Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (12 page)

"I'd like to hear about that," Barry said.
"Even with the size of our overseas phone bill, I don't feel like
we got the whole story."

"I know good and well we didn't," Molly
said. "Come on, you guys. Give."

Ellie began, "Well, at first we had a
little trouble making connections since we ended up going on the
road with the Gypsy circus. But Rosa—she was the new Phurai Dai
after her husband disappeared—she and her uncle knew a lot of
really neat Gypsy songs. Her uncle tried to give Faron his violin,
but, Mama, you wouldn't believe how
beautifully
that man could play. He even played
a Gypsy lament for that horrible Giorgio. He told us that at one
point Giorgio tried to break his hands—a wonderful talent like
that, and Rosa's
uncle
to
boot, and Giorgio was going to maim him. But this song he played
was
so
—so—" She sniffled, and
her father handed her a Kleenex.

Faron also reached for a Kleenex and blew
his nose heartily. He wiped his eyes and continued. "It was really
something," he told them. "It makes both of us cry just thinking
about it."

Brose's face spasmed with pain, and he
walked hurriedly out the front door mumbling, "Gonna walk."

"Giorgio was in a Nazi prison camp when he
was just a kid," Dan put in. "It sort of snapped him, and he was
breaking all kinds of Gypsy law and putting his people at risk,
mistreating Rosa and the old man and the kids when they tried to
interfere. But the old man had been in the camps too before he
managed to escape, and he knew what it was like. The song was his
own composition."

"Besides"—Terry made a face—"the poor guy
fell under the influence of that damned redhead. She had him
peddling drugs."

"Anyway, he tried to give me his violin,"
Faron said, "because he'd given it to me once before when he
thought Giorgio was going to break it. I told him to leave it to me
in his will."

"There's somethin' I got to tell you kids
when you're done," Molly said, worry darkening the bright
expression that had livened her Indian-dark features since her
daughter arrived. "Somethin' important. About that bill. Remind me,
Barry."

"Okay," her husband said. "But now then,
y'all were traveling with the Gypsies. Then what?"

"Well, they took us to all these little
islands, and guess what? They had great libraries the devils'
minions hadn't even thought of touching. I stayed on Iona while the
others toured the Orkneys."

"Ellie was in hog heaven," Faron said.

"So were we," Willie said, pausing in
mid-pace. "In little old places like that where there ain't much to
do, it's a lot like the town I grew up in—people make music all the
time. Hell, we was playin' one party after another with some of the
best damn musicians you ever saw in your life. Lots of them
couldn't sing worth shit, but then, a lot of 'em could, and they
could all play rings around any of us on any instrument they took a
mind to play."

"We stayed there the first year," Terry
said. "And another in the Shetlands and the Hebrides. The music was
wonderful, but I thought I was going to mildew."

"Well, then Ellie got a card for us
forwarded from Hy MacDonald sayin' he was back from the oil fields
and did we still need help. So we wrote back that we'd admire to do
that very much and asked him to meet our ferry the next month."

"He introduced us to some great people who
knew people in Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland. We spent a year in
Cornwall and another in Wales. One of the people we met knew
someone whose granddad had been a private collector of broadside
ballads, so we combed London and the surrounding area for music
while Ellie researched those for a year. She knows the words
to—what—five or six hundred of them?"

"And I learned Gaelic," Ellie said. "A
little anyway."

"Enough to make fun of us when we try to
sing in it," Faron said.

"Anyhow, after that we got a ride with this
chantey singer who was skipper of a fishing boat, and he took us
over to Ireland. God, I have never seen somebody's personality
change so drastically between land and sea!" Ellie said. "He was a
doll and so entertaining you couldn't believe it when we met him at
the party, but once we were away from shore, it was like Captain
Bligh time."

"Ah, Ireland," Willie sighed. "Picker's
paradise."

"Especially if the picker happens to lean
hard into country and western like you," Anna Mae said. "Have you
folks ever heard Irish country and western? It's like 'How I miss
the old homestead with Mama and Daddy sittin' by the fire smellin'
the peat smoke.' "

"The Irish are just very emotional," Dan
told her. "That's why they like that kind of music. Willie was a
huge hit, and we learned lots of great Irish stuff when we could
get them to stop egging Lazarus on to playing 'Foggy Mountain
Breakdown.' "

"How come you had to come through Mexico,
though?" Gussie asked. "I couldn't believe your message."

"The Canadian border is closed tighter'n a
drum, darlin'," Willie told her. "We heard that from Liam, our
skipper buddy. They were deporting all U.S. musicians from Canada,
and the U.S. was deporting all the Canadians too. Some new trade
agreement. Not wanting the arts to contaminate each other or
something dumb like that. Just when we were tryin' to decide what
to do, who shows up in port but Jim Hawkins."

"That chanteyman from the festival? The one
who got us out of the traffic jam from hell?"

"Live and in color," Willie said. "He was
sailing a yacht back to Mazatlan for some wealthy folk and decided
to take a little detour to drop us off."

"We learned some cool songs in Mexico too,"
Dan said. "But we were ready to come home. The buses were crowded
and hot and smelled bad, but the people were pretty great, and it
wasn't too hard to get a place to stay and some food as long as we
had Lazarus."

"We caught a ride to the border," Willie
said, "and were about to cross when all that business with the
snakes and the ghost and the flood and stuff happened—"

"Whoa, whoa, wait up a minute," Gussie said.
"Go over that part a little slower." He did.

"I think that's more than I
wanted
to know," Molly said,
shuddering. "Those snakes sound
awful
."

"Well, I'd still like to hear more details,"
Barry said. "But I guess they'll come out when you've been home a
little longer."

Ellie threw her arms around her father's
neck. "You don't know how good it is to talk to you again. I just
missed y'all so much. It's just so good to hear people talk—well,
normal."

Terry's boyfriend Dan grinned at her.
"But you don't talk normal—
I
talk normal. You guys have an Okie twang."

Molly Curtis stuck out her tongue at
him, but Ellie said, "No, it was so funny. But here we were,
jamming with all of these people, with these
beautiful
singing voices who talked in these
gorgeous Irish brogues and Scottish burrs and all these fascinating
English dialects and accents and stuff, and I was just so lonesome
to hear people who sounded like home."

"You used to
hate
how people talked here," Molly reminded
her. "You tried to talk like the people on TV so you wouldn't sound
so pig-ignorant, you said."

Ellie twiddled an end of her hair and
grinned. "Well, yeah. Maybe I just thought we sounded pig-ignorant
because
I
was if I said a
thing like that."

"You should have seen her," Faron put in.
"She'd go up to anybody who sounded like they were from west of the
Mississippi or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. She's got a whole
address book full of phone numbers she's supposed to call to let
people know she got home all right. And I kept having to pull her
away from homesick soldiers who got the wrong idea."

Ellie hit him with one of her stuffed
animals, which her parents had arranged on the sofa to greet her.
"Yeah, but we learned some great filk songs from some of those
guys, and the marching chants were funny. What did they call them?
Judy calls? Mom, Dad, if a Major Chuck Hamilton phones, you'll let
him know where we are, won't you? He's been stationed overseas ever
since this started, so he still knows lots of folk songs. He was
supposed to be coming back to Fort Sill. He put us on to some
really good informants. Not everybody I met was as nice as he was,
but I still met some great people, including some older folks. When
they heard that Faron and I were going to do music someplace,
sometimes they'd come along. We met three people who'd learned
Appalachian versions and Ozark versions of the British ballads from
their folks and had completely forgotten about them until they came
to the jam session."

"Seems to me like that might be a place to
start looking people up if you want to reintroduce the music,"
Barry Curtis told her. "Because I'll tell you for sure, honey,
there aren't any more radio shows or folk festivals or even bars or
restaurants where you could get your foot in the door anymore."

Ellie nodded. "Maybe not, but some of the
people I've met are pretty rich too, and maybe they could help
us."

Gussie, who'd been listening drowsily,
looked up. "Speaking of rich."

Willie, pacing from one room to the other
and back again, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts, said,
"Tell 'em about comin' into all that money, Gus."

"I surely will. You want some by the way?"
She dived into the basket bag and pulled out a wad of bills. "Its
our seed money to get us rollin' here. We need at least one other
vehicle, for starters."

"Oh?"

"Well, I assumed we'd split up and I'd keep
doin' what I'm doin' to get people worked up about hearing the rest
of you. Except that I'd just as soon I wasn't entirely by myself
after what happened outside of Marfa."

"Uhhuh," Barry said. "Which ghost saved you
that time?"

"Actually, it was a bunch of lights—them and
Buddy Lamprey—"

"The Texas Ranger who was going to arrest me
last time you saw him," Willie explained. To Gussie he said, "Well,
to tell the truth, darlin', we're home now. We got the songs, and I
think Ellie's experience with the people she met while we were over
in Britain show that once we help people remember these old
ballads, the rest will start coming back to them. I think you could
probably just go on back home and spend time with Lettie and Mic if
you want to. Relax and let the rest of us take over."

"But you'll need to know where I've been,
who I've talked to, what I've found out, won't you?" she asked in a
surprisingly small voice.

"Of course, we will," Julianne told her.
"It's just that since you're not actually a musician, there's no
need for you to keep sticking your neck out anymore."

"I see."

"She doesn't," Anna Mae said. "And I don't
either. Only eight of us are musicians, counting Hawkins, who's
still at sea, of all the people involved in this. We have every
bureaucracy and power structure in the country pitted against us,
plus the supernatural stuff. We're going to be on the road a lot
and singing a lot and hiding a lot. We need someone who can make
calls and write letters and talk to people and—"

"And organize," Molly Curtis said. "I hate
to break the news to you guys, but they're tryin' to pass a bill in
Congress that you have to license musical instruments. Especially
banjos."

"What? How can they do that?"

"Some guy beat his wife to death with two
banjos. The gun lobbies got together, no doubt inspired by
you-know-who with the little horns and pointy tails, and started
petitioning the congressmen to pass laws against instruments that
could be used for murder, in an effort to pressure them into
repealing gun laws. Instead, Congress seems to be takin' it all
seriously."

"That's
terrible
," Anna Mae said. "We need
to—"

"Organize," Molly said. "That's what I mean.
So, if y'all are going to run off on Gussie, leave her here to work
with us, will you?"

The banjo, resting against the arm of the
sofa, began tinkling a tune.

"That's familiar," Willie said. "What is
that?"

Gussie smiled smugly. "Lazarus is on my
side. Even I know that one. My mama told it to me as a rhyme, and
later in school we learned it as a round."

"Sure," Molly said. "I know it too." She
sang in a light, warbly voice, but entirely on pitch.

"Make new friends but keep the old;

One is silver and the other gold."

Willie lifted a brow at the banjo and gave
it an ironic half salute. "Okay. So Gussie comes with us. But
where? Where do any of us go and what do we do now? I still think
the fastest way to get the songs spread out is to travel
separately."

"Fine," Anna Mae said. "But who takes
Lazarus? The banjo was our protection before, and if one of us
takes it, that leaves the others vulnerable to attack."

"Not if you're careful," Willie said. Part
of him had been aching for some time to be back on his own again,
to have some time to himself, to choose whom he would be with, to
not have to account to anybody else.

"How careful do you have to be?"
Gussie asked. "Just to let folks know you were comin', just to tell
this story, I've been prowlin' school yards and kids' parties like
some kind of pervert, riskin' jobs to talk to customers in bars and
at conventions where I work, and I certainly have not been getting
paid or invited special to tell my stories—and still that redheaded
devil has tracked me down. And I wasn't even performing music. So
I'd say offhand you have to be
real
careful."