Picking the Ballad's Bones (22 page)

As her host fell asleep, she was dimly
aware of the family murmuring outside the door. "A sudden fever. It
takes them like that sometimes," his sister said.

"Please let me go in to him," the
bride said. "I could put cool rags on his head. I could hold his
hand and comfort him. I could—"

"Now, dear, I've lived
with Clark all his life and I
know best,"
his mother said. "When he's sick he wants no one but me to tend him
and he wants little tending at that."

And Anna Mae heard and Clark heard his
wife's heartsick weeping.

"She does love me, doesn't
she?"
Clark asked himself, and the fresh,
now-undeniable realization cut through his pain for a moment like a
ray of sunshine piercing a storm cloud.
"She'll miss me and be true to me although we've been man and
wife but one night. And Lillian will go find some other
fool."

"Lillian should have cut
your nuts off,"
Anna Mae
snapped.

As if mentioning her invoked her, the
mermaid appeared suddenly at the foot of the bed, singing her
little song. "Will ye lie there and die, Clark Colville, will ye
lie there and die?" she asked, her white teeth glittering in the
glow of the single candle his mother had left burning at his
bedside. "Or will gang to Clyde's Water to fish in flood wi' me?
I'm ruined around here because of your accusations, but if you'll
be true next time, you may live and bide with me, though you'll
have to behave yourself this time and agree to my
terms."

"I will lie here and die," he said
angrily.

"Had it all wrong, did
you, sport?"
Anna Mae asked.
"Your lover is the one in control, your mother is
the one who will continue to benefit by you even after your death,
and your wife is the one who truly loves you."

"Aye,
" he agreed.
"And I've learned one
thing. I know now that my time is near and that my chiefest enemy
is within me. Living with Lillian or living with Margaret, it's all
the same. It's living with myself that causes me such pain."
Aloud he said, "I will lie here and die. To spite
you and all the devils in hell, I'll just lie here and
die."

Lillian disappeared with a look that,
to Anna Mae, said, "So long, sucker."

Before Clark died,
Margaret escaped his mother long enough to be at his side and hold
his hand, which he held on to most gratefully. His speech centers
were affected by now and one side of his body paralyzed, as vessel
after
vessel broke behind his handsome
face. His eyes flickered to his wedding ring, which he wore oddly
on the middle finger of his left hand, having averred that it was
too large for his ring finger. With his good hand, he tried to
twist it backward, but could not.

"Does it bother you, love?" Margaret
asked. "Do you want me to take it from you that you not lose
it?"

It cost him great effort to shake his
flaming head from one side to the other. His fingers feebly twisted
the ring again and through a haze of pain he beseeched Margaret
with his eyes.

"I don't understand,
love," she said, taking that hand in hers and twisting the ring
backward as she had seen him do. But when she looked to his eyes
for further instructions, they were staring beyond
her
into
nothingness.

CHAPTER 20

Gussie and Sir Walter picked up Faron
and Ellie shortly after they left Abbotsford.

"We walked through the woods, kept
behind fences, anything to get away from where the guy let us go so
that if his buddy found out we were gone he couldn't come back to
the same place and get us."

Ellie yawned. "Can't we find someplace
to sleep? I'm whipped."

"That's unanimous," Gussie
said.

Walter Scott assented silently within
her, by which she knew that he was really out of steam, mist,
ectoplasm, or whatever made ghosts run.

At the Galashiels tourist
office, set in a mobile home in a vacant lot next to a fire
station, they found a brochure of places to stay in the Borders and
found what was called a self-catering flat big enough to
accommodate them, a stone cottage that had once belonged to the
gamekeeper on a
much
larger estate. The estate was given over to black-faced sheep
and "belties," the lowland
belted
cattle. Faron phoned ahead to the owners, who
lived in "the big house," the former mansion of some squire or
other, and when they drove up the maze of winding graveled roads
that led to the place described by the owner, they found the
cottage as advertised, smack in the middle of a pasture surrounded
by cows and sheep. A little red car was parked on the gravel patch
in front of the stone cottage and the door of the cottage stood
open.

A woman wearing a bandanna on her
head, corduroy pants tucked into black rubber wellies, and a
patched blue windbreaker was inside, making beds. She extended her
hand in a businesslike but friendly fashion. "Hello, I'm Janet
Carr. You must be Mr. Randolph, who rang up?"

"Yes, ma'am," Faron said. "This is my
wife Ellie and this is my wife's aunt Gussie."

"Nice to meet you. How long will you
be staying?"

They hadn't discussed it.

"I only ask because we can just take
you as we usually have tenants from the States who stay all summer,
but the lady's had a bit of heart trouble this year and can't
travel yet."

"How much is it?" Gussie
asked.

"A thousand pounds for the three
months is our usual rate, or eighty pounds a week."

"May we pay you for today and tonight
and let you know tomorrow?"

"That will be fine. I simply need to
know if I can accept other reservations."

The house actually had more than
enough room. Four bedrooms, two adjoining the living room on one
side, two adjoining the entrance hall on the other side of the
living room. Each bedroom was furnished with a wardrobe, a bed, a
bookcase stacked with old paperback mysteries, and a bedside stand
and lamp. A coal stove dominated the living room, augmented by an
ancient electric heater. In back of the living room was a narrow
kitchen, fully equipped with pots, pans, a few assorted dishes and
pieces of cutlery, and an electric teakettle that heated water
almost as fast as one of those boiling water faucets Gussie had
seen in the States. The entrance hall led from the front door to a
back door that let out onto a narrow cement sidewalk around the
house, kept from the hill behind by a low cement wall. The bathroom
adjoined the kitchen.

Gussie made use of one of
the beds, and by the time she woke, Faron was already up, the
electric kettle busily boiling. Ellie actually slept
more
soundly than the
dead
since as evening drew closer, Sir
Walter's ghost grew increasingly alert.

"So, what now?" Faron
asked.

"So now we try to figure out how to
stick around for seven years without getting thrown out," she said,
and told him as much as she could about the happenings of the
previous night that she hadn't had time to relate after she had
found him and Ellie and driven them to Galashiels.

Faron shook his head. "We'll never
manage to stay here seven years," he said. "Too many legal
complications."

"Maybe so," Gussie said. "But I think
we need to use what time we have to try to recover anything we can
find about the ballads. They weren't all at Abbotsford, after all.
There are supposed to be some in the Edinburgh library, and other
more isolated places."

"It's too late to go there now," Faron
said. "Damn, you know, Gussie, I can't help but wish if you were
going to get haunted by somebody it could have been Professor Child
instead of Sir Walter. He's not generally considered a very
reliable authority."

"He's been a lot of help," Gussie said
loyally. "Anybody could have gotten taken in by that Torchy or
whatever she calls herself, and he got us the Wizard's spell to
help the others and all that. He's just a little weary now—losin'
his library like that was a big shock."

"I didn't know
ghosts
could
be
shocked," Faron said. "Besides, I don't mean that he's not a nice
enough guy as ghosts go, just that his collection was
limited."

"I beg your pardon, young man, but I'm
forced to take exception to that," the ghost said for the first
time that evening. "Why do you find my credentials
lacking?"

"Sir, you just never collected as many
ballads as Professor Child or researched them the way he did and
you, uh, you changed them, sir. You messed around with the
text."

"But don't you see? The
story was incomplete and I
knew
how it should go. Fragments were lost. I wanted
people to listen to those stories and to hear them as I
did.

Besides, the originals were in the
manuscript folios. I'd like to ask your Mr. Child how many of his
ballads he found in the folios and books I collected at Abbotsford.
I knew all of the collectors of the day, corresponded with them and
collected their works. I read Percy as a boy and besides had
Ritson's works, Buchan's, and Motherwell's, among others. I'm a
lover of good stories, and the ballads are among the best. I could
not in a' conscience present them dismembered and incomplete. I
assure you, lad, my alterations were altogether in the original
spirit of the ballads."

"I'm sorry, sir, but it wasn't good
scholarship," Faron said with his square chin jutting across the
table at Gussie, quite forgetting her in his argument with her
bodily guest. "You didn't say where you'd added things
and—"

"Aha! You see! If you canna say where
I've made my little contributions, you canna tell my work from the
auld songs. That shows you how true to the spirit they
were—"

"Nevertheless, it alters
the meanings, alters the language, alters the
text
dammit."

"Will you boys pipe down?" Gussie
asked. "You're making me dizzy. Faron Randolph, I'm surprised at
you. Who makes up new lyrics at the drop of a hat for any song
that's ever been sung? You do, that's who. Why, from what I
understand of the folk process, any song going is fair game for
anybody who wants to sing it and it doesn't seem to me that it's
any worse to write down your own version than to sing out loud or
record it. What's Wat if he isn't folks anyway?"

"But we need to know the original old
versions from long ago, Gussie, so that we can learn things about
the people."

"Well, hell, he's old and from long
ago and all of us will be to somebody someday. I think this is just
plain foolishness."

"Knowing the authentic
versions is what makes folk songs different, why they can't all be
copyrighted by record magnates and made the property of SWALLOW,"
Faron said stubbornly, referring to the Songwriters and
Arrangers Legal Licensing Organization Worldwide,
which now claimed a broad hegemony over music all over the world,
although it had gained the strongest hold thus far in the United
States and was just starting to make real inroads in enforcing its
"rights" in Europe.

"And a lot of damn good authenticity's
done us lately then, ain't it?" Gussie asked, and to her bodily
guest she said, "You gotta forgive Faron, Wat. His uncle Vance was
a famous ballad collector in America and so he's upholdin' the
family opinion or something."

"Gussie, it isn't just
Uncle Vance's opinion. He cross-referenced a lot of the versions he
collected with stuff in the
Minstrelsy
—"

"I rest my case," said the
ghost.

"The sad thing," Gussie said, taking
back control of her own mouth, "is that all those songs are no use
to us. Wat, you have to help us think of some places we might find
those ballads that the devils wouldn't think to look. You mentioned
correspondence. Can you help us maybe track down some of the
letters or books that might have ballads?"

"Oh, aye," he said. "Her
Highness is a very fine lady and all that but she never had that
much to do with humankind that she knows all our tricks.
And
I vow that if you
took all of the ballads out of the libraries and literature of
Scotland, not to mention England, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall,
you'd have precious little left. Our stories are part and parcel of
our lands and people."

All of a sudden the banjo in the
corner began frailing a tune and Faron began singing "On the Dowie
Dens of Yarrow—"

Ellie emerged sleepily from the
bedroom.

"My kingdom for a tape recorder,"
Faron said during a pause in the timing.

Ellie bumbled back into the bedroom
and reemerged with a sketch pad. "Shorthand," she said. "I can
always fall back on it."

She wrote down the words
Faron sang—fortunately, he had only sung the first verse before she
got the pad and it was repeated later in the song. After he sang
that
version, Sir Walter triumphantly
recited six others from memory. To her amazement, Gussie remembered
three more; one from a Steeleye Span album, one as Ewan MacColl had
used to do it, and an Appalachian version she had on an old Jean
Ritchie tape.