CHAPTER 22

 

The Snail broke down a few miles into Glacier Lake National Park, around midnight.

"No big deal," the driver said. "Just a little overheated, I think. Thermostat blew and the fan belt gave out and I thought maybe one of you guys could hike with me down the road to the waterfall to get some water for the radiator. I sent a relay message to headquarters on the CB and the owner's mom should be driving down from Eugene in her station wagon to bring a new fan belt and thermostat. Oh, yeah, and a jack. I forgot ours this time. So maybe you guys will want to set out signal flares. I don't think you can build campfires around here but you've all got your sleeping bags so you should be okay. You can stay on the bus till Mrs. Tortuga arrives but then you gotta pile out so we can work on this heap. Oh, yeah, one more thing. Anybody got a flashlight?

The storyteller produced one from an extremely battered Mexican basket bag. She hoped when she got to the border she'd be able to replace the bag.

"Thanks, that's great. Anybody got some cookies? We had emergency rations stowed under my seat but I got the munchies."

Mrs. Tortuga arrived two hours later. In the meantime, there were no lights for fear of running down the battery. The only lights to be seen were the stars and moon, high above the fog that boiled over from the river basins and streambeds between the mountains. The passengers who had been reading had to stop reading and the passengers who had been playing cards could hardly do it by Braille.

"Now you see here, this is just what I mean," the storyteller said to the group around her. She said it in a kind of declaiming voice, though, so that everybody could hear. "In times past, when something like this happened, people would all sing and everybody would know the songs. Anybody here know any songs?"

Only the peepers and a few night birds answered her. All of the people shook their heads in the darkness, which produced a lot of rustling but nothing in the way of sociability.

"In olden times, people thought songs would ward off evil, but of course, we don't believe in that kinda stuff now, do we?" the storyteller asked.

"I, uh—I know the tune to Duck Soul's new hit,” somebody said from a dim corner of the bus. "Only I can't quite understand the words. But the tune goes like bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop-bop BA!"

"Jimmy, honey," a deep female voice drawled, "from what I can make out, the words are about a mass murderer hacking a town to death at night while they sleep—nice beat but if you did try to sing it I'd freak out. Besides, you can't carry a tune either." To the storyteller she said, "So, what's all this stuff you're telling those people? I keep catching something about time travelers and fairies and shit but is it all made up or is there some stuff happening in, like, you know, the real world?"

"Well, yes, yes, there was. After the Queen of Fairies, who was also the Debauchery Devil, Torchy Burns, turned herself into an orange kitty cat to spy on the Randolphs and Gussie, who was possessed by the ghost of Sir Walter Scott, in case you didn't catch that, that devil-woman realized she had made herself some serious miscalculations. Her boss, the Chairdevil, had plenty of reason to be peeved with her. Now, Torchy was not especially a worryin' kind of entity, but as the months rolled on, she saw that her soft heart (she liked to think of herself as the original prototype for the whore with a heart of gold) had led her astray again. She honestly had thought the singers were going to have a much tougher time getting from one song to the next.

"The reason she miscalculated, I reckon, is because of what your psychiatrists and psychologists and folks in the counseling-type professions call projection. Any of you here not been in therapy?"

"Can't afford it, lady. I do sweat lodges, but I never heard of projection except when you're at the movies.

"No, she means like projecting your voice,” someone else said.

"It's a little bit like that, I guess. But what it really means is that you think whatever you would do is what somebody else would do—you sort of lay your own way of behaving on them. Like with some people, if they got a rovin' eye and are playin' around on their lover, they get powerfully jealous over nothin' because they figure if they're playin' around, then naturally their lover is doing the same thing, and they spend all their time tryin' to catch 'em at it"

"Oh, yeah. I heard about that."

"Anyway, when Torchy Burns changed the spell around to suit herself and gave the musicians the out with the ring, she figured they'd never think to use it. Her idea of what would happen was that they would do like her and when they found themselves in somebody else's body, they'd be rude guests and just push that other person entirely out of the way. But she also guessed that doing that wouldn't be a good thing because while they were in that other person's body during the other person's lifetime, the visiting spirits would get completely lost and forget all about why they were there. They'd be out of place in the old times too, since they wouldn't know what ballad they were in or be the same sex or anything, and would act so crazy the other people in the ballad might even think they were bewitched or something. She figured they'd never even get to use the ring. But of course, it didn't work out like that. Bein' a devil, she probably never had to say, 'I'm of two minds about this situation,' and wouldn't realize that sometimes people really are. Any one person has room to be lots of different things and has lots of different people within them, though most of us don't get to try more than a tiny part of who we can be.

"The musicians, who were real used to being guests in other people's houses, blended right in and fitted their spits to the needs of their host spirits without even knowing how they did it. They took their cues from their hosts and fitted themselves to the character and the situation so well that the hosts in most of the ballads never even realized there was somebody there who wasn't originally part of them.

"Of course, in the case of Brose Fairchild, it was a little different, since his hostess was what we would call psychic and what people back then called a witch."

 

* * *

 

Torchy Burns's little joke with the ballad ashes provided the biggest shock of all for Brose Fairchild. "Hey, man," he thought when he arrived in his appointed body. "I'm not only a chick, I'm white."

"Not white enough," answered the grim womanly voice that shared his current vocal cords.

"Hey, babe, this is a whole lot whiter than my usual," Brose answered.

The other parts of the woman's mind probed at the part that was Brose and she asked, "Be you an elf or a demon sent to succor me?"

"Not exactly. I be Brose Fairchild from Austin, Texas, and since I seem to be inside o'you I don't think I could succor you if I wanted to without it bein' pretty awkward, but if somethin's buggin' you, you could talk to me. Lots of kids talk to me. You knocked up?"

"Knocked up?"

"In a family way? Preggers? Havin' mah bay-bee?" It was a logical guess, being the main kind of peculiarly female trouble with which he was acquainted. In these olden days, as he could guess was where he found himself judging from the dump she lived in, folks didn't have stuff like the pill or even Trojans.

"No, praise be to my granddam who taught me herb lore for such ailments. But I am forsaken. You were not here, I suppose, a moment ago, when this came?"

She picked up a letter from off of her bed. Brose saw that the little sack of brush she used for a pillow was all wet. Her eyes felt scratchy dry now, however.

"Dearest Barbara," the letter said, "I'm not good enough for you. I am in awe of the wisdom of you dark woods folk and we had wonderful, wild times together. Your house and lands are tempting too, but I find that I cannot sleep for thinking of Ellen, who is fair, like me, and therefore a much more suitable match, you see? She'd fit in with the family portraits so much better. I know this is a caddish thing to do after all we've shared (heh heh) but I just thought I'd let you know. Please don't wax wrothy or do anything rash. Love, Your Own (Formerly) Sweet William."

"Asshole," Brose said. "Reminds me of some pickers I used to know. Hell," he said after thinking it over a little more, "Reminds me of me."

"So you see, demon, you've caught me at a bad moment. It seems I will be going through my days with no true love, and I rather thought every maiden was entitled to one."

"Your name's Barbara?"

"Aye."

"Look, Babs, I got a hot tip for you. Guys like that are a dime a dozen. You seem like a pretty classy lady. This house yours?"

"It is mine, from my mother's mother."

"And you got a little piece of land too?"

"I do."

"Then the hell with him."

"Oh, demon, would you do that for me, really?"

"Nah, I mean, forget him. Get along without him. Sounds like a jerk anyway."

"But how can I?"

"Lots of ladies where I'm from do just fine on their own. What'd you just tell me? You got property. Look in your mirror."

She bent over a tub of clear water she'd drawn for drinking purposes. "Hey, you are one fine-lookin' woman. Black eyes, nice tan, good body, and a way about you. Girl, what are you moanin 'for over one measly little pale-faced no-account no-class ball-less wonder who hasn't even got the nerve to come tell you in person when he wants to drop you? Baby, you are just too much woman for a man like that anyway."

"You're right," she said, staring not so much at her reflection as into it for a few moments while her thoughts spun. "How can he reject me so? Why does he not love me enough to keep his promise? Am I too brisk? Why does it matter that I am brown? Once he thought me fair enough for him." Then she sat down and picked up the letter again, staring at it hard so that Brose felt tears trickling in the edge of her eyes. "What shall I write?" she asked.

"How about 'fuck off and die,' " he suggested.

"How do you spell that?" she asked, and scrawled the message on the back. When she was done she rolled the letter and walked out into the field, where some of her neighbors were sharecropping her land. Brose, whose body was often overweight and stocky, was delighted at how gracefully she moved, like the deer that came to ruin his garden regularly every spring, but with a ferocity about her determination not to show her weakness that was more like a mountain lion's. A man looked up from his work, glowering into the sun a little, suspicious even as he tugged his forelock to her. His woman ignored her and kept chopping weeds while other children peeked and giggled and whispered to each other. To the youngest child, a boy of about seven, Barbara said, "Take this to William Graham in the toun." She handed him a coin to seal the deal. The child took off at a run.

All that afternoon Barbara worked in her own garden, planting, hoeing, weeding, gathering the herbs and flowers for hanging to dry from her rafters. Just before dark the boy returned with the letter still in his hand. He pretended to have run all the way but Brose noted the sack tied to his waist, the purchase he'd made with Barbara's coin, no doubt.

"The gentleman says you're to come to him, miss. He's taken terrible sick and says you're a' can cure him. He says you'll know what he means."

Barbara smiled. "Does he noo?"

Brose said, "See there, Babs baby. The dude can't live without you."

"You don't understand, demon. He wants me to come and give back his faith."

"His what? I'd think if anybody's lost faith in anybody else it'd be you losing it in him."

"We plighted our troth," she told him wearily. "He begged me for months. I knew somehow all along that it would not work, you know. Not, as he says, because he is fair and I am brown, but because my living is earned not just from things of the soil but from things of the spirit, because I read and spin and keep myself to myself but say what I think when I am amang others and he cares only for hunting and hawking and being with his fellows and says that I am rude to speak out so, though he also says he admires it in me. I think he is not yet weaned, sometimes. I think that he wishes me to mother him but also that he wishes to unsettle me as a rebellious child unsettles its mother. He could not stand it that I could pass his letter of un-love off so lightly and now he seeks to make me face him."

"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 touching 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.

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.