The Rock Child by Win Blevins Page B

faithfully to the meeting house with the family twice a week, did chores, went to school when I got enough English, workedtoward 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!
2
    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