The Rock Child by Win Blevins Page A

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
1
    “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. “Idress 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