by Emma Bull
I managed to stay in motion, and so avoid having to talk to anyone else. I saw Frances for a moment, at the opposite end of a table. What, I wondered, did all these nice people make of her? So well spoken; lovely person, actually, for a mass murderer. She returned my look with a grave, piercing one, and I moved on again.
I didn’t see Sher until much later. There was music at the edge of the bonfire: guitarists, singers, a fiddle player, a mandolin, someone with a clarinet, and a shoal of drummers who sounded as if they’d played together in the womb. Someone offered me finger cymbals, but I declined. At the edge of the light, people were dancing.
On the opposite side of the hodgepodge circle of musicians and audience, I saw Kris, the woman from the beet field. She sat on the grass with her arm around another woman. They were both smiling, alternately at the musicians and at each other; they whispered in each other’s ears; they laid their heads on each other’s shoulders. The other woman kissed Kris on the cheek, halfway between her cheekbone and her jaw. Josh had removed the stitches from the inside of my mouth just a few days ago, in about that spot.
I stood up abruptly and walked into the dark. I ended up on the other side of the big central tree, leaning against it, staring up into the branches. The candle lanterns hanging there had almost all gone out. I concentrated on my breathing, on letting my chest rise and fall, on seeing if I could take in exactly the same volume of air each time. The day and everything in it seemed to have conspired against my composure. But it had survived, and with a little attention would continue to do so. This had been a bit of testing for real life, that was all.
“It’s all right,” said Sher, beside me, in a wrung voice I’d never heard from her before. “Nobody wants you to hurt. It just seemed so strange — you were so different. But if you have to shut us all out or break… then shut us out.”
I put my hands over my face for a moment. Then I let them drop. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
I heard her breath run unevenly into her lungs. “It doesn’t matter. Never mind.”
The farmhouse was close, but I would have found it anyway. This body I was leasing had always had good night vision. I closed the door of my room behind me, folded the borrowed clothes, and went, eventually, to sleep.
The next day I hunted through the fields until I found Kris, and asked her to put me to work. She was in one of the smaller garden plots this time, a long straight stretch between the dairy barn and the horse paddock.
She got up off her knees and banged her hands together to get the dirt off her gloves. “Sure. What are you good at?”
“Nothing,” I said. It was a useful word lately. “I’ll have to be trained.”
Kris grinned and waved at the rows. “Then you’re doomed to learn to weed. C’mere.” She pointed. “That’s an onion. Don’t pull it out. Anything that doesn’t look like that — see here, and here — is a weed. In this row, anyway. You’re trained. Off you go.”
In half an hour the cramped, unfamiliar position met my healing injuries and joined forces against me. I was sweaty, too, even though the work wasn’t strenuous. But it was just what I wanted. It slowed down thought, and channeled it into unfamiliar paths, ones my life to date hadn’t sown with mines. I was surprised when I reached past the last onion sprout and found that it was the last.
“Good work,” Kris said. “The next row is lettuce. It looks like this.”
A minute into that row, and Kris pointed to the thing in my hand. “That’s also lettuce.”
“Oh,” I said. After that, I did better.
Eventually I could figure out for myself which were the weeds. At that point, Kris moved on to the next garden plot, and I had the first one to myself. It was hypnotic work, with its own loose rhythm and a set of physical techniques both precise and trivial. The way a slow, smooth pull would bring a weed up by the roots and a jerk would snap it off at the surface. The way dandelions had to be pulled by all their leaves at once. The machinery of my arm moving out and back, reach, pull, toss. I could do this. I knew where this skill came from, and whose it was. Mine, mine. Wherever the rest of me was stolen from, this was mine.
Via Kris, who had taught it to me. Then was it Kris’s skill, after all?
And someone must have weeded China Black’s garden. Whoever it was, I shared this knowledge with her or him.
I’d stopped in midmotion, still crouched and kneeling, the latest thing I’d pulled still in my hand. It was a thin-stemmed little plant with short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. At the end was a cluster of star-shaped flowers in an aching, vibrating magenta.
I had pulled one of these before — in China Black’s garden. “Sparrow?” Sher’s voice came to me, from the end of the row.
I couldn’t breathe, except in little bursts that seemed to catch halfway down my throat. I had pulled one of these when, angry with Sherrea for something I’d done, I hadn’t listened while she told me again: You don’t belong to them. You don’t now, and you never did.
The origin of my body and my mind didn’t matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I’d pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.
I couldn’t breathe. I’d dropped the plant; I closed my dirty hands over my face as if I could find and tear away whatever was keeping the air out. My whole curled body shook with gasping, with the high, thin sound it made.
“Oh,” said Sherrea, very close now. “Oh, hell.” I felt her arms close around me, lightly for a moment, then very tight.
I was crying. Once I realized it, it got worse, until I couldn’t stop it, until I wondered if a person could die of it. I was catching up for all the things I hadn’t cried for: for Cassidy; for Dana; for my own pain; for the archives with their sweet glowing window on the past; for the lost, desperate look on Frances’s face when she thought she was at the end of her life; for Theo, cut off from his father and his home. I cried because Josh still missed his wife, and because Sher was crying. I cried because all the things I’d never felt before had come and settled in, and since the surface there was new and delicate, they were all painful.
“Sparrow,” Sher said damply. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
She was right, actually. I turned my face into the cloth on her shoulder and went on crying.
Card 9: Hopes
The Star
Crowley: The Daughter of the Firmament, the Dweller between the Waters. Hope, unexpected help, clearness of vision, realization of possibilities.
Waite: Immortality. Truth unveiled. The Great Mother communicating to those below in the measure that they can receive her understanding.
9.0: The new day begins in darkness
It was not unlike being invalided all over again. The effect wasn’t widespread; the number of people who knew about my emotional collapse was limited. But for several days Sherrea, Theo, Frances, and Josh all behaved as if I was likely to either erupt or evaporate without cause. I expect I needed it.
I needed forbearance from myself, too. It hadn’t been a perfect catharsis; my instincts were still in place, and I had to struggle against a passionate desire to slip back into silence. And my memory was still good. Now that I had a nice, scraped place on my soul to scour them across, the cruder things I’d said or done to protect my privacy came back to me.
The worst was that same night, in the kitchen. Mags was replacing the gasket in the faucet, and I was sharing the lamp oil, reading A Tale of Two Cities at the kitchen table.
“Why are you called Sparrow?” Mags asked suddenly. “Did you name yourself? Is it symbolic? Is it a reference to something?”
I could tell her about waking up on the side of a levee in a tangle of brush, sweating already in the morning sun, and seeing a buff-gray breast and a round black eye bobbing on a twig above me. The word h
ad appeared in my head. That was when I recognized language, that I had it; and that I had no past, that I recalled, to have learned it in. It was my first moment of self-knowledge. How was I supposed to know that Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil?
Cassidy had told me that.
“No,” I said suddenly, “it’s just a name.”
“It doesn’t fit you, you know.”
Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil. Shortly after he’d said that, he’d made me a gift of something and I’d felt trapped by it. Beer. I’d finished his beer. And because of that violation of my principles, my valuable principles, I’d made him believe that I didn’t care about him.
“I mean, sparrows are little and round and brown.”
The last conscious thing Cassidy had done in his life was to try to make me a gift of mine. “They work for the Devil,” I said, my voice breaking up like a clod of earth in water. “Excuse me.” I bolted out the back door.
By some miracle, there was no one in the town circle. I stood leaning against the big central tree, my forehead on my clenched hands, and wept again. This time the storm was silent, and angry. And this time I had to do it alone. However well I told it, no one else would understand the size of my wrongdoing or my grief. There had been a person who’d felt entitled, for the value of a swallow of beer, to deny a friend. It didn’t seem possible to share a life with that person.
The night continued to move around me, the tree continued to hold me up, the earth didn’t open under my feet. Instant oblivion wasn’t offered to me. I would just have to go on.
But I noticed, eventually, that there was an uncommon lot of verbal tiptoeing happening around me. It was Frances who was the first to be polite and self-effacing one time too many. I can’t remember her exact words; I remember that the sentence was even more ornamented and less linear than usual. I said, “I tell you what: I’ll lock myself in my room, and you can slip notes under the door. That way you can think about what you want to say for days before you say it.”
Frances’s eyes opened wide. “Hullo,” she said, grinning, “you’re back!”
Theo slid gradually into quoting from movies again, because he couldn’t help it. I understood how that worked. After all, I’d avoided seeing Theo for weeks because I couldn’t look at him and not think of VU meters and mixing boards. Sherrea simply forgot and cussed me out one day. After that, without comment, we picked up the rhythms of genuine conversation again, genuine argument, and silences that weren’t loaded with anything.
So there was no discomfort, when I went out to the stables looking for a pitchfork, in finding Sherrea propped against the fence of a nearby paddock. There was a certain amount of strangeness, however. She was feeding handfuls of clover to a camel. A two-humped, dark brown, disreputable-looking camel.
“How in the name of… everything did that get here?” I said, in lieu of the sentence I’d been planning to say.
“Isn’t she hot stuff? There’s not a thing we can do with her, but the camels keep hanging on, and they’re so weird we can’t bring ourselves to trade ’em off to somebody who needs ’em.”
“There’s more than one?”
“Oh, yeah. A male, two she-camels, and a calf just this spring.”
“But where from?” I asked again, holding out my hand.
“Put some grass in it, or she’ll just bite you. The land we’re on used to be the zoo. Whenever you’re up for a serious hike, you can see the old buildings — they’re over that ridge a ways. They’re ruined, though. It’s kind of a sad place. When the Engineers set up camp, the tropical animals had already died, and some other species, too. The last tiger died two years ago, and everybody was miserable, even though we all knew it was gonna happen eventually.”
“A tiger?”
“Yeah. He was beautiful. But we just couldn’t find out enough about taking care of tigers, and what we could find out, we couldn’t always use. But the moose and the wild horses did okay on their own, so we let ’em go feral. And you’ll see snow monkeys in the woods, if you watch. The musk oxen were our big success, though.”
The camel looked adoringly at me from under vast, sand-colored lashes, and tried to tear a piece from my sleeve. I pulled another hank of grass and offered that instead. “They’re still here?”
“No, it’s too hot for ’em here now. We were losing too many to disease. But we found out about some people north of Winnipeg who’re doing kind of what the Engineers are doing here, and they said they’d take ’em. So we had a musk oxen drive up to the border. It was great, except people started singing ‘Git Along Little Musk Ox’ when we’d stop for the night. Now we hear the herd’s increasing again. I figure that’s one for the good guys.”
“Who are—?”
The camel bit me.
“She’s really sweet,” Sher said as I rubbed my forearm. “You just don’t want to ignore her.”
“You’re darn right.”
The camel pulled her lips back blissfully once more.
Josh’s brand of tiptoeing wasn’t verbal. It wasn’t even tiptoeing, really; it was a different kind of caution, another sort of concern for my mental state, and it manifested itself in watching me. I’d known he was doing it, but I hadn’t known how thoroughly he was doing it until he stopped. I brought it up one evening, in his surgery, where he’d had an emergency call. Large Bob Beher had broken his left wrist; I assisted at the cast-making. (Josh’s principles of doctor-patient formality were, based on this example, a little slippery; Large Bob referred to the doctor as “Josh, you sonofabitch,” and Josh addressed the patient as “Mr. Beher, you horse’s ass.”)
We were alone, and I was gathering up the last ends of plaster gauze and the pan of chalky water when I said, “Did you think I was going to kill myself?”
Josh looked up from his dishpan full of scary stainless-steel implements. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know you before, you see. But I knew while I was sealing up the outside of you, that something inside was broken. Then, when you… ”
“When I did my imitation of a garden hose all over the carrot patch,” I said.
“Whatever. I couldn’t tell if that helped or hurt. Acceptance of despair sometimes looks like that, too. That’s why people often say of suicides that they seemed so much better the day before.”
“I couldn’t have done it. Frances would have been furious, after I kept… ” I took a moment to decide if I was really going to do what I thought I was. “Josh, do you have any beer?”
He looked affronted. “I have an icebox, don’t I?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story if you want to hear it. But I don’t think I can do it yet without drinking some beer.”
“These things take practice,” he agreed. “How ’bout the porch?”
So we sat outside in the dark, reeking of pennyroyal to keep the mosquitoes off, with three bottles of home-brewed beer apiece, and I told him what I was and how I’d managed to end up blood-boltered in his front yard. Josh whistled and invoked gods in all the appropriate places. When I was done, he took a long, meditative swallow of beer and said, “What are you going to do now?”
I hadn’t expected that. “I don’t know,” I answered after some thought. “Do I have to do anything?”
“Maybe not. Probably not. But in the larger scheme of things, we’re close to the City. We do a lot of trading there. This seems like the kind of business any sane person would leave unfinished, but you may find that it won’t leave you.”
I finished my third bottle. “Maybe I ought to go.”
“Where?”
“South again? Or I could try Mick’s idea, and head for the border.”
“Not the border,” Josh said. “You wouldn’t get across openly, anyway.”
“Have they closed it?”
“No. But they’d ask for your health card. And when you couldn’t show them one, they’d give you a physical. Then they’d take you out back and shoot you.”
“Oh. Not fond of unusual foreigners up nor
th, huh?”
He finished his third beer. “Besides, you might not have to go anywhere at all. Then what’ll you do?”
“Prune the raspberries?”
He laughed. “Be careful what you ask for.” Then he set his bottle down on the porch and leaned forward in his chair, looking out at the village circle. “Has anyone explained to you about hoodoo?”
“I know about hoodoo,” I said, a little sharply.
“Really? Well. Ask Sherrea,” said Josh in an odd, pleasant voice, “about this town.”
The tone put my back up. It occurred to me that Josh could have meant it to; he might not have been all-knowing, but he had a respectable average with me. “She said it used to be the zoo.”
“That probably had something to do with it, but that’s not what I mean.”
“Will she know what you mean?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Do I have to ask her tonight?”
Josh opened his eyes wide. “You don’t have to ask her at all.”
Frances would probably have had an elegant and corrosive response to that. I only sighed and took six empty bottles back to the kitchen.
The next day the weather was beautiful, in a way it rarely was so close to midsummer: warm, but full of fresh wind and high, white clouds. Theo and I spent almost the whole of it in a shed-turned-machine-shop, overhauling a generator. We came out, sweaty and filthy, and discovered the tail end of what we’d missed just as the sun touched, blinding, on the treetops. Theo scrambled to the top rail of the fence and sat with his face to the dazzle, his eyes closed. I didn’t have the energy to climb; I just leaned.