Narragansett words. I don’t always feel like I’m learning them, but then they just pop into my head at times like this. For some reason today is the first time that any of those words have come to me. You don’t really hear Narragansett spoken much anymore. I’m not sure if anyone, even Grama Delia, is fluent enough to carry on a long conversation in our old tongue. But unless you live around Charlestown, which has the biggest population of our people in Rogue Island, there’s not much likelihood you’ll hear any Narragansett spoken at all. That was another thing they made illegal in this state more than a century ago. It was actually against the law for Narragansetts to speak their own language. You had to speak it in secret and pass it on to your children the same way. Of course, nowadays it isn’t illegal anymore. My father had always said he was going to teach me our language.

“When?” I’d ask him.

“Soon,” he’d say. But he never got around to it.

Kuttannummi nosh. Will you help me, my father?

“What was that you said, Maddy?”

I looked over at Roger. How long had I been speaking my thoughts, mumbling to myself like someone with bipolar disorder, as we walked up Benefit Street?

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just distracted.”

“It’s okay,” Roger said. And he meant it, and I wished that he was right.

12

QUESTIONS

AS ROGER AND I continued to trudge along, I started hoping it would rain. I wanted to hear the thunder roll. Neimpaug pesk homwak. Thunder’s lightning bolts will strike. That is what you can say about a thunderstorm. Neimpaug, that’s the thunder. And I love it. Whenever a storm comes rolling up from the coast, I want to sit out on the porch or by the window to watch it come, hoping for thunder and lightning. Aunt Lyssa is freaked out by storms.

“Get back from the windows,” she’ll say. Or “Don’t use the phone during a storm; lightning can come down the wire and kill you.”

She even says that about making calls on my cell phone during a storm. It makes me want to laugh the way she gets so scared. But I am careful not to make fun of her. It’s not her fault that she’s not Indian and doesn’t understand the way we think of thunder and lightning. Dad would always smile when he heard the rumble of thunder.

“Old Neimpaug, he’s out hunting for monsters,” Dad would say. “He’s shooting his lightning arrows down at the earth to cleanse the land.”