Picking the Ballad's Bones (21 page)

"And your
mistress?"

"Her exploitation of me is
one for which I have more sympathy. She has more than the normal
female liking for
screwing. Moreover, she
is outcast because she has no fam
ily and,
as far as the world can see, no fortune, and she is uncommonly
fair, which, coupled with her love of displaying and using her
pretty self, makes her an enemy to all
other women. Were it not for me, no wife in town would
be
safe of her husband and they'd try to
burn Lillian for a witch, I vow. Fortunately, I have too much need
of her to leave her time to make a whore of herself with others. I
fancy once the honeymoon is over, that one in my bed will be
withholding her favors in order to win her will of me in
less amiable pursuits. We shall see who has whose
will of
whom! But for now
. . ."

Aloud he said, "Come and
walk with me,
my love
,
and wear the wedding present that
I gave you so I may show off to all of your other admirers the
magnificence of their loss."

"Oh, Clark, you say the sweetest
things—"

She pulled a long scarlet gown over
her head and clasped her waist with a magnificent jeweled belt. "I
do love this," she said, Anna Mae thought quite sincerely. Her eyes
beamed with what she certainly thought was love.

"Faith, but she
should,"
Anna Mae's host thought,
"it cost me fifteen crowns."
To his wife he said, "It pales by comparison with your
beauty, my own."

The garden at the fine house where
Clark and his lady lived was in full bloom, rich emerald green with
manicured trees and bushes and rows of flowers in shades of rose,
pink, yellow, and violet. Lilacs and roses, daffodils and violets,
the ground studded here and there with little white gillie flowers
among the paving stones that glittered with shards of wild gemstone
crystal.

The bride sighed. "Do you mean it,
Clark? Do you really think I'm beautiful?"

"The most beautiful woman
in the world," he assured her, mentally amending it to
'
the most beautiful one I see in front of
me, anyway.'

"Fairer than the fair maid who lives
by the stream?" she asked, looking down and biting her lip as if
afraid.

He didn't answer, hoping
his silence would restrain her, but she looked up at him with
searching, tearing eyes.
"She does love
you,"
Anna Mae said.

"Perhaps she does,
"
the host replied with surprise that was
immediately smothered by bitterness denying
that
she might love him, wanted to
love him,
could
love him for himself alone.
"But if
she does,"
he continued,
"it's only while she thinks she does not have all
of me. Once she has me in her power, she'll despise me. Women are
that way, as I well know. Why else did my mother send my father
away?"

"There could have been a
lot of reasons. She said he left."

"He would only have left
if she made him leave. Once he got her with me, she had no more use
for him. She had her dower money and she says he was a wastrel. But
he
would never have left
me
behind, would he? No,
she forced
him away once she had what she
wanted of him. I'm not about to make the same mistake."

And Anna Mae
thought,
Poor silly boy. Just a grownup
kid who resents his mother for running off his father. How fucking
Freudian.
But a pang pierced her wondering
how her parents had come to leave her, to put themselves into such
danger that they died and couldn't raise her. They'd left her with
adoptive parents who were well off and who cared for her, but she'd
never fit in really. And much as she might sniff at this man's
rationalizations of his filthy behavior toward the women in his
life, his artist/miller analogy made a certain amount of sense to
her. Her adoptive parents expected her to earn her living in the
white man's world. They said they wanted more for her, and she knew
that meant more than she would have had on the reservation, more
than many women of her people had, more than dancing for tourists,
playing her guitar for tips in smoky honky-tonks, probably between
taking guys to some back room, or wearing out her eyes and fingers
with beadwork while raising her own tribe of brats by some
itinerant rodeo bull-riding alcoholic. They encouraged her to
develop other skills—clerical and political—and she was thus set up
to be the lackey of a white man who wanted her, not even for her
beauty or sex appeal or amiability but so that she would betray her
own people. She was as cynical about men as Clark here was cynical
about women and she supposed both of them had pretty good cause.
She didn't really want another man particularly, or another kind of
man. But yeah, she would like to just be left alone to devote
herself to music, to what she was good at and what she understood,
she'd like to be able to make a living and be happy doing
that.

In Clark's time, it wasn't
that cool for a man to be an artist of some kind. Even minstrels
were often out of fashion and ended up trying to play in taverns
for bread. They slept in stables or in the rain instead of in
kings'
halls. Painters could only make it
in major cities, where wealthy patrons vied with one another for
fashionable portraits. This guy might well have some other artistic
talent than "horizontal refreshment." The sensitivity to his
partner's need for romantic fiction might well have developed into
something less whorish if he were encouraged to pursue it, but she
could see that there didn't seem to be that opportunity. She just
wished that he could see that the woman in front of him, whose
manners might not be as pleasing as he thought, was not anxious to
be the domineering bitch he thought she was.

"You should listen to
her,
" Anna Mae argued.
"Whatever her reasons may have been for getting you to marry
her, she loves you now. Look into her eyes."

"'Now' is the key word. I
have to make sure she continues to love me."

The bride put her hand on his sleeve
and he recoiled as if they had not touched other body parts so
intimately throughout the night, as if she had no right. "Clark,
that woman is evil," she said. "Please. You married me. You agreed
to do this. Don't go to her. I fear—"

"You see? It's starting
already. She wants to control me,"
he
thought but said with a throaty laugh as he tickled his wife's
sharp chin, "Don't you worry your pretty head about me, my love.
Here you are trying to take care of me already, but I'm a grown man
and I can take care of me and you as well. Haven't I told you
enough times that there's no one as fair as you? Now you'd better
go send your thank-you tokens to our friends. I have business
across town."

The bride swallowed and nodded and
went meekly indoors again.

"Whew,
"
Anna Mae's host said to
himself.
"She's mild enough now but I
expect that as time goes by, I'll have to be firmer and firmer to
get her to let go. Faith, I feel smothered already."

He saddled his horse himself, for
their budget did not allow for a stable boy, and besides, he needed
some excuse to get out of the house now and again.

The horse was brown as
acorns, brown as bark and
sleek and fleet.
His love had given him this horse, though as he told the story
around town, he had won his mare while gaming in the village two
valleys away. As he rode, he whistled the tune he'd been humming
when he arose from bed.

"You could be a
musician,"
Anna Mae told him.
"You could learn to play that song on an
instrument, set words to it
.
That
would give you an
excuse to get out of the house too."

"I might at that. I'll ask
Lillian when I see her. She mumbles the words to herself but I've
never heard her sing them out. Perhaps I could learn music, now
that I'm a respectable married man."

He rode on until he came to the far
edge of the town, where he came to the banks of a river, and
followed it upstream and into the hills and the woods.

At length they came upon a woman
washing something in the water. Her long fair hair fell over her
shoulders as she scrubbed and her high round bosom bobbed
sensuously to the rhythm of her hands. Her legs, long and shapely
as birch saplings, curved under the crescents of her hips and she
sang to herself in a soprano clear and high as wild bird song. Only
when he dismounted did she turn to him, brushing a sheaf of fair
hair away from wide grass-green eyes that reflected the play of
light on the river.

He sang out to the pretty woman as he
bent to cuddle her from behind, cupping her breasts, squeezing
gently as she worked, "Wash on, wash on, my bonny maid/That wash
sae clean your sark of silk."

She laughed and sang back a response,
rubbing backward against him so that he rose to the occasion, "And
weel fare you, fair gentleman/Your body whiter than the
milk."

The disembodied Anna Mae
felt as if she'd been plunged into a bath of lava with the
sensations she received from this male body. She didn't like it. It
went against everything she thought should happen.
"You're nothing but a two-timing son of a
bitch!"
she screamed with all the venom
she'd built up from the betrayals she'd experienced.

But she was trapped inside him and
there was no place else for her rage to go. It reverberated through
his head and beat against the inside of his skull until he stopped
fondling his mistress and fell back, clutching his head. His very
hair throbbed with the blinding pain.

"My head, my head!" he groaned,
scrubbing at his face and scalp with his hands as if to scrub the
pain away.

"What's the matter, love?" the woman
asked.

"It hurts me sore, Lillian," he
sobbed. "I can't bear it."

"Can't you then? My poor
dear."

"Can't you see she's
mocking you, shithead?"
Anna Mae
screamed.
"You think she didn't hear about
your wedding? Where do you think this is, London, that you can
screw everything that moves and have it not get back and hurt
somebody? You ignorant bastard, this woman has given you everything
she has and you married another one and still expect her to play
second fiddle. Dumb shit!"

"See here, my darling,
here's a little bane-knife. Cut a bit off my sark here and we'll
bind it around your brow
.
That'll
make it feel
better."

But
she kept chirping her little song as she tied the piece of
silk around his head and as she sang, Anna Mae felt her rage
growing and growing, and although she realized she was under the
woman's spell, she could do nothing to restrain the tidal wave of
anger and contempt that, to her host, felt like self-contempt and
self-hatred.

The
scrap of silk only served to bind the anger in and bind Anna
Mae to anger and she called Clark Colville sixteen different kinds
of a fool and told him what ought to be done to a man who acted the
way he was acting. "My head is worse than ever!" Clark groaned.
"Sorer and sorer it aches."

And Lillian shrugged and returned to
her washing. "I know," and sang her little tune with the words "And
sorer sorer ever will, till you be dead . . ."

Rage to answer her own rose up from
the man within Anna Mae's host and he drew his knife. He couldn't
Anna Mae without killing himself but he lashed out at the betraying
female—even though he'd set her up to betray him—who mocked his
pain. She laughed, evaded the blade easily, and to the wonder of
the host's pain-dazzled eyes did a backward flip, her gown
glittering suddenly like sequins and ending, not in ankles and
feet, as Anna Mae had been sure there were when the girl sat on the
bank, but in a long scaled tail. By the time Lillian hit the water
she was half fish and swam away laughing.

Clark barely managed to keep his seat
as he rode home. His mother, sister, and younger brother stood
talking in the garden with his wife as the steed carried him,
half-dead with pain. It was the of Anna Mae's inner roar and the
din of his own self-loathing that Lillian had magically amplified
with a silent spell. When she bound her sark around his head, she
bound the rage inside him to continue until it hounded him to
death.

"Mother, Mother, take off this sark
and braid my hair. My lady, make my bed. Brother, you take my sword
and spear—"

"Faith, Clark, what's wrong! A little
headache? God's blood but you've always gone to pieces over such
trifles."

"No, Davey, listen to me. I have seen
the false mermaid. Lillian. It's true what they say about her. Go
ahead—take my weapons. Unbend my bow until you're big enough to
pull it. 'Twill never be bent by me again."

His wife rushed up to make the bed and
his sister and mother guided him up the stairs. His mother braided
his hair until he fell asleep. "A sudden fever, I suppose." Anna
Mae was quiet now, for the headache hurt her of course too, and in
her last roar she felt something break within the man's head. A
stroke perhaps? Too many sweets, that was for sure.