Picking the Ballad's Bones (29 page)

A dog howled, and another, anxious
baying sounds. City dogs from London maybe, not used to the
country.

She sprinted toward the sound, almost
effortlessly. "This is on me, lass," Wat said. "Now it's nicht and
I'm stronger. Gin that sound is what I think it is, this could be a
wondrous night for the baith of us."

As they sped through the trees, Gussie
focused on the campfire and soon saw that it was too small for a
camp-fire and too high. It flared from a little ridge in the
forest, and burned against the sky, torchlike.

"Aha," Wat said. "I thought as much."
Drawing closer, they saw that the flame indeed emanated from the
torch and holding the torch was a woman on horseback followed by a
small band of men, perhaps ten or twelve. She seemed to be starting
her chant over again. It didn't scan, it didn't rhyme, but it rose
and fell on the night wind with a wild and angry eeriness that at
once made Gussie's neck hairs rise and broke her heart.

"Weel may ye ken

Last night I was right scarce o'
men

But Toppet Hob o' the Mains

Had guesten'd in my

House by chance

I set him to wear the
fore-door

Wi' the speir,
while
I
kept the
back door

Wi' the lance.

But they hae run him
through

The thick o' the thie,

And broke his knee-pan

He's lame while he lives, and where'er
he may gang

Fy, lads! Shout a' a' a'
a' My gear's a' gang!"

Gussie's breath rose and fell with the
chant and the wind. The woman looked down at her with pale eyes
full of fury, determination, and exhaustion.

"You there!" she cried down at Gussie.
"I claim your aid by law of the trod. Two nights ago my stock was
stolen, my goods despoiled, my guest maimed, and my person
violated, and I seek my lawful revenge. Have you seen reivers
riding near?"

Sir Walter answered as if he and not
Gussie had been addressed. Gussie felt her body's blood pulsing
with his excitement. "Madame, all my skill is at your service to
redress the injustices perpetrated upon you by sich ruffians. My
companion and I are fleeing ruffians ourselves."

"Driving a late-model Winnebago,"
Gussie volunteered and the woman seemed to peer through Sir Walter,
who, to Gussie's eyes, was suddenly standing independent of her,
rather like a Siamese twin joined back to front.

"What?" the woman asked. "Have you
your wife with you? She's standing behind you so that I cannot see
her."

"The lady is a close companion. She
haunts my every movement."

"Who haunts
who?"
Gussie
demanded.

But then she realized that the figures
on the hill seemed a little see-throughish and to them, no doubt,
Sir Walter looked real and she seemed ghostified. Certainly the
longer they stood there, the more solid they and Wat looked and the
wispier she felt.

"I regret we have no horse with which
to assist you," Sir Walter said. "Our transportation has
just—er—died."

"I regret I have no horse
either," the woman bit back sourly. "My horses and cattle have been
lately driven off by your countrymen and this mare I ride is the
charity of
my neighbor. You are the first
soul my trod has come near on this side of the border and are
obliged to help me, horses or none. I know my rights. Neighbor
Cuddy, will ye tak' this man up behind you?"

"Aye, Mistress Hetherton, I
will."

And Gussie found herself, her haunt,
and her basket bag, banjo and all, lifted up beside an apparition
who gained more reality as she sat on the equally apparitious
horse. Both man and horse even sweated smelly spectral
sweat.

"What's she carrying that torch
through the woods for?" Gussie asked. "She's going to start a
forest fire that way."

"That fire's as dead as I am," Sir
Walter said. "Besides, it's the symbol of the hot trod. She must
carry the torch to notify all that she takes to the trail in her
own righteous cause. Poor lady." He scratched. "Her neighbors are
poor too, I wot. Neighbor Cuddy is louse-ridden."

"Don't scratch so hard. Those are
ghost lice and they aren't bothering me a bit."

The riding didn't bother Gussie much
either. She used to ride with friends all the time back in Texas.
But she did wonder about these people. The woman was no beauty,
with lank greasy brown hair and a nose like a tulip bulb. Livid
bruises showed around her eyes and on her jaw, neck, and naked
forearms. She wore a slip that might have been white once but now
was dirty, spotted gray, and another garment, loose and ugly and
just as disreputable over it. She looked about the age of Gussie's
daughter Lettie, in fact, if Lettie had been a hard-liver, heavy
drinker and smoker, had ten babies in a row and had let herself get
knocked around a lot, she might have resembled this woman. Gussie
knew the woman was a ghost but she could also see the ghostly
gooseflesh rising on the woman's thin bruised arms. She dug into
the basket bag and pulled out the afghan she'd been crocheting for
Lettie and Mic. She only had a strip of twenty granny squares by
ten hooked together but the woman was small and the piece would
make a good-sized wrap for her.

"Can she use this?" she asked Wat, but
Neighbor Cuddy took it from her hand and passed it to the woman.
Gussie guessed it figured that if she herself could ride a ghostly
horse, the ghost woman could warm herself with a piece of a
corporeal afghan.

"Your lady is kind," Mistress
Hetherton said, dropping back to speak to Wat again and fingering
the bright-colored acrylic yarns draped over her skinny shoulders.
Her voice wavered between softness as she ducked her head to rub
her cheek against the yarns and ferocity as she added, "If I had
had such a pretty piece as this to lose when they came to my stead,
I'd have strangled them each with my bare hands before I let them
take it. My husband left me little enough to live on, but my herds
had increased until I had twenty-four good oxen and cows. Now
they're gone, all gone, with my pots and pans and all my food, my
dishes, every stitch I owned including what I was wearing, the
sheets from my bed, my candlestick, and the coats I was making for
my grandchildren. I would be going after them naked but for the
guilt of my neighbors, who never rose nor lifted a hand to help me
and my poor guest Toppet when the reivers came. It's a comfort
indeed, sir, to have such fine Scotch folk as yourselves enlist in
my cause. Besides," she added on a more practical note, "if we find
the rascals, and they're too many for us, likely they'll occupy
themselves with the likes o' you while we escape." There was no
special rancor toward them in her tone.

Sir Walter didn't even seem to notice,
but said, "We've been in far lands for many years now, madame. Who
now sits the throne of England?"

"Why, Good Queen Bess. How far have
you gone not to have heard and how came ye home not knowing? Oh,
but I forget. You're Scotch and things be wild
hereabouts."

"True. Well, then, I think I know
where there will be stronger help than mine for your cause. I have
powerful kinsmen whose hold is but a league or so distant from
here, on the edge of the forest. I wonder that you did not pass
them as you rode."

To Gussie he said, "What an adventure
we have before us, auld lass! All my life I've heard of my
ancestor, the Bold Buccleuch. The stronghold of Buccleuch is close
by. He'll see to it that this poor woman's given justice. I hope
he's at home instead of off to Liddesdale, where he was sometimes
Warden, a position much like the one I held during my
life."

CHAPTER 24

The fog was so thick by
now that the people who sat directly opposite her could see neither
the storyteller nor the people who sat next to her. As she talked,
the driver tinkered and swore beneath the bus, aided by Mrs.
To-tuga, who held the lantern. The beam of the lantern glimmered
like a rheumy eye from behind cataracts of fog, but
except for it, the passengers might have been
alone in those
mountains and the bus, the
driver, and Mrs. Tortuga might have been alone as well.

"So, " a disembodied voice
said, "I guess that robbery victim lady and her buddy on the horse
got them out of that jam, huh?"

"Out of the frying pan
into the fire," the storyteller replied. "See, once Gussie and the
banjo went with the ghosts, it was sort of like they disappeared
too. Now, I know it never worked out like that on
Topper
but the fact is,
Sir Walter possessing Gussie made the difference in whether she was
real in this world and hazy in the next, or straddled both planes.
He pulled her with him over to the ghost side
—
not out of malice, mind you, but
from the affinity he had with the other ghosts."

"One of those affinities
the Wizard was talking about?"

"Similar. Anyway, once she
took off with the hot trod, the Gypsies couldn't find her, but
then, neither could anybody else. Furthermore, the banjo was in the
ghost world too, and that made all kinds of difference, upset the
magical equilibrium as it were."

* * *

Willie MacKai was so relieved to hear
the banjo he could have bawled—in fact, he reckoned he probably
would, next song around. He was as purely tired of being a
beautiful young female as a man could be of anything. First, of
course, he'd gotten his lover killed off by his family, losing a
bunch of them in the process, then as "Tifty's Annie" he'd been
part of a girl who'd been beaten to death by her family for falling
for the wrong guy.

He had joined May Margaret right after
some swarthy galoot named Prince Heathen had raped her, drowned her
brothers, stabbed her parents to death, burnt her house, and
carried her off to live in a cave where he didn't feed her or give
her anything to drink until she'd had a son for him and then he'd
half killed her dragging her through the brambles while she was in
labor as his men laughed at her. Willie wished to God that Torchy
Burns had added to her instructions not to get killed or laid that
they couldn't have babies or get beaten to a nonfatal pulp either
because that was the god-awfulest thing he had ever been through,
bar none. May Margaret was tougher than most of the girls Willie
had inhabited though. Once she had her kid and started bawling
because she thought her self-appointed boyfriend was going to kill
the kid too, Prince Heathen got all solicitous and started behaving
himself. He said he didn't mean to hurt her. He was only testing
her. Yeah, sure. Well, he'd messed up Margaret's looks real bad and
he had to sleep with the results.

Willie wished he could go back and
tell Margaret what his next hostess, a middle-aged woman known for
some strange reason as Fair Annie, had done. Her old man had
kidnapped her when she was a little girl and Annie had had seven
kids by him, boys, who he had raised up to be as rotten as he was.
Then he decided Annie was looking a little long in the tooth and he
began regretting that he'd never gotten a dime's worth of dowry for
her, so he started courting another girl and ordered Annie to act
like his housekeeper. Fortunately, the other girl had brought up on
tales of how her older sister was kidnapped to such and such a land
by a man who seemed mysteriously like her fiancé and she thought to
ask Annie who her parents had been. The girls were sisters, and
conspired between them to have the younger girl's bodyguard hang
the husband, then both girls went back to their native
country.

Along with his hostesses,
Willie had also been knifed by jealous women, and drowned by his
brother, who didn't want the folks to know he was about to give
birth to his own niece or nephew.
Nice
people,
these ballad folks. Reminded him
of the real tiny little hollers in the South where sex was so often
a family affair. He especially liked the ballad where the brother
accidentally killed two of his sisters trying to get one of the
three girls to marry him, till the third woman laid a little family
history on him. That had been Willie's idea. He had finally started
to figure out how to help these gals once in a while.

He hadn't done so well as Mary
Hamilton, who'd gone to Russia and had been fool enough to abort
the King's bastard and been hung for her trouble. (Willie had
bailed out of that one as soon as he recognized the ballad and
realized that poor girl just had a talent for putting her foot in
her mouth and plain hadn't learned in time to "just say
no.")

But the last little old gal had been a
smart one. When her boyfriend talked her into taking her daddy's
horse and her mama's jewels and running away with him, then wanted
her to strip off her designer clothes before he pitched her in the
river, Willie, as the voice of her common sense, had told her to
pretend maidenly modesty. When the bastard's back was turned, she
shoved the jerk over the cliff and into the ocean. Worked slicker
than deer guts on a doorknob.

Willie wished he could have done more
to help these women but of course if he had, their songs would have
changed. Still, it made him feel a little like a network news
cameraman filming away while people were being murdered all around
him. He wondered if the songs about the women he had been would
make a bit of difference in anyone else's life, but somehow he
figured if he ever got to be a guy again, they would make some
difference in his own.