Picking the Ballad's Bones (26 page)

"So he can break you down
and see you cry, right? Yeah, that's probably it okay. I used to
play that little game myself, just to see how tough a lady really
was. That's why I like bein' around critters better. You kick them,
they bite you. Fair enough. You gonna bite this dude?"

She shook her head once
and he felt the heart within her sink with sorrow.
"I knew he wasn't suitable. I didn't want to
become involved with him. But he followed me and flattered me and
did all he could to please me until it
seemed foolish to give in to my reservations. If I tried
to
mention them, even gently, he seemed
wounded and offended, until I thought, I have never been happy in
love so perhaps I need instruction. So I gave in, and giving in,
I
began to love him. It will be hard to
see him without touch
ing him, to speak to
him without calling him by the endearments I've come to use, to
have him speak my name and not the endearments I'm accustomed to
from him."

"You got the blues bad,
Babs,"
he said and hummed an eight-bar
melody line.

"That's strange music. Is
it demonic?"

"Nah, it just feels that
way. Guess you might say it's what folks use where I'm from to get
rid of their demons, or at least make 'em feel at home. Goes with
situations like yours."

"Are there
words?"

"Lots of words, but you
can make up words to fit the situation and you can play to fit the
situation. You don't own a guitar do you?"

"What might that
be?"

"A musical instrument.
Came over from Spain I think. Maybe you folks would have lutes or
something."

"Harps,
perhaps?"

"Yeah, there's blues harps
but you play 'em with your mouth."

"Can you show
me?"

He put her hands to her
mouth and made sounds
like
a blues harmonica with her lips. It wasn't as
good as when he did it at home and he said,
"Loosen up, baby. You gonna lose this man for your skin, you
might's well get some of the spiritchal benefits thereof, know what
I mean? Now lissen here and we'll sing you one."
And he sang her one of his favorites, "The
Hootchy Kootchy Man."

"Is that your true name,
demon? Hootchy Kootchy Man?"

Brose laughed.
"Might say it's one of 'em, yeah. Let's get our
beauty sleep now, sugar. We want to look cool
tomorrow when we see that man, just so he'll see what
he's
missin' out on."

She undressed and washed
in a tub of clear water and Brose surveyed their mutual charms
before she slid back into her night shift and into
bed
.
"Umm, umf"
he said.
"That man is a pure fool. No doubt about
it."

The next day after a
leisurely bath and washing
her
waist-length black hair with herb-scented soap
she'd made earlier that spring, and dressing in her long green
dress with the red and yellow embroidery on the
bodice
,
she
set off on the road to town.

Brose sang her other blues
songs he remembered, using her husky alto voice.
"You're a natural, babe,"
he said.
"Now it's your turn to make
you up one."

There was no one to hear but the ewes
and the lambs so she tried one.

"I am a brown brown girl

My eyes are black as sloes

I'm as brisk as a nighttime
nightingale

As wild as a forest doe."

"Real nice,"
Brose said. Now
the
chorus."

"And I am.

And everybody
knows
I am

I'm a bonny brown girl
don't give a
damn

For no false-hearted man."

"You're cookin',"
he said.
"Keep it
rollin'."

"My love has sent me a
letter

He sent it from yonder town

He says he cannot fancy me

Just because I am so
brown."

And together they sang the chorus
again.

"And I am.

And everybody
knows
I am

I'm a bonny brown girl
don't give a
damn

For no false-hearted man."

They kept making up verses as they
drew near the town but they stopped to dance (Brose showed her some
rock and roll moves that totally amazed the cows) and picked
flowers that she wove into garlands as she sang:

"Y'know I sent that man

back his letter again

For his love I valu'd not

Whether that he could fancy
me

Or whether he would not

'Cause I am.
Wheeooo—oo-ooo!

And everybody
knows
I
am

I'm a bonny brown girl
don't give a
damn

For no false-hearted man."

On the outskirts of town,
people started staring, and Brose said,
"Better cool it,
" but held her head
high and proud and she walked as if she didn't have a care in
the
world,
Brose's sly smile twitching the edges of her mouth.
"Okay,"
he said.
"Where does this mental giant live
anyway?"

The house was one of the
largest in town and had a big iron door knocker that Barbara
brought up and let fall. A slender elderly woman with fine features
and watering
blue
eyes answered the door. Her mouth slitted when she saw
Barbara and she turned her eyes away, but opened the door
wide. With
much swishing
of silken skirts she climbed the stairs, showed Barbara to a
certain door, then left. Barbara pushed open the door and stepped
inside. A man lay in the bed, his hair almost as white as the
linen pillowcase beneath his head.

Three other men were in the room but
two of them were talking in low voices by the window while the
other watched from an upholstered chair to one side of the bed
head.

"His
friends,
" Barbara thought to Brose.
"They hate me. They told him I was a
witch."

"Hmph,"
Brose said.
"Probably
just want in your panties themselves. Ignore 'em."

She walked past them as if they
weren't there to the head of the bed and looked down into the man's
face. He opened his eyes as if he had only just realized she was
there. "Hello, William," she said.

"Barbara, at last you've
come. I thought you would come last night or
this
morning. It isn't such a long
way it should take you until—" He had risen on one elbow as his
voice rose into a whine but now he sank back onto his pillow,
flopping elegant fingers toward the man at the bedside and asking,
"When
is
it,
Humphrey? I've been so terribly
ill.
I swear I am dying."

"You do look awful," she said, not
answering his implied questions. "Your face is rather swollen,
William. You look like a squirrel with its cheeks full of
nuts."

"I'll be damned,"
Brose told her.
"Man's
got the mumps."

"What's that?"

"The mumps. It's a disease
kids get. Affects the glands. Just makes kids sick for a little
while but on a grown man like this it gets him where he
lives."
When he explained it, Barbara got
an evil grin on her face and then started laughing.

"Beg pardon," she said, hiccuping to
the man in the chair, and lowered herself onto the chair arm
doubled up with laughing.

"What's so funny?" William
demanded.

"You are. You seduced me, flouted and
scorned me and, from what I hear, half the women in the town before
me, and now you're after another and want me to bless you on your
way. But there is justice in the world and you lie before me
receiving your reward."

"Barbara, I
loved
you," he said, his
voice high and squeaky in his sore throat.

"Stop laughin', baby, you
s'posed to act impressed now,"
Brose
said.

"So you said," she
answered William. "In that case, I'll give you back your token and
two of my own for good measure." She pulled three gold rings from
her fingers, and one by one dropped them on his bed. She got so
into pulling rings she reached for the twisted wire one on her
middle finger and Brose stopped her with a
"Not that one, babe. It's magic."
She was fortunately the kind of girl he didn't have to offer
any other explanation to. To William she said of the rings on the
bed, "Here. Maybe these will help pay for the funeral."

"Barbara!"

"You'll be wanting your faith and your
troth back, I suppose, to make peace before you die."

"I—if that is the way you're going to
behave, I should say so."

"Of course, you'll be
needing them if you wish to
make an honest
woman out of the blonde lady you mentioned in your letter so that
she can be your widow."

William set his mouth in much the way
that his mother's had been set and closed his eyes as if her
attitude pained him too much to bear.

"Very well, then." She took a long
piece of bone from her pocket.

"What's with the
chopstick?"
Brose asked.

"It's my wand,"
she said.

"Like the fairy fucking
godmother?"
he asked.
"What're them little squiggles carved on it?"

"Runes,"
she told him and, bending over William, touched
him with the wand. He flinched, but all she did was stroke him with
the wand and said, "My faith and troth I give back to thee so thy
soul may have rest."

"Do you have to put it like that?" he
asked. "I said I felt badly enough to die—and I must say I feel
even worse the way you've been carrying on, but I didn't say I was
actually going to die. Your problem, Barbara, is that you've always
taken everything so seriously. Can't you forget and forgive? Give a
man a little space to breathe? No wonder a man gets sick with you
taking his natural urges in such a deadly way."

"I wouldn't wonder but she's put a
curse on you, Will," said one of the men at the window.

"Then she's cursed Elinor Elgin's wee
brother and sister the same," the other man said. "They look just
like him, though not so deathly ill. It's a wonder she hasn't
cursed Elinor as well."

"Oh, I'm not likely to forget your
betrayal, William, nor to forgive you," she said. "I wouldn't want
to be wooed with soft words again. I need no vengeance, however,
since the ailment you've caught will be sufficient to make you rue
the very day that you were born. I will promise you this however. I
do think that though you've broken faith with me so that I may
never trust another man, I'll do as much for you as any maiden
might her somewhat-truer love. I faithfully promise that I'll dance
upon your grave for twelvemonth and a day thereby lining your
coffin with rose leaves and heralding your arrival into the
hereafter. How will that be?"

He groaned and turned his face to the
wall.

Since Barbara seemed neither inclined
to die nor to get laid any time in the near future, Brose's spirit
stayed with her and learned from her the song of an ancestress who
had been similarly betrayed by a winsome youth who had a taste for
blondes.

"But this grandma of yours
went off the deep end and stabbed the girl and then the guy
beheaded her? You people make Frankie and Johnny look like
lightweights."
He learned the song from
her, wondering if somewhere in the Wizard Michael Scott's fission
of souls theory, his Barbara wasn't a chip off the old brown block.
She had more class than her grandma, though. Brose helped her with
her stock and showed her a few veterinary tricks he had picked up
on the ranch. She showed him uses for herbs and mushrooms, lichen
and fungi her grandmother
had
taught her. He liked her a lot. She was tough and
smart and, left alone, could even be funny and playful. He wondered
what it would have been like if they'd each had a body and then
decided it probably wouldn't have worked because he never would
have gotten to know her so well. She reminded him a little of Anna
Mae, but he couldn't say how much exactly, because he only felt her
expressions from the inside, never saw them from without. But he
loved brushing her long black mane and bathing her sleek brown body
with its Crosshatch of scars from briers and thistles and its hands
rough and dirty from work around her place.