Rockabee

Rockabee

by Timothy O'Fallon






If ever you journey through the west of Ireland you may by chance stumble into the little town of Cong.  While you are there, if you happen to see an old man holding a dark wooden cane walking down the street, dressed in gray pants and a blood red vest, his back stooped with age, do not stop to say hello.

If you say ‘hello’, he will say, “Hello?  Hello?  I never say ‘hello’ to a perfect stranger.  But since you are clearly far from perfect, I’ll ask you, ‘How are you today?’”

Say no more to the old man.  Move on to your intended destination.  Because if you answer him; and worse yet if you ask him if he is well, he will say:

“I’m glad you asked.  I’m not well today.  Not well at all.  I’ve left my medicine in an alder tree – and it’s too far for me to walk there, too full of weeds for me to pass through, too high for me to climb, and too rocky for me to cross the Giant’s Grave to the little stream which the alder tree covers with its boughs.  But you are young and strong!  You can walk the paths and brush through the brush, climb the climb, and cross the rocky Giant’s Grave to the little hole in the alder tree where I left my medicine.  Could you get it?  Yes you could.  Will you get it?”

You mustn’t look at him when he speaks to you.  If the red-vested man locks his sparkling gray eyes onto yours, you cannot say no.  You will find yourself following his directions to the Giant’s Grave to fetch his medicine in the alder tree just beyond it. 

Soon you will leave the road and will be walking down ancient paths, overgrown and dark with trees overhead.  And nineteen paces from the stump of the ash you will see grass as tall as you are on the right side of the path.  You will walk through it and see a tree-covered hill in front of you.  You will clamber up the hill on your hands and knees, and when you reach the top you will see it – you will see the Giant’s Grave.

The Giant’s Grave will be empty.  If there ever was a giant in it he is long gone.  You will see stones piled up around a little room underneath, but it is spooky in there and you will think you hear a woman’s voice whispering, “Dermot…Dermot…where are you, Dermot?”  But it will only be the wind, and it will be no concern of yours even if it were not the wind, so you will leave the Giant’s Grave and make your way toward the sound of water bubbling over stones.

Before you see the stream you will see the tree, the alder tree, no taller than the other trees but somehow the most treeish tree of all.  And a hole, the hole (it could be no other hole) - just the right size for you to put your hand in- will be plain for you to see.  But of course you will not blindly stick your hand into a hole in a tree just because an old man with a dark wooden cane and shiny grey eyes told you to.  You will be careful.  You will look into the hole first.  And when you look into the magical hole in the alder tree by the stream flowing beyond the Giant’s Grave in the west of Ireland, I do not know what you will see.  Since I do not know what you will see I cannot tell you.  But I will tell you what I saw.

The hole led to a small, cozy space.  It was almost perfectly round with smooth walls.  A bed of moss covered the bottom of the space like a rug.  But there was no bottle of pills, no inhaler, no ointment, nor salve anywhere in sight.  I almost pulled away, when something on the moss caught my searching gaze.  A marble-sized reddish-brown bead rested in the precise middle.  It was a sphere of alder sap.

I still did not reach into the holey place, but inspected the ball of tree-sap from the outside.  To my surprise, it encompassed my vision until I began to look into it, and then to look through it.

So I saw that it was not only a drop of alder blood, but it was also a universe.  I’m sure it was.  A billion galaxies twirled in its rosy sea.  My vision focused on one galaxy, a spiraling pinwheel of stars.  I could even make out some of the individual stars on one of its many arms.  One blue sun seemed most noticeable of all: an azure star with seven brown planets circling around it this way and that.  The second brown planet loomed in my vision, and I could see peaks and valleys and ancient dry riverbeds.

My vision descended through atmosphere and clouds, past a sea of sand, and then to a magnificent white cliff jutting over the sea of sand like a glacier.  Suddenly, like a flash of imaginative discovery, I knew all about that world.  I knew, for example, that long eons before, there had been watery seas and real rivers and green forests.  All that was gone, and there was but one thing remaining in that world that gave any hint of the people who had once lived there.  This white cliff was the very thing. 

The cliff, you see, was alive - alive in a rocky, barren sort of way.  A long, long time before a king decided he must have a palace built of living stones.  So he sent his wisest mage to procure living building material.  When that mage found just the right rock by just the right stream, he placed a spell upon it that it should have a new kind of life: a mineral life all its own.  Not a thinking life, but a sleepy, dreamy life.  But the mage had only enough power to transform a single rock.  And unfortunately one rock would not be enough to build a palace, so the mage returned in failure to his king, and the palace was never built.

But the life in that single rock spread.  It spread, molecule by molecule, over millions of years until it took over the entire plateau and stopped only where the rock ended, towering, over the sea of sand. 

Life’s predictable habit emerged.  Whether fish, falcons, or firs: all living things grow.  Living rock grows too.  Thus the cliff that overlooked the crystalline plain below expanded, thrusting forward like a growing glacier at the breakrock rate of nearly a quarter of an inch a year.  Since rock isn’t meant to move like that, large pieces would frequently break off and fall to the sand below.

When the living pieces of white rock fell to the sand below, the shock of the impact did something very strange indeed.

It woke them up. 

And they moved.  All rocks move, if you give them enough time.  They move from geologic forces, or floods, or glacier, or even volcanoes.  And it is true that in order to see the movement of these “living stones”, the days would have to fast-forward into weeks, the weeks into months, the months into years, and the years into millennia.  It might take a living stone three thousand years to move across town to visit a friend.  So in order to see these wonderful events in my own short life, time sped up on this distant world so that there seemed not to be any “day” or “night”, but only the dimness of in-between as days and nights sped by like the blades of a fan or a strobe gone haywire.

So the living stones moved about, they spoke to one another in gravelly voices, and they even built a little town for themselves.  They named the town Crrrkgrrnchgrblgrbleknchpchhhhh.  But this is hard to say, so I will call it “Rockabee”.

The animated boulders of Rockabee lived a very long time, never went hungry or thirsty, and never suffered from the ailments of organic life.  There were no wars among them because there was never much to fight over.  But there was a longing in them, a desire they could never quite understand and which never seemed to go away.  It must have been an unanticipated side-effect of the magic that made them.  They wanted to become people.  But the odd thing about this desire is that none of them had ever seen a person or even knew exactly what people were.  All they knew was that they desired to be other than what they were, and they spent most of their long lives addressing this problem.  They tried rubbing themselves against graphite and coal to make beautiful designs on themselves.  They ground themselves against each other to change their shapes a little.  In some drastic cases, they would hurl themselves against a dead rock or down a ravine to chip off large chunks of themselves.  But no matter how complex their designs or finely ground their sides or how sharply cut their angles, they were never satisfied.  And most of them lived their whole epic lives ignorant of their desire or how to fulfill it until they crumbled to rubble in the Great Gorge.

One day, a new rock fell from the cliff.  It was the regular size, but somewhat top-heavy.  In fact, it very much looked like the letter “V” with the middle part filled in.  When the rock hit the ground, she awakened from the dreamy unity of the white cliff, and she knew her name was Vee.

Vee was very happy to be alive, and she was welcomed into Rockabee just like any newly born rockling.  There may have been a few titters from the younger stones about her unusual shape, but all in all Vee fit into the igneous society pretty well. She made friends just like any other young stone, enjoyed the latest rock music, and for a short while even had a crush on a stone named “Flint”.  But the desire to become something other than she was burned in her mineral heart like the heat of the earth.  The desire all living stones struggled with was especially strong in Vee.  She spent more time than usual at the graphite lounge, and was even considering hurling herself down a ravine when one of her friends, a particularly garrulous stone by the name of Sillica, made a suggestion.

“Why don’t you go see old ‘Gran’?” she asked.  “She’s got some strange ideas, to be sure, but I’ve heard that since she hid away in the Crevice, she has really become a Person.  That’s why she’s not allowed out.  Maybe you could go find out if it’s true!”

Sillica really wasn’t interested in helping Vee, and didn’t think Gran – banished from Rockabee for millions of years – was really a Person.  But she was a busybody, and was very curious about what had happened to the old boulder.  In Vee she thought she had found just the right stone to spy things out.

“But wasn’t Gran sent to the Crevice as a punishment?” asked Vee.  “And isn’t the Crevice a dangerous place, sitting as it is next to the Great Gorge?”

Falling into the Great Gorge meant splintering into a million pieces, so far down was its bottom and so hard the surface.  It was certain death for a living stone.

“That’s what they all say,” Sillica replied, “but I’ve heard whispers that she has become the Real Thing, or that at least she knows what a Person is supposed to look like.  Still, I’m not surprised that you are too afraid to go see her.”

Vee was afraid.  For a while, she tried to forget about Sillica’s words.  But every effort she made to make herself look more like a Person made her feel less like a Person, and she wished desperately that she knew what a Person was supposed to look like in the first place.  What if Gran really did know?

Finally, Vee could restrain herself no longer.  She rolled and tumbled across the sand, out of Rockabee, and towards the Crevice of the Great Cliff.  It was a long and lonely journey.  When the Crevice loomed dark and foreboding before her, she almost turned around.  But she had come too far to turn back, and so she pressed on.  The wind whistled all around her as she entered, and she wondered if she was beginning to erode.  She trembled in the shadows.

Suddenly, a voice crunched out of a dark alcove, and Vee was so frightened she nearly crumbled on the spot.  But the voice spoke in a kindly, gravelly tone.

“Who are you, young stone, to have rolled all this way?  Have you been banished?  But surely not for the reasons I was, because you do not look like a Person at all.  You look like one of the silly girls who paint and chip themselves at random.  Speak, child.  Why are you here?”

“I…I heard you were a Person, or knew how to make yourself one.  And I wanted to find out for myself if it was true.”  Vee strained to see into the darkness.

The voice from the dark alcove laughed.  “No, child, I am no Person yet, and if there is a way to make myself a Person (which I very much doubt), that is knowledge I do not possess.  Yet I am becoming a Person.  In fact, I think the time of my transformation draws near.”

“How?” asked Vee, not understanding at all.

“Come in, and I will tell you,” answered Gran.

Vee did not want to go into that dark alcove in the shadowy Crevice.  She was afraid.  But something pulled her irresistibly forward, and almost without volition she found herself drawing near to the darkness, at the edge of the darkness, and finally within the darkness.

“Where are you?” Vee asked.

“I am here,” said the voice of Gran.

I do not know by what means living stones see.  After all, they have no eyes.  But by whatever magic causes them to have vision, Vee gradually became accustomed to the dark and became aware of a white shape before her.

It was grotesque.

Gran was boulder-height, but stripped of most of her stone.  She was thin and spindly, with four long appendages.  Two appendages met the ground at an odd angle, and two reached out in Vee’s direction.  Atop the mass in the middle was a round bulbous thing, with odd attachments.  Gran’s features were smooth and rounded, with not a single sharp angle.

“Behold the work of the Sculptor,” said Gran.

“I…I do not understand,” said Vee, still in horror.

“I have not done any of this,” Gran explained.  “It is all the work of the Great Sculptor.  He comes to me and changes me, little by little, into the image of Himself.  And He is a Person, a Real Person.  He tells me that I shall be like Him, and yet be myself when all is done.  And I know it to be true.”

“That…That is what a Person looks like?” asked Vee.  She was trembling.

“Yes.”

Vee tried to calm herself.  Gran certainly was on a completely different track than all the other living stones.  Perhaps I should not be so hasty to judge, Vee thought.

“How do you make yourself so…so smooth?” asked Vee.

“That’s just it,” answered Gran.  “I don’t do anything.  Long ago, when I was a young stone like you, I heard a boulder say that some stones believed that there was a Great Sculptor who longed to chisel us into People, to fulfill the deep longing in our hearts.  But that for Him to do so a stone would have to call out to Him and surrender to his artistic will.  A stone would have to cease trying to be a Person, and let Him do all the transforming.  I did this thing, Vee.  I met the Sculptor, and He has been remaking me ever since.  Someday He will finish His work, and I will live with Him forever.”

“I must go now,” said Vee, sure in her heart that Gran was ready to crack up, an unstable stone.

“Go, then.  But remember what I said.  I think the Sculptor must be calling after you, for you to come all this way.”

Vee left the alcove as quickly as she dared, then left the Crevice and its howling wind.  She stayed far away from the edge of the Great Gorge and rolled back to Rockabee and its familiar sights and sounds.

Sillica was there to greet her.  “Did you really go?  Did you see Gran?” asked the excited young rock.

“Leave me alone,” answered Vee, and would not speak of it for a long time.

Vee tried to continue with her life as it had been before her journey to the Crevice.  She spent more time than ever at the graphite lounge until she was covered with squiggles from top to bottom.  She had a sandblast treatment on one side, hurled herself on an outcropping on the other side, and tried to grind down her unsightly “v” spires.  But she could not stop thinking about Gran’s words about a Great Sculptor.  She could not help wondering if it were true.

She spoke to an old rock named Split one day.  He had chiseled and broken himself to nearly nothing over the eons.  Now he was little bigger than a pebble.  But he had a reputation for wisdom, so Vee shared her anxieties with him.

“Sculptor?  Ha!” laughed Split.  “There is no Sculptor.  That’s a chip’s fancy.  There is only stone and sand and sky and water – that’s all.  Gran is a cracked rock, always was.  Pay no heed to such nonsense.”

“But she was so strange in appearance, Split,” pressed Vee.  “Great gaps showed between her appendages and her whole frame was, well, very smooth.  I cannot imagine how she could have accomplished that by herself.”

“Smooth, you say?  Gaps, you say?  Ha!” laughed Split.  “Then she has done nothing.  The wind of the Crevice has eroded her smoothly, and she must have found some underground river to wash away some of her features, leaving gaps.  She is eroded and cracked, Vee.”

Vee pondered Split’s answer.  “I suppose you must be right.  But she seemed so peaceful, so sure she was becoming a person.  Everyone else seems so unsettled and full of longing that is not fulfilled.”

“I can solve that for you, too, young mineral,” answered Split with confidence.  “There is no such thing as a Person.  That is all made up fairy-tales, wishful thinking, and whatnot. We are stone, and stone is all we can ever be. We are perfectly fine the way we are when we fall off the cliff.  The sooner you stop thinking about trying to be anything else the better off you’ll be.”

Vee was confused. “If stone is all we can ever be, how did we get the idea we could be something else in the first place?” she asked.  “And if we can’t be anything else, why would we wish it?”

“Because of wishful thinking!  I already told you that.  Now if you excuse me, I’m off to have a smooth spot chiseled into and I can’t be late.  Good-bye!”

Vee watched the little rock roll away, and she wondered if Split realized he had tried to answer her question by restating the problem.  She also wondered why he had chiseled himself into such a small stone if he really thought stones ought to stay the way they are. 

Vee stopped going to the graphite lounge, ceased lunging into other stones, refrained from getting chiseled and sandblasted.  She spent a lot of time thinking.  She spent a lot of time alone.  And the desire to be a Person was stronger than ever.

Finally, she decided that there was no harm in calling out to the Great Sculptor if He did not exist.  And so she called out.  For a while, she heard nothing.  She began to feel a little self-conscious about her sandblasted posterior and graphite squiggles, even to feel sorry for them.  So she called out again:

“Oh Sculptor, if You really exist, I’m asking You to make of me whatever You want.  I’m so sorry for what I’ve tried to make of myself.  You must think me a mess.  And I am also sorry for my ridiculous “V” shape—“

At that instant Vee felt a soft thing touch her, and she heard a voice like rolling waters vibrate within her.  It said, “Dearest Vee, I forgive you of your wasted efforts.  We shall make it all right.  But do not apologize for your shape.  Your shape is what I intended when I broke you off from the cliff.  I have heard your call, and I will sculpt you into the Person I always intended you to be.”

Vee was filled with delight, and over the next few thousand years her friends were amazed at the change in her.  No more did she search for answers; instead she searched for ways to bring happiness to others.  No more was she absorbed in her self; she was absorbed in brightening everyone else’s century.  She lost all her graphite squiggles, and as time passed her friends noticed Vee was becoming thinner and more rounded. 

“She’s letting herself go,” said Sillica to Crystalllia day.  “I think she may be cracking up like old Gran.  She went to see her some time ago, you know.”

The citizens of Rockabee became so concerned that as this transformation continued, they called her before the Council of Quartz.  The council was comprised of Six ancient rocks:  Keystone, Sandbump, Earthcrop, Slate, Rollwell, and the Base of the Council, the venerable Split himself.  They were displeased with the stir Vee was causing in Rockabee, and disturbed even more that some of the newer rocklings fresh off the cliff seemed to find Vee’s newfound quarryview attractive.

“Vee, step forward,” called out the tiny Split in his most quaking voice.

“I am here, sirs.  It is an honor,” answered Vee.

“Do you know why we have called you here?” asked Split.

“Yes,” said Vee.  “It is because you do not believe in the Sculptor, and so now that you can see His work in me it distresses you very much.  You do not want to believe that you have been going about things the wrong way all your lives, so you wish to do away with me.”

“How dare you speak to the Council in this manner!” shouted Rollwell.

“I mean no disrespect in answering truthfully,” Vee replied.

Split spoke out again.  “Vee, do you have any idea how horrible you look?  Your middle section is rounded and thin, your “V” spires are thinned and smooth, with five little tentacles at the end of each.  The bump between the spires is full of disgusting ledges and grooves, even holes.  If this is the result of some Sculptor, then you should fire him immediately!”

There were laughs among the Council at this and among the audience that was gathering.

“I know I do not look as I would make myself,” said Vee, “but to feel His hand and hear His voice is to trust Him, that He knows what He is doing as He makes me in His own image.  I would not have it any other way.”

“In his image!” mocked Split.  “So is the Sculptor so grotesque?”

“I do not know,” answered Vee, truthfully.  “I cannot see Him with the sight of a stone.”

The Council mumbles and murmured for only a moment before Split spoke out the decision.

“Vee, you are hereby banished from Rockabee, you and your cracked ideas.  You are banished to the Crevice.  Keep Gran company, if she has not eroded away.  The Council has decided!”

“No,” said Vee, quietly.

“What?” inquired the astonished Split, just as the crowd began to murmur and then quiet down again.

“No, I will not leave,” said Vee.  “I respect the Council’s authority, but the Sculptor has commanded me to stay in Rockabee for the sake of the young Rocklings who may also hear His voice.  His authority is greater than that of the Council.”

“That is rebellion,” said Split very gravely.  “If you will not go of your own free will, then I have no choice but to command you to be taken to the Great Gorge and cast  into its pulverizing depths!”

“That is your choice, not mine,” said Vee, her voice clear and steady.  “But I know it is not me you fear.  It is the truth you fear, the idea that you have been wrong all this time, the thought that you wasted your mineral life on nothing, when instead you could have been under the gentle hand of the Sculptor.  Now you would deny—“

“Enough!” shouted Split.  “Need we hear more?  Carry her away and cast her into the Gorge!  The Council has decided!”

It seemed stones came from everywhere, and soon she was lifted from the sand and carried the long journey to the Gorge.  It seemed a much longer one than the time she visited Gran.  All along the way the citizens of Rockabee shouted curses at her, and at timed chanted “cracked, cracked, cracked!”  Vee’s own voice offering forgiveness was drowned out by that merciless chant.

Finally, Vee was brought to the lip of the Gorge, impossibly deep.  Without ceremony, she was hurled to the depths below.

She fell against the dead rocks and smashed into thousands of pieces, each too small to have any life in them at all.

I supposed that this was the end of Vee, and that my vision would now come to an end.  But the scene blurred with my tears, and it seemed to me that my vision plunged beneath the rock of the gorge and out the other side, then turned upside-down so that the gorge was not a gorge, but a mountain.  And it seemed a maiden drifted from the side of that mountain, one with long flowing brown hair and beautiful bronze skin.  She drifted as if in flight to a lush valley below, to the edge of a sapphire stream, and she landed on the grassy bank.

A Man waited for her there, His eyes full of stars and his smile unlocking a thousand comforts.  The maiden looked up at Him from her knees, and she raised her arms above her head.

She raised her arms in a perfect “V” of praise and adoration.

“Come,” said the Man, “it is time you learned how to be a Person.” And He reached down and gathered her up in a tender embrace.

My vision lifted from that scene, then plunged into the mountain and out the other side, where it was still a gorge.  And from the Great Gorge my sight ascended past the still-assembled citizens of Rockabee and higher to the top of the magnificent white cliff.  Still my vision rose above the few clouds hovering over peaks and dry riverbeds, high above the second brown planet from the blue star on one spiral arm of a spinning pinwheel of stars and beyond to see a billion swirling galaxies in a rosy sea.

I blinked. The marble-sized drop of alder-sap still rested on a mossy bed in the perfectly round hole in the alder tree.  I left it there in its place.  I did not dare to touch it.

So if you leave the Alder-tree from whatever world to which your vision has been guided, turning away from that holey place; and if you walk past the Giant’s Grave with the voice that whispers after ‘Dermot’, then clamber down the hill and through the tall grass nineteen paces to the stump of the ash, and you take the ancient paths overgrown and dark with trees, finding the Road back to the little town of Cong in the West of Ireland: do not bother to look for the old man in grey pants and a blood-red vest.  You will not find him.  His medicine will have done its work.

You can ask everyone in the village about him, but you will get no answers.  If you mention the Giant’s Grave or the alder tree the townsfolk may hurry away.  But if you let your heart wander past the kind citizens of Cong and out to the whole world, you may see countless living stones scurrying about, painting themselves, chiseling themselves.  A few might seem different to your eyes, less like the beauty of this world and more like the beauty of another.  And there are some among them whispering about a Sculptor who would make them into People someday.

Hearken to that whisper.