The Grandfather Rock

by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

I was half Blackfoot and half Cree and everyone knew it. I look Indian. My father was a powerful Cree shaman. But to the Blackfoot around Browning, I was still only a half-breed, only a half a notch better than if my other half had been white. Maybe not even half a notch. In a case like mine, it's very good to have special power, special protection.

My father gave me a grandfather rock to keep with me after Allen Running Water came lurking about. I was only about twelve and not yet rounded out. It was always a mystery to me that he'd think I was worth the trouble. Allen was older. He may have been old enough to be in high school but he wasn't. He hung around the streets and behind the bars in town and when I went to get bread from Earl Unser's grocery store he always found me. He'd tug on my skirt or try to hike it up as high as he could. He always used a stick so he wouldn't have to get too close and could still get a good look if he had a little success with a well-placed flick.

So when I saw him this time, I moved in a big half-circle to avoid his stick. "Lookin' real pretty," he said. His teeth were rotted out of his head, way before their time-all dingy orange and brown. His eyes look blended, like too much White Satin had unfocused his pupils.

"You get the hell out of here." I grabbed his stick and broke it over my knee and heaved it into the summer twilight. He stuck out his foot and tripped me and then got all polite to help me up, feeling my crotch as he lifted me as if I was nothing more than a brittle leaf. When he got me upright, I stomped on his foot so hard I could hear his foot-bones squeak. He howled into the curling, early evening moon and his pain gave me time to get away with some dignity, as if nothing happened, when the other good-for-nothing reservation boys appeared from the shadows like spirits in the setting sun. I walked faster than usual, but it was a walk and not a run and so no one suspected nothin'.

But my daddy knew. He might not of known what, but he knew something. He came into my room that very night and placed that grandfather rock from the Missouri River on my pillow near my cheek.

"This grandfather will protect you, Alice," he said low and rumbling in my ear in the dark.

The power in it made tears run down my cheek onto the pillowcase, dappling the white cotton into gray, moist spots I could feel with my fingers and see behind my eyelids.

"It's from the origins." That might of meant it came from his traditional land of Eeyou Istchee way up high in Quebec or he might of meant it came from where the spring melt has been trickling into the headwaters of the Missouri since way before Montana began. I didn't move when my father was there. Just listened to his breath, in and out, in and out. But when he left, I felt the smoothness of the rock. It was easy as big as my hand and smooth and impenetrable and impervious.

I kept the grandfather rock for many seasons, many years. My mother, a Blackfoot, didn't like the rock. I thought she didn't like it because it was part of my father's Cree powers, too omnipotent, too authoritative. That was the way it was for me, a split of spirit even within the circle of my family. Cree against Blackfoot. Blackfoot against Cree.

So I moved the grandfather rock, glistening with tiny mica chips, from the cushioned spot in the pillow to under my pillow to keep it from my mother's gaze. Then it moved to the corner of my mattress and finally made its way in forgotten silence to the corner under my bed. That's where I found it anyway. I was moving from one bedroom to another to make room for a new brother. Some of the new brothers were blood, others were brothers in spirit, people my mother took in when their soup ran out or the spirits beckoned their kin. I just swept everything from under my bed, childhood treasures. A cigar box full of pods and seeds. A marble bag full of diamondback rattles. Feathers from crows and pheasants. Pieces of antler bone I'd planned to carve. A bottle of Evening In Paris perfume I once bought at the five and dime. Agates and quartz and chunks of pyrite. A box of Kotex I'd made into a bed for a doll--all nice and cushiony with a perfect little hollow left to cradle the doll after I'd used up some of the pads. That was a time of magic, a time of power. The only time I hadn't liked it was when I had to sit in the moon circle during the sweat lodge ceremonies. I liked those ceremonies, hearing, feeling the chants deep inside me. But when I had to sit outside because of the cycle it felt as if my power was cloven from that of my father, separated into two parts instead of one. As if, when my power was renewing itself, it was also being denied. That wasn't what the rituals said, only what I knew as I bled old power and new power began to fill me.

I didn't throw out the Kotex box doll bed. Some castoffs--like clothes--went into other rooms for other children who would grow into them, some into bags that feed the braids that would become rag rugs. I buried the rattlesnake rattles and I took the grandfather rock out and put it by the side of the two-rut road that ran outside our house. I didn't think of the influences that might pass up the road that it wouldn't like. The unpure, the lazy--maybe even murderers, rapists, drunks, liars.

When I made up my bed in my new room, there was the rock. I checked to see if it was really not out laying among the pebbles at the side of the road among the dried foxtails and stumpy yarrow where I'd put it. The soil and pebbles had turned pink in the setting sun, rays over the mountains like the arms of God. It was an omen. I placed the rock in a bowl and burned some sage over the curve of its body, an abdomen in a bowl, sweet and pungent. I chanted an apology about discarding it after many years' protection. Allen hadn't really bothered me again, had he? I'd seen him hanging about the corners of town, trailing his feet in the summer dust, huddling against the winter of '58. Only last summer I'd seen him fishing with his hands in the creek that runs out of Eagle Canyon. But he hadn't laid hands on me. I hid the grandfather under the bed where he had been happy for years, comfortable in his pottery bowl.

But the rock was now on my mind more than it ever had been before. It called me in the early morning hours when the waking birds are the only sounds in the universe. It called when sun painted the sky in intense colors of the blood of the Gods as it dropped behind the mountains. I kneeled before my bed in the dusky part of evening and peeked under. I expected a voice or a message. I peered past accumulated dirty laundry and fuzzy dust balls. I swooped my arm under to pull out the rock in its little pottery bowl. I changed positions to reach a bit farther. Pushed and maneuvered it with my fingers until I could finally grasp it. Slid it across the floor toward me. I sat on the floor, my back against the bed rail, the bowl between my legs.

There were two rocks in the bowl. The other was very much like Grandfather Rock, only smaller. It felt right that he should have a companion. That he wouldn't want to be isolated. But the next day there was another little one, then two and then three-baby rocks, rounded, gray and dense, just like the parents. And then so many they were spilling out over the top of their home-bowl. I separated them into bowls of their own, keeping big rocks apart. Still more came. It was their nature. Finally, I filled the bowls with sage and rosemary and burned pine needles in each bowl as well. A welcome. A blessing. A thank you for their protection. Another apology for exposing their grandfather to the harshness of the world. And they fell calm and quiet again.

During the summer I turned eighteen my mother started to serve a kind of gruel on Friday nights to keep the young Indians off the reservations away from the bars. It was my job to help her make it. Townspeople would bring vegetables--overruns from their garden plots. There was rarely anything like potatoes or apples. Those they could keep in root cellars for winter eating. But we always had carrot tops and plenty of zucchini and the children would bring things like rhubarb and asparagus and mint that grew wild along the edges of irrigation ditches and creeks. I wanted to help but I didn't like the feeling that some of our guests carried with them into the yard, up to our front stoop.

"You're just like your father," my mother said. I supposed she meant his healing magic. But I was different. I felt the vibrations of souls. More like grandfather rock, actually. A sensitivity to the worries of the world. And some of our guests distressed me. They were altered by alcohol and rape and abuse and hunger. I felt sorry for them. I hoped the gruel would burn it out of them in the fretting summer evening heat. But still I was uneasy.

"You see the truth in a pink sky," my father said. "Feelings are wisdom," my father said. But he didn't tell me what do about them.

When Allen Running Water came to our yard for gruel I was not surprised. I looked at him over the bowl I handed him and he leered, his broken teeth looking like a grinning pun'kin.

"I told you I din't want to help," I said to my mother.

"So what is the answer?" my mother said.

I went to bed worried about the answer. Anxious about what I should do.

That morning when the birds' early song eased me out of sleep I found a large Indian lying on the floor at the front door. My mother had already called the Browning cop. I stood transfixed as he looked at that bare Blackfoot on the floor. He was without a shirt, face down, the reek of whisky coming from his pores, his quiet breath, his clothes.

"He has one huge welt on his head," the sheriff said after he had moved around the body on the floor, real slow, like a hawk circling prey. He walked his boots around the hulking stench on the floor, breathing as shallow as he could. His shirt and pants had sewn-in creases. He was a crisp Indian. When he didn't look at me I thought about him being Blackfoot, too.

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know who did this?" Now he did look at me and it felt like a flush. A beautiful crisp Indian.

"I didn't see it happen." It was a kind of a half-lie. It was true that I didn't see it happen but I knew how it happened. Lying on the floor within leaping distance of the semi-corpse was a large, round rock glistening with mica chips. I didn't have to do nothin'. Grandfather Rock took care of things just fine.

The sheriff smiled. I had a feeling in my stomach like grubs moving in the soil. Then the sheriff looked away like it was hard for his eyes to leave me. He rolled the man on the floor over with his boot. The body grunted. Then groaned.

I looked down at that Indian's face. His mouth was slack-jawed, like he'd been snoring and his teeth were like the pointy little candy corns we give out at Halloween. It had been seen to that he wouldn't be pulling on my skirts again. That was good enough. I was grateful for a whole lot more than that. I wouldn't have figured Allen Running Water would end up doing me a favor.

The Grandfather Rock is based on a story told to me by a woman of American Indian heritage who had come to Feathered Pipe Ranch near Billings Montana to conduct a sweat lodge ceremony for a group of breast cancer survivors. It took me a minute to understand that she was utterly serious about her mythology and another brief moment to understand that my own culture's myths may seem just as mysterious to the uninitiated. Then I realized that her story fitted well with a theme I often explore in my work: Nonfiction is rife with little white lies; great truths abound in fiction.