The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “You didn’t hurt her.”

  I don’t say anything. I’ve heard all the arguments before. From Angel. From Wendy and Sophie. From Geordie. They’re very logical, and it all makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t change what I did. Nothing can. Nothing ever will.

  Interview

  Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for The Crowsea Arts Review, at her Yoors Street studio, on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.

  Any regrets? Anything you’d do over again, given the opportunity?

  Not really. We are who we are because of our life experiences and I’m comfortable with who I am. I wish I’d never hurt anyone, but I never did so deliberately—which isn’t an excuse, really, because we’re responsible for all our actions, even the thoughtless ones—but at least it was never my intention to hurt anyone.

  Can you give me an example?

  I started running away from home when I was ten years old because life there wasn’t just unbearable, but dangerous.

  So what is it you regret about that?

  I left my little sister behind. I was pretty messed up for years after running away. When I finally got my life back on track, I went back to make sure she was okay, but they’d moved, the house was empty, no forwarding address.

  Over the years I’ve tried to find out what happened to her, but I’ve never had any luck. [Long pause.] Or maybe I just never tried hard enough.

  Jilly

  There’s nothing worse than the things we leave undone. No matter how long ago it was we deserted those obligations, they find ways to return, again and again, nagging at us like intermittent toothaches, fermenting a bitter and depressing brew in the shadows of our minds that’s one part guilt, one part shame. They sour pleasures and sow a discontent inside us that seems so far removed from its true source, we end up finding other things to blame, creating new problems to stack upon the old. And so we end up with this midden in our heads, hot coals smoldering deep inside the refuse, invisible, but no less dangerous for that. At any moment they could burst into flame, the subsequent conflagration utterly consuming the safe little world we’ve been pretending to live in for all this time.

  And all our kindnesses would come undone …

  ON THE ROAD NORTH OF NEWFORD, JUNE 1973

  We’ve no money to speak of and we’ve borrowed this ratty old car of Christy’s that doesn’t look like it’ll take us out of Crowsea, little say the city, but here we are anyway, Geordie and me, setting out for Tyson like newlyweds on their honeymoon, except we’re not even a couple and what’s waiting for us at the end of the trip is anything but fun.

  We’re still learning about each other as we head off on our road trip. We only met a few months ago, two part-timers hired at the post office to help deal with the Christmas rush. That doesn’t happen now. Now the union’s too strong and they don’t bring in casual labor. Their members get the extra hours at time and a half, leaving the art students and street buskers like us to find other ways to augment their meager winter income.

  I’m not even sure how Angel got me the job. Even back then there must have been some kind of security check and here’s me, not even using my real name. Except Jilly Coppercorn is my real name now. I even have the documents to prove it and I have no idea where Angel got those either. I have a birth certificate and a social security number. I’m on the voter rolls.

  “Don’t ask,” Angel told me when she handed me the envelope full of documents.

  When I looked inside, I understood. And I didn’t.

  I guess that’s another reason she and Lou must have broken up. The true-blue cop he is would never have been able to stand by while she was providing new identities for kids like me. He wouldn’t understand how we couldn’t bear the idea of ever being tracked down by our old families again. His solution would be by the book. If someone hassled you, call the police. That’s what the police were for.

  Except all of that just adds to the old pain. Better to be invisible. Better to disappear completely from who you were and be reinvented as a stranger that nobody from your past has ever known. Technically, it’s breaking the law, yes. But ask any Children of the Secret, ask the abused wife in hiding, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: better to break the law like this than be hurt again. Who knows what’ll happen to you the next time? Who knows if you’ll even survive? Too many don’t.

  But anyway, there I am at the post office last November. It’s my first day and I stand in the doorway of the cafeteria with my bagged lunch in hand because there’s no way I can actually afford to buy a lunch. I look around at all these people—good, solid, hardworking people, most of them—and all my own attempts at fitting in and making a new life for myself just disappear.

  I feel like I’m this runaway junkie hooker again. That they’ll look at me and see through the lie of what I’m pretending to be, see right through it to the truth of who I really am. Angel warned me when I first got off the street: the hardest thing would be trying to feel normal again. For some of us, it never happens.

  I’ve been doing pretty good. Finished high school through an adult education program and I’m halfway through my first year at Butler U. as an arts major. I’m off the streets—living in a boardinghouse, it’s true, but I’m paying my own way now, not scrounging a living from the goodwill of others. Angel’s found me a sponsor to pay for my courses and books and art supplies. Everything else I pay for with waitressing, modeling for artists, and part-time jobs like this.

  I’m saving up to get myself one of those run-down lofts on Lee Street, or Yoors. It’ll be a studio and place to live, two in one. My own place. My own space. No more sharing bathrooms and kitchen facilities. No more coming downstairs in the morning to find that the small bag of groceries you managed to buy the day before has been used by somebody else. No more creeping in late at night, shoes in hand and holding your breath, hoping you don’t wake the other boarders, because then the landlady will be on your case. Instead, I’ll have a place where I can stretch and breathe, leave a work-in-progress on the easel, and if I don’t feel like doing my dishes for three days, I don’t have to. A place where I can play my music as loud as I want and actually have friends in for a visit or a party, anytime of the night or day.

  These are the things that hundreds of other students are thinking about, right now, right across the country. It’s normal. I can be normal, too.

  Except the past still comes rearing up inside me—unbidden and certainly unwanted. Usually at times like this, when I’m facing a room full of strangers. You should have seen me in my first class at the beginning of the year. If it hadn’t been for Sophie making friends with me while I was sitting on the floor in the hall outside the lecture hall, too scared to step through the door, I might never have gone in at all.

  And the weirdest thing is, it catches me off guard. It always catches me off guard. The fear that somebody in this room could’ve been one of my johns. One of the women might have dropped a quarter in my grubby hand when I was panhandling. They might have seen me huddled in a doorway, shaking with the need for a fix, or stumbling down the street, high on some cocktail mix of alcohol and pills.

  So I turn away and bump right into the only other person who looks as out of place here as I’m feeling. Geordie.

  Let me describe Geordie Riddell at the time: he’s all arms and legs, tall and gangly, with long, long brown hair and kind brown eyes and a big hurt inside him walled off from the world the same as I have, though that last thing I don’t know yet. Or maybe I do, maybe I recognize a kindred spirit beyond the outward scruffiness we share, only the recognition is still working on a cellular, unconscious level. He’s wearing raggedy bell-bottom blue jeans, a collarless, plain cotton Indian shirt with a tweed vest overtop, and desert boots that have salt rings from the slush outside.

  Of course I’m no fashion plate myself. I’ve always been somewhat of a rake, albeit a small one, and baggy is my usual style choice. Today it’s cotton trousers
with ties at the ankles and tights underneath for the warmth. A long-sleeved jersey and a shapeless sweater that hangs down almost to my knees. Black cotton Chinese slippers, though I did wear boots for the walk to work, which are now stored in my locker along with a dark brown duffel coat.

  We’re like bag people in training. All we need is the shopping carts.

  I’ve got my own reasons for wanting to look shapeless. As for Geordie, well, this was the early seventies, after all, so he was pretty much in style for the time. The sixties, really. When most people talk about the sixties, they really mean from about 1966 through to 1974. The early sixties had the Beats, but otherwise it was all ducktails and bobby-soxers.

  But the one thing is, no matter how raggedy we look, our clothes are clean and so are we. After all those years of living on the street with grimy skin and crusty clothes, I’ve promised myself that I’ll never have to live like that again. When I can’t afford to go to the laundromat now, I wash my stuff in the bathtub at the boardinghouse and hang it up to dry on the backs of chairs and the like. Mind you, I can’t seem to keep paint off my hands, or out of my hair for that matter, but at least it’s clean paint.

  Anyway, I bump into him and we do that fumble people do when they’re both off balance, but being polite and not trying to grab at each other. Neither of us manages to fall, though I do drop my sandwich in its brown bag. Ever the gallant, Geordie picks it up and offers it to me.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I find myself considering his features. Now that I’m studying art and have started drawing and painting for real, I see everything in how it will translate into art. How the light falls, how lines and shading can define character. Geordie’s features are strong rather than handsome, but I like that better than a pretty choirboy look. There’s a shyness in his face, as well. When I meet his brother Christy later, I see it’s a family trait, or at least one that the two of them share, though with Christy it comes off more as this distance he puts between himself and everything else.

  With Geordie the shyness is coupled with this feeling of kindness and a good heart that draws people to him. I’m sure it’s why he does so well when he’s busking. People hear it in his music, stop to listen, see it in his eyes. He rarely comes away with an empty fiddlecase.

  But I don’t know any of that right now. All I know is that he seems safe. That the kindness I sense draws me to him. I find myself asking his name and after work we go for a coffee together.

  We end up becoming pretty much inseparable, certainly during lunch breaks, but away from work as well. He becomes an honorary member of the close sisterhood I share with Sophie and Wendy—“our boy mascot,” as Wendy put it once when he wasn’t around.

  I suppose people think we’re a couple, but it isn’t really like that. We never kiss, or even hold hands. We just hang together, and talk forever, about every and any thing. I realize now that he was simply too shy to make a romantic move—those Riddell boys are seriously bad at initiating an intimate relationship, or at least they were back then. But that suits me well because I don’t want a boyfriend, though I do like having a friend that’s a boy.

  It’s a novelty for me. Being with a guy I actually like, I mean. And being relaxed in his company because there’s no pressure, no worry about things going any further, or getting complicated, or anything really. Until that day we borrow Christy’s old clunker of a Chevrolet and start our trip to Tyson.

  Geordie knows about my past, just as I know about his—in a general way, not all of the exact specifics. We didn’t go through exactly the same thing by any means, but his wasn’t even remotely a happy childhood either. The only thing he took away from his family was his father’s old Czech fiddle and this awkward relationship with Christy that they were both determined to maintain.

  The fiddle had been their grandfather’s and once their father knew Geordie was interested in it, he’d locked it up in his tool chest, down in the basement of their house, just for meanness’ sake. Geordie learned to play on a sixty-five-dollar fiddle he bought with money he’d earned doing chores for their neighbors. The day he left home for good, he broke into the tool chest and took his grandfather’s fiddle with him. He was fifteen at the time and lived on the street for a lot of years before we met. He has an apartment up on Lees now, but he still spends more time on the street, busking, than he does at a regular job.

  As for his relationship with his brother Christy, that’s a kind of complication I don’t understand. They like each other, anyone can tell, but they are forever pushing each other’s buttons. The thing that drives Geordie craziest is how his brother has escaped into fairy tales, the way Geordie has into music. Christy collects the strange and odd things he hears on the street and weaves them into stories that are sometimes simply anecdotal, sometimes containing braids of traditional folklore and fairy tales as well. He isn’t really selling them these days, but they appear from time to time in the Crowsea community newspaper and he’s always happy to let you read the ones that haven’t yet been published.

  Naturally I’m delighted with these stories of his and I like him, too. That quirky way he has of looking at the world coincides perfectly with my own little worldview. But as I said, it drives Geordie crazy. Not the fact that Christy writes these stories, but that he believes in them. Utterly and completely.

  I do, too, of course, though back then it’s more wishful thinking on my part. It’s another six years before I find the stone drum down in Old Town and find out for sure that magic is real. But I like to tease Geordie about magic and ghosts and faeries living in those places you can only see out of the corner of your eye. For some reason, he takes it better from me than he does his brother. Maybe it’s because I don’t push other buttons as well.

  But that’s where we are when he comes by the boardinghouse to pick me up, that old Chev coughing a blue cloud of exhaust as we pull away from the curb. It’s a half day’s drive to Tyson by the highway, but we have to go by the back roads since the Chev won’t go over forty and with a missing headlight and no rear bumper, we’d just be asking to get stopped by the police if we took a busier road. That’s saying we make it out of the city without getting stopped.

  But we do.

  Soon we’re putt-putting along back roads, raising a cloud of dust, side panels flapping, feeling every bump on the road, our teeth chattering when we come to one of those washboard sections. After two hours of these country roads, we top a rise and the engine splutters, coughs, and then it just dies. The silence is almost a relief. Geordie gets out and pops the hood and then we both stare down at the greasy engine with its fine coating of dust.

  “Do you know anything about cars?” I ask.

  Geordie shakes his head. “No. Do you?”

  “I can’t even drive.”

  When we asked to borrow the car, Christy warned us that it might not even make it. “If it dies on you,” he told us, “just take the plates off and leave it where it is.”

  That seems too strange. And besides, we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I can’t remember how far back the last farm we passed is and all that’s ahead of us are the Kickaha Mountains, which, in this part of the country, are mostly wild and all reservation land, except for Tyson and the farms around it, though that’s still a-ways off and to the east. The road we’re on points straight north.

  Geordie tries jiggling wires, cleaning the battery posts, wiping out the distributor cap, but nothing helps.

  “I guess we walk,” he says.

  I grin at him. “Good thing we packed light.”

  We’d planned to stay overnight in Tyson at the very least, so we each have a little backpack with a change of clothes and some toiletries. Mine also has a sketchbook and some pencils and paints stuffed into it. Geordie has his fiddle with him. We have no food except for a bag of chips and some candy bars. Nothing to drink except for half a bottle of apple juice.

  Borrowing my penknife, Geordie works loose the screws that hold the license plates and takes
them off. The plates go into his pack and that’s it. We’re ready to go. We take a last look inside the car and in the trunk. There’s a ratty old blanket in the back that I roll up and put under my arm. Geordie pats the hood of the car and then we set off, walking down the road.

  “This is kind of nice,” I say. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  And it is. Blue skies, the June sun shining. Everything’s in that in-between spring and deep summer stage—lots of fresh green pushing up through the old dead grass and weeds, whole squadrons of dandelions and other wildflowers adding splashes of color. Compared to the city, the air tastes like it’s supercharged with oxygen and everything smells as fresh as a sweet Sunday morning, to quote a line from a song in the repertoire of one of Geordie’s pickup bands. The temperature’s balmy and there aren’t even any bugs. It’s still too early for deer flies and happily just past the black fly season, though if we’re still out walking this evening, we’ll certainly have mosquitoes to contend with.

  Turns out mosquitoes are the least of our worries.

  By the time the poor old abandoned Chev is two hills behind us and well out of sight, our brisk walk has slowed to an amble and threatens to simply come to a halt. It just feels like too nice a day to do anything more than laze about. All I want to do is lie on my back in one of the fields on either side of the road and stare up at the blue. Sketch, maybe, while Geordie plays a few tunes. I could sketch Geordie playing a tune.

  I suggest we do just that as we reach the crest of yet another hill. Geordie shrugs. I guess he figures it’s my road trip, so I can decide the agenda. He’s just along for the ride. While we had a ride, that is.

  I look ahead. The road drops into a valley below us before it starts to climb up the next hill once more. The forest is closer to the road here. The fields are spotted with scrub trees, outriders that will get swallowed by the forest as it marches a little closer to the road every year. I guess we’re finally running out of old pastureland and getting into the reservation proper. The Indians only got militant about farmers running cows on their land a few years ago, so you still see sights like this all along the southern ranges of the rez—pastures returning to scrubland, then going completely wild.