.
Queenie grasps one of her cooking sticks and probes the fire. A fresh blaze springs up, lighting the flat, broad planes of her brown face. Leaning closer to the fire, she begins her slow rocking motion, the one that accompanied her humming before.
“Can you tell us a little more?” Joelle asks her. “Please. We’d like to know.”
With her eyes on the fire, Queenie keeps rocking and rocking. Once again she makes the fire leap with her stick. Then she begins to speak in the same humming drone as before when she sang her song.
“If you go near this place, the Crying Rocks, you will hear them, the baby ghosts: Woo-woo! Woo-woo! The mother ghosts: Scree-scree! They make these sounds, and many others. Some say, ‘Oh, that is the wind,’ but they are wrong.”
“So what is it?” Carlos asks.
“Ghosts, like I said.”
“Yes, but why are the ghosts there?”
Queenie draws herself up and stares off into the dark. “Never you mind.”
“Is it true that, long ago, Indian children born sick or crippled were abandoned there?” Carlos asks straight out. “My father heard that. He said there are other places like this, that many ancient cultures had them, in many parts of the world. They’ve come down to us as weeping bogs or wailing cliffs. Ghosts are guilty consciences, he says.”
“Carlos, be quiet!” Joelle murmurs.
Queenie is glaring at him too. “A ghost is a ghost,” she tells him. “It is real and can do what it wants.”
“Then how—” Carlos begins, but Queenie cuts him off.
“The story of the Crying Rocks is for our people, not for you,” she tells him angrily. “Only our women can tell their daughters. Only we can understand. Isn’t it so?” She looks around with bright eyes at Joelle. “Do you remember?” she asks. “It is your story too.”
“Remember what?” Joelle replies. “That was hundreds of years ago.”
“Listen—” Carlos starts to protest. Maybe he wants to bring up his one-sixteenth Indian blood, or maybe he’s going to point out that the Crying Rocks story is no longer a private Narragansett legend. It’s gone out into the world and joined up with other stories from human history. Its events can be proved or disproved by the excavation of real bones. Whatever Carlos intends to say, Joelle lays her hand on his arm to stop him.
“Don’t. You’ll upset her.”
And he stops. They all sit still, watching the fire jump and spark. In the distance several cars can be heard passing on the street. From overhead, the roar of an airliner crossing the sky drifts down to them. As it fades Joelle feels the shimmy of a memory. Glancing at Queenie, she is suddenly aware of another fire, one that burned long ago and far away, so far away that it was lost all this time and she’s just now caught sight of its flames through the dark.
The air was chilly then, as it is now. The fire was well made and warm. The sound in the distance was not of cars on a street or a plane in the sky. It came from train wheels speeding along a track. Clackety-clackety-clackety, the train races past Joelle and fades out of sight into the night.
She turns to Queenie and says, “I do remember now. I know you, too. You were my friend, weren’t you? We cooked out . . . somewhere. Where was that?”
Queenie smiles her wide tobacco-stained smile.
“I’ve been watching you,” she says proudly. “We’ve all been watching you. But, shush! We must not speak.”
“People have been watching me?” Joelle says.
Beside her Carlos leans forward with interest.
“What people?” he asks, but Queenie presses a finger to her mouth and shakes her head.
“I promised,” she says to Joelle. “We all promised. You won’t tell on me, will you? You were so little then. Now you’re big and look like her.”
“Who?” Joelle says, barely breathing.
“Like Sylvie,” Queenie says. “She was very tall, like you.”
* * *
It’s past 1:00 a.m. and Vernon is already home when Joelle lets herself into the kitchen through the back door. The house lights are all out. At the top of the stairs she hears heavy breathing coming from Vernon’s room and guesses he never noticed she was gone. It’s not his habit to check up on her. Aunt Mary Louise was the person who looked in, to close a window or pick her clothes off the floor. One of the changes Joelle has had to get used to is that Vernon doesn’t intrude on her this way. He’s made no attempt to take Aunt Mary Louise’s place, and maybe it’s just as well. Joelle isn’t sure she needs that kind of attention anymore.
When she gets in bed, she can’t sleep at first. Queenie’s campfire burns in her brain, and whether she wants to or not, she finds herself groping for other memories to connect to the amazing facts unearthed tonight.
“You had a nice bed. A box like a house,” Queenie had said when Joelle asked her about the depot. But “I don’t allow no dogs near me,” she’d announced, so perhaps the little dog and the story of the shared Snickers bar were Joelle’s own inventions.
“They brought you in by a freight train, scared they were going to get caught,” Queenie said.
“Who?” Joelle demanded, and Queenie wouldn’t tell. She shook her head and patted her closed mouth like a naughty child.
They’d lived outside, near the tracks, and had eaten “from the hamburger place or cooked out.” “Summer living,” Queenie called it, and “I never made a kid hunt cigarettes for me. I did my own hunting.”
“Did I sleep on a pile of smelly rags?”
“Rags? You had blankets. Everybody brought you things—clothes, toys. The whole yard was looking after you. Don’t you remember?”
“What yard?” Carlos asked, and Queenie had laughed.
“The railroad workers. At the station.”
“Why were they looking after her?”
“She knows why,” Queenie said, gazing at Joelle with solemn eyes.
“Do you know?” Carlos said.
Joelle had shaken her head.
To listen to Queenie was to realize that the old woman had not been some lone crackpot taking advantage of an abandoned child, as Aunt Mary Louise had described her. There was an order to the way she lived then, just as there was now. She’d cared for Joelle, along with others, apparently, and had watched over her, even after Joelle was adopted and moved in with her new family.
“What did Queenie keep thinking you remembered?” Carlos had asked her as they’d walked home. “It had to do with the Crying Rocks.”
“Nothing. She was confused, I think.”
“She didn’t look confused. She knows something else about you. And who is—”
“Don’t talk about that!” Joelle had rushed to stop him.
“You don’t want to find out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not? It’s so strange.”
“Maybe I already know enough,” she’d replied, and then, feeling the pinch of invaded territory: “Anyway, what do you care? It has nothing to do with you!”
“That’s a good question,” Carlos had said. “Why do I care? And here’s another one. Why did you call me up tonight?”
He’d stood facing her on the dark street while Joelle cast around for a mean reply. But none would come to her, for some reason, and in the end, he’d walked away without saying good-bye.
Now, as she drifts closer to sleep, Joelle puts Carlos and his question in a well-guarded place in her mind where she can consider them later. She thinks back once more to Queenie’s campfire, hardly daring to look again at the most important artifact that’s risen up out of the Marshfield town park that night, the one she’d felt a need to protect from even Carlos’s friendly gaze.
“Sylvie.”
She whispers her mother’s name once, in the dark. It’s enough for now.
* * *
They are expecting visitors. This is what Vernon tells Joelle when she appears downstairs late the next morning, still in her nightgown.
“When?”
“Now. Soon. I don’t know,” Vernon says. “Go get dressed.”
He’s jumpy and mysterious and has already been out to the store to buy supplies: beer, soda, chips, some sliced cold cuts and bread.
“Are they coming for lunch?” Joelle asks in disbelief. They’ve never had anyone for lunch. The only people she can think of who would barge in like this on a Sunday morning are Aunt Mary Louise’s Tiverton relatives, but they’ve written her off now, once and for all. Aunt Mary Louise’s ashes are buried here, on this side of Narragansett Bay, not in Tiverton with them.
“If they want lunch, they can have it,” Vernon declares.
The next thing Joelle knows, he’s carrying out a pile of newspapers that’s been accumulating in a corner by the front door for about four months—ever since Aunt Mary Louise died. Then he’s getting out the vacuum and running it over the living-room rug and onto the bare linoleum of the kitchen. He pushes the TV back against the wall and brings down a couple of chairs from upstairs.
“How on earth many are coming?” Joelle demands, which makes Vernon stop and look at her.
“Everybody,” he answers. “They’ll all be here. You’re going to get an earful, so go up and dress.”
When she stands there, not moving, her arms folded stubbornly across her chest, he says: “Scoot! This is a big day in your life, you just don’t know it yet. You might not want to live here anymore when this day is over.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it says.”
“Well, I have something to ask you about first.”
“Not now,” Vernon tells her.
“Who?”
“You know, the lady who lives in the park and drives around in that red Bug.”
“Oh, Queenie,” Vernon says. “I guess she finally got ahold of you.”
“Last night, and she said—”
“I can bet I know what she said,” Vernon cuts in. “What she’s been waiting to sneak up and say for years. Why she had to come around here, I don’t know. She didn’t want to let go of you and followed us over from New London. At least she left Mary Louise alone, and she better! I told her I’d put the cops on her if she came near us. That’s the only way to get through to her, scare the daylights out of her.”
“What are you talking about?” Joelle shouts. “I can’t understand one thing you’re saying!”
“Well, don’t worry, you will,” Vernon replies. At that moment they hear the sound of wheels turning into the driveway. A car door slams shut, and feet start walking up the steps of the porch.
“Go on, get!” Vernon says, pushing her toward the stairs. “Put on a clean shirt and brush that hair. You want to look like something to them.”
“Why?” Joelle says, stubborn as she can be.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Queenie told you.”
“Well, you tell me. I want to hear it from you.”
Vernon gazes at her a second longer than usual. Then he heaves a kind of desperate sigh, as if he’s throwing in the towel at last.
“Because they’re your people coming to see you, Joelle. You said you don’t want secrets, and I’m taking it serious. Now go on. I’ve got to let them in the door.”
She runs up the stairs and tries to see out the window to the driveway, but the porch roof is in the way, so she races into her room to get dressed. By the time she comes out, a chorus of men’s voices is coming up out of the living room: “Hello.” “How ya doing?” “Nice place.” “Where’s the chick house?” “I took the highway.” “Well, I came up Route 2 and crossed on 138.”
Then another car arrives, more guys come in, and the racket rises another notch. Into this boil of conversation Joelle descends, as nervous as she’s ever been about entering a room. For a few moments nobody notices her standing by the stairs, and she gets a good look at the company. They are who she thought they would be, the tall, dark men she saw crowding around Vernon at the funeral. They’re not in suits anymore. They have on casual clothes that anyone would wear on a Sunday—Levi’s, T-shirts, jogging sneakers. One has boots like Vernon’s. That they’re all related is easy to see, not only because of their black hair and eyes. It’s the way they’re carrying on together—breezy, joking, not afraid to touch.
“Come on over here, Joelle,” Vernon calls out when he notices her. Before she can even breathe, they’ve turned around and are grinning at her. One of them does a big, fake double take as if he’s never seen her before, and says: “Whoo-eee! How you’ve grown! Who would’ve thought that sad little sprout we knew back then would’ve come out like this?”
“She’s not done yet, from what I hear,” says another.
“She’s got Sylvie in her. Look at that pretty complexion,” another declares.
Then, just when Joelle’s starting to feel her face flame up, a terrible silence descends and no one can think of how to go on. It seems they’ve been putting on a brave show for her. They’re not so sure of themselves after all. Joelle folds her arms across her chest and stares them down.
Vernon clears his throat. “I guess we all know why we’re getting together today,” he blurts out.
“I guess so,” somebody murmurs. Others nod, a little sadly now, or thoughtfully. And this is the place where Joelle decides to wade in. Loud and clear, she says:
“Well, I don’t know! So are you going to fill me in or what?”
Everybody laughs, except Vernon, who looks as if he’d like to make a swift escape.
“I guess I’m the one who should start,” he tells Joelle, “because I’m the one that caused Sylvie to have to run off to Chicago. If I hadn’t’ve done what I did, she would’ve stayed right down there at Charlestown and learned to live a quiet life.”
“Well, she never would’ve done that!” one of the men breaks in.
“Sylvie was not destined for a quiet life,” another says. “Do you remember how she hitchhiked up to Providence that time . . .”
“. . . and took a job at a coffeehouse where folks read poetry at night. . . . This was way before you came on the scene, Vern,” a third puts in.
“At fourteen! She was serving drinks and all. How’d she get hired at that age?”
“She was tall, that’s how.” (They’re all weighing in now.)
“She was writing poetry herself! Spirit poems, she called them. She was into her Narragansett Indian heritage. I went up and saw her.”
“Sylvie was writing poetry on top of everything else?”
“And reading it to the college kids up there.”
“Who’d that girl think she was?”
“Royalty, that’s who. Ready to lead a nation. She took that old Narragansett story Ma told us seriously.”
“I heard people say she wasn’t that bad. At poetry, I mean.”
“Until they found out how old she really was, I’ll bet.”
“I was in Chicago then, working my first yard job. What happened?”
“Well, the public school caught up with her that time . . .”
“And she pulls out her little pocketknife . . .”
“She was a wildcat.”
“She’d never hurt anybody, though.”
“The school, you say?”
“She was dragged home again, for the tenth time. Ma was having a fit!”
It’s in this way, with everybody jumping on board and cutting each other off and disputing the facts, that Joelle finally meets her mother, Sylvie, and Sylvie’s older brothers, her uncles. All five of them are there in her living room. Not that anybody takes time to introduce himself. Only by listening does Joelle begin to understand: They’ve been nearby the whole time, knowing her, watching her, knowing her mother, and not saying a word to her about it.
“But why . . . ?” she tries to ask, and her question gets drowned out.
Jodie and Jerry, the twins, are oldest and the only ones who still work for the railroad—where they all worked, with Vernon, at one time, it seems. Then comes Roger, the tallest at about six three, who’s now at the turkey farm with Vernon. After him is Frank, in the Rhode Island Highway Department. Everyone calls him Franko. And finally, Greg, wearing his hair long and braided like an old-time Indian because, it turns out, he’s a guide at the Pequot Museum over in Connecticut, knows his history inside and out.
“He used to look normal,” Uncle Jodie says, rolling his eyes at Joelle, “when he worked in the freight yard up in Worcester. That was around the time you came through on the CSX line, and we had to transfer you over for New London.”
“Me?” says Joelle.
“Sure, don’t you remember your ride across the country?” Uncle Greg asks.
“Well, I—”
“Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the whole way from a brown paper bag? You didn’t half get through them. The leftovers were stiff as a board by the time you hit Worcester.”
“I think I—”
“And a couple of screw-top jars full of water. Jerry met you in Cleveland—he was the yard conductor there—and climbed on till Buffalo. Then Jodie came on and brought you down to meet me in Worcester. He was in shipping, like Franko here. They had you fixed up in a special car that was carrying new parts for a nuclear sub down in New London. Good suspension, remember that, Jodie?”
“Sure do. Better than the paying passengers were getting coming in on the New England Central. You got a fast ride, too, because New London was in a hurry to take delivery for its sub.”
“But—”
“You were five years old,” Uncle Greg says. “Never cried a single drop. A real trooper after all you’d been through.”
“What—”
“Can’t you remember anything? That’s how you came from Chicago!”