The Crying Rocks by Janet Taylor Lisle

Author:Janet Taylor Lisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

10

NOT UNTIL THE RAIN BEGINS to slant hard into their faces does Joelle notice it. She pulls the hood of her jacket over her head and looks around belatedly for shelter. Overhead the sky has blackened. Gusty swirls of wind rush past them, carrying a new cold.

Beside her Carlos stirs. “Come on, I know where we can go.” He stands up and runs to get his knapsack.

They walk fast toward the edge of the rocks and retrace their steps to a place near their base where it’s possible to climb a little and crawl in under an overhanging ledge. Here they are protected and can sit in relative comfort while the rain, now edged with ice, slams down on all sides.

“I noticed this spot on the way up. I thought we might need it,” Carlos says in an empty-sounding voice. He still looks shocked.

“Carlos the Careful Camper,” Joelle jokes, but he’s beyond humor and stares at her bleakly.

Sitting on the earth floor, her back against a wall of stone, she surveys the surrounding landscape. Their view is of the swamp, a soupy tangle of dead brush and reeds, black mud and yellowed grasses. Whenever an especially heavy curtain of precipitation travels across it, a thunderous rattle of husk and stalk drowns out all other noise, even their voices. What did the Narragansetts do in this kind of weather? Joelle wonders. Caught out in such a storm, did they come here, to this very rock niche, to wait it out as she and Carlos are waiting? Faintly, she hears a low growl of sound ricochet through the downpour.

“Sounds like thunder,” Joelle shouts. “Did you hear that?”

Carlos shakes his head.

The wind is tuning up, fortunately blowing the sleet away from, rather than into, their hollow. It’s cold, though, and Joelle keeps her hands in her pockets. She’s hungry but doesn’t mention the sandwiches, which are in the knapsack beside her. Somehow this is not the time for food. Carlos has pulled up his hood and sits huddled against the rock.

While they wait for the storm to subside, Joelle thinks back to her earlier fantasy in the woods, the flight of the children from the English. Now that she’s here, in the very middle of the Crying Rocks, she sees that their massive formations would never have provided good hiding. There are no caves or caverns of any depth. The vegetation is sparse above and an impassable swamp cuts off escape from below. If this was really a place of retreat, the people who came here would soon have been trapped. And then what? Joelle presses her body closer to the rock. A low windy moan echoes in the distance.

“There it is again, that noise,” she says.

Carlos isn’t listening. He’s dealing with the weather in his head.

Hoo . . .

“And again. Now it sounds like an animal.” She crawls out from under the overhang on her hands and knees and stares up. A muffled cry reaches her ears, perhaps from the rocks above, though it could be issuing from the swamp.

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