The Big Rock
chapter one
I like to get up every day and work on something, a writing project. For weeks, I have been becalmed. Nothing to work on. I’ve been typing boring notes on this and that, global warming, our stupid president, the condition of my bladder, and then I delete them. What fun is that? This morning, I started something new. Happy days are here again.
The Big Rock, a novel by Gary Arms
Chapter 1
“It’s coming back,” the little girl named Lily said. She was eight years old and lived across the street from Joe with her mother.
The old man looked at her for a moment. “What’s coming back?”
“The Big Rock.” She picked at the scab on her knee.
The old man was sitting on his porch swing, and Lily was sitting beside him. She was the kind of little girl who had remarkably long red hair. She liked to dance in her front yard. These dances were spontaneous and involved holding out her arms and twirling until she fell over. A minute ago, she had been twirling and falling over in Joe’s front yard, but now she had tired of that activity, and was sitting on the porch swing beside him.
Joe felt the girl needed more friends her own age. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have any. Their street consisted mostly of old couples and single women without kids. One of the nearby houses contained teenagers, but Lily was the only little kid on the whole block.
The Big Rock was famous and beloved in the neighborhood. At least, it had been famous and beloved until it had been buried by the city when the new school got built.
“You’ve heard of it,” he said, “the Big Rock? You’ve never seen it, but you’ve heard of it?”
“It’s coming back,” the little girl said again.
Even when Joe was a little boy, seventy years ago, the Big Rock had been a big deal. It was a huge boulder that sat like the statue of an elderly elephant on one corner of the park that was three blocks from where Joe lived, at the end of his street. The park filled one city block and contained slides and swings and a merry-go-round, but it was the Big Rock that was its main attraction.
The first time Joe had climbed it, he was only a little kid. It was not easy to climb on top of the Big Rock if you were only four years old. You had to start your climb on the north slope of the Big Rock, work your way up a diagonal crack until you arrived at the top, which was the spine of the elderly elephant. Then, you sidled along the slowly rising spine to the other side of the elephant where there was a child-size seat, a gouge, a niche that was called The Chair. Sitting in the Chair, you could survey the entire park.
Girls believed if you kissed a boy while sitting on top of the Big Rock, you would get to marry him. Boys believed if they were able to stand erect on top of the elephant’s spine and wave their fists in the air, they might someday become a rock star. All the neighborhood children believed if you could stand in the Chair and leap to the ground seven feet below without turning an ankle or breaking a bone, you would never again be afraid to do anything.
Kids told one another the Big Rock was just the top of a much bigger boulder. It was like the tip of an iceberg. They told one another the Big Rock had been pushed down here by a glacier during the last Ice Age. Probably dinosaurs had roamed this area a million years ago and fought horrific battles with one another within its sight.
Kids had feelings about the Big Rock that were deep and hard to describe. It was not merely an enormous boulder. It had a living presence. They sat on top of it and whispered secrets to it. Generations of kids loved it.
And then, one day, the town in its wisdom decided to use the square block that contained the Big Rock for a new school, a very large and very modern school that would replace two old schools that were getting rickety and old-fashioned.
The swings and slides and the merry-go-round were removed to make room for the new school. The Big Rock also had to go. The town needed its location to build a parking lot for the teachers.
The town attempted to remove it. They dug it out, created a deep muddy pit. The workmen had to fence off the pit because the local mothers were terrified their small children would fall into the pit and drown in the mud and water that accumulated at its bottom.
Once the pit was dug, everyone could see the Big Rock, all of it. It dwarfed the backhoes that dug it out with their big buckets. It was magnificent, ancient. If you stood there on the other side of the fence and looked at it, you experienced something. A feeling. You felt small and insignificant.
At first, the town planned to bring in an enormous crane big enough to haul the Big Rock out of its pit, load it onto a truck bed, and cart it away to a new home, outside the town limits. Unfortunately, once it was dug out and displayed, all of it, it was simply too enormous to move. No truck bed could have contained an object that size. It would have crushed the truck.
The town contemplated breaking the Big Rock into smaller pieces, perhaps with dynamite, but the expense of this operation was determined to be too much. Instead, the Big Rock was turned on its side and buried in the muddy pit. A parking lot was built over it and a sidewalk with a strip of grass beside it.
If you were new to the neighborhood, you would hardly know it had ever contained a park and a Big Rock, but sooner or later someone would tell you about it and point out the location of its grave. It was as if your beloved Great Grandfather or the founder of the town was buried there.
The little girl said she knew everything about the Big Rock. She said all the kids at her school (the new one) knew about it because there was a framed photograph of it hanging on the wall beside the classroom for the Third Grade, Mrs. Alabaster’s room. Besides her mother had told her about it. Her mother had kissed a boy in the shade of the Big Rock. Unfortunately, she had not married him.
Lily successfully picked off a bit of the scab on her knee.
Joe said, “You keep picking at that, it’s gonna bleed.”
Lily pulled her skirt down so that its hem concealed her knee and its scab. “I think it’s a dinosaur egg.”
Joe did not know how to respond to that statement.
“I could show it to you if you want. Can we take Otway?”
Otway was the name of Joe’s dog, a white and black mutt who was fifteen years old. Otway was the kind of dog who walked slowly and liked to stop frequently and pee on something.
Joe put Otway on his leash and the three of them walked to the new school. They arrived at a sidewalk that ran beside a strip of lawn.
“See,” Lily pointed. “It’s coming back.”
In the middle of the lawn was a bit of rock about the size of a dinner platter. It was indeed possible to imagine this patch of rock was a bit of the Big Rock, and that, ten years after the opening of the new school, the buried boulder was slowly emerging from its grave.
“People say if you sit on it and close your eyes and hold your fingers like this and make three wishes, one of them will come true.” She laced her fingers together. “Like this.”
“You’ve done that?”
She nodded.
“What’d you wish for?”
Lily shot him a look that suggested she sometimes suspected Joe was stupid. “If you tell people what you wish for, it won’t come true. Don’t you know that?”
Joe touched the visible bit of the Big Rock with the toe of his shoe. Otway tugged on the leash. He wanted to go back home.
“I think it’s an egg,” Lily said. “A dinosaur egg. One day, it will hatch, and a baby dinosaur will come out.”