The Rock Child (7 page)

Protect him. Nurture him. Stay with him. Let him nurture me
.

“Sun Moon.” I chuckled. “What a funny name.” I looked at my companion. A youthful face, a beautiful face. Then, somehow for the first time, I noticed the great scar. I looked at her face again, carefully. Pure. Simple. Pretty. And a
big
scar, above and below the eye, like two big dashes.

I looked into the western sky. Now the moon had set, and only the day star held forth in the sky. I thought,
The time is in joint
.

I brought my mind back and regarded Sun Moon. The eye split by the scar looked bright and alert, somehow even brighter than the other eye. I thought,
Sun, moon
. Like the two stars in the daylight sky this morning, two stars that do not belong together, things in conflict yoked together.

I smiled to myself. I’d never seen a Chinawoman close, and sure never imagined looking at one like this.

Something in my heart moved. Opened.

“Sir,” said Sun Moon in a soft, high, melodic voice. “You must eat more. Danger. Cold.” Sun Moon clasped her elbows with her hands and mimed shivering.

I smiled big.
How did you get here?
I went to another world and brought back a Chinawoman. I chuckled. “Hey, you didn’t tell me your name, Mrs….”

Mrs.! He’s seen through my disguise. He knows!
Sun Moon took off her felt hat, but she resisted throwing it down disgustedly.

She studied the red man.
He knows. But he can’t be one of the hunters
.

Sun Moon called on the iron band to hold down the emotion. She wanted to stay near this man. She was a scholar-nun, hoping to become a teacher of Mahayana philosophy at the great lamasery at Zorgai, celebrated for scholarship. Her special interest was the history and development of Mahayana, including its roots in primitive religious thought, such as the Bön religion of her country. Though as a woman she would never have the degree
geshe,
she hoped to make a reputation as a scholar.
And before me is a red man with a gift of spirit! What a discovery!
The student in her trembled.
What is his gift? Prophecy? Healing?
The hairs of her head itched.

Hairs of my head!
Her chest clutched.
My hair should be cut short. I am no longer a nun. I am
… She didn’t know what.
No longer a nun
.

CHAPTER SIX

“We cannot go, Sir, must rest.”

I looked into Sun Moon’s extra-bright eye. “OK,” I said.

If I asked just my body, in fact, I felt OK to travel. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to talk to this rare bird of Asia. Or lie back and hear the new music, the songs of the river. Anyway, where would I go? My job was gone, my connection to the Saints was gone, and the wide world stretched before me.

“OK,” I repeated.

Sun Moon tugged at my sleeve and motioned with her head. I followed easy. She led me a few yards to a spot in the willows where brown fabric was spread, peculiar cloth. A low fire was burning, a camp made. I looked at Sun Moon hard.
You’re hiding and sleeping during the day,
I realized.
Who you running from?

“Get off wet clothes,” said Sun Moon. “Wrap up. Rest.”

I waited for Sun Moon to turn her back, then stripped. “How you tell I be woman?” she asked.

I chuckled. That getup was supposed to make me think she was a man? “Everything about you is woman.”

I rolled up in her brown cloths. Sun Moon looked at me kinda queer when I did that. Then she turned back and sat leaning against a rock. “I
dress like man,” she said, “fool many. Even queue hair.” She pointed to her pigtail.

If she wanted to know how I knew, I couldn’t help her. “You look like all woman to me.”

She’s also just plain afraid,
I said to myself. Once in a while, maybe without her knowing, her left hand touched her scarred eye. Other times it touched her shirt at the waist. I was tempted to say, “Never mind the knife—you won’t need it against me.”

Bear’s ass!
All of a sudden I knew something else I’d brought back from the other side. I wasn’t afraid. Didn’t know if I’d ever be afraid of nothing again. So her knife just made me smile.

Also, I knew things, and I sure knew Sun Moon meant me no harm.

I smiled big to myself. I rolled up in her brown robes and laid back on the sand. But I had no intention of sleeping. I felt alert. I felt like my senses and mind and heart and whatever other organs we use for knowing was wide-open. I needed to ponder. My old life was done for. I had seen something. I’d felt something with my whole being. I had heard music, sacred music. Who had borne it to my ears? The river and the birds. Especially, now I thought about it, the birds that live on the river or by the river, specially the eagle and my friend the fish hawk.

“We cannot go,” she had said. I grinned wide as the prairie. Where would I want to go? Working as a clerk in the mere—what could be more far-fetched than that? Preposterous, that’d be the bishop’s fancy word for it. I rolled my shoulders and scrunched my back against the sand.

What would I do?

I had no idea. Somehow that tickled me. I smiled at the sky. Wasn’t the sky where my music came from?

Then I shivered. I felt tingles of delight and fear at the same time. For the first time in my life I felt free.

Heckahoy, I’d heard about freedom all my days. I’d been taught the American people fought a revolution to break free of the British. I’d been taught the Saints came clear to Deseret to break free of the prejudice and violence of the gentiles. I’d been raised by Mormons to be free of the superstitions of my own people, whoever they were. I’d gotten an education so I could be free of the shackles of old ways of thinking.

Then, all educated up, what did I do with my life? After I was given to the Saints, I went faithfully to the meeting house with the family twice a week, did chores, went to school when I got enough English, worked
toward my endowments, and labored in the mere. I was white as could be. Except that the Saints did not treat me as white and delightsome but as a Lamanite, a person whose dark skin showed I’d been cursed. I myself had no memory of being anything but white.

What kind of half-Injun could I be? The ones the Saints knew out in Washo were Shoshones and Diggers. When I first talked to Shoshones, I didn’t recognize their language, so that didn’t seem right. And Diggers, I found out all sorts of tribes lived out in Washo, and the whites called them all Diggers, no matter who they were related to or what language they talked. So I’d come to a blind alley on that search.

Ever since the Pfeffers told me I was adopted, which sure made me mad at the time, I had not a notion who I was.

The next thought jolted me. I looked soberly at Sun Moon sitting against the rock. In the whole wide world I penned up my mind in this place with these Mormon folks and in their one language, their one way of understanding. Not a whit of it was my own, not by birth, not by belief.

A whirligig feeling dizzied me. I felt lost. I had let go of everything that gave my life shape, so was utterly lost.

I shivered. I thought,
I’m free. For the first time in my life I’m free
.

I chuckled.
Or am I lost?

I grinned at Sun Moon. The Chinawoman appeared to be far, far away in her mind. Maybe in China.
Maybe I will go to China
.

I felt silent laughter coming up in me like bubbles. I stretched. I was tickled. I felt like whistling.
Free. Lost. Free-lost!

The music rang. It rang from everywhere in the world to everywhere in my mind, which was the world. It was birds and bells, accompanying a single voice. The voice was the purest I’d ever heard, neither male nor female but somehow both at once. It reverberated like a bell in a tower. I heard it less with my ears than with my bones, my body, my entire consciousness. It was exquisite, soul-satisfying, a fountain of sound would go on forever, easy, bubbling over and over, tumbling on itself, forever creating beauty, forever healing.

I started awake. I’d heard myself singing. I had no idea of the words—or even whether the meaning was borne in words—but I’d felt the music ringing out of me.

Sun Moon was watching me. She had the extra alertness of the hunter, or the hunted, I couldn’t say which.

So. I’d cut loose with the music. I brought it into this everyday place. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad, dangerous or safe, healing or destroying.

I ought not to do it. I want to do it
.

I squirmed. I didn’t know … I didn’t know anything yet. I needed to wait. But wait for what? Just wait.

I looked into Sun Moon’s extra-bright eye. That eye felt like a dagger now. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No,” she said, “not crazy.” Sun Moon considered. Her scar was hurting. That meant, she’d learned over the months, she was in danger. Or at a crossroads, danger one way, opportunity the other.

What should she tell this strange man, this piece of flotsam washed up, about what she thought? Crazy, no, except that divine madness was still madness. As for particulars, he would not know what a
pawo
was. Or a dervish—she had seen wandering dervishes in her country, Moslem initiates of ecstasy. This stranger had their look, something in the eyes far, far away, a light no one else could see. Such people could cross to the other side and come back. Some said they escorted souls to the place of the dead. The young man would know nothing of this. He had a gift, and had not begun to plumb it. She knew more about his spirit in some ways than he did.

Of course, she had only book knowledge. Like many scholars, she did not have a gift, she had merely studied it. Nor had she felt the need of it. She liked the simplicity and clarity found in meditation. No mysteries of ecstasy for her. They felt… hard, inimical.

“No,” she repeated, “you are not mad.” She studied him.
What to say?
She was fascinated.

The pain in my scar
. With a lurch she corrected herself.
I must think practically. I am not a scholar, not even a nun. I need help
.

She touched her scar where it came out of her eyebrow, where it sometimes hurt. That was comforting somehow. Then she saw. Yes. Wonderful. Yes. She ventured tentatively, “We could help each other.”

As she spoke, she had the sensation of stepping onto a floating log. It might take her downriver, or it might turn and dunk her.

“You could help me,” she said.

Sun Moon’s story sucked at my heart. I listened to how she was raised as a nun. A nun! Wearing these queer brown cloths as robes, staying clear of men, and hours and hours of praying and chanting. Then the part she wouldn’t say anything about, getting abducted. But Jumping Jesus—quick, she’d been practically enslaved, shipped like a burlap bag to Idaho, and required to play the whore. I felt the drama of the way she risked her life rather than give in to whoring. I suffered her bad cut with her, the swelling, the infection, the slow healing. I wanted to know more about her weeks of lonely, nighttime flight from Tarim. Heroic, that’s what her walk was. I knew heroic when I heard it.

She was not Chinese but Tibetan—what did that mean? It was frustrating that she wouldn’t spell it out. “I traveled from Kham into China, I was abducted and brought against my will to the United States. That is all I can say.” I knew a closed door when I saw one.

The whole story had a queer effect on me. Only an hour ago I had felt—well, knew in that queer way I found in the river—that all this day-in, day-out stuff was foolishness, these struggles to make a buck, having a spat in the family, getting sick or well, whatever—it was all trifling as the ripples the wind makes on a lake. Compared to the eternal music in the depths.

Yet here across three feet of sand was a human being who was suffering in just that struggle. Torn away from her life, getting enslaved, escaping—it felt hard as thirst in the desert. So … Yet… Sweet gizzards.

I gave up on figuring this out and went straight for the next step. It was mad, but everything was mad. “How do you want me to help you?”

“First,” she said, “you must tell me who you are.”

I was surprised that she turned it back on me. So. I took a deep breath. I made up my mind to tell the truth, even if she didn’t understand it, more of the truth than ever I knew until now. Right off I had the feeling of pushing my boat into the waters of a stream that no one knew where it went. I wondered,
Is this what it feels like to be free-lost?

“My name is Asie Taylor. Don’t know how old I am, maybe twenty-one. Asie, a name from the Shoshone Injuns, in full Sima Untuasie, meaning first son. It sounds like Ozzie in English, but it’s spelled different.” I spelled the two words for her. “Name means ‘first son,’ or it’s a short version of ‘first son.’ Don’t know if I was born half-Shoshone or half some other Injun folks. Came from somewhere on the trail to Californy. Big stretch, somewhere in there.”

I took another deep breath. “When I was a kid, a fur trapper name of Taylor give me to some Mormons headed for Salt Lake City. He lived at Fort Bridger sometimes, with the Shoshone other times. Made his living trapping or guiding folks across the trail to Oregon or California. He was taken sick and dying, couldn’t tell them nothing. His woman was dead. Another woman belonging to another mountain man, a Shoshone herself, told them he called me Rock Child, but his woman, who wasn’t my real mother, called me Sima Untuasie.

“So when I was about seven, I ended up in Salt Lake. I don’t remember nothing of my real father or mother or that way of living.

“The Pfeffer family raised me as one of their own children, and educated me. I owe them a debt, though I didn’t always like ’em. They didn’t tell me I wasn’t theirs until I was twelve. I hated that. So I decided I didn’t want to be Earl Pfeffer no more. I threw out their name for me, took my father’s last name, and shortened the name my mother called me to Asie. The family didn’t cotton to that, but I didn’t care.

“To the Mormons I’ll always be a Lamanite, a descendant of Laman, son of Lehi, who was cursed with dark skin because of his sullenness. The light-skinned sons of Lehi on this continent were destroyed by the Lamanites. Among the Mormons I’ll always be an outsider.

“I worked in the Pfeffer family store in Salt Lake until I was eighteen. Then in the mere in Brigham City. If I worked hard enough, and tithed, and went to stake house regular, I was part of the Mormon community. If I studied and kept the commandments of virtue, charity, and tolerance, and served my fellow man according to the teachings of Christ, I would have received my endowments, and been a good Mormon.”

I held back feeling. “Then I might even been allowed to marry a white woman.” I felt salt tears in one eye. “I doubt it, though.” I made myself look at Sun Moon and smile. “What else do you want to know?”

“You tell what happen today? How you wash up here on river bank?”

I didn’t know what to say. It would seem mad to anyone else, how I
had come here. I hesitated. I quavered. I shook. Finally I said to myself,
It being a day of madness, I will honor it with one more mad act
.

Slow and hesitant-like, I told Sun Moon what happened that morning: Dissatisfaction with my life, queer feelings of things not being right, thinking time was out of joint. Now and then exhilaration for no reason. Voices in the trees, which turned out to be not in the trees but in the wind, and then turned out to be in the river. The waves calling to me. The flash flood sweeping me off, taking me to the world of waters. There the darkness. And in the darkness the music.

“When I come back to the world, I was singing songs I never heard before in a tongue I didn’t know. Still,” I told Sun Moon, “without knowing the words, I knew what I sang, or what the birds and the river sang through me.” I shrugged. “The spirit of flowing water. Soaring in the sky. I knew, just knew, knew more than knowing. Like you know your breath, your blood, your heartbeat.”

I lifted my eyes into hers, and had one clear thought.
Now she will have nothing to do with me
. I felt easy about that, and in a gentle way curious.

He trusts me with the truth.
Had he been older, he might not have trusted her. Had he been Chinese, he wouldn’t have trusted her. This young man couldn’t even say what people he belonged to, yet…