Jilly likes to think of them as mysterious, attributing all kinds of fairy-tale traits to them. Meran, she’s convinced, with the green highlights in her nut-brown hair and her wise brown eyes, is definitely dryad material—the spirit of an oak tree come to life—while Cerin is some sort of wizard figure, a combination of adept and bard. I think the idea amuses them, and they play it up to Jilly. Nothing you can put your finger on, but they seem to get a kick out of spinning a mysterious air about themselves whenever she’s around.
I’m far more practical than Jilly—actually, just about anybody’s more practical than Jilly, God bless her, but that’s another story. I think if you find yourself using the word magic to describe the Kelledys, what you’re really talking about is their musical talent. They may seem preter-naturally calm offstage, but as soon as they begin to play, that calmness is transformed into a bonfire of energy. There’s enchantment then, burning on stage, but it comes from their instrumental skill.
“Geordie,” Meran said after I’d paced back and forth for a few minutes. “You look a little edgy. Have some tea.”
I had to smile. If the Kelledys had originated from some mysterious elsewhere, then I’d lean more toward them having come from a fiddle tune than Jilly’s fairy tales.
“When sick is it tea you want?” I said, quoting the title of an old Irish jig that we all knew in common.
Meran returned my smile. “It can’t hurt. Here,” she added, rummaging around in a bag that was lying by her chair. “Let me see if I have something that’ll ease your nervousness.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“No, of course not,” Cerin put in. “Geordie just likes to pace, don’t you?”
He was smiling as he spoke, but without a hint of Christy’s sometimes annoying demeanor.
“No, really. It’s just…”
“Just what?” Meran asked as my voice trailed off.
Well, here was the perfect opportunity to put Jilly’s theories to the test, I decided. If the Kelledys were in fact as fey as she made them out to be, then they’d be able to explain this business with the bones, wouldn’t they?
So I told them about the fat woman and her bones and what I’d found in her squat. They listened with far more reasonableness than I would have if someone had been telling the story to me—especially when I went on to explain the weird feeling I’d been getting from the whole business.
“It’s giving me the creeps,” I said, finishing up, “and I can’t even say why.”
“La Huesera,” Cerin said when I was done.
Meran nodded. “The Bone Woman,” she said, translating it for me. “It does sound like her.”
“So you know her.”
“No,” Meran said. “It just reminds us of a story we heard when we were playing in Phoenix a few years ago. There was a young Apache man opening for us, and he and I started comparing flutes. We got on to one of the Native courting flutes which used to be made from human bone and somehow from there he started telling me about a legend they have in the Southwest about this old fat woman who wanders through the mountains and arroyos, collecting bones from the desert that she brings back to her cave.”
“What does she collect them for?”
“To preserve the things that are in danger of being lost to the world,” Cerin said.
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m not sure of the exact details,” Cerin went on, “but it had something to do with the spirits of endangered species.”
“Giving them a new life,” Meran said.
“Or a second chance.”
“But there’s no desert around here,” I said. “What would this Bone Woman be doing up here?”
Meran smiled. “I remember John saying that she’s as often been seen riding shotgun in an eighteen-wheeler as walking down a dry wash.”
“And besides,” Cerin added, “any place is a desert when there’s more going on underground than on the surface.”
That described Newford perfectly. And who lived a more hidden life than the street people? They were right in front of us every day, but most people didn’t even see them anymore. And who was more deserving of a second chance than someone like Ellie, who’d never even gotten a fair first chance?
The gig went well. I was a little bemused, but I didn’t make any major mistakes. Amy complained that her regulators had sounded too buzzy in the monitors, but that was just Amy. They’d sounded great to me, their counterpointing chords giving the tunes a real punch whenever they came in.
The Kelledys‘ set was pure magic. Amy and I watched them from the stage wings and felt higher as they took their final bow than we had when the applause had been directed at us.
I begged off getting together with them after the show, regretfully pleading tiredness. I was tired, but leaving the theater, I headed for an abandoned factory in the Tombs instead of home. When I got up on the roof of the building, the moon was full. It looked like a saucer of buttery gold, bathing everything in a warm yellow light. I heard a soft voice on the far side of the roof near the Bone Woman’s squat. It wasn’t exactly singing, but not chanting either. A murmuring, sliding sound that raised the hairs at the nape of my neck.
I walked a little nearer, staying in the shadows of the cornices, until I could see the Bone Woman. I paused then, laying my fiddlecase quietly on the roof and sliding down so that I was sitting with my back against the cornice.
The Bone Woman had one of her skeleton sculptures set out in front of her and she was singing over it. The dog shape was complete now, all the bones wired in place and gleaming in the moonlight. I couldn’t make out the words of her song. Either there were none, or she was using a language I’d never heard before. As I watched, she stood, raising her arms up above the wired skeleton, and her voice grew louder.
The scene was peaceful—soothing, in the same way that the Kelledys‘ company could be—but eerie as well. The Bone Woman’s voice had the cadence of one of the medicine chants I’d heard at a powwow up on the Kickaha Reservation—the same nasal tones and ringing quality. But that powwow hadn’t prepared me for what came next.
“Too many of us live desert lives,” Cerin said, and I knew just what he meant.
At first I wasn’t sure that I was really seeing it. The empty spaces between the skeleton’s bones seemed to gather volume and fill out, as though flesh were forming on the bones. Then there was fur, highlighted by the moonlight, and I couldn’t deny it any more. I saw a bewhiskered muzzle lift skyward, ears twitch, a tail curl up, thick-haired and strong. The powerful chest began to move rhythmically, at first in time to the Bone Woman’s song, then breathing of its own accord.
The Bone Woman hadn’t been making dogs in her squat, I realized as I watched the miraculous change occur. She’d been making wolves.
The newly animated creature’s eyes snapped open and it leapt up, running to the edge of the roof. There it stood with its forelegs on the cornice. Arching its neck, the wolf pointed its nose at the moon and howled.
I sat there, already stunned, but the transformation still wasn’t complete. As the wolf howled, it began to change again. Fur to human skin. Lupine shape, to that of a young woman. Howl to merry laughter. And as she turned, I recognized her features.
“Ellie,” I breathed.
She still had the same horsy features, the same skinny body, all bones and angles, but she was beautiful. She blazed with the fire of a spirit that had never been hurt, never been abused, never been degraded. She gave me a radiant smile and then leapt from the edge of the roof.
I held my breath, but she didn’t fall. She walked out across the city’s skyline, out across the urban desert of rooftops and chimneys, off and away, running now, laughter trailing behind her until she was swallowed by the horizon.
I stared out at the night sky long after she had disappeared, then slowly stood up and walked across the roof to where the Bone Woman was sitting outside the door of her squat. She tracked my approach, but there was neither welcome nor
dismissal in-those small dark eyes. It was like the first time I’d come up to her; as far as she was concerned, I wasn’t there at all.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
She looked through, past me.
“Can you teach me that song? I want to help, too.”
Still no response.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
Finally her gaze focused on me.
“You don’t have their need,” she said.
Her voice was thick with an accent I couldn’t place. I waited for her to go on, to explain what she meant, but once again, she ignored me. The pinpoints of black that passed for eyes in that round moon face looked away into a place where I didn’t belong.
Finally, I did the only thing left for me to do. I collected my fiddlecase and went on home.
Some things haven’t changed. Ellie’s still living on the streets, and I still share my lunch with her when I’m down in her part of town. There’s nothing the Bone Woman can do to change what this life has done to the Ellie Spinks of the world.
But what I saw that night gives me hope for the next turn of the wheel. I know now that no matter how downtrodden someone like Ellie might be, at least somewhere a piece of her is running free. Somewhere that wild and innocent part of her spirit is being preserved with those of the wolf and the rattlesnake and all the other creatures whose spirit-bones La Huesera collects from the desert—deserts natural and of our own making.
Spirit-bones. Collected and preserved, nurtured in the belly of the Bone Woman’s song, until we learn to welcome them upon their terms, rather than our own.
PAL O’ MINE
1
Gina always believed there was magic in the world. “But it doesn’t work the way it does in fairy tales,” she told me. “It doesn’t save us. We have to save ourselves.”
2
One of the things I keep coming back to when I think of Gina is walking down Yoors Street on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve during our last year of high school. We were out Christmas shopping. I’d been finished and had my presents all wrapped during the first week of December, but Gina had waited for the last minute, as usual, which was why we were out braving the storm that afternoon.
I was wrapped in as many layers of clothing as I could fit under my overcoat and looked about twice my size, but Gina was just scuffling along beside me in her usual cowboy boots and jeans, a floppy felt hat pressing down her dark curls and her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her pea jacket. She simply didn’t pay any attention to the cold. Gina was good at that: ignoring inconveniences, or things she wasn’t particularly interested in dealing with, much the way—I was eventually forced to admit—that I’d taught myself to ignore the dark current that was always present, running just under the surface of her exuberantly good moods.
“You know what I like best about the city?” she asked as we waited for the light to change where Yoors crosses Bunnett.
I shook my head.
“Looking up. There’s a whole other world living up there.”
I followed her gaze and at first I didn’t know what she was on about. I looked through breaks in the gusts of snow that billowed around us, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. I saw only rooftops and chimneys, multicolored Christmas decorations and the black strands of cable that ran in sagging geometric lines from the power poles to the buildings.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked.
“The ‘goyles,” Gina said.
I gave her a blank look, no closer to understanding what she was talking about than I’d been before.
“The gargoyles, Sue,” she repeated patiently. “Almost every building in this part of the city has got them, perched up there by the rooflines, looking down on us.”
Once she’d pointed them out to me, I found it hard to believe that I’d never noticed them before. On that corner alone there were at least a half-dozen grotesque examples. I saw one in the archway keystone of the Annaheim Building directly across the street—a leering monstrous face, part lion, part bat, part man. Higher up, and all around, other nightmare faces peered down at us, from the corners of buildings, hidden in the frieze and cornice designs, cunningly nestled in corner brackets and the stone roof cresting. Every building had them. Every building.
Their presence shocked me. It’s not that I was unaware of their existence—after all, I was planning on architecture as a major in college; it’s just that if someone had mentioned gargoyles to me before that day, I would have automatically thought of the cathedrals and castles of Europe—not ordinary office buildings in Newford.
“I can’t believe I never noticed them before,” I told her.
“There are people who live their whole lives here and never see them,” Gina said.
“How’s that possible?”
Gina smiled. “It’s because of where they are—looking down at us from just above our normal sightline. People in the city hardly ever look up.”
“But still…”
“I know. It’s something, isn’t it? It really is a whole different world. Imagine being able to live your entire life in the middle of the city and never be noticed by anybody.”
“Like a baglady,” I said.
Gina nodded. “Sort of. Except people wouldn’t ignore you because you’re some pathetic street person that they want to avoid. They’d ignore you because they simply couldn’t see you.”
That thought gave me a creepy feeling, and I couldn’t suppress a shiver, but I could tell that Gina was intrigued with the idea. She was staring at that one gargoyle, above the entrance to the Annaheim Building.
“You really like those things, don’t you?” I said.
Gina turned to look at me, an expression I couldn’t read sitting at the back of her eyes.
“I wish I lived in their world,” she told me.
She held my gaze with that strange look in her eyes for a long heartbeat. Then the light changed and she laughed, breaking the mood. Slipping her arm in mine, she started us off across the street to finish her Christmas shopping.
When we stood on the pavement in front of the Annaheim Building, she stopped and looked up at the gargoyle. I craned my neck and tried to give it a good look myself, but it was hard to see because of all the blowing snow.
Gina laughed suddenly. “It knows we were talking about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just winked at us.”
I hadn’t seen anything, but then I always seemed to be looking exactly the wrong way, or perhaps in the wrong way, whenever Gina tried to point out some magical thing to me. She was so serious about it.
“Did you see?” Gina asked.
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “I think I saw something____”
Falling snow. The side of a building. And stone statuary that was pretty amazing in and of itself without the need to be animated as well. I looked up at the gargoyle again, trying to see what Gina had seen.
I wish I lived in their world
It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood what she’d meant by that.
3
Christmas wasn’t the same for me as for most people—not even when I was a kid: My dad was born on Christmas day; Granny Ashworth, his mother, died on Christmas day when I was nine; and my own birthday was December 27. It made for a strange brew come the holiday season, part celebration, part mourning, liberally mixed with all the paraphernalia that means Christmas: eggnog and glittering lights, caroling, ornaments and, of course, presents.
Christmas wasn’t centered around presents for me. Easy to say, I suppose, seeing how I grew up in the Beaches, wanting for nothing, but it’s true. What enamored me the most about the season, once I got beyond the confusion of birthdays and mourning, was the idea of what it was supposed to be: peace and goodwill to all. The traditions. The idea of the miracle birth the way it was told in the Bible and more secular legends like the one telling how, for one hour after midnight on Christmas Eve, anima
ls were given human voices so that they could praise the baby Jesus.
I remember staying up late the year I turned eleven, sitting in bed with my cat on my lap and watching the clock, determined to hear Chelsea speak, except I fell asleep sometime after eleven and never did find out if she could or not.
By the time Christmas came around the next year I was too old to believe in that sort of thing anymore.
Gina never got too old. I remember years later when she got her dog Fritzie, she told me, “You know what I like the best about him? The stories he tells me.”
“Your dog tells you stories,” I said slowly.
“Everything’s got a voice,” Gina told me. “You just have to learn how to hear it.”
4
The best present I ever got was the Christmas that Gina decided to be my friend. I’d been going to a private school and hated it. Everything about it was so stiff and proper. Even though we were only children, it was still all about money and social standing and it drove me mad. I’d see the public school kids, and they seemed so free compared to all the boundaries I perceived to be compartmentalizing my own life.
I pestered my mother for the entire summer I was nine until she finally relented and let me take the public transport into Ferryside where I attended Cairnmount Public School. By noon of my first day, I realized that I hated public school even more.
There’s nothing worse than being the new kid—especially when you were busing in from the Beaches. Nobody wanted anything to do with the slumming rich kid and her airs. I didn’t have airs; I was just too scared. But first impressions are everything, and I ended up feeling more left out and alone than I’d ever been at my old school. I couldn’t even talk about it at home—my pride wouldn’t let me. After the way I’d carried on about it all summer, I couldn’t find the courage to admit that I’d been wrong.
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