Picking the Ballad's Bones (19 page)

"They could have offered
you a ride to the house."

"They could have left me
and mine alane and I'd never need a ride. I'd walk from here tae
the ends of the earth to undo what I fear done."

"Maybe he's just
wounded,"
Willie said,
"I think that might be it. I don't feel anything. I can't
believe they've killed him. I can't believe that dream was
real."

"I can believe though I'm
loath tae think it."

A hand curled out over the crest of
the hill, its fingers spread as if relaxed in sleep. But the nearer
she drew and the higher she climbed, the more apparent it was that
the hand belonged to the body of a dead man, his chest cleaved
open. The grass was slick with blood in a trail leading to another,
whose severed arm lay to the left of a tree root, his body with his
free hand still clasping the stump, to the right.

And Willie knew from
Sarah's memory that this was her brother Michael, who had once
slaughtered her pet lamb and laughed at her when she wouldn't eat
mutton for her supper. He had died from hemorrhage when his sword
arm was severed. Beside him was a hired man, his
skull split to the bridge of his nose, his brains
and blood leaking from the cleft. Her brother Robert was beside
him, but she ignored them all, the servants and her brothers alike,
and never drew a breath the entire time she walked across the hill
until she saw him.

He lay facedown, as if napping, his
clenched hands arrested by death in the act of tearing at the
heather between his fingers. His sword had fallen to one side and
the blood on it was still red, the smell of hot metal and gore
simmering from it in the sunlight. The dream was not accurate,
Willie was glad to see, for his head was still on his neck and the
killing wound was from the sword that still stuck in his back.
Willie could not recall having seen brother John's sword when they
met on the trail. John it was then who must have surprised Sarah's
lover from behind.

"You took eight of them
with you though, buddy, "
Willie thought
fiercely.

"Aye, they bought him
dearly but not sae dearly as it's cost me.
" And Sarah pushed and pulled until she turned him over and
Willie looked into his own dead face. The mouth was quirked as his
quirked when he cut himself shaving. The eyes were glazed as his
were glazed before his first cup of coffee. He might have been
looking in the mirror but for the blood.

Sarah, on her hands and knees, stroked
the corpse's hair and began to kiss the wounds and Willie did not
somehow find it morbid when she licked and sipped the blood, as if
by doing so she could take her lover into herself once
more.

Two ravens sat in the tree above them,
casting speculative beady eyes on the corpse.

"Get lost, you
buzzards!"
Willie wanted to cry, but found
he had no voice without Sarah, who wearily made shooing motions
with her hands and tried to tug her love by his arm away from where
he lay. "I'll bury ye myself, love," she said, and stepped backward
on her long braids. She fell and her belly exploded with pain
again.

She scarcely cried out,
but Willie felt the bodily pain that had
only been dulled by her deeper pain and he said,
"Take the sword from his back and cut off that
hair. What
do you care? He'll never stroke
it again. Make a harness to
lift him
with."

And with the rope of her hair lapped
under the arms of the corpse of her lover, she tugged and pulled
and dragged her love to the foot of the hill.

Her father and her brother were
returning with men and shovels for the burying of the bodies and
her father glared down at the top of her shorn head and commanded,
"Stop. John, tak' that body frae your sister. She looks aboot to
swoon."

"He's a little goddamn
late to be worried about your welfare now,"
Willie growled.

Sarah looked up at her father and said
in a voice made flat with pain, " Tis like my dream, Father, all
full o' woe and weale—"

"Enough!" her father roared. "I won't
have ye greetin' thus o'er this sneakin' seducin' dirty dog. It
ruins the aftermath of a good battle. I cam' home for comfort and
rest and what do I find but rebellion and sorrowful speeches.
Nivair ye mind aboot him. I'll find ye a lord tae wed ye to who's
twice the man and wi' his ane siller besides."

But Sarah jerked aside when her
brother would unwind the hair from the knot across her chest and
although he was stronger than she and not above striking her, as he
had often done before, he shrank from her now.

Her father dismounted and reached for
her gently. "I promise, I'll find ye anaither, worthier
lord."

She didn't resist as he folded her in
his arms.

"Let go of her, you old
hypocrite!"
Willie said, and just then the
baby inside her burst from the womb and baby, placenta, womb and
all plunged from her body in a torrent of blood.

She fought and clawed at her father as
he eased her down on top of the body of the slain man, and she
screamed, screamed and screamed, wrenching at him, until the ring
on the middle finger of her left hand was half ripped from her
finger, torn sideways in her struggles.

As her strength failed, a strain of
music came to her and to Willie within her from far off, and Willie
knew the song that went to the music.

Last night I dreamed a doleful
dream

I knew it would bring
sorrow.

I dreamed I saw my true love
slain

On the dowie dens o'
Yarrow.

And with remembering the
song, he remembered that
he mustn't
die with her here in Yarrow.
"The ring. You've got to twist the ring twice more,
backward
—"

She slumped so that her
cheek was against her lover's wound and as the song played Willie
saw that her love was waiting for her.
"The ring, Sarah, the ring,"
Willie
in her mind said and the slain lover waiting for her echoed,
"My ring, love, my ring
—
"

That which was Sarah and that which
was Willie tangled together more tightly than ever as she died,
drowning in her blood.

Willie
heard the song clearly, and desperately dived for her spirit
that was abandoning his own, trapped in that dying body,
"You can't
go yet. Stay
and release me. Sarah, this isn't
all of
you. It isn't
all of him. It isn't
the end. There's the song, Sarah, the song they
made for you and him
. . ."

And through her rang the second verse
and with it the realization that this pitiful short life she had
lived and was losing, that her lover's life, was not the end, and
that they were avenged and remembered at once in all the time
thereafter.

"The ring. Twist the ring.
Backward
—"

Her arms were limp over
her love's body and her hands, dragging in the heather, clutched it
in her death throes, the heather against her left hand working the
ring slowly around in a full counterclockwise
twist
. . .

CHAPTER 18

"Wat, are you still there?" Gussie
asked. She felt lonesome, after weeks and months of being
surrounded by people, to be driving down an empty road in a
borrowed van in a foreign country all by herself.

"Aye," the ghost said as mournfully as
ghosts are supposed to sound.

"What do we do now?"

"What ye will," the ghost said
indifferently.

"Wat, come on. Give me a break. You've
got to help me. This is your country, you're the ballad expert, and
all of this supernatural business is a lot more your kind of thing
than mine."

With great effort a faint
voice inside her replied, "I'm no the man by day I am at night,
lass. Leave me be. Return me to my grave for I maun rest
me."

"Oh, no, you don't, buddy," Gussie
said, gunning the engine and heading for Abbotsford. "You're not
going to pull that poor-dead-me cop-out on Augusta Turner. You
helped get us into this and you have to help get us
out."

Abbotsford did not look
very much different than it had when she first saw it, except that
the doors were ajar and the windows were broken. The stone roof and
the slate tile roof were still intact. The lawn and gardens and the
front courtyard/parking lot looked like a giant garage sale. Some
of the furnishings hardly appeared to be damaged, but when Sir
Walter groaned Gussie saw the remains of the Spanish Armada desk.
The docent from the
day before and two men
were there, ignoring the waterlogged upholstered chairs, the
charred dining-room table, to paw through a sodden, smoking mass of
books and papers. Swirling smoke veiled the house, as the fog had
done last night.

Gussie watched from the van. Was it
safe to go up to the house or might someone have reported spotting
the van driving away from the fire last night? She didn't know. She
didn't care. She wished she too had a place to rest—though
preferably not a grave. It had been a long night.

Sir Walter spoke softly. "Did you know
that the walls of my study were covered with hand-painted silk? Oh,
yes, a present from my publisher. Blue, of a Chinese design.
Charlotte, my wife, was delighted. She would have liked it for the
parlor but I liked to rest my eyes by looking at the pattern. Is
the dog anywhere out there? I'd hate to think something happened to
it. I have grown fond of it."

"Oh, Wat."

"I think it rather sad that things
don't seem to have spirits after all. Some would think that
sacrilegious I suppose, but many of the old peoples were animists,
you know. They believed that things did have a life. Swords and
such."

The banjo, tucked in Gussie's basket
bag, had been noodling to itself, and changed tunes suddenly to the
line in the hymn that went, "Some glad morning when this life is
o'er, I'll fly away."

"Oh, aye. There's you, of course. But
some people thought there was no special enchantment needed. That
all things had lives of their own. If so, mine have been murdered.
Better that they had been divided up among my creditors than
this."

"Do you want to go to the house and
see what the damage is?" she asked.

"I do not."

"Okay, then I'll take you back to your
grave. You—uh—you can get in this time of day, can't
you?"

"Aye, that I can."

"Fine." She started the motor
again.

"But, on reflection, I'd prefair to
bide with you. I've been dead a lang time and it seems obvious
there is some reason for me to be active in the affairs of the
living noo."

"Blast that Torchy anyway for what she
did to your home. Wat, I don't know what fairy stories you've
heard, but that is not a nice woman."

"Of course not. She's not supposed to
be a nice woman. Even human queens seldom are, as you'll ken frae
your history. As for Abbotsford, there's naught to be done aboot
it. What else might we do?"

"I think we'd better start by trying
to find the Randolphs. We can go to the police if all else fails
but if Torchy kidnapped those kids, the police either wouldn't know
anything or would deny they knew anything or were, who knows,
responsible for it. And we're going to have to do something about
latching onto some work visas or else find a way to hide and a way
to get by over here for seven years. I haven't been a saint most of
my life, but I never figured on becoming an outlaw at my
age."

"I was always on the other side of the
law myself," Sir Walter said. "But I canna say as much for my
ancestors. I'm not acquainted with the laws we'll be breakin',
lass, but I do hope we can do it with style."

"I hope we can get away with it,
period," Gussie said. "I think now, though, what we have to find is
that Circus Rom truck. The circus stopped in Edinburgh. I'm going
to head up that way."

* * *

"Whoa!" said the man
sitting next to the storyteller. He wore an ancient tie-dye tee,
baggy jeans, and a beard that hung in two braids to his waist. He
was probably about twenty-five, too young for the sixties the first
time around, not a "productive citizen." Other nonproductive
citizens or
at least not-productive-enough
citizens were also stretched
out over the
carpeted floor of the gutted bus known throughout the Sound area as
the Silver Snail. Six people at the far end were playing cards, one
couple was necking,
and across from the
group an artist tried to sketch between
jolts. The jolts were to remind the passengers that the cheap
transportation and the room to stretch out the Silver
Snail provided were accompanied by such no-frills
features as
no-shock-absorbers-either.

Most of the twenty-seven
other passengers, however, had
gradually
found themselves drawn into the group surrounding the little
curly-headed granny type in the pink jogging suit. She had been
saddened to notice that these days no one brought a guitar, a
banjo, or even a harmonica with them. Only ten years before, such
things would have been an expected part of the trip. She had a hard
time understanding why people chose to do without instruments now,
and then it occurred to her that maybe it was because so many of
the songs were still forgotten. Even people who had once been
interested in folk music
wouldn't remember
anything to play. It wasn't only the old
ballads gone now, it seemed, but pop music that had passed
into the hands of ordinary people who liked to entertain
themselves
—
that
too had somehow vanished. Now
these people
were content to sit passively and let her enter
tain them with no participation on their parts except the
occasional remark or bit of discussion. Sad. If they took in what
she was saying, however, if it made them curious, maybe this state
of affairs wouldn't continue much longer.