Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
Page 18
Murder Ballad No. 7
No one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least. No one who is only a human man or woman. In this modern day and this disenchanted era, there are none who might even suspect the simple truth of her. She herself did not know until the age of thirteen and the onset of menarche, when she woke one morning to find the bed sheets stained red, and from the blood of her menstruation had sprung minute sprigs of rye-grass and wild thyme. She wadded the ruined and oddly fecund bedclothes into a heap and hid them beneath bulging plastic bags at the bottom of a trashcan. The garbage men and their rumbling truck came and carried them away, and that night, an unruly procession of goblins and pixies arrived and danced in the flowerbed beneath her windowsill. They trampled the pansies flat, and nibbled the impatiens to ribbons, so that the next morning the woman whom the girl had always believed to be her mother blamed the damage on a neighborhood dog. The next evening, the fairies returned and sang for the girl, who, by proxy of blood, was no longer a girl, and who, of course, had never truly been a girl. They serenaded her in their high, reedy voices and played raucous, bawdy songs on petite flutes and lyres and drums no larger than a thumbnail. She sat on the floor and listened, though her heart ached to rush outside and join in their revelry. In the long, last hour before dawn, a hairy little bogie of a man perched himself haphazardly upon the window ledge and, more or less off key, and with no evident heed to the tempo set by the musicians below, he sang:
Fast, fast, through the greenwood speeding
Out in the moonlight bright,
Her fairy raid she is leading,
The dainty Queen so light,
And the baby heir of acres wide
She is carrying away to fairyland.
A changeling is left by the nurse’s side
And she in the young heir’s place shall stand.
And when his song was clone, he whispered to her that this must forever be a secret thing between them, a confidence. Before she could object or even think to ask why, the bogie quickly related to her all the mischief that had been done to people only suspected of being changelings. He noted, with an obvious, smug sort of pride, that virtually none of the condemned had actually been born to the Shining Court, for the Sidhe are generally much too cunning to allow the babes they leave in place of stolen human children to be found out.
She listened, only half believing, for her life had been easy and kind, and she was unaccustomed to such awful tales. Besides, they’d all happened a very long time ago, in a more superstitious age, in countries far across the sea. All those suspect infants left out to freeze on cold Welsh and English nights, abandoned on cairns or graves or in ditches, the ones flogged and the others placed on hot shovels and held over the coals. Sometimes, the bogie confided, an unfortunate was fortunate enough that it was only pelted with bits of iron or placed in a dung pile.
The logic was simple, said the bogie. Surely, we’d never allow our offspring to suffer so grievously, and would rush in at once to reclaim those left in the stead of their own wee pink whelps.
And, in case all this was still insufficient to keep her from telling tales and giving away the game, the bogie then assured her that it was not only the very young who’d been tortured and suffered at the hands of priests and “fairy doctors.” Consider, he told her, the case of an Irish cooper (and here he had to pause to explain that a cooper was one who made wooden barrels and wash tubs) who’d suspected his own wife of being a fairy. She had been stolen, he believed, and an almost perfect imposter left behind. Only almost perfect, though, because the cooper claimed his wife was not so pretty, and, besides, the imposter was two inches taller than the woman he’d married. The cooper performed a sadistic rite of exorcism, aided by friends and even the unlucky woman’s own cousins. They held her immobile while she was forced to swallow a noxious concoction of milk, piss, and chicken excrement, and then placed her naked body above the hearth fire, instructing her to fly away up the chimney. However, neither torture proved sufficient to banish the pretender and restore the cooper’s mortal bride. So, the very next night, and again with the assistance of friends and family, the husband drenched the poor woman in lamp oil and set her ablaze with a hot brand. Her charred corpse was found in a shallow grave barely even a quarter mile from their home, the bogie concluded. He stared a moment, looking down into the girl’s eyes, and into all the places behind her eyes, to be sure that she’d understood.
When the sun rose, the fairies had all gone away, the revelers and the hairy, admonishing bogie, and many years passed before she saw any of them again. And no one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least.
She keeps her secrets well, and in this day and age very few take note of her peculiarities or the way she always smells like a summer afternoon Her neighbors have no cows to stop giving milk if she strays too near, and no chickens to stop laying. She lives at the edge of a great, glittering city, and the people there are far too busy and concerned with money and taxes, electronic gewgaws and the price of gasoline, to worry about fairies. Whenever they might pause long enough to bother being afraid of anything, it’s likely no more than bankruptcy or old age, cancer or the gay couple who moved in next door or, perhaps, an imam overheard praying the salat on a commuter flight. There is no more time in their lives for fairies and changelings than there is for dragons and wicked witches, and often the fairy lady marvels what good fortune she’s had to be a changeling in so cynical and disentranced a time and place.