Picking the Ballad's Bones (27 page)

The longer he stayed, the
more peaceful she grew too, the less mad at everything. The people
who worked for her started to look up and almost smile when she
came
out
to the
field to bring them water or a loaf of bread to split for
lunch
,
and accepted her when she worked alongside
them.

The townfolk were
something else again. Though William did not die, and lived to
marry his Elinor (Barbara had sent them a garland of garlic for a
wedding present, to prevent further illness, as her note said),
neither he
and
his friends forgave her and spread rumors about how she was
cruel and a witch and had cursed William first to die and then to
the more lingering death of an unhappy marriage. After his illness,
he could no longer comfortably sit a horse for prolonged periods
and his fellows missed his company.

He did not linger at home, however.
Within six months Elinor grew as tight-lipped as his mother so that
when his bride spoke to him it was as if she were pulling stitches
one by one from a winter garment. By the time two years had passed,
it appeared she would remain barren. But at the end of three years,
with no kinder attitude toward her husband, she bore a son that was
the spitting image of the dark-haired and florid-faced man who had
once sat in the chair at William's bed head.

A few months after, William began
suffering mysterious stomach pains and this time he did die,
according to rumor, still calling for Barbara's forgiveness and for
his friends to be kind to her.

She walked to the town church for his
funeral, but in spite of her threat, she didn't feel like dancing
or singing. She took another braid of garlic for the grave but the
expressions of the widow and her mother-in-law and all the other
townsfolk kept her from stepping forward.

"You've a lot of nerve coming here,
you hard-hearted witch," snarled a fair-haired, cherubic-faced boy
who was Elinor's younger brother.

Another boy picked up a stone and
threw it at her and the florid-faced man who stood beside the
grieving widow said, "That's enough, boys. Not at a funeral. She'll
get her punishment in hell."

"Goddamn, babe, what do
they want from you?"
Brose asked when they
had finally arrived back home, bruised from the stones and tired
from walking briskly, if not running.
"You
gave him what he wanted, you let him marry who he wanted, you were
a class act through the whole damn business."

"They want me dead,
"
she said.
"And
they want me to bear the blame. And whether I will it or no, I
suspect that I shall."

And that day they said no more, but
the older children of her tenant family did not accompany their
parents to work. "Mr. Nixon has given them work, ma'am, and is
paying good wages," said the woman. "We're only staying the
fortnight." The two youngest ones were singing a new song when she
went to take them water, which they refused, though they stopped
singing.

"A pretty tune," Barbara wheedled.
"Come, sing it for me.

"You'll like it not, ma'am," the girl
said.

"But I like it already."

"You promise no matter what not to
beat us?" the boy asked.

Brose thought,
"Look out, baby, here it comes."

But Barbara, the smile
still on her face, said,
"Better to know
than not."

The children sang, hesitantly at
first.

"It fell about the Martinmass
times

When green leaves all were
fallin'

Sweet William on his deathbed
lay

For the love of Bawbee
Allen."

"That ain't fair,"
Brose said when all the verses were sung.
"It even says he was after your
money."

"That's not
unusual,
" she said with wry
amusement.

Brose wasn't amused.
"
I
remember that
song and that ain't all of it."
She had to
ask him the rest of it three times before he would tell her and
then she smiled.
"My world must be crueler
than hell from the way you act, demon. Come, I'll show you now how
a deathbed's to be made. I suspect I may have need of it
soon."

They had no need of her preparations
that night or the next or for yet another night, but in the
meantime, her sheep died mysteriously in her field, her tenants
left, and on the last night she drank water from her well and
immediately a cramp seized her belly and sweat broke out on her
forehead.

Brose had time to help her lay herself
on the bed as she'd showed him and to twist the ring thrice
around.

When he found himself back
all by his lonesome in the
fluid
haze of the in-between world, he looked for her,
hoping she was a ghost too and would stay with him.
But
when he called for
her, the only response he felt was from the churchyard. Someone had
made the song come true by planting a rosebush on William's grave
and its little red flowers crept toward the place outside the
churchyard where the bastards had buried his Barbara. She was still
fighting back though, tough little bitch that she was. A blackberry
bramble held the roses at bay and within the year, Brose knew,
would take them over.

CHAPTER 23

Mrs. Tortuga had come,
bearing cookies and lite beer for the passengers, as well as the
required maintenance parts for the bus. Meanwhile, the passengers
took their sleeping
bags and retreated,
shivering, to the edge of a scenic look
out
point, where they huddled close together, munching
cookies and sharing coffee from the thermoses of
those who
had had the foresight to fill up
at the last truck stop.

"So, while all this wild
stuff is going on in olden times, seven years is passing on the
home front, right? How did they handle getting to stay in the
country? How did they make a living?"

"I hate to admit this in
open company, but they sort of broke the law a little. After all,
what had it done for them except to support the bad guys against
them? The work permit thing was helped somewhat by the laws
changing in Europe that made almost indefinite stays possible.
Faron would busk part of the day, playing Lazarus the banjo or the
Gypsy's fiddle on the streets in Edinburgh to earn a little money
while Ellie researched. Her folks back home sold Faron's car and
rented out their house for more than the mortgage payment, which
made for a little income too. They stayed at the Carrs' lodgings,
which didn't normally bring in money during the winter months, when
the Carrs often visited friends in the West Indies. So Mrs. Carr
arranged with Gussie to trade caretaking and housekeeping for rent,
which was a major expense.

"Everything seemed to
settle down for a little while. Each month brought more songs,
trickling in sometimes note by note, sometimes two or three whole
songs in an hour or so. 'King Henrie' came in November, and later
that month they got a bonus of first another transformation song,
'Alison Gross,' and then 'The Marriage of Sir Gawain,' which is
about a knight of King Arthur's who voluntarily marries an ugly
monster of a woman, and then all of the King Arthur songs one after
another like a string of popbeads fitting into one another, and
then 'The Laily Worm and the Mackrell of the Sea,' until just about
all the transformation songs known in the British Isles had turned
up. That kept Faron in plenty of material for the Christmas season,
even though the first notes of 'The Brown Girl' had not yet come
because that song took a long time to end and to hook up with the
other songs that were related.

"The research was goin'
real well too. The librarians got to know Faron and had heard of
his uncle and for a while, even let him bring back to the Carrs'
some of the common, popular books about Scottish history and so
on,
until the orange cat peed on the book
one day when she got
locked in
accidentally, as they thought.

"That cat was one
frustrated critter. It had come to the farmhouse to spy on them,
but they were all so pooped by the end of the day trying to find
songs that they didn't
talk about plans
much or reveal anything important. Finally, Torchy ended up having
to turn herself into a German library-sciences exchange student
named Miss Fahrenheit to keep any track of Faron at all, and then
she ended up getting herself stuck back in the stacks of the
accounting books for the Kingdom of Scotland from decades past.
Once she tried to disguise herself as a tourist who wanted
to get her palm read, so she could check up on
her Gypsies,
but the Expediency Devil, who
was teaching the Gypsies time management and more efficient ways to
process and smuggle their drugs, spied her almost at once. The fact
was, her magic was pretty well occupied with maintaining the
interference she had cast into Wizard Michael's spell.

"Meanwhile, every day he
was at the library, Faron Randolph uncovered some new piece of
information that
led the banjo to remember
yet another song
—
the Robin Hood ballads poured in around New Years, and all
through the month of February, when he found a book of
poetry the Gypsies had overlooked when they
looted the
Edinburgh library. Later on,
Ellie took a graduate course in Shakespearean theatre and a whole
bunch of songs based on Shakespeare resurfaced. The banjo kept all
of them up every night that week transcribing.

"The devil board of
directors by this time was having to rely on the mischief they had
already made, for the music continued on its merry course. The
dirty tricks the devils played unraveled the songs in the States
and in the British Isles faster than the ragged-ass group of
musicians could possibly bring the songs back. When Ellie called
her daddy at home, he told her each time of another big
collection
being destroyed, more musicians
being killed in supposed
accidents or
dying before their time of drug- and sex-related illnesses, of
old-timers getting Alzheimer's or throat cancer or something else
that effectively put them out of commission, of the media and the
schools ignoring anything connected with any kind of man-made music
in favor of more and better computer simulations and high-powered
games and such.

"But the devils were
having a hell of a time too. They'd only concentrated their efforts
against the music in English-speaking countries, and had let a few
other things slide while indulging that little whim of the
Chairdevil's. One day he called them all back in, including the
Debauchery Devil aka Torchy Burns, Lulubelle Baker, the Queen of
Fairies, DD, and Miss Fahrenheit, and said:

* * *

"It's almost as if the
Opposition has been playing us along, plotting this diversionary
tactic. While we've been messing around with these music mongers,
distracting ourselves with their wretched noise, the worst possible
scenario has occurred; peace has broken out in several parts of the
world and unless we act fast, it may spread like a virus until it
consumes the earth. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United
States are seeing eye to eye and some millionaire has actually been
using good money that could be used for wild living to get the
world powers
talking peaceably among
themselves and other kinds of bleeding-heart liberal bullshit. The
Berlin Wall, one of our greatest monuments, has been torn down. Our
minions in charge of oppressing the citizens of several Eastern
European countries have been brutally slaughtered. If we are to
salvage anything, any massive breakdowns in the economy, any
impatience on the part of people who are just about to be liberated
to make it happen faster until they undo the whole thing, any
further rebellions just for the hell of it, we have got to get
cracking."

"You've just about tied my hands," the
Debauchery Devil complained, not that she didn't enjoy that sort of
thing under the right circumstances, but it wasn't often she got a
chance to display righteous indignation, since she disdained
righteousness as a rule. "You've appropriated and mismanaged my
minions and left all my magicks tied up with your little scheme
while I have to prowl around on four paws or hide behind thick
glasses and stacks of musty old books. I'm glad we're abandoning
this in favor of schemes more worthy of my talents."

"You misunderstand me, DD," the
Chairdevil said. "I'm simply pointing out that we need to pull
Expediency back where he belongs and you need to behave yourself
with more dedication and dispatch. Take back your minions. They're
human. You have the chief offenders tied up in your realm for the
time being and the cursed instrument is guarded only by two
bookworms and an old woman. Have your minions recapture it. I don't
care how. Then even if our adversaries do relearn some of the
charms against us, they'll have no way of sending them back into
this world and we can keep them where they are."