The Rock Child (31 page)

Once in a while those of us at the fire would smile and nod to each other like we were friends, or were enjoying ourselves till we couldn’t stand it, or knew what was going on. It was tough on account of none of the Paiutes hardly spoke English, except Joe, and he wasn’t talking. We had too many languages and not enough of them in common.

So I decided. “I’m gonna give my river language a try anyway,” I says to Sir Richard. He looked at me quizzical-like. “Hell,” I says, “maybe my river talk is Paiute.”

Sir Richard smooched his lips and eyebrows and said, “Carry on.”

I was some worried, naturally, because I never had been sure of the words of my special talk, or even the syllables. My notion was just to start babbling, and maybe the right sounds would come out. My stomach felt all willywoolly, but I surely to goose had nothing to lose.

I cleared my throat. I put on my brightest smile. “Paiute Joe,” I says, “kriggledy dap wash ack gono? Bah, wokewoke Paiute?” Felt not too bad for river talk. I meant, “Do you understand what I’m saying? Is this the Paiute language?”

Joe answered, “You trying to make our talk?”

My heart and stomach did acrobatics, one over the other.

Joe beamed. “Kwa, kwa?” he said, or something like that—I can’t recall the exact foolishness he uttered. He giggled. “Bo wah gik gik. Burr, burr, gowsy gop.” He turned and bellered at a dog, “Saminy gip!” The dog skittered off.

Then Sir Richard got in on the spirit of the thing. He recited,

“‘’T’was brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe
.’”

(He explained to me after that this was a bit of nonsense from a forthcoming book by a fellow Oxford man, and later he sent me a copy of
Alice in Wonderland.)

“Every man know play talk,” said Joe, and embarked on another gaggle of baby babble and silly syllables.

Sam joined in with a cacophony of gibberish, and scratched his ribs like a monkey.

Joe’s brother asked him something that must have been, “What’s going on?” Joe answered in Paiute, and the brother and sons told each other and commented in Paiute and grinned like fools. What with them carrying on, and Joe, the two white men acting crazy, we had a regular babel.

And didn’t I feel the idiot?

In the midst of all this word folly, and with a sinking feeling, I decided
to go for completely idiocy and try the words my father left. “Rock Child. Does anybody know what Rock Child means?”

Somehow this stopped conversation. Everyone looked at me, smiling. Then Paiute Joe took off into song.

“
Rock-a-bye-baby on the tree top.

When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

Down will come baby, cradle and all.
”

Heckahoy, I couldn’t help it, I joined in myself, singing it straight but turning it into a round. Sir Richard launched in with me. Sam tried, but he only croaked.

We sang through it three times, enjoying ourselves thoroughly.

In the following silence, I said in Joe’s direction, “Rock Child don’t mean nothing to you?”

He shrugged. “It means a baby-rocking song of you people.”

Fortunately one of Paiute Joe’s wives took the edge off my embarrassment by holding out the ladle and offering me more to eat. Glad of the distraction, I accepted. After all, hadn’t Sir Richard murmured to me on the way to camp, “You must eat every bite of the supper and ask for more. Among these people that is mere politeness”? (Him and his books again.)

“You like the stew?” says Sam, trying to slow down the comical twitches his thick eyebrows and bushy mustache were doing.

“Sure,” says I, “I love it.” This remark was just politeness, though I had no particular objection to it as yet. Mrs. Paiute Joe, who we hadn’t actually been introduced to, so I didn’t know her name, filled my bowl right up.

Sam’s lips twisted. He leaned over, spat on the ground as a cover, and whispered, “It’s boiled
garbage.
”

I looked in horror at the conglomeration. In it I saw T-bones with tooth marks on the meat, half cobs of com, oysters, clams, rags of scrambled eggs, hunks of lettuce, and orange peels. My mind leapt to a picture of the garbage pails behind Virginia’s restaurants.

I ran for the bushes and threw up. And did some more throwing up. In the end my job of throwing up was quite thorough.

Why hadn’t I spotted the signs sooner? I am inclined to live in my
dreams, and often fail to notice things. I have never had occasion to regret this defect more than at this moment.

Now I looked back at everybody sitting around the little fire. They just stared at me for a minute, Paiute Joe and Sam and Sir Richard. (The rest of the family was kindly off to themselves, and there was a flock of them.) I was scared.
If you’re impolite to Paiutes, do they scalp?

Then Sam lost control and began to hoot and holler and slap Sir Richard on the back. Even Sir Richard’s severe countenance shook with merriment. Altogether they quite enjoyed the joke.

I walked back to the circle of my friends and looked at my bowl, which was spilled. I studied the cook pot. Cast my eyes back and forth, and sloshed around in my misery.

Then Joe jumps up in a clownish way and offers me more. I shake my head woefully.

Sir Richard says dryly, “You must not be a Paiute.”

Joe let out a big, squealing giggle. (Of course, he’d heard and understood everything.) That did it—they all commenced to heehawing again.

I took the whole business a little unkindly. It doesn’t ever feel good to be the butt of laughter, and there was something else: My feelings were tender. Sir Richard knew I didn’t feel good about it, not being a Paiute.

Heckahoy, I’d thrown up their food.
Guess I’m not one
.

I drooped my bowl toward my feet, and my whole self drooped toward the ground.

After a little, Joe said in a kind tone, “You skin dark. You Indin?”

I nodded and shook at once. When I’d recovered from this confusion, I said, “Father white, mother Indian. Don’t know what people. Can’t remember my mother—she died.” Sam was watching me right smart now. Sir Richard was paying attention, too. “She come from somewhere in Washo, I think, don’t know where. Been hopin’ to find ’em.”

Paiute Joe nodded sagely. “Hope you find what want. Watch out, watch out, I say. No matter what, it surprise, it surprise what you find, whatever something you find.”

I tried to nod sagely back.

“Maybe you should meet Sallee Joe,” he said. He pondered that. “Yes sure, you should meet Sallee Joe. She white get be Paiute. You want?”

I nodded eagerly. Maybe I could turn this embarrassment to the good side yet.

“She gone gather nuts. Few days I send word, you come. OK? Few days I send word, you come.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sun Moon put the
torma
before the altar and lit the cedar. As it sent up a waft of smoke, she knelt and began to pray. But even as she began, she was aware that it was not the same. For weeks her prayers had a different spirit. She was different. Odd …

Several times a day she meditated, as was now her practice, and several times she prayed. She continued to pray to Mahakala, her savior of the last year. She gave thanks to Mahakala for the anger she had discovered deep within her, the protest against those who mistreated her, those who … She worked her throat, tried to loosen it against the iron band.
Mahakala, you saved my body, my life, and my spirit
.

Once she had prayed for access to anger and what paradoxically lay beyond the anger—serenity.

Yet she felt different. Now as always in meditation she made herself aware first of the source of energy for meditation, the
tewa korlo,
behind and below the navel. As always when she prayed, she sent her prayers outward from that source. But now it was changed. It was the source of energy not only of her self but of two selves. In the same place in her belly, it felt like, grew the new life. Her prayers were not only hers but her child’s. She and the child were the same.

And her life was being restored to her. In a new way she was being saved. The human incarnation growing within her, she seemed to nourish it less than it nourished her. It felt like a blessing to her, like a fountain
of life-giving water. Each morning and each night, on waking and before sleeping, she simply lay in bed and felt the life in her belly, the life at the center of her body, the hint, essence that would become a human being. This was her center, not self but other, or both self and other.

Now, kneeling before the altar, she felt a little woozy. She went to the bed and stretched out. She breathed—closed her eyes and breathed. She put her left hand on her belly, her right hand on her heart. She felt the beat of the two hearts within her. Though her fingers couldn’t detect the belly heartbeat physically, she knew it as truly as the other. Two heartbeats, the beat of life, the rhythm of the one great force on the Earth, live now, live now, live now. She was the channel of life. Like Asie’s drum, like the great brass horns of the monks, she was a primordial resonance of existence, she was the cycle of incarnation after incarnation after incarnation. She felt this being a vehicle somehow more strongly, more clearly than anything in her life. It felt more real. She felt the beat with her fingers, heart in chest, heart in belly.

It is changing me
.

She did not know yet just how the awareness of the beats was changing her. She did not permit herself to formulate thoughts or words about that. She simply pictured a bud opening, before anyone can see the kind of flower it is. She could feel the thrust of whatever rose up from the ground and into the stem and opened that bud. It felt like hope.

I dedicate my existence to the nurturing of the incarnation within me
.

She drummed her fingers lightly on ribs and belly.
My carnal act with Asie, forbidden, condemned, was in truth a great blessing
.

She rubbed herself gently, ribs and belly.
That is why I now must find the courage to speak
.

While the Heritage was being cleaned one morning, before opening for lunch, Daniel and me would run over tunes. One day he put some sheet music in front of me at the piano. I didn’t read music nearly as well as I played by ear then, but he showed me, and soon I got the hang of it. Snazzlely stuff it was, but nothing for the Heritage at all. Tunes by a fellow from Louisiana, says Daniel, name of Louis Gottschalk. I read through them pretty excited.

Then he put another one up, called “Nocturne.” He played through it for me, and then I gave it a go. Subtle sounds like you can hardly imagine, moods quick on the wing, deep as a lake, shimmery as light on water.

I’d barely heard a glimmer of music like this.

“Chopin,” he says, pointing to the composer’s name at the upper right.

I looked at him with what must have seemed the gleaming eyes of a child.

“I’m going to take tomorrow morning off,” he says. “Business. Maybe you want that time to practice.”

My thought was, well, honest, I don’t know what it was. This music somehow put me back in the river. Like then, I was tumbling upside down, right side up, upside down, and like then I was hearing things. But I couldn’t see yet where I wanted to go. Couldn’t
hear
yet.

“Play some more Chopin for me,” I says.

He gave his small smile and did it. I sat there and let the music play me, that’s what it felt like.

After a while he says, “Let me take you to lunch.” Daniel never worried about money, seemed to have plenty, and sometimes had the way of a man of affairs. And a man of secrets. And always unpredictable. We did the lunch.

And I did something that surprised me. Over lunch I told him about getting swept away by the river. Hearing the music. Washing up and Sun Moon finding me. Sir Richard saving us both. About scouting for the people I was born to. Even about Rock Child.

“Rock Child?” he says in an odd tone.

I nodded and said it again. It did feel foolish, and not just because it was like a lullaby. “You ever hear of it?”

Daniel studied me. “I’ll ask around,” he says.

I thought,
Friends are the best things we have
.

Paiute Joe and Sallee Joe, his adopted daughter, stopped by the Heritage one afternoon and wanted to know if I’d like to walk back to their camp with them. I did.

I looked at Sallee Joe and saw a dirty, dark-skinned, rotten-toothed Paiute woman of middle age, two little kids trailing behind. When I looked closer, I saw a white woman in her mid-twenties with skin that was tanned deep by the desert sun, brown hair full of dust, and pretty green eyes.

We headed down the road. “Tell you story,” Joe urged her. As usual, he was beaming like the sun.

She began hesitantly. “I been with the people for fifteen, sixteen years,” she says in a backwoods-sounding accent. She looked to Paiute
Joe for guidance, and he nodded her on. “My folks come across on the California Trail, I guess. Paiute Joe took me from them on the Carson River, says they killed one of his kids so he took me for even. Don’t know anything else and can’t remember one single, solitary thing before I come here.” She looked up at Joe, but always kept her eyes down in front of me.

“No one single, solitary thing.” She mused a little on that. “Seemed so peculiar I went to the doctor over to Virginia. He told me a big scare can do that to a kid, leave you with no memories.”

She stopped. She didn’t know something like that happened to me, and I couldn’t remember either. My tongue was caught.

Hers seemed caught, too, and I didn’t know how to get her going again. I wanted to know how she felt about things, I wanted to know … Everything.

She walked in silence, eyes cast down to the ground. I remembered what Sir Richard had said he would ask. “The way you see it, how are Indians different from white people?”

The eyes darted up and down my face and forced themselves down. “I don’ hardly know nothing about white people.”

I felt stymied. She lived next door to a whole town full of white people and saw them nearly every day. She lived with Paiutes, had a Paiute husband and Paiute children. How could she not know?

“Like how Paiute women live against how white women live?”

“Tell him,” wheedled Joe.

She began to talk slowly. “White women, most whores,” she said. “Far the most whores.” She let that sink in. “No Paiute woman sell her body, none.”

I checked this out later, and it was gospel. Some Indian women did, but not Paiutes.

We left the road for the footpath toward their camp.

“Some white women work for other white folks, cook, clean, bring food, wash clothes. When I come to the people, no Paiute woman work for someone, for money Now some do such.” She shrugged her regret.

“Some white women got families, children. But they have to fight to keep them. Divorce sometimes. Children orphans. Women widows, or divorced women alone.”

She flicked her eyes straight into my face for an instant, and then shot them down. Sir Richard had explained about the respectful custom of not looking others directly in the face. “No Paiute children orphans. No go
to big building far from home, live without parents, live without relatives, unhappy. Every Paiute child have parents, relatives, families connected to families.”

She let me sit with that sobering thought before she went on. “No Paiute woman without family, not one. None but very old without husband. Your husband die, your sister’s husband take you. No orphans, no widows.”

I was uncomfortable. Hell, I didn’t make orphans or widows or courtesans either. I wasn’t even white. “I ain’t exactly white,” I said.
Besides, there isn’t anything wrong with being white. Is there?

She looked at me full on now. “You ain’t what? Dressed like that? Playing piano in a bar? Living in a hotel? Living in a
ho-tel
with a John Bull lord?” The shy squaw was gone. She shook her head in disgust.

This must have been the way to act she learned from her real mother, I thought. I was kind of feeling distracted.

“Tell him vice,” Joe said, happy as a clam.

“Vices,” she said. “No whoring.” I’d about had enough of that one. “No drinking. You never see a Paiute drunk.” Turned out they were well-known for staying sober, but my back hairs were getting up.

“Vice,” Joe repeated.

Sallee Joe threw a grin at the landscape. “Gambling,” she said. “You got one thing you call vice we like, gambling. You never gave that to us, though. We had plenty of that all along.”

I decided to stand up to her. “What do you want that the white man has to offer?” Half of me felt like a traitor and half like an ass. Don’t know why I couldn’t please at least half. “What good sense do you see in the white way?”

“
Sense?
” Now she put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “No sense, white people don’t have no sense. Live off the labor of other men. No Paiute does that. Ever’ one of our men works at jobs, you’ve seen it.” True, I had.

“Not grub around in dark holes in the earth that cave in on you, or kill you with gas. Not hunt daylong nightlong for something don’t do no good—go crazy for it.” Her voice was getting an edge. “Kill each other. Steal from each other. Cheat each other. You’ll never see a Paiute doing none of that.”

My feet had the willywoollies now—they wanted to run away from being white.

“Destroy your own food. We used to eat well on the pine nuts that
was all over this mountain. The white man used all the pine trees up for firewood. You think on that.”

We had climbed to the top of the little divide between Virginia and the camp. Sallee Joe stopped and looked back toward the city. I looked down at the Indian camp and then back toward the city, comparing. Joe watched us both, tickled.

The camp houses were, well, got up from brush, odds and ends of canvas, scraps of lumber, calico, poles, everything you can imagine, except you can hardly imagine what they managed to make use of.

And you eat garbage
.

“What you looking at?” she challenged me.

“One people builds fine brick houses. The other lives in scraps. One people eats steak, the other eats the leavings. One …”

“You get on,” she said, good-humored now. “You see better’n that. Or you don’t, come to camp, set down and look. Yes, they rich, we poor, you bet. Now. They miserable. Far away from families, men alone with other men, I know how they live. Go to whores, get drunk stay drunk days and days, rob each other, beat on each other, kill each other, kill themselves from misery and despair. I seen it, sure I seen it.

“Look at poor little me, then, crossed to the other side. I give up fancy houses, smooth sheets, and canned food, and for what? Lemme tell you for what. I got my family, I got my husband and kids, I got my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandpas and grandmas, nephews and nieces, I got everything.” She nodded at me as though to repeat, Everything.

My heart did a little tap dance.

“How many men come here with they families? Where your family?” She pointed straight at me, and I could feel how rude the jutting finger was. “Where’s that Sam’s family? Back in Missouri. Where’s that Sir Richard’s family? Back in England. You all living like sailors come into port. I bet. Civilized?
We’re
civilized, watch out for each other, make sure everybody treat each other OK. No Paiute goes too hungry, we get food together and share it. We don’t let nobody end up naked, or get sick without being took care of. How much of that can you say? How many you men in Virginia watch out for each other? Or do you watch out see if somebody dies so you can get what’s in his pockets?

“Last year a white man said he’d go and get me a job, I wanted to come back to town and live white. I laughed in his face. Why would I want to live white? Lose my husband, who takes care of me? Live alone,
get preyed on by white men who see a lone woman as a target. If I fall into debt, go to jail or work like a slave or sell my body to pay it off. Be lonely every day, not know what I’m living for, not be able to offer my children anything to live for, ’cept get treated bad by white men think they’re superior.

“I’m rich, and you men are all the way paupers.

“And here’s the worse of it. Every day you white folks wake up and think, ‘We’re high and all other creation is low.’ That’s as what sticks in my craw. So I wake up every day and say, ‘Praise God. Lord, you set things right, you made me red and not one of them whites.’”

On top of the divide there I turned back. They invited me to camp for dinner, but I felt like being alone. I noticed Paiute Joe just kindly smiled sweet and kind as we said our good-byes, and sure didn’t say anything to correct what Sallee Joe had proclaimed, nor set her down for saying it.

My walk home was strange; I don’t know how to tell you. I wasn’t a white man, I wasn’t a red man. Nor even knew which I wanted to be. I wasn’t thinking Virginia City was a jimmy-joomy place, but I wasn’t holding out for the Paiute camp either. I saw the truth in a lot of what Sallee Joe said, and could have added other unpleasant truths from my own experience. I started out on this big ramble partly to find out if maybe my soul was Indian.