Picking the Ballad's Bones (31 page)

"No, she's tormented me long enough.
I'm tired of second best. This is the last time she gets all the
attention while I go neglected." And with that Jane turned her back
and walked away.

As Isabelle twisted her ring for the
third time, Willie swam free and left her to her much-sung
fate.

* * *

"Tha's aye a fine sang that unco harp
ye have there plays, Great-Grandson. It plays a' by its lane?" Bold
Buccleuch asked, momentarily distracted from robbing and
slaughtering them all by the banjo twanging away in Gussie's basket
bag.

Gussie answered, "That it does, sir.
It's magic and it knows all of the songs about love and war and
right and wrong and justice and injustice that ever were sung.
Wonder what songs it's going to play about you?"

"Eh?" He lifted a red eyebrow as thick
as the tail of the orange cat at Carrs' and just as mobile. "That
sang's very familiar but I canna' recall it."

"Ahem, allow me, laird,"
said a tall, skinny man, balding and with a trimmed beard. He
looked less ruffian-like than the others. "The song is called 'The
Two Sisters' or 'The Cruel Sister' or sometimes by the burden it
often bears 'Binnorie.'"

"Ah, our renegade Irish harper. How
cum ye to know a Scottish tune?"

"Many songs have crossed from one
shore to the other until who can say where they began, laird," the
man said, but sang the lyrics as the banjo played through them
again.

"Sometimes she sunk, and sometimes she
swam,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

Until she cam' to the miller's
dam,

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie.

'Oh, Father, Father, draw your
dam!'

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

There's either a mermaid or a
milk-white swan,

By the bonny, bonny banks of
Binnorie."

* * *

Giorgio had opened the
door and forced the Randolphs inside, before beginning to search
the rooms. Before he could get started however, Terry Pruitt's
white van, its front grill dented but otherwise unhurt, careened up
the driveway and skidded to a stop. Giorgio's wife flung open the
driver's door and jumped to the ground as a van-load
of Gypsy women, children, and some of the older
men swarmed from the vehicle. Even inside the house, Faron could
hear the persistent ring of a phone.

Giorgio's wife dove head first back
into the van and finally groped under the driver's seat until she
triumphantly held aloft the cellular telephone, which kept ringing
until she pushed the switch to answer it. '"Allo!" she
said.

"This is Sam Hawthorne speaking. I
can't come to the phone right now but at the tone I'm leaving you
the following message."

Torchy Burns stood in the doorway with
her hands on her hips. "Oh, hell! I should have known when I mixed
up those affinities that all the dead people would get into the
act. That Hawthorne is well named okay—he's always been a thorn in
my side and a pain in my ass. I offered him plenty of opportunity
but no, he had to be Mr. Clean and now the son of a bitch has the
temerity to haunt me!"

The tone sounded and was followed by
the mournful wail of a banjo playing a tune that Torchy recognized
at once. She grabbed Giorgio, saying, "Come on, you fuck-up, I need
you to occupy a body." Giorgio's uncle, who was also the maternal
uncle of Giorgio's wife, slipped past where Torchy had been
standing and saw his beloved violin lying on the table. He didn't
even need to tune it since Faron had been playing it the night
before, and now he joined in with the banjo, which seemed louder
than it could have possibly been over the telephone.

Everyone ignored him except Faron,
Ellie and Giorgio's wife. There was a sort of an instrumental
bridge, and then Faron began remembering the next part and sang
it.

* * *

"You're a miller now, Giorgio. It's
your chance to go straight. Whatever you do, don't let that body
fall into the wrong hands. You must strip it so it can't be
identified. Got it?"

The miller of Binnorie nodded and went
to draw his dam while Torchy Burns vanished once more to intercept
the boyish-looking man who was the district harper.

* * *

In Buccleuch stronghold, Harper
Hawthorne sang the same verse Faron Randolph sang at the Carr
estate in Galashiels, both of them singing for audiences of rogues
and thieves:

"The miller hasted and drew his
dam,

Binnorie, O Binnorie

And there he found a drowned
woman,

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie.

"You could not see her yellow
hair,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

For gold and pearls that were sae
rare,

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie.

"You could na see her middle
sma'

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

Her golden girdle was sae
bra'

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie."

As Juli's harper host rounded the
hill, he saw a red-haired dandy, very fine, leering at him.
Julianne would recognize that leer anywhere. Her host hesitated. He
was a well-known harper, but was little more than a boy and a
smallish one at that. His voice had not yet changed, but was still
a sweet countertenor, and his hands, more delicate than Juli's had
ever been save for the hard calluses on the fingertips, were deft
at the making of instruments.

The dandy, who was none other than
Torchy Burns in another guise, said, "And where are you
going?"

The boy harper, on his way to sing at
a school for gentlemen's sons, replied, "I'm going to the
school."

"Wait,"
Julianne said to him.
"This sounds familiar. Remember all the riddles in the King
Arthur stories? This
is
the devil and he's trying to trick us. Be careful
of your answers."

"I wish you were on yon tree!"
proclaimed Torchy, thinking that the Juli harper would have to go
there because she, Torchy, declared it.

Juli, who had picked plenty of apples
in her time, supplied the harper with the answer, "With a ladder
under me!"

"And the ladder for to break," the
Torchy/man said between clenched teeth.

"And you for to fa' down," the boy
harper replied, getting into the spirit of the thing with a typical
bit of preadolescent "Oh, yeah" comeback.

"I wish you were in yonder sea," the
red-haired man rejoined.

"With a good boat under me," Juli, the
voice of the harper's memory and all of the riddle songs he knew,
replied. Fortunately, Juli had lived through plenty of riddle songs
already, and Torchy had nothing on the Lady Ragnell and her brother
whom Julianne had encountered with Sir Gawain.

"And the bottom for to break," Torchy
said, which Juli thought was pretty weak.

"And ye to be drowned," said the boy
harper. The fuming dandy vanished in a spurt of flame and Juli's
young host ran down the road past the singed spot in the
dirt.

CHAPTER 26

In the time of Bold Buccleuch, the
renegade harper sang along with the banjo that Gussie and Sir
Walter's ghost carried in the basket bag. In Gussie's own time,
Faron sang the next verse along with the Gypsy's violin and the
banjo, which Sam Hawthorne had patched through from the Other World
on the cellular phone. And in a time somehow the same as theirs
while at once being a long time before, the boy harper hosting Juli
lived out the same song with the sad, bedraggled corpse of a poor
young girl crying for revenge upon a cruel sister.

"A famous harper passing
by,

Binnorie, O Binnorie

The sweet pale face he chanced to
spy

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie."

Giorgio, as the miller, had stripped
the body of its fine jewelry and clothing before shoving it back
into the mill-stream. Then he took Isabelle's rings to sell for
drink to comfort him for his sorry lot in life to be abused by
first his wife and then by Torchy Burns.

The Fair Isabelle washed
up, considerably the worse for wear, some days later at the feet of
the boy harper. The fishes and rocks had worked upon the body until
it was unidentifiable but the boy, whose sensitive heart broke with
pity, was also moved by a preadolescent attraction for the
gruesome, plus, unbeknownst to him, an
inbred instinct for the magical he had from being a seventh
son. So he fished the battered body out and made of the
once-beautiful flesh another beautiful thing.

Some people claim that it wasn't the
body itself that was made into a harp, but that the body decayed
and fertilized a linden tree, and it was that tree that was used
for the harp, but when Gussie Turner looked close at the banjo
sitting there in her basket bag as Buccleuch's Irish harper sang
the next verses, she noticed some things about that banjo she had
never noticed before.

"He made a harp of her breast
bone,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

Whose sounds would melt a heart of
stone

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie.

"The strings he framed of her yellow
hair,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

Whose notes made sad the listening
ear

By the bonnie milldams of
Binnorie.

"And what did he do with her fingers
so sma'?

Binnorie, O Binnorie

He made them pegs to tune his
vial

By the bonny milldams of
Binnorie."

Gussie had been traveling with that
banjo all over the United States of America, across the Atlantic
Ocean, and across England and Scotland, and never before had she
seen that what she had taken for plastic in the tuning pegs did
indeed seem to be bone, now that she looked at it, and so did the
inlay on the neck. The strings had a funny appearance too. They
weren't gut and they weren't metal and they always stayed in tune.
They looked like brass and since she didn't play, she'd never
really paid any attention but at one time, maybe, they could have
been tight-wound and woven hair, transformed, she supposed, by all
the magic that was going around. She didn't even want to think
about the hide stretched across as the banjo head but now she had
some idea of what had happened to that magic harp from long ago.
She thought that would explain why this banjo, made by that
Appalachian witchman luthier from, perhaps, an older instrument,
had served Sam Hawthorne so well over the years against so many
enemies. The song continued:

"He laid the harp upon a
stone

And straight it began to play
alone

O yonder sits my father, the
king

And yonder sits my mother, the
queen

And yonder stands my brother
Hugh

And by him my sweet William,
true.

But the last tune that the harp play'd
then

Was—'Woe to my sister, false
Jane!'"

* * *

The storyteller's words
pierced through the fog and everybody listening felt lost and
lonesome, up there in the mountains stranded by that broken-down
bus. A little patch of fog floated away on a breeze and the
storyteller saw, off to one side of her, on a rocky outcropping,
three elk grazing under the trees.

Then there was a rumble
and a shriek and in a few more minutes, a train rushed past them,
rattling and roling and streaking on by, car after car with ghosty
people staring out the lounge windows into the dark, and in the
passenger cars nothing showing but just the blank lids of lowered
shades over the windows.

When the train had passed,
the storyteller took a deep breath and said, "It was Willie MacKai,
of course, who came back into that harp after it was made into a
living thing again from that poor girl's dead flesh. He was the one
who told on that mean sister. And Brose Fairchild turned her ring
widdershins three times on her finger and then he left her to her
hanging, but this time he left, not out into some haze, but through
that harp too. So did Julianne Martin, abandoning that boy harper
as she realized that her role had ended with him. Likewise Anna Mae
left Sir William just before he killed himself in remorse
for
his fickleness bringing on the death
of his true love and the
craziness of her
poor jealous sister. Those four souls left
through the harp music and stayed with it until it took them
where they were next to go. Now, at that point, they felt real
close to being themselves again, and within the Wizard's own spell,
they would have been free, but Torchy
Burns had sentenced them to serving seven years under
her
and they were stuck in her spell
without some stronger magic to free them.