A Cup of Normal (24 page)

I love origin myths and wanted to write a myth about the origin of music. After finishing the story, I knew it was missing something. Finally, it dawned on me that I needed another character. I added Sath, the snake to the story, and then the myth felt complete.

SINGING DOWN THE SUN

It wasn’t the music that changed
, bell-sweet and delicate as a moth’s wing. Jai always heard the music no matter where she had hidden it. But the silence within the melody was different, the pauses between each note too long, then too short. Jai tightened her grip on the handle of her hoe and glanced up at Black Ridge where a forest of yellow pine stood dark in shadow. She knew what the changes in the song meant. It meant Wind and Shadow had found a new child to do their bidding.

“What will you do about the music?” a soft voice asked.

Jai startled at the sound of the ancient corn snake, Sath, who sunned on the flat stone at the corner of her garden. He was her forever-companion, the one creature who had promised to never leave her. But he had been gone for nearly a year and had returned this morning as if he had never left. As if she had not spent long days and nights worrying that Wind or Shadow had found him, killed him.

His sinuous body looked like a rope of sunlight, his scales jewels of orange and yellow with deep black outlining the patterns down the length of him. She had forgotten how beautiful he was, but had not forgotten how afraid and betrayed she had felt when he left.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Jai answered.

Sath lifted his head, black tongue flicking out to taste the air, the wind, the song. “The song has changed.”

Jai didn’t answer.

“Wind and Shadow will take the child,” he whispered.

Jai blinked sweat from her eyes. “You have been gone for a year. Did you come back to tell me what I already know? I won’t teach another child. The gods can fight without me this time.” Jai went back to hoeing the dirt between the summer-green shoots at her feet.

“But I am home now,” Sath said.

“That is not enough.”

Sath rocked his head from side to side, his black eyes never moving from her. “I am sorry you were alone. But the child is —”

“— the child is not my problem.”

“Even if he dies?”

The wind carried the song to her, melody and pauses chilling the sweat on her back and neck, tugging her faded cotton dress and the handkerchief covering her thick black hair.

Jai did not answer the snake. She pulled the hoe through weeds knowing that Sath was right. When Moon discovered Wind and Shadow had caught a child, there would be a battle for the music, and the child would die.

It’d happened before. She had found the first child who played the music many years ago. He was a fine strong boy named Julian. Julian had been a quick student. He’d learned how music had come into the world. He’d learned that Wind and Shadow wanted it, and that Moon wanted it more. He had fought to keep the music hidden in the world, like she had, like it was meant to be. Maybe he’d been too strong. Like an oak cracking down under a storm.

He had been only six years old.

And that slip of a girl, pretty and bright as the sunrise, Margaret Ann. Jai had taught her too. Tried to teach her to ignore Wind and Shadow. But Margaret Ann had gone walking in the night and was swallowed up by moonlight. Poor little bird, Jai thought, poor sweet child.

“I’ve buried enough children,” Jai said. “Teaching them didn’t help.” She struck the dirt, broke clumps, uprooted weeds, but the memory of the children would not go away.

Sath drew into a tighter coil, resting his fiery head upon circles of scales. “Not teaching helps less,” he said. He gave a slow, gentle hiss. “Please, forever-companion?”

“Forever-companions don’t leave each other.” Jai finished weeding the row and the next, following the curve of the land. All the day Sath watched her with dark unblinking eyes. And all the day the music drifted down to her, sweeter than she’d ever heard it before.

There was power in that song and there was power in the player. But she had made up her mind.

At the last of the last row, Jai straightened her back. The shawl of night would soon come down. Time to fix a meal, boil water for tea, soak her feet.

“Are you coming?” she asked Sath.

The snake uncoiled and slipped off the edge of the stone like a ribbon of orange and umber and gold. He crossed the rich tilled soil and stopped at her foot.

“Will you teach the child?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Ahh,” Sath said sadly.

The sound of his disappointment made Jai wish she could take the words back, but she did not want to teach another child, could not bear to see the gods tear a soul apart again. Jai ignored the snake and made her way to her house: a sturdy square cabin with two windows and a pitched shake roof shaded by a gnarled hickory that combed the wind in leafy exhale. Perhaps the child’s ignorance would also be his saving.

Just as she reached the edge of her yard, just as she looked up at her doorstep and saw the small silent figure standing there — that very moment — she realized the music had stopped, leaving nothing but the warble of the night bird and the whisper of the old hickory tree.

The child was small, dusky-skinned and red-haired. A boy. Long in the leg, and serious of eye. He looked to be ten, still dream-slight, as if not yet anchored to this living world.

Oh, please no,
Jai thought. “What are you doing out this late, child? Don’t you have no mama calling you in for supper?”

The child blinked, shook his head. He pressed his back against her front door. He held a wooden bowl-shaped instrument tightly against his chest — string and wood and magic itself. There. On her doorstep. In his arms.

No one had ever pulled it down from the mountains. No one, not one adult who had no chance of it really, nor one child who could still hold magic bare and true in their hands, had ever gone up to the mountains and brought the music down to her.

“Please help him,” Sath said from the grass at her feet.Jai put one hand on her hip and tried hard not to show her fear. She did not want to fight the gods again.

“There’s no place for you here, child,” she said. “No place for that music. You should go on to your mama now.”

“I don’t have a mama,” the boy said, and his voice was honey and starlight, the sound of a barefoot angel begging on her doorstep. “I don’t have a daddy, neither.”

Jai shook her head. None of the children who were taken by Wind and Shadow had kin.

“There’s no room for you,” she said again.

“Jai,” Sath whispered, “please don’t turn him away.”

The boy looked down at the snake.

“He told me,” the boy said. “Told me I should find you. Said you would help me. Please. I don’t have another place to stay.”

Jai was surprised the boy could understand the snake — Sath had never spoken to anyone but her. She was even more surprised that Sath would tell the child to come to her, that he would expect her to help again.

“Maybe you should have stayed gone,” she said to Sath. “Maybe you should go now.”

Sath lifted up, high enough the blunt tip of his mouth could touch her fingertips. His whisper was so soft, she could feel it on her fingers more than she could hear it. “We are — we were forever-companions. You trusted me for many years. Trust me now. Then I will go.”

Jai opened her mouth to tell the boy to leave but a gust of wind whipped by. The wood and string bowl in the boy’s hands hummed a sweet, low, soul-tugging tone. Even at half the yard away, Jai could see the child sway beneath the music’s power.

“Please don’t be mad at the snake,” the boy said. “It’s not his fault. I will try to pay you back any way you want if you’ll help me.”

Holy, holy, always the sweetest children. How could she turn her back on him now? Jai glared again at the snake. Sath arched back down to the ground and slipped through the grass toward the house, toward the boy.

Jai stepped forward with a heavy sigh.

“I’ll do what I can, child. Don’t expect miracles. You are tied to this thing,” she pointed at the instrument, “until the end of time.”
Your time,
she thought. “But that doesn’t mean you have to fear. You are the one who plays the music. It doesn’t play you.”

As if to prove her wrong, the wind snatched at the strings again, and the boy’s fingers found their place on the strings. His eyes glazed and two strong notes rang out.

Jai put her hand on the boy’s shoulder, breaking the spell. “First rule is you keep your hands off the strings if you want into my house.”

The boy’s eyes cleared. He swallowed. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Second rule is to listen to me. This is not an easy thing.”
For either of us,
she thought.

The boy nodded. “I’ll try to do right.”

Jai stepped past him, avoiding even a casual brush with the instrument. She did not want to feel its power in her hands again.

“Come inside, and I’ll get us some food. We have some time yet before night thickens and Moon wakes.”

The boy followed her into the house and stood in the middle of the small living room, a shadow in the uncertain light. Jai moved around the room and lit the kerosene lamps. The light revealed a wood rocking chair and padded couch, a braided rug and a rough stone fireplace with a mantel made of a lightning rod. Sath was no where to be seen, though she was sure he had slipped into the house ahead of them.

Once all the lanterns were lit, the boy gasped.

The stronger light showed walls covered by hundreds of musical instruments. Hung by cords, hung by nails, hung by strings, every conceivable musical instrument rested against the walls, repeating the sounds of Jai’s footsteps in gentle harmony.

“Do you play them?” the boy asked.

Jai raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t think I spent all my days hoeing the field, did you? I’ve been a few places in my long life, boy — what
is
your name, child?”

“Julian Jones,” he said.

“Julian?” Jai’s heart caught. Her first. Her oak-strong boy. Buried so many years ago beneath the moss and loam of a continent far and an ocean away. But this boy was different than her first Julian. This boy was built like a supple willow and had a voice as sweet as a afternoon dream.

“I haven’t heard that name in a long, long time.” Jai walked into the small clean kitchen and lit the lamps. There were no windows here to let in sun or moon light. Sath might be here, but she did not see him.

“That name has strength, child,” she said.

“Will it help?” his voice was almost lost to the wind blowing outside.

“Every little bit helps when Wind and Shadow want you to serve them. Do you know the old stories, Julian? About how music first came to the land?”

Julian shook his head and took a step toward the kitchen, then stopped.

“Come on, child. Sit at the table.”

Julian came into the room and a long streak of orange followed at his side. The boy eased into the chair, keeping the instrument cradled in his lap. Once he was settled, Sath slipped up the wooden rungs of the chair until his wide diamond head rested just above the boy’s shoulder.

Jai wondered why Sath was so protective of the child, wondered if he had promised the boy to be his forever-companion. That thought made her heart ache. She turned to the sink and pumped water into the kettle, putting the hurt aside. They had only an hour before Moon woke.

Jai had told the story of music to every child. She had tried every way she could think of to defeat Moon and Shadow and Wind. But no matter what she taught the children, no matter what they tried, the gods always won, always drank the music down, and with it the child’s life.

Wind scraped across her rooftop, clawing to get in.

She rekindled the wood stove and pulled the morning’s bread out of the warmer. Her thoughts raced. What way to destroy the instrument? What way to stop the gods?

“In long ago days,” Jai said, “Sun would walk over the edge of the horizon to the dreaming world each night. Sun’s dreams were beautiful and terrible, frightening and foolish. They were so filled with wonder, the sound of them caused the stars to blink in awe and all the world to tremble.”

She put the kettle on the stove and turned to place a plate of bread in front of the boy. Outside, Wind rattled in the hickory tree.

“Every night sister Moon listened to Sun’s dreams and grew jealous of the beauty she would never see in her dark world. She wanted those dreams, wanted what her brother, the Sun, had.

“So Moon sent Wind to catch Sun’s dreams and bring them into the night. But Wind had no hands, and the dreams slipped away before he could reach Moon. Then Moon sent Shadow into the dreaming land. But even in dream, Sun shone too brightly for Shadow to touch.”

Julian was perched on the edge of his chair, looking as if at any moment he would fly away. Jai hurried.

“Moon was crazy with want. A greedy, selfish want. She shone that hard cold eye of hers down across all the lands, across the seas, and into the hearts of every soul until she found herself a brave child. A girl with more curiosity than good sense.”

“A brave girl,” Sath whispered.

Jai shook her head.

“A foolish girl that listened to Moon’s call and let her feet follow. She found her way over the edge of the world and into the dreaming land.

“There, the girl scooped up armfuls of dreams that glittered like jewels. She put the dreams into the wooden bowl she carried and ran back to the waking world.

“But Moon was waiting for her at the edge of the horizon. Waiting with Wind and Shadow. All three of them so greedy, they tussled for the bowl of dreams.

“The girl tripped and the bowl flew. Moon tried to save the dreams by sealing the bowl with silver light, but Shadow and Wind wanted it too and tore at the bowl, shredding Moon’s light into strings.

“The bowl up-ended and dreams poured out between the moonlight strings, crying a sweet music as never a soul on earth had heard.

“The music of Sun’s dreams soaked into the land and was caught in every river, every stone, every tree, bird, beast and all the souls between.”

Wind buffeted the roof. Shadow crept down the walls, leaching light from nooks and corners. But Julian watched only Jai.