Tish had given her an accounting pad to use. Blue stared at it. She’d slept her way through four days. Tish knew her name. How was it that she hadn’t suffered the wrath of the woman in the red dress? The right thing to do would be to thank Tish for the shelter, pick up her guitar, and head on out the door.
But she didn’t want to go. She had no money, no clothes, no ride. She wasn’t even sure where the road was. And she was still tired, even after all that sleep. All she wanted was to go back upstairs and nestle down into the bed and close her eyes.
Instead, she sat at the table. Tish was already there. A pair of reading glasses was perched on her nose, and she sipped coffee from a mug streaked with the rosy colors of a sunset. How had she become old? She was just another woman with short graying hair and glasses.
How had she gotten to be old when Mama hadn’t? How was that possibly fair?
“The police stopped by, Blue.” She said police as if it were two words, emphasis on po. “Apparently there was a dead man in one of my snowbanks. An old guy who parked his car and got out while wearing the wrong clothes for a blizzard. He got snagged on a fence and froze up.”
The Traveler. She’d kept going, but he hadn’t. She thought of the faces that had lit the snow as she ran. The kids he’d murdered, she believed, there to see her to safety. He was done; he’d never kill another person. For once, she was grateful for the storm.
“You’re safe, Blue. No one’s gonna bother you here. I promise.”
I may be safe, but you’re not. She looked at Tish, solid, not dead, not hurt, not even looking regretful. No one around me is.
That afternoon Tish handed Blue a dirty barn coat and a pair of work gloves and told her to come out to the barn. She didn’t want to—didn’t want to ever go outside again—but she did.
Outside smelled so clean. The sky stretched forever, blue and perfect, the snow brilliant beneath it. The snow-covered land looked like the ocean, with crests and valleys formed by the wind that had driven it this way and that. The red of the barn cut stern and sturdy lines through it all.
The air inside the barn was sweet with hay, horse, and grain. Blue didn’t know much about horses, but her guess was that the two there were old. The white one in the closest stall had huge pits above its eyes, and long whiskers off its nose, and it nodded, watching them with curiosity. The other one, a somber dark brown, stared stoically, as if hoping for food but expecting disappointment.
“Old man,” Tish said, rubbing the white one’s face. He shook his head, his long mane flopping from side to side.
Blue took her gloves off, pulled out her notebook.
Names?
Tish kept scratching his neck, letting him rest his head against her chest. “No names. Old Man, Old Lady.”
Really?
Tish moved on to the other. “They just arrived a few years back. Dumped, I guess. They were old then, they’re older now.”
Teena’s family often had cats dumped on their farm. Dogs, occasionally. Never a horse.
“Hard times make for hard choices. I’m guessing someone couldn’t feed them but wasn’t ready to sell them for dog food. Lucky for them, I had the space.”
Tish walked down the aisle, past other empty stalls. Blue followed. In the back was a small room with a woodstove, a counter, a sink, and a coffee pot. Tish pointed at the pot. “Heat up some water. I’ll take care of the stove.”
Blue did as she was told. As much as she wanted to hit Tish, to yell at her for being there and unapologetic, part of her wanted to cling to her. She was almost eighteen, and she was nine, too, wanting Tish to hold her, wanting to smell home on her, wanting to follow her into a room where Mama and Cass were waiting. She settled for following Tish everywhere, alert for all the ways in which the woman in the red dress could steal her away.
Tish had other ideas. “I got this. You go into the loft and feed the cat. Crunchies are under the seat. There’s a bowl up there.”
She went back out, past the stalls and the horses, up the stairs by the door. The hayloft had almost no hay in it. One or two bales in a corner, a collection of faded green twine hanging from a nail, cobwebs draped across the corners. A ceramic bowl in the middle of the floor, with DOG painted on the front.
Really, Tish? The cat can’t just be a cat? She opened the bag, poured the crunchies in. From behind a bale came a tiny calico cat, tiptoeing along on four white feet. Older, Blue guessed, than the horses, at least in cat years. The cat gave a yawn that exposed a mouth of yellowed teeth.
Blue crouched down and rubbed her fingers together. The cat walked beneath her hand, then settled to lick her feet clean.
Fussy princess of a cat. You need a gold collar to go with that attitude.
“You find the bowl, or what?”
She thudded back down the stairs. Tish showed her how to pour something that looked like soup made of swamp grass into the shallow rubber pans belonging to the two old horses.
“Clary would have loved these two.” She gave Blue a look that reverberated in some secret space between her ribs and her lungs, then gently tugged the bit of mane hanging between Old Man’s ears. “Here’s the deal, Old Man. This girl shows up here in the middle of the night, in a blizzard, says she’s looking for her sister who’s been gone for two years. And she claims she can’t talk. Rather than have her lying on the couch all day, every day, when the couch is mine to lie on, I figure I’ll have her look after you. But first, I need to show her a few things.”
So Tish did. She showed Blue things like where to stand around a horse, and what to watch for, and what not to do. The itchy spots that Old Man liked to have scratched, and the way he stretched his neck out and wiggled his nose when they were scratched right. Tish did the same with Old Lady. By the time they were done, Blue didn’t want to leave. The horses were honest and warm and didn’t care what her name was or how she’d arrived in their home, just that she was there.
“This is the deal between you and me.” Tish touched her face, turned her so their eyes met. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you to brush them. You can do that, and feed them. In exchange, you can stay here and I won’t sic Lynne on you.”
Blue looked away. Too many things to think about. Too many questions to ask. It felt better not to have to try to talk.
“But, and this is a really big thing, Blue. I expect that you’re going to tell me the rest of the story. Doesn’t have to be today, or this week, but I expect it. If not, at some point I’m going to have to get other people involved. You understand?”
Sort of. Not really. Tish owed her something, owed Mama and Cass something, too, but Blue was the only one there. Did everything in life require deals, and Blue had just never noticed? If Tish required a story for her deal, she’d figure one out. It couldn’t be that hard.
Blue had taken over the guest room, which was less like a guest room and more like the room that time forgot. The rest of the house had walls painted pale yellow with natural wood trim. When the sun shone in, the spaces felt bigger, like cathedrals, even though Blue could reach the ceiling with her hands.
The guest room had wallpaper, though, with tiny roses all over. The bedspread was black, and the roses struggled to be seen beneath posters of musicians—Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith and other women Blue didn’t recognize—and Van Gogh paintings, and concerts thirty years gone. On the wall next to the bed, the roses had been carefully filled in with black marker, a climbing vine of decay.
Blue took out the guitar that night. She hadn’t before, except to peek in and make sure it had survived unscathed. Now she opened the case, laid one hand on the neck, and traced the body. She used to think that Mama had had the guitar stained to match the rich color of her hair, the Guild emblem pinned at the top like a jewel. She hadn’t, of course. She’d bought it used with money she’d saved from babysitting.
It was such a simple thing: veneer, thin wood, metal strings. There was wear on the neck where Mama’s, and now Blue’s, thumb had rubbed while playing. She lea
ned down, held her ear over the hole. Had it all been a dream? Had there never been a woman in a red dress singing in Mama’s voice, or a man in a blue shirt tearing Amy’s soul away? Had Andrea and Lacey been found because the world was a bitter place, and not because the devil had made Blue pay?
The only proof she had of anything was her missing voice and a pair of boots that made her feet sore. But feet got tired when they were stuck in boots all day. And sometimes people lost their voices or just stopped speaking.
She lifted the guitar out of the case and tuned it. The urge to sing as she began to play was so strong it made her cry. She remembered being six and holding this guitar, hands too small to press the strings down, trying anyway as she sang as loudly as she could. Mama had clapped, and Blue had been embarrassed, because she hadn’t meant to be heard, and proud, because she had been heard. Mama had lifted her into her lap, placed Blue’s hands over her own, played for her, their voices winding together.
She didn’t notice Tish until she’d finished the song.
“You look close enough to her that it takes my breath away, but you don’t play like her.”
No, she didn’t. Somehow the chords were different in her head, the speed slower, or faster. It was like the urge to keep hiking a trail in order to see around the next corner, only she knew where these corners went. She just wanted to change them. Stretch them a bit.
And how could Tish say she looked like Mama, when Blue was inches taller, when she had no hair.
When she had no hair, just like Mama hadn’t.
She ducked her head down to study the strings. Hurt didn’t go away; it just lurked around corners in disguise. Tish came closer.
“There was one point, after we’d made the record and we were feeling flush. I asked her if she wanted to trade it in, you know, get something a little flashier. She insisted that everything she’d ever played was stored up in there, and that’s what made her sound real.” A shrug.
Ice grew through the room. Not sheets of it; strands, threads, everything touched by it. All Blue had to do was move and it would break, and she might break with it. Not moving, not changing, that was how you held on to things. Only she had changed. She wasn’t nine anymore.
You still play?
Such a simple line, and it still took her a minute to write it, crafting each word with care.
“Play in what way?” For a moment, she saw something of the old Tish there, making a joke that she was finally old enough to get. “Not like that. There won’t be anything like Dry Gully again for me.” A pause. She could almost see Tish’s dark hair on Mama’s knee, both of them on the couch. “I play at a bar with some friends a couple nights a month. Kind of country, kind of fun, kind of me. We’re called Pour Me Another.”
Of course they were. Tish reached out. “May I?”
Blue didn’t want to give up the guitar, but she did, too. She wanted to hear what would come out of it under Tish’s hands.
But Tish didn’t play. She stroked the sides, strummed once, held the body to hers. Her eyes were red as she handed it back.
“It wasn’t just me, Blue,” she said before turning to leave.
Blue flipped her middle finger at Tish’s retreating back.
The next day, after feeding the horses, Blue went for a walk down the drive, figuring she’d follow the road a stretch. She never reached the road. The driveway just went on and on like a road itself, one that ended at Tish’s and probably began somewhere in the Atlantic. Sure, her boots liked the movement; but the truth was that they also liked the movement back toward the house after she turned around.
A terrible thought took root in her. At first, she’d believed the lack of direction meant Cass was near. Now, she felt a growing certainty that the boots gave no indication because there was no Cass to find. She touched her throat, remembering the pressure of Rat’s hands there, and thought about Halloween, about waiting for a call that didn’t come.
Blue walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. She thudded along in her boots to the house, snow-blind and heart pounding, and ran straight into Tish at the door.
She pushed her way past and knelt on the floor, ripping at her laces until she could get the boots off. It was only then that she realized she’d been crying.
“Time to tell me what’s going on?” Tish leaned against the counter, watching her.
Blue shook her head.
“Listen, I’m sticking to my end of the bargain, but I need a few answers. Do you need to see a doctor?”
A shrink, yeah. That wasn’t what Tish meant, though. She wanted to know whether Blue had been raped, whether she might be pregnant, all those things that people believe are the very worst things that can happen to girls.
She shook her head.
“Is anyone looking for you for any reason other than that you ran away from Lynne’s?”
She shook her head again.
“I’ll keep waiting, then. Just not forever.”
After dinner, Tish played for her. Not Dry Gully songs. Ones you might hear joined by a steel guitar or a banjo. Some songs Blue was sure she’d heard at Barn Magic.
Gentler, that was how Tish sounded now. Not that she couldn’t still have been what one reviewer had named her—“the dark angel of alt country”—but that fierceness was held in reserve, replaced with a wry humor.
“Now you play for me,” she said as she laid the fiddle on the couch.
Blue shook her head.
“No, really, I want to hear you. You owe me for dinner, right?”
If she’d played for strangers, she could play for Tish. Only, the logic was flawed, because who cared what strangers thought? She’d have to face Tish every morning until she moved on.
She got the guitar anyway. She didn’t know what to play, so she played a couple of Dry Gully songs: one of Mama’s and one of Tish’s.
Tish listened carefully, her head resting in the palm of her hand. “Which do you like better?”
Blue froze. An impossible question if there ever was one. She loved the one Mama wrote because it sounded like Mama. She loved Tish’s because it felt like thunder.
Both are cool, just different. Like the two of you—different but right together.
Tish didn’t speak for a few minutes, enough time for Blue to wonder whether she’d said something really wrong.
“That was us. Totally different and right together. We used to have a joke, Clary and me. You know Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, right?”
Blue shook her head. She sort of knew, just that one of them had written “This Land Is Your Land,” and one of them played the banjo, and maybe something about the Dust Bowl. Nothing she’d want to be quizzed on.
“What the hell are they teaching kids these days?” Tish asked. “The two of them were in a band called the Almanac Singers. Radical shit, kid, folk tunes and political words. Woody played a guitar, and Pete played a banjo. Woody’s guitar had a very simple message painted on it: ‘This Machine Kills Fascists.’ The kind of thing you want from an instrument, that spit-in-your-eye attitude.
“Pete, his banjo had a message on it, too. His said ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender.’ Had to take a pretty steady hand to get that on a banjo, that’s what I always thought.
“Clary and me, she used to say that was us. I wanted my fiddle to destroy. She wanted her guitar to spread love. But we wanted the same thing, just had our own ideas about how to get there.”
What would you write on your fiddle?
She expected a Tish answer, something flip and a little lewd. What she got instead was a pucker of the lips, lines above her eyebrows.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “‘Open to Do-Overs,’ I suppose.”
It figured. If anyone needed a do-over, it had to be Tish.
“Do you write anything of your own?”
Whole notebooks of stuff. Haven’t you noticed? Blue shrugged, not sure how to answer.
“Those songs are fifteen, twenty ye
ars old. You must have some things of your own to say.”
Oh. Songs. She thought of what she’d scribbled down at Beyond and blushed a little.
“Pony up, little girl. What are you keeping secret?” Tish leaned toward her.
She couldn’t share it. Instead, she took the capo out of the case, put it on, and played the little music-box tune that she’d made up.
It hurt to play it. Not in her fingers, not through her calluses, but inside, in secret spaces in her joints, swollen with what she’d had, what was gone. Losing Teena had seemed terrible, back in Eliotville. Here, after everything else, it was nothing. Almost nothing. She’d be lying to say it didn’t hurt some to remember watching fireworks from the bed of Teena’s pickup on the Fourth of July, talking about nothing while feeling it was everything. Being friends.
Tish had dumped Mama as a friend the same way Teena had dumped her, only she hadn’t even had a reason. Blue ended the song abruptly and carried the guitar back to her room, leaving the case behind.
As she lay in bed after Tish turned the lights out, a memory nudged its way into her mind. Toward the end of the night at Barn Magic, there had been a wiry guy playing guitar. The words painted on the body of his guitar had read: “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
She crept out of the room, down the hall to where Tish’s computer sat. Turned it on, waited while it whirred to life, waited more while the modem slowly connected. Searched for Woody Guthrie.
It was him. The guitar, the hair, the body. She looked to see whether he lived anywhere near Minneapolis.
No. He didn’t live anywhere. He’d been dead a long, long time. She’d been watching a ghost in the barn.
If she was seeing ghosts, that had to mean the game was still on.
Devil and the Bluebird Page 20