WITH THE COMING OF APRIL, and then May, the weather in Marshfield gradually warms. Showers muddy the yards and gardens frequently at first, then give way to days of sunshine. The swallows return and nest. The catbirds shriek and mimic the cries of babies. Trees break into leaf, and Joelle’s interest in the early Narragansetts, now that she knows they’re her people, revives. Her interest in Carlos revives too. He’s wised up from their early days, and their research sessions in the library now often end as sparring matches.
Joelle, reading out loud (with a slight smirk) from a book titled Indian New England, 1524–1674:
“The men, for the most part, live idly; they do nothing but hunt and fish. Their wives set their corn and do all the other work.
—FRANCES HIGGINSON, 1629”
“Oh, yeah?” Carlos counters. “Well listen to this:
“Narragansett men shouldered the most dangerous and exhausting duties—hunting and fishing, making the bows, arrows, and canoes, and protecting the tribe and family.
—INDIAN NEW ENGLAND BEFORE THE PILGRIMS”
“So? What about this?” Joelle says. She reads:
“It is almost incredible what burdens the poor women carry of corn, of fish, of beans, of mats, and a child besides.
—ROGER WILLIAMS, 1643”
Carlos laughs scornfully and reads from another source: “ ‘For all the assertion that the woman was overburdened . . . or that her health was ruined by labor, little direct evidence can be found. The excellent physical health attributed to women of the agricultural tribes is testimony to the contrary.’ ”
“Wait a minute. How could they possibly know Narragansett women were in such excellent physical health?” Joelle demands. “Most of us were wiped out, remember?”
“They found graves. It says right here: ‘Narragansett burial sites support evidence of powerful women of extraordinary height.’ ”
“Well, that doesn’t mean we didn’t work harder than the men.”
“I never said you didn’t.”
“I’m just making sure you understand. Women were important back then.”
“I understand.”
“Hunting and fishing were sidelines for the Narragansetts. Their tribes depended on food that was grown, harvested, and stored by women. Women were crucial to survival!”
“They definitely were. And not only that, they still are,” Carlos replies, looking up at her with such ardent sincerity that Joelle is left feeling like an entire Spanish armada becalmed in the heat of battle.
They are friends again. And perhaps a little more than friends, as people usually are who have telephoned each other late at night, and heard each others’ extraordinary stories, and discovered links between their lives that are invisible to others.
Carlos has asked: “So Queenie knew you were coming to the New London freight depot?”
And Joelle has answered, as if she’d always known it: “Oh, sure. She was part of my uncles’ plan. I needed to drop out of sight for a while, and Queenie was the perfect cover. Vernon told Aunt Mary Louise that I was a lost child picked up by the police, but it was all part of the plan. The Family Services Center she always talked about was a fake my uncles arranged. I was the only kid there. Queenie had just driven me up from the New London depot, where we’d been hanging out that summer.”
Joelle has asked him: “How are you and your dad getting along? Is he still going on a lot of trips?”
And Carlos has answered: “He’s taking us on a trip, my mother and me. We’re visiting some Sioux historical sites in South Dakota this summer.”
In the midst of this new closeness, there remain private zones between them, places that seem to lie beyond the reach of words or explanations. Even knowing what she now does about Sylvie, Joelle can’t imagine how her mother did what she did. Sylvie’s choice, and the part Joelle played in it, are matters Joelle can’t explain to herself, and she keeps the frightening room in the high-rise apartment building locked behind its door in her mind.
Somehow, Carlos is aware of this and doesn’t trespass. With equal understanding, Joelle stays away from the subject of Daniel’s fall. Though Carlos’s father has spoken to him, it’s not enough. She can tell that Daniel is often on his mind, a shadowy form following silently behind him on hikes through the woods, a figure watching from the edge of the picture.
Like Sylvia.
Joelle recognizes her twin now. She was there the whole time, as close as Joelle’s own skin, separated by only a twist of imagination, which shows how close the past can be to the present. Invisible as Sylvia was before, now that Joelle knows what to look for, she sees her everywhere in her life.
“Remember that long-haired cat I told you about?” she asks Carlos one day, trudging home from school. “The one that came with me from Chicago on the freight train and ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I’ve just figured it out: That was my sister, Sylvia.”
“It was?”
“Yes. She wasn’t going to be left behind.”
“Or you weren’t going to leave her,” Carlos points out.
“Maybe, but remember the feeling I had that I was being tracked through the woods when we hiked to the Crying Rocks?”
“You also had it coming back,” Carlos reminds her.
“That was Sylvia too. She was following secretly in my footsteps, just as our mother taught her to do.”
Carlos appears doubtful. “So she’s somehow around here in spirit form?”
“In a way. She was that little dog who slept with me in my box at the railroad depot.”
“This is all in your mind, of course,” Carlos says, to reassure himself of her sanity. Or maybe his.
“Queenie wouldn’t think so. Ghosts are real to her. That painting in the library . . .”
“Oh, that painting! I never should have told you about it. You’re turning into a dangerously haunted person,” Carlos kids her.
“Maybe I am, but Sylvia is there. That’s a picture of her, standing with me in the bushes. I’m holding her hand the way I used to in Chicago. We’re looking at our village.”
“Seriously haunted,” Carlos repeats, shaking his head. “It’s a bad case of ancestor worship.”
“As if someone who’s only one-sixteenth Indian would know anything about my ancestors,” Joelle says with a smile.
Carlos nods and grins. “You certainly beat me there.” A moment later, his face changes.
“Speaking of ghosts,” he whispers. He points behind them, up the sidewalk.
Swinging around to look, Joelle catches sight of a bobble of little-girl heads sneaking along behind the hedge.
“If you don’t mind, I’m heading back to the ranchero,” he says. “I don’t want to be yelled at. Your royal followers have been getting a little out of control lately. I think you’re beginning to lose your charm.”
He takes off at top speed leaving Joelle to face her troops. They are back to wearing braids again, and going a step further, are all sporting beaded bands with exotic feathers from various long-winged birds. Whether they talked their mothers into buying these crazy headdresses at a costume store or made them themselves, it’s hard to tell. Whatever, enough is enough. This spy operation must come to an end.
“Buenos días, Indian princesses!” Joelle calls out determinedly.
A storm of giggles arises from behind the hedge.
“Come forth and show yourselves!” Joelle calls. “I have a proposition.”
“A what?” says one princess, sticking her head around the hedge. They all file out with suspicious eyes. This is the first, the very first time Joelle has consented to speak to them. They’re gazing at her skeptically, wondering if it’s some kind of trick. Over on one side of the pack, Joelle is happy to see Michiko. She’s worked things out, it seems, and is back with the others.
“I wish to speak of tribal matters,” Joelle addresses them formally. “Give me your leader.”
“We can’t,” one of the princesses pipes up.
“Why not?”
“We threw her out!”
“You did?” Joelle glances at Michiko. “You never told me! You threw Penny Perrino out of her own club?”
“It wasn’t hers anymore. She was too mean,” Michiko says.
“Penny wasn’t even in our grade. All she wanted was to boss us around,” another princess explains. “Now we have meetings when we feel like it, and nobody gets cut out.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Joelle says. “Here’s what I was thinking. How’d you all like to know a real Indian queen?”
“Oh, come on. An Indian queen is still alive?”
“How can you tell she’s really a queen?”
“Because she told me, and I believe her,” Joelle informs them solemnly. “Come and meet her, you’ll see.” She strides off on her long legs toward the park, the whole of her tribe trotting doubtfully behind.
* * *
Vernon would not approve, but ever since hearing her story from the uncles, Joelle has been visiting Queenie. She finds her in the park in the late afternoons or, spotting Queenie’s red Bug parked outside the library, looks for her there. It’s more than information she’s after. Some old feeling of comfort and safety has lingered from their days at the depot, though Joelle still recalls little from that time. Being with Queenie simply makes her happy.
Often they sit together without saying anything. The old woman is not always prepared to talk. Certain questions anger her and mention of past events introduces strain and confusion. Whether any event is truly past or is merely biding its time, waiting to come round again, is an issue for her. Small pieces of new information have reached Joelle’s ear, though, and there is even the occasional jewel.
About Sylvie, Queenie had volunteered: “She is crying for you. Do you know she misses you?”
“How?” Joelle had asked. “Where is she?”
“There.” Queenie pointed vaguely behind her. “In the forest. She cries with the others.”
“At the Crying Rocks?” Joelle asked. Queenie had turned away and hidden her face in her hands.
But another time, about the rocks themselves, she had suddenly burst out: “It’s a place the earth keeps for us, our people. In ancient times a mother who had to leave her baby brought him there—a child born sick or unfinished or damaged beyond repair. She knew what she must do, but she was sad, so sad. Can you imagine?”
“When you say mothers left their children, what does that mean?” Joelle had asked. “The mother abandoned the child?”
Queenie had grown confused at this. Shaking her head, she’d answered a different question. “No, no, not Sylvie. Sylvie couldn’t leave her girl. She wasn’t crazy, like they said. She wanted to stay with you, but she had to go with the little one.”
“With my sister?”
“Yes. Sylvie was very brave.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Yes,” Queenie had whispered. “And I hear her cry.”
Now, as Joelle approaches the park with her troop of feathered princesses in tow, Queenie’s dark shape can be seen in the distance, moving through the trees. She is usually here at this time, gathering wood for her evening campfire. Subject as she often is to confrontation with the local police, she stockpiles supplies in hidden places near the barbecue pit. Only late at night, after the patrols have passed, does she light her blaze to cook, as Joelle knows now, having been out a few times to sit with her.
“Look!” Joelle tells the Secret Princesses, and their eyes widen, for here comes Queenie in her many-layered outfit, wild hair streaming, not at all what they expected, but certainly something to be reckoned with. Tall and wide, she is a force of nature.
“Sit down and wait,” Joelle tells her tribe when they reach the old barbecue pit, and they do, removing their headdresses, which have a tiresome way of falling into their eyes. After some hesitation Queenie approaches and sits too. This is her parlor, after all, and she’s become used to seeing Joelle at this hour.
For a while there is nervous silence as Queenie eyes her visitors warily. Finally, Michiko, unable to contain herself a second longer, raises her voice.
“Are you really an Indian queen?”
Immediately, the old woman relaxes. She gives Michiko a wide, tobacco-stained smile and answers, with immense pride.
“I am related to kings and queens. To kings and queens, that is what they say. And to her,” she adds. “It was a secret. Did you know?”
When Queenie points, all eyes turn toward Joelle with sparkling new interest.
* * *
The forest, when Joelle and Carlos enter it off the busy road, welcomes them with pungent scents of both decay and new growth. Beneath trees bright with June leaves, last fall’s castoffs lie in various stages of boggy digestion, already too far gone to be raised by even the strongest wind. The North– South Trail is clear and dry. They pass along it silently, barely disturbing the ongoing beat of life around them.
“Look,” Carlos says in a low voice as two red foxes on the hunt pad across the trail a short distance in front of them. A little while later, coming up on the chattering flow of Cowaset Brook, a wiry doglike creature with a yellowish coat bounds away, sneaking one sharp glance over a shoulder.
“That was a coyote,” Carlos says. “You didn’t use to see them, but now they’re moving in from other areas.”
“Why?” Joelle asks.
“Too many roads and houses, I guess. They need uninterrupted territory to live.”
The Narragansetts had a similar need, Joelle recalls from her reading. Never rooted to a single place, they moved with the seasons, depending on where the best food supplies could be found. Their villages could be dismantled and packed up in a few hours, and they traveled light, carrying the barest minimum of possessions.
Hefting her knapsack on her back, Joelle tries to imagine how it would feel to live with the land this way, bound to nature’s rhythms. Bound to its mysteries as well, the uncertainties and anomalies of the spirit universe, whose relation to the human mind is still far from understood, she thinks suddenly. For as they cross the brook and head away, following the trail’s incline, she is aware of a disturbing black mass looming up in her mind’s eye. She can’t see or hear them, but somewhere to the west, from the edge of their disreputable swamp, she feels the Crying Rocks send out a warning.
She and Carlos are hiking to the high council place. It’s a pleasant Saturday morning. They’ve brought sandwiches and bottled water. School will close for the summer in a week, and they have a plan to make a much longer hike with Carlos’s father, over several days, up through southern Massachusetts. The walk today is a preliminary expedition to build stamina.
“Do any of your uncles like to hike?” Carlos asks over his shoulder.
“Greg does. He did a survey of original Native American trails in southern New England for the Pequot Museum. He told me he was out there trying to trace the routes along highways roaring with traffic, in fear for his life half the time.”
Carlos laughs. “Maybe he’ll come with us on our long hike. We’re not going on any roads if we can help it.”
“I’ll ask him. Vernon would like that. He’s always worrying about me these days.”
“Well, that’s a change,” Carlos says. “What’s up with him?”
“Don’t ask me. He says his good luck has moved over from Aunt Mary Louise to me, so he has to keep an eye on me. It’s kind of a pain, but . . .” Joelle shades her eyes against a shaft of sun that’s broken through the foliage. For a moment she’s blinded, and then: “What was that?” she asks Carlos.
“What?”
“I thought I saw people. Over there, through the trees.”
They come to a halt and look, but all is quiet and unrevealing. As they listen the forest around them seems to deepen, to spread away into miles and miles of whispering greenery.
“Nothing moving that I can see,” Carlos tells her cheerfully. “What did they look like?”
“I’m not sure,” Joelle says, though she knows very well what she saw. The warrior hunters are here, watching them from just beyond the border of time. Their tall, dark forms are woven into the shadows of the trees. Their eyes are spangles of light between the leaves. As she and Carlos set off again the hunters turn silently on their own trail and veer away toward their village, a place so well concealed in the folds of the forest that Joelle knows she will never be able to find them. Like the deer and the coyote, they have slipped through the encroaching ring of highways and towns and come here to hide. Only occasionally, on such hikes as this, will her path cross theirs for one flash of a moment.
Ahead of her Carlos looks over his shoulder and slows a bit, so she can catch up.
“Almost there,” he says, bringing her back to solid ground.
The trail rises steadily now, and for a few minutes they push on without speaking. From somewhere to their right, the high rasping screech of a bird rings out, answered by a second screech, much closer by. Joelle glances up, but the foliage above them is too dense to see anything.
“Where are the Crying Rocks from here?” she asks.
“About a mile south,” Carlos answers between breaths. They are in the final steep climb toward the ledge, both panting. “Nothing to worry about,” he adds, knowing what she’s thinking. “There’s not even any wind blowing today.”
And then they are there, at the high council place, stepping out on top of the world. To Joelle, it’s a shock all over again, the long sweep of the view across the valley, the blast of sun in their faces. The trees far below form a carpet of light and dark greens. In some places the leaves are late in coming and the brown scalp of the earth shows through. In another area silver spires of dead wood poke up from a dense cover of low-lying vegetation.
Carlos has taken out a pair of binoculars and begun to look around. He points to the silvery section. “You can see where the swamp begins,” he says. “I’ve never been able to tell where it was before. Later on it’s hidden by growth.”
Joelle nods. While he stands on the brink, peering here and there through the glasses, she keeps herself well back. For one dizzy moment she’d felt the emptiness below drag her forward with its insistent grip. Now she is released and in charge of herself again.
“What can you see?” she asks.
“I’m looking at the edge of the swamp,” Carlos answers. “Somebody’s walking down there.”
She follows his gaze and picks out the dead trunks again. Farther to the left, she’s just able to make out a gray outcropping of rock, and she is looking at this, wondering if it could possibly be what she thinks it is, when a long, shrill cry echoes across the valley.
Beside her Carlos jerks the binoculars away from his eyes and goes absolutely still. This is no bird. It’s a sound they both recognize, though removed now from its stormy context. Into the sunny silence of a June morning comes that wild, pure, grieving shriek again. And once more.
“Let me see,” Joelle says. She takes the binoculars, and focusing on the Crying Rocks, since this is certainly what they are, she catches sight of a tiny human figure moving slowly, with a familiar gait, up one side. As she watches, the cry rings out again, piercing and unearthly, an elemental wail of sorrow and loss.
Below, the lone figure has stopped walking and turned a face toward the outcropping above.
“It’s Queenie,” Joelle breathes to Carlos, “but I can’t tell if . . .” She peers harder into the binoculars. “I can’t quite see . . .”
The old woman begins to move upward again. She passes into the shadow of the rocks and, with infuriating finality, disappears from sight. Joelle turns to Carlos.
“I couldn’t tell if she was listening or crying.”