The creature himself whistled through his trunk, a keening sound, high and low toned at once, like two notes being played, one as deep as a lake bottom, the other a thin flash of bird in an open sky. They moved through the camps and crowds and people parted, pressed hands to his wheels like you would to a saint on pilgrimage.
I had not known magic in the world until I saw him, until I came upon their song and dance and open fires burning blue. I wanted to be in it, dancing. I wanted my fingers to press the strings of a violin, move the bow, make those sounds so unafraid. A hand touched my shoulder then, and there was the man in the black top hat, holding a fiddle, grinning beneath a hooked nose.
“A little madam from the city!” he exclaimed, offering me his hand to shake. “I’m Krezki. Welcome! You seem to be the bravest soul around, our first and only guest.”
“I’m Margaret. Margaret Cole. I don’t mean to intrude—”
“Nonsense, Margaret of the big round eyes, little owl,” said Krezki, gesturing with his violin, which swept against the stars. “The entertaining of guests is a high art, a high pleasure, very good for the heart and the digestion too.”
I had been hiding behind a leggy pine tree, one of many planted in neat rows in what was once a park by the waterfront. Krezki stroked his long fingers on the bark and grinned as I stared at him and tried to speak.
“Come out from the shadows and join us. I’ll show you around.” He extended his forearm and helped me up. He brought me to the bonfire I had seen first, where he had been playing, where the old woman nursed, the older woman smoked a pipe, two coyotes napped, a wooden girl on wheels sang hymns under a dark tree.
I can’t speak of that evening without crying, now. I can’t tell of it like one tells a normal story, with a narrative arc, with a beginning, middle and end, because it filled me to bursting. My nose, my eyes, my fingers, my stomach, my skin, my ears, my young heart. It filled me like music will, all at once, utterly, so no lines can be made between moments, notes, feelings. Nothing in my life has been like it, before or since—the celebration, the carelessness, the joy, the ragged edges that comforted rather than repelled me, the sense of purpose. We are all ragged inside; why not fray out into the world, dressed in red?
I can only tell it in scraps and pieces, a quilt that has come to cover my heart in order for me to continue despite the fact that it is all in ruin, bones and broken refuse, the joy gone from the world.
It was rabbit skin and fat in my teeth, a feral grassy sweet flavor, rough wine and rougher stars, tipping me with dizziness and warmth, the carts of roasted nuts, of porridges and cakes set up on the old roads, making all the painted lines blurry; a boy playing a grand piano on the top of a hillock above the marsh, a piano on wheels as big as a bike’s, and pulled by tame deer, how he sat up there amidst the brackish smell of mud and played old songs that waltzed and mourned, how beautiful his face was in the moon, a face I loved that instant and will love until I die; how the woman nursing the babe on her wrinkled breast decked me in velvet ribbons with gold bells at the ends, gave me a ragged silk skirt to twirl and flow over my straight pants, blue as any jay, the ceramic pipe of the old grandmother stuffed and smoking with wild sagebrush and orange poppies, the shapes of two hundred small fires along that cement road and in and out of gray patches, parking lots, so the whole bayfront was a walk in the Milky Way, each bonfire a star, its own shape, fed by its own unique pile of branch, chair-leg, willow shoot, shingle.
I know that Krezki put his violin in my hands and let me play, and though I made only hisses and squawks, it felt like holding my own soul outside my body, letting it speak, cradling it in my arms. No wonder it sounded rusty, never having been aired and held. I know that Krezki said to me, with a wink of his green eye, “we follow the dream of all things living, of all things wild, we are following the paths the bears once walked over the earth, and are calling to them.” I didn’t understand this, but I knew it was good. I knew that the grey creature was their god and their heart, all in one place, and he was also a dream no man or woman could have made, a dream from the great belly of the ground. When I too got close enough to touch his wheel, I wept because it was warm like an arm or a calf, a living wheel, and then I danced. Someone put a wreath of marshgrass in my hair, fed me the best bits of their soup, wrapped a scarf of bright green wool around my neck, dusted my shoes with pollen and seasalt, with cinnamon and then with rust, until I swear I was gliding, my hands full to weeping, my hair a wild owl of a braid.
I am not sure how I made it home. By then, it was almost dawn. The sun at the edge of the sky, like a skirt lifting, was a silver streak, a pathway, and I was so spun with the life of those people that I could not distinguish between the tar road, the white lines painted up it, the strings of Krezki’s fiddle which I could still feel under my hands, and the coming of dawn. I think those two coyotes, and a mutt terrier-hound, led me through the city streets, nipping at my hands, and that there was an owl above.
My mother sat on the steps to our apartment, crying with worry. When she saw me with those dogs, looking flushed, traced with ribbons, marshgrass, rust, pollen, velvets, a bell, mud, she screamed.
*
I have never wanted to know if what followed was because of me. It can’t have been, not all of it. But the part that hurts me most, even more than the loss of my own mother, even more than the dead sick bodies of people and dogs in the streets, the buildings crumbled and smoking from earthquakes one after the next, is that it was all somehow linked to that night, the streets of bonfires, the music, the velvet rags of joy. There was only a handful of days between that morning when I returned and my mother screamed, and the morning when the men with machine guns lined up along the road once called Marina and opened fire. I heard it from the window. I heard the music stop suddenly and I ran past my mother who yelled for me to stay; I ran all the way back to that place where the green of music had been ringing. I couldn’t get past the men.
They were a barricade of shoulders and the smell of gunpowder. I recognized some of them as the fathers of other children I knew, or grocers, or carpenters. Blood was everywhere, and bodies in pieces I couldn’t understand, all over the marsh and grass and the road with the lines painted on it. I did not know how soft and full of blood a human body was until then, nor how hardened the brothers and uncles and handymen of my city, how full of anger and hate. I wish I still did not know. I was so small, just seven; I threw up when I saw it all, when I saw that place I had only just been filled with blood and not roasted nuts, red velvet, fire, song.
I saw their bullets fill up the grey creature on his dreaming wheels. I heard his cry through his trunk, sadder than the moon. I heard one man yell: “demented elephant freak-show!” and I fainted, it all went dark, I wanted to be dead too.
I will never forget him, the trunked and wheeled dream. How when the bullets ripped him, they seemed to light dozens of candle flames in his ribs. How all the hope went out of my body right then, my body far too young to have to give up such a thing.
After, that, everything fell, and fast. The earth moved, again and again, and people became sick. The city smoked, broken apart in pieces, like clouds that one minute are cathedrals with spires, the next all loose and frayed, stones tumbled. Only the churches, the old missions, the temples, still bustled with people. Nothing and nowhere else did.
I don’t know how all the pieces fit together; I was too young. I don’t know who is to blame exactly, but I do know that the doors of the churches and missions and cathedrals, were polished and open when every other apartment and office building was abandoned or collapsed inward. It was like they had been ready all along, the men who led prayers and confessions and called themselves Fathers, who said that we were the clean of soul, who had survived. That this was Judgment. And the women too, whom we called Sisters, who wore brown habits and white cloth over their hair; they seemed so well prepared, as children and men separated from their families staggered in and began to sob on the stones in th
e courtyard. Just like I did.
For ten years after the Fall, until I was seventeen I lived in a cloister, in the place we call the Abbey, which was once called Mission Dolores. Tragedy will age you. My hair had strands of white and I was small, not bigger than a girl of ten. Bells rang all day long with the hour, meal-time, prayer time. We dressed in brown robes the Fathers called habits. I was considered musical, because when I arrived, I hummed and hummed all the songs made up from my story-books, and also a single wild tune which I learned from those roving music-makers at the edge of our city, at the corners of the empty lots. I hummed without stopping for days on end and through the nights, until my throat burned and seared. I hummed until the Sisters who watched over my cloister came into my tiny cell and fed me a drink that made me sleep so deep I remember only darkness. I hummed to keep from the totality of panic that winged in my chest.
God, we were told, had chosen us to live. It was the musicians, in velvet rags, with their mutts, who’d brought it—the sickness, the violence, then the fires and the earth moving and all the smoke. They got in the cracks like weeds in sidewalks, like devils. This could have been easy to avoid, we were told; you can’t let people like that in. Or dogs. Not raccoons either, with the darkness around their eyes like masks, with their paws too clever and too much like hands. Certain seeds were suspect too—unidentified herbs, exotic fruits. Certainly no mushrooms and their unseemly spores.
I didn’t trust the Father and the Sisters from the start. It made my life harder, and it wasn’t because I was more clever than the others. I don’t mean that. None of us had a place to go; all were afraid, so afraid that at night, silence was so rare as to be alarming. The halls filled, by 3 a.m., with shouts, with children crying, women muttering, my own humming, and later on, the sound of my violin. Sometimes, I even thought I heard the whimpers and wails of ghosts, in a language so different from English I couldn’t make out a single familiar word. It was a language like water and the chipping songs of robins. No, I didn’t trust them because of what they taught us about the musicians, and what they allowed me to play on the violin, which was the only thing that finally made me stop humming. I knew differently than what they told me. I knew because of that one long night, edged in yellow pollen and the wheeling Lyoobov.
There was a single thing that kept me from jumping off the tallest roof. Only one. It was a room at the back of the cloisters and the man and woman who lived there. It had white-washed walls like every other room. Big wooden beams darkened the ceiling. They were the only couple to have made it through the Fall together. They had a secret that only I knew, and the ceiling of the small room they’d been given to live in was hung with three-dozen bells. I took my morning tea in there with them—some hot mass of boiled roots and herbs from the tired Abbey garden we were all forced to drink daily for our health. The soil everywhere was sour. No one knew if it was poisoned. Nothing grew well that we tried to plant. The trees that grew still on the sidewalks dropped their leaves too early, grew them yellow and curled. But in that small white room, with the woman who called herself Rose and the man who called himself Ash, the tea tasted sweet and round. The sun coming in the windows felt soft on my face and on theirs too. Rose opened a drawer in a beat-up cabinet and took out a sugarcube for us to share on each visit. She had carried them in a tin with her since she was a child, tucked into her belt. When I knew her, she was somewhere near forty. She looked older, and so did he.
It aged them, the massacre down by the bay, more than it ever could have aged me, because they were there. They were in the middle of it. Those men and women, playing fiddles and singing up the blue bonfires, dancing in old costume velvets and doling out roasted hazelnuts and sips of whisky, as the ghosts of bears wandered between—these were their people. Ash whispered to me, tears on his face and his cracked lips, his beard turned all the way grey: “we led them.”
He told me that the grey creature, who called himself Lyoobov, was their desperate and wild dream. He was shot right out from under them. When he fell, they were trapped between his wheels, miraculously, as if he had maneuvered his own death so they might live. It was only when the guns stopped, the ground ran dark with blood and overturned nut carts, that they emerged. No one else was left alive. Not a soul. I felt dizzy and sick when they told me this, although I knew it in my heart. I thought of Krezki. Rose still had her violin in hand, two strings broken along with their pegs. Her fist had been clutched so hard around the neck it took weeks to ease the cramp of that shape; her hand is still curved, like she is cupping water.
“We were deranged,” Rose told me. “We should have run away, run over the bridge and far north, far inland, run and run and never looked back. But like two ghosts we crept through that place so recently full of song and now full only of bodies torn until they couldn’t be recognized, so horrid our minds, I think, shut their own doors and hid. We couldn’t leave them all—we who had led them. We did not know how to honor them. We wandered, picking up every last bell, carrying them in a trash bin we found. We cleaned the blood off in the bay. We hid through all the sickness, all the earth-shaking, those months and months of darkness and the moon not moving, trying to tend and to bury, to burn, all of our dead. In secret, so no one would notice. We watched the bridges fall into the water during the earthquakes. We watched how they fell on their knees first, like our Lyoobov, and we cried. By the time the Fathers and the nuns went on the prowl to save all us disheveled survivors, we looked no worse than the rest. No one knew of the bells at all. No one knew the source of the leathery rain-capes we wore, or the single wheel we carried, bone and skin, big as my chest. In the end, you see, we were shattered, and we were afraid. We did not want to be all alone in the world now broken. And now we’ve found you.”
Rose told me this the first time we met, as a wind shook and chimed the bells, as a big moon peered in. I had found them and their secret because one morning I heard a song coming from that little room all the way down the hall. I was ten then. I crept to the door and I smelled something green and rich coming through the cracks. Despite myself, it made me think of that single night I spent in velvet ribbons, full of wild hope. It smelled like new spring green air; it smelled also, impossibly, of rose oil, of woodsmoke and oats cooking. I sniffed at that door crack for months, quietly, at night. One day the door was open and I peeked in. I saw all the bells—silver, gold, grey, black, rust-orange, lichen green—as small as my pinky tip and as big as my head. I saw the wheel, sitting on a single red pillow in the corner. That’s when I went in. That’s when I went in and I said, straight out, to the worn couple in brown habits who sat by the window, having tea and talking low: “I was there the night before. Krezki fed me rabbit fat and his violin.” The woman dropped her tin cup of tea on the ground. It clanked and spilled, blood dark. The man began to weep.
*
One morning, a few months into our acquaintance, Rose and I sat at the window working on the crude table looms that the Sisters give us, as women, to make cloth with. It is a lumpy and misshapen affair, but blankets are blankets. Ash hummed at a song and pretended to be in prayer, in case any Fathers passed in the hall. A little brown bird, plain but glossy, landed by the window. It had been years since I had seen a songbird. She cheeped lightly. Rose stopped her work, flushed, grew teary. I just marveled at her small and sharp beak, the perfect shapes of her feathers. Rose stood and brought her old violin from under the bed. Two-stringed and two-knobbed. D and E. A high and lonesome sound it made, a little out of tune, when she played me a reel, then handed it over. It was like the wind and that small brown bird at the window, cheeping sweet.
“This,” she said, “is the sound of our Lyoobov and the snow he came from, all shining and sharp, while we slept in the roots of trees and did not know where to turn. Please, it is time you learned it too. I did not think I would have the energy to try this again, but I find, sweet Margaret, that because of you, I do.” Ash touched my long hair like you might a young owl, with tenderness and also
care, and Rose placed it in my arms. I cried. I hadn’t cried at all, since the day of the blood and the guns. It was like the tears had been put elsewhere. Now, they got all of us wet, and left salt crystals behind. The wind hit all of the bells at once, and we smelled that green blood of springtime and hope, right off the backs of the motley dancers and fire jugglers long dead. It seemed, then, to come right from the belly of the violin.
I played it every day. When I woke up. When I couldn’t sleep. To quiet my thoughts, to quiet the world out the window. I played it during mass, to accompany the singing, though I didn’t enjoy those songs. But they gave me a reason to always practice. When I played that two-stringed fiddle, I woke cords of green and walked them through the air and into my memory. I wondered, as those cords flew the windows like verdant-feathered owls, where they landed. If there were people out there whom they touched. I was afraid to leave and to search, because I was afraid I’d find no one. I wondered if there was any hope left for us at all. Or if, as he listened, the moon himself wept. I left out a bowl of water there, on the sill, to catch his white face when I played the violin, to see if he cried.
What I found, in the end, was not the moon’s weeping, but an owl. Krezki, a lifetime before, had called me Little Owl. I saw that he had known my true name, all along.
I’ve heard the story told of myself after Margaret, myself as Little Owl Woman. It is not easy, or comfortable, or natural, for an owl to tell her own tale; we don’t enjoy the process. It is not a hunt, with a mouse at the other end, but a winding way, with so many twists and turns.
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