Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Here is what they have said of me:

  It is said that the sound of her wing beats is full of sorrow even as they press the wind and find within it stars. It is said that she is the dream and the grief of a woman some called a saint, a woman who poured water into bowls at night and set them at her windowsill to catch the dark and the moon’s face, handsome as a man’s. By day, she caught the opening of leaves, the way they grow from nothing into spires of light, a green alchemy.

  It is said that an owl came to that bowl of water as she sat in her Cloister at the End of the World. A barn owl, the common kind, who had just eaten a mouse and had blood on the white blade of her beak. That owl landed. She drank delicately through the blade of her blood-streaked beak from that bowl where the moon and the night and the stars rested like fish. It was a cold night, ice on the tiles of the abbey roof, ice on the branches that were still bare of their green, ice on the moon and the stars in her bowl, and the woman who some call a saint looked up as that beak dipped to drink. It felt like a thorn in her heart, it is said, that beak and those eyes so long and black that she finally found she could see the night for what it truly was—an owl, hunting the shadows of earth for the heartbeats of the furred, all blood and warmth in their nests.

  It is said the bowl of water was really her soul. It is said she was a saint because she lived in the abbey in a Cloister at the End of the World, and the Fathers there spoke of God, but it is also said she was a witch, with her heart in a metal bowl of rainwater, reading the night as the city smoked and the gutters cried out poison.

  They say that she began to grow feathers from her forearms at that moment, and each one grew sharp and soft as her sorrow under the dark eyes of a barn owl who knew the night and herself more fully than any of us ever know ourselves.

  It is said when she became an owl, she left behind two people she loved, a man and a woman, and a beast she had seen killed, who was only bones. But owls, of course, have an eye for bones, a sense for bones, that humans do not. In their chests they have a chamber for them, a place to transmute them, crunched, to bring them up again. It is said that for many years she searched the night-ground not for skunks, not for the blue-glowing bones of voles. No, she searched for the bones of a great wheeled creature whose name was Lyoobov.

  They had been scattered all along the edges of the Bay, in the streets of the city fallen to shards, dragged there by dogs. On owl wings she found every last bone. It is said she was only part owl, then, with breasts and a single foot, and her breasts in the dark were cold and hard as moons when she flew. It is said in her eyes the bones shone silver. It is said that a smell of the newest grass, the sound of a violin wailing, lived in the marrow. She flew from one to the next as a pilgrim will do, visiting first one shrine, then another, following a pathway of bones. Except for the vertebrae, the ribs, the finger bones, they were so heavy she flew them one at a time to a special place. She wanted them away from the City that Fell. She wanted them away from the darkness there of which she knew too much. It took her many years to gather all of those bones. While she did, she saw the City scatter into a hundred thousand pieces. She saw the people of the City, and the surrounding towns, gather into Camps scraped together of tarp and tent.

  By the time all of those bones were gathered in one place, she would have been a woman of one hundred years, but she was neither woman nor owl, but caught between, and so she did not age.

  It is said that in order to bury those bones, she made peace with the moles who saw her ice-sharp beak, her feather white belly, and grew cold with the shadow of what looked to them like their death. She perched and sang to them, something like a hoot and the cry of a violin, until they came, and she told them she would guard their tunnels from All Owls if they would only make her a hole, deep in the earth, for the bones of Lyoobov, the dream of the man and the woman she loved. She asked only that they dig with all their hearts, and then help her to cover the hole up again.

  It is said by all the alders, sung by all their yellow catkins and the goldfinches who eat them, that she hung a single bell in the trees above the tunneling moles. She sat in the white branches, ringing her bell, singing poems to the sky in some inbetween tongue, part woman, part barn owl, that sounded quite a lot like a scratchy violin, as they dug.

  When it was done, all the bones buried, she covered the fresh ground with the seeds of poppies and lupine, gold grasses, the bodies of voles. She watered him daily. She hooted through the night, and flapped the air with her wings even as she gathered comfrey leaves with her one hand and her talon and laid them across the earth. She hoped they might knit his bones together, like they will flesh wounds.

  It was nine years she tended that place, perching up in the branches, ringing her single bell that was orange and heavy with rust. The moles called her goddess, and laid offerings of the deepest soil flecked with dirt against those bones. None of their kind were taken by owls in all the time she lived in the trees near them, roosting in the silvery buckeye one season, the alder the next.

  Being only half owl, the other half woman, her hand at last grew restless. She fashioned quills from the feathers she shed, and it is said she wrote strange poems into the branches of one of those trees. No one is quite certain what they said, as she carved in a human tongue and an owl tongue at once, C’s and V’s and A’s interrupted by deep claw marks like runes, and traces of vole and dove bone from her meals. Some say she carved with the quill of her body love poems to a boy playing a piano. Those are the romantics who say such things.

  The only one, they say, who every read her etchings in the alder bark as she tended and circled the grave garden of Lyoobov those many years was a young boy lost in the forest for an afternoon, lost from his camp of tarp, of Toolshed, of dancing fool. He told his sister what he read while they were out collecting dry fir branches on the old tar streets of a neighborhood, each fallen house like a dozing horse. She told her friends, and soon all the children of that camp knew, and whispered about it at night, after their Fool had danced and their Master of the Fire had put out the flames.

  A tale given to children will change in very odd ways, hooted and hung and feathered. It is said by those little ones of long ago that she wrote down the story of her Lyoobov, her dream, and also the story of All Owls and How They Make the Night, and so it was a broken tangled poem, part diary confessional, part owl-song, ripe with the red hearts of voles and the constellations they make through the dry grass, with some brief mention of how the stars above were themselves voles moving through their kingdoms, ready to be swallowed by that greatest of owls, the Moon.

  It is said by the boy in the ripped denim who found it, his sister in her black braids and red sweater who told it, sweeping the tarp-tent for her mother, that the end of the poem was all owl-scratched. That she had become, by the end of those long years, completely a barn owl and no more woman. That it was hard to tell if those marks were full of anguish or the purest joy.

  And so she left Lyoobov there, bones tended by the moles, and flew away into the dusk hooting her worship of vole heart and meteor, all owl. She would have stayed there by him, her Lyoobov, until her death, if she had remained in any way a woman and not wholly an owl. But perhaps it was a blessing, an act of grace, to be washed clean by owlness, and only follow the heartbeats of the dark night, no longer the sorrows of the human world.

  It is said when she hunts she hunts not for mice but for the night itself, the shadow of the earth and world. It is said she hunts for the night itself, but what is it we hunt through the night, passing between stars and darkness like needles, if not our dreams? What is it we bend over with bowls of stream water tinged with the bark of willow roots, holding them in our single hand, pouring them on the earth where the bones of our heart rest, if not that single and final dream?

  IN THE ALDER WOOD, UP HILL FROM THE CREEKBED, THERE WAS AN open space in the trees and an encampment made of tarp, cob and old canvas tents. In a sunny patch, the women grew carrots and leeks. There,
I danced and was called the Fool. They thought I was the product of the nuclear power plant leakage, or pesticide waste, of the Fall, but my mother told me differently, and I knew that she was wise. She told me I was part spider, part wagon, and the rest of me girl. What else can explain the wheels that are my feet and how they collect dew, like spidersilk, at dawn?

  There were three dusky-footed woodrat nests next to the Camp. They looked like huts made of twigs. Sometimes I wanted to curl up inside of them and hide. I never felt like rolling for the Camp people on my tender and wheeled feet, but I was always afraid of what they would do to me if I didn’t. Some nights, the people were bored, or restless or maybe they felt insecure, with the stars so many above us all. The children sang songs that mocked my curve-backed shape. They called me Quasimodo and they threw old plums. They made jokes, loud enough for me to hear. Sometimes a girl my age with one blind eye stood up for me. Or at least she didn’t join in. But she was never brave enough to come talk to me on her own. I could only keep on with my rolling dance. It wasn’t so much of a dance, really, just spirals and pirouettes on my wheels. The people liked to stare at something different, something freakish, and forget their own lives in their disgust, their fascination.

  I learned to juggle, because that’s what they said Fools used to do, in the courts of kings all wrapped in colored velvet. Nobody really knew what they were talking about, but I wasn’t in a position to argue. I juggled buckeyes, polished and fallen, or old baseballs. I taught the woodrats to dance on the curve of my back to the strange twanging of the little metal jaw harp my mother gave me when I was small.

  It was only because I wanted a friend that I sat at the entrances of their three tall woodrat nests, and I talked. I told them about my mother, who everyone called a gypsy, or a witch, or both words at once, strong and dangerous words that have stayed in our minds, under our tongues, since before the world broke, a hundred thousand telephone wires snipped and dead. The land bucking and leaping like a panicked deer. They called her those things because she lived in an old hay cart pulled by six tule elk, the last to be found anywhere, that was painted purple and yellow. She didn’t brush away spiderwebs when they were built between one of her tent poles and the side of the cart, between axle and wheel. If a spider spun a web between one of the wheels and the ground, as they often did on cold October mornings, we would stay, for two days or three weeks, until the web fell in of its own accord, until the lady in the middle had eaten her fill and decided to move on.

  There was a tent made all of felt over the bed of the cart. The elk who pulled it were female, so they didn’t fight or get their antlers tangled. My mother let them graze often, in the old grassy center divides on the empty freeways, in the pastures that were once for cows. She sold medicines. That’s why they called her a witch. Her medicines always worked. She also sold pretty scraps, hoarding them the way woodrats do.

  My mother liked pieces of glass jars, the kind once made for preserving blackberries or plums. She liked marbles and coiled bedsprings, coppery pennies which she polished at night when we stopped to make a fire under the stars. She collected tea tins, clear, orange plastic bottles used for pills, beautiful spiraling screws, spoons made from silver, old keys, tin whistles. She never told me exactly where she found that small key-shaped jaw harp, nor how she knew just the way to balance it against the teeth and coax out that strange lonesome twanging. I think it came from the City, and Before, and we didn’t talk about it, but I loved the way it made the place between my eyes hum. During the short peaceful time of my childhood, I spent hours with it while the elk grazed and my mother gathered elderberries.

  Above all things, my mother loved to find the rectangular “brains,” as she called them, from inside old computers and phones. They shone metallic, with a thousand strange lines and squares and geometric patterns, some ridged and some flat, like maps to the underworld. She kept all these things in neat baskets inside our moving home, and showed them to customers who came for elderberry syrup, for lemon balm and poppy petal tea, tinctures of coastal sage for menstrual cramps, datura and dark speckled mushrooms for visions.

  I was only nine when she died. I should be forthright, I said to the woodrats. I was only nine when she was killed. I was only nine when they surrounded our little cart, when they shot the elk for food and took us here, to burn her the way witches have always burned, they said. I alone was proof of her dark power, they said, with my wheels for feet, the way I rolled, my body more curved than a raccoon’s. The people of the Camp burned her. They made me watch the fire take my mother piece by piece, screams that licked up toward the sky with the flames. Only I, listening to my mother scream, sick all the way through my bones and out my wheeled feet, could hear that in her screams she was also singing her curse.

  Afterward, they buried her black bones in a hole, and they had a feast. They ate the body of one of our elk. I was sick and the tears made my body sting with salt. They tied me up to keep me from running, though I never would have got far on my slow and glistening wheels.

  So you see, I told the woodrats, sitting at the messy entrances of their dens, I don’t do this because I want to. I do this because I am afraid they will burn me too, if I try to escape. I am not as brave as my mother. I do not want to die. And where would I roll to? I asked them. I know what people do now, to us, to the ones who are strange. It is worse, sometimes, than burning.

  That was when they started to come out, to run up my arms and sleep on the hunched plateau of my back—when I told them the truth, that she was killed. I think they liked the vibrating little metal jaw harp too, which I played almost more than I spoke, making sounds like stars calling out to each other. I taught them to stand up and balance my mother’s golden marbles on their heads. I taught them to twirl, and to somersault. I don’t know why they listened to me. Maybe it was the folded-up scraps of aluminum I left at their twiggy entrances, like offerings. I folded them as I talked, into tiny crisp birds, balloons, stars. When I came back, they were always gone. Maybe it was just that I sat so often, talking to them like you do to friends. Or maybe it was my wheels, spoked and flesh and spidersilk.

  I say they are spidersilk, though of course I don’t remember my own conception. I never knew my father. But my mother told me, when I was young and barely understood, that my father was a man and also a spider, and I believed her. I still believe her. What else is there to do? It was on early, dark nights that she would tell me about him, when she was quieter than usual and had a sad, sorry look at the edges of her lips, at the corners of her dark eyes, tucked into the coils of her brown braids. She’d have already lit a fire from dry oak twigs in the narrow woodstove tucked into our tent. The elk would be unhitched and grazing. They never ran away. I don’t know why. Maybe because my mother loved them, and they knew it. She’d put me on her lap and let me have a sip of her brandy.

  “It was a day just like this one,” she would begin, gesturing to the early dusk, the chill, the leaves the color of fire, and falling. She said a spider had made a web attached to the left back wheel of the cart one cold November morning. She saw it while she was out feeding the elk a treat of wild oat and honey cakes. Dew hung on all the threads. The spider in the middle was as orange as the leaves, legs striped just like stockings. His body as round as the moon, save one single taper, where the thread came out. My mother was mesmerized. She sat down in the wet grass, a big flat meadow right next to the old airport runway, cracked with weeds, and watched him weave. She imagined what it would be like to have silk thread coming right out of her own body, to build her own home in the air. She longed for that. She watched him for days, even when he sat motionless in the center of the web for hours.

  Then, one morning a week later, when she ran out early under a wet blue dawn, the spider was gone and the web ripped to shreds by raindrops. She was so sad, the rest of the day, she told me she couldn’t eat. She closed up the small back door of the haycart, kept her vials of herb on the shelves, and did not answer to any kn
ocking.

  Night came clear, with armloads of stars. Finally, my mother opened the felt flap door to look up at those stars, which reminded her of dew on spidersilk. A man was sitting right outside, in the mud, smoking a long, orange pipe and holding a book in two hands, reading it in the dark. At first my mother said she only stared—he wore clothes made of velvet, the orange of sunsets after storms and persimmons about to fall with ripeness from the branch. Black and brown lines spiraled across his velvet coat in the finest needlework. It was only slowly that she saw how he smoked his pipe with one hand, held and read a battered paperback with two others, reclined in the grass with still two more palms, and had three resting quietly in his lap. It felt like dizziness at first, all those arms. She counted them, and when she got to eight, he looked up at her from his book, removed the orange pipe from his teeth, which she saw were quite sharp, and said, “I’ve been knocking all day now.”

  My mother told me she let him in, and they made love on her narrow bed of felt and fur. She was held in eight arms instead of two, and the whole cart turned warm and orange as an ember around them. Even though I was too young to understand, she would say to me, brushing my hair with her hands and blushing, “to make love with an eight-armed man, my wheeled child, that is beyond all the pleasures of the world.” She never told me more than that, only how, in the morning, she woke to find him nowhere, and the inside of her haycart-tent covered, from side to side, with spiderwebs round and pinwheeled. They clung to the glass jars and plastic bottles, to candlesticks and tabletops, to each ceiling corner.

  “It was the spider who first invented the wheel,” my mother would say, at the end of the story, “not us, not man.”

  The woodrats listened to my talking every day, and then they came out, every dusk, walking on silver feet. I loved their silk ears and the fur on their tails. Three of them came normally, now and then four. They climbed my arms, up the slope of my back. I gave them each a small and shining object from my pocket—silver key, paper clip, copper-colored battery. It was these objects they danced with, on the raccoon hump of my back, as I rolled on my two flesh and spidersilk wheels in slow spirals and figure-eights. They stood on their hands and looped their tails, balanced their treasures on their heads, swayed to the sound of the jaw harp.