Picking the Ballad's Bones (25 page)

CHAPTER 22

The Snail broke down a few
miles into Glacier Lake National Park, around midnight.

"No big deal," the driver
said. "Just a little overheated, I think. Thermostat blew and the
fan belt gave out and I thought maybe one of you guys could hike
with me down
the road to the waterfall to
get some water for the radiator.
I sent a
relay message to headquarters on the CB and the owner's mom should
be driving down from Eugene in her station wagon to bring a new fan
belt and thermostat. Oh, yeah, and a jack. I forgot ours this time.
So maybe you guys will want to set out signal flares. I don't think
you can build campfires around here but you've all got your
sleeping bags so you should be okay. You can stay on the bus till
Mrs. Tortuga arrives but then you gotta pile out so we can work on
this heap. Oh, yeah, one more thing. Anybody got a
flashlight?

The storyteller produced
one from an extremely battered Mexican basket bag. She hoped when
she got to the border she'd be able to replace the bag.

"Thanks, that's great.
Anybody got some cookies? We had emergency rations stowed under my
seat but I got the munchies."

Mrs. Tortuga arrived two
hours later. In the meantime, there were no lights for fear of
running down the battery. The only lights to be seen were the stars
and moon, high
above the fog that boiled
over from the river basins and
streambeds
between the mountains. The passengers who
had been reading had to stop reading and the passengers who
had been playing cards could hardly do it by Braille.

"Now you see here, this is
just what I mean," the storyteller said to the group around her.
She said it in a kind of declaiming voice, though, so that
everybody could hear. "In times past, when something like this
happened, people would all sing and everybody would know the songs.
Anybody here know any songs?"

Only the peepers and a few
night birds answered her. All of the people shook their heads in
the darkness, which produced a lot of rustling but nothing in the
way of sociability.

"In olden times, people
thought songs would ward off evil, but of course, we don't believe
in that kinda stuff now, do we?" the storyteller asked.

"I, uh
—
I
know the
tune to Duck Soul's new hit,” somebody said from a dim corner of
the bus. "Only I can't quite understand the words. But the tune
goes like bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop BA!"

"Jimmy, honey," a deep
female voice drawled, "from what I can make out, the words are
about a mass murderer hacking a town to death at night while they
sleep
—
nice beat
but if you did try to sing it I'd freak out. Besides, you can't
carry a tune either." To the storyteller she said, "So, what's all
this stuff you're telling those people? I keep catching something
about time travelers and fairies and shit but is it all made up or
is there some stuff happening in, like, you know, the real
world?"

"Well, yes, yes, there
was. After the Queen of Fairies, who was also the Debauchery Devil,
Torchy Burns, turned herself into an orange kitty cat to spy on the
Randolphs and Gussie, who was possessed by the ghost of Sir Walter
Scott, in case you didn't catch that, that devil-woman realized she
had made herself some serious miscalculations. Her boss, the
Chairdevil, had plenty of reason to be peeved with her. Now, Torchy
was not especially a worryin' kind of entity, but as the months
rolled on, she saw that her soft heart (she liked to think of
herself as the original prototype for the whore with a heart of
gold) had led her astray again. She honestly had thought the
singers were going to
have a much tougher
time getting from one song to the next.

"The reason she
miscalculated, I reckon, is because of
what your psychiatrists and psychologists and folks in
the
counseling-type professions call
projection. Any of you here not been in therapy?"

"Can't afford it, lady. I
do sweat lodges, but I never
heard of
projection except when you're at the movies
.

"No, she means like
projecting your voice,” someone else said.

"It's a little bit like
that, I guess. But what it really means is that you think whatever
you would do is what somebody else would do
—
you sort of lay your own way of
behaving on them. Like with some people, if they got a rovin' eye
and
are playin' around on their lover,
they get powerfully jeal
ous over nothin'
because they figure if they're playin' around, then naturally their
lover is doing the same thing, and they spend all their time tryin'
to catch 'em at it"

"Oh, yeah. I heard about
that."

"Anyway, when Torchy Burns
changed the spell around to suit herself and gave the musicians the
out with the ring, she figured they'd never think to use it. Her
idea of what would happen was that they would do like her and when
they found themselves in somebody else's body, they'd be rude
guests and just push that other person entirely out of
the way. But she also guessed that doing that
wouldn't
be a good
thing because while they were in that other person's body
during the other person's lifetime, the visiting spirits would get
completely lost and forget all about why they were there. They'd be
out of place in the old times too, since they wouldn't know what
ballad they were in or be the same sex or anything, and would act
so crazy the other people in the ballad might even think they were
bewitched or something. She figured they'd never even get to use
the ring. But of course, it didn't work out like that. Bein' a
devil, she probably never had to say, 'I'm of two minds about this
situation,' and wouldn't realize that sometimes people really are.
Any one person has room to
be lots of
different things and has lots of different people within
them, though most of us don't
get to try more than a tiny part of who we can be.

"The musicians, who were
real used to being guests in other people's houses, blended right
in and fitted their spits to the needs of their host spirits
without even knowing how they did it. They took their cues from
their hosts and fitted themselves to the character and the
situation so well that the hosts in most of the ballads never even
realized there was somebody there who wasn't originally part of
them.

"Of course, in the case of
Brose Fairchild, it was a little
different, since his hostess was what we would call
psychic
and what people back then called a
witch.
"

* * *

Torchy Burns's little joke
with the ballad ashes provided the biggest shock of all for Brose
Fairchild.
"Hey, man,"
he thought when he arrived in his appointed body.
"I'm not only a chick, I'm white."

"Not white enough,"
answered the grim womanly voice that shared his
current vocal cords.

"Hey, babe, this is a
whole lot whiter than my usual,"
Brose
answered.

The other parts of the
woman's mind probed at the part that was Brose and she
asked,
"Be you an elf or a demon sent to
succor me?"

"Not exactly. I be Brose
Fairchild from Austin, Texas, and since I seem to be inside o'you I
don't think I could succor you if I wanted to without it bein'
pretty awkward, but if somethin's buggin' you, you could talk to
me. Lots of kids talk to me. You knocked up?"

"Knocked up?"

"In a family way?
Preggers? Havin' mah bay-bee?"
It was a
logical guess, being the main kind of peculiarly female trouble
with which he was acquainted. In these olden days, as he could
guess was where he found himself judging from the dump she lived
in, folks didn't have stuff like the pill or even
Trojans.

"No, praise be to my
granddam who taught me herb lore for such ailments. But I am
forsaken. You were not here, I suppose, a moment ago, when this
came?"

She picked up a letter
from off of her bed. Brose saw
that the
little sack of brush she used for a pillow was all wet. Her eyes
felt scratchy dry now, however.

"Dearest Barbara," the letter said,
"I'm not good enough for you. I am in awe of the wisdom of you dark
woods folk and we had wonderful, wild times together. Your house
and lands are tempting too, but I find that I cannot sleep for
thinking of Ellen, who is fair, like me, and therefore a much more
suitable match, you see? She'd fit in with the family portraits so
much better. I know this is a caddish thing to do after all we've
shared (heh heh) but I just thought I'd let you know. Please don't
wax wrothy or do anything rash. Love, Your Own (Formerly) Sweet
William."

"Asshole,"
Brose said.
"Reminds me
of some pickers I used to know. Hell,"
he
said after thinking it over a little more,
"Reminds me of me."

"So you see, demon, you've
caught me at a bad moment. It seems I will be going through my days
with no true love, and I rather thought every maiden was entitled
to one."

"Your name's
Barbara?"

"Aye."

"Look, Babs, I got a hot
tip for you. Guys like that are a dime a dozen. You seem like a
pretty classy lady. This house yours?"

"It is mine, from my
mother's mother."

"And you got a little
piece of land too?"

"I do."

"Then the hell with
him."

"Oh, demon, would you do
that for me, really?"

"Nah, I mean, forget him.
Get along without him. Sounds like a jerk anyway."

"But how can
I?"

"Lots of ladies where I'm
from do just fine on their own. What'd you just tell me? You got
property. Look in your mirror."

She bent over a tub of
clear water she'd drawn for drinking purposes.
"Hey, you are one fine-lookin' woman. Black eyes, nice tan,
good body, and a way about you. Girl, what are you moanin 'for over
one measly little pale-
faced no-account
no-class ball-less wonder who hasn't
even
got the nerve to come tell you
in person when he wants to drop you? Baby, you are just too much
woman for a man like that anyway."

"You're right,"
she said, staring not so much at
her
reflection as into
it for a few moments while her thoughts spun.
"How can he reject me so? Why does he not love me enough to
keep his promise? Am I too brisk? Why does it matter that I am
brown? Once he thought me fair enough for him."
Then she sat down and picked up the letter again, staring at
it hard so that Brose felt tears trickling in the edge of her
eyes.
"What shall I write?"
she asked.

"How about 'fuck off and
die,' "
he suggested.

"How do you spell
that?"
she asked, and scrawled the message
on the back. When she was done she rolled the letter and walked out
into the field, where some of
her
neighbors were sharecropping her land. Brose,
whose body was often overweight and stocky, was delighted at how
gracefully she moved, like the deer that came to ruin his garden
regularly every spring, but with a ferocity about her determination
not to show her weakness that was more like a mountain lion's. A
man looked up from his work, glowering into the sun a little,
suspicious even as he tugged his forelock to her. His woman ignored
her and kept chopping weeds while other children peeked and giggled
and whispered to each other. To the youngest child, a boy of about
seven, Barbara said, "Take this to William Graham in the toun." She
handed him a coin to seal the deal. The child took off at a
run.

All that afternoon Barbara worked in
her own garden, planting, hoeing, weeding, gathering the herbs and
flowers for hanging to dry from her rafters. Just before dark the
boy returned with the letter still in his hand. He pretended to
have run all the way but Brose noted the sack tied to his waist,
the purchase he'd made with Barbara's coin, no doubt.

"The gentleman says you're to come to
him, miss. He's taken terrible sick and says you're a' can cure
him. He says you'll know what he means."

Barbara smiled. "Does he
noo?"

Brose said,
"See there, Babs baby. The dude
can
't
live
without you."

"You don't understand,
demon. He wants me to come and give back his faith."

"His what? I'd think if
anybody's lost faith in anybody else it'd be you losing it in
him."

"We plighted our
troth,"
she told him wearily.
"He begged me for months. I knew somehow all
along that it would not work, you know. Not, as he says, because he
is fair and I am brown, but because my living is earned not just
from things of the soil but from things of the spirit, because I
read and spin and keep myself to myself but say what I think when I
am amang others and he cares only for hunting and hawking and being
with his fellows and says that I am rude to speak out so, though he
also says he admires it in me. I think he is not yet weaned,
sometimes. I think that he wishes me to mother him but also that he
wishes to unsettle me as a rebellious child unsettles its mother.
He could not stand it that I could pass his letter of un-love off
so lightly and now he seeks to make me face him."