“Like corralling horses, ducks and pigs,” said Boots, handing each child a fine white napkin, a porcelain saucer-plate painted with fading bucolic scenes from a long distant rural past—neat brick farmhouses, maids in gowns, gentlemen on horseback—and a set of silver, buffed to a bright shine. Amidst our ragged simplicity, this supperware felt bewitched, molten in its fineness to the children. Like holding the stolen wares of a king from a story they thought was made up, but had turned out to be real, there amidst a rough whispering meadow, beside a blackened pot of stew and a cart all hung with bells and leathers and scratched by the talons of raptors.
They were used to eating from flaking clay bowls fired in the kiln down near the ocean, which many villages shared. The bowls had to be thrown back to the ground after a few weeks because they started to crumble to dirt. In some hamlets, the women wove baskets, small ones the size of plates. These lasted. Everything tasted a little bit like grass or ground. Abalone shells found on the shore, or metal bowls, plastic jugs that could be sliced open, found in refuse piles or by ancient suburbs, were precious.
The children’s hands felt weak as they held that china, stroked the glaze with their fingertips, stared at the silverware, all its curves and prongs.
“Where did you get these? Did you have to trade something very special, like a cup of your own blood?” It was Mouse who spoke, looking at her own reflection in the polished spoon, how the flames from the fire turned it orange. A small sigh of relief passed from Jay to Jeremiah, Samfir to Henrymoss, that someone had spoken. They’d been afraid of dropping the plates because of the sweat on their hands and the way Perches, sitting directly opposite, watched them with perfect stillness, just like a peregrine falcon does a hummingbird, hooked, sharp, waiting, his nose very pointed, his eyes so light a green they were almost yellow, his hair a sleek brown fringe.
Mouse avoided Perches’ gaze, speaking instead to Boots. He seemed to her the sturdiest of the three of us, the most kindly, with big freckled hands and a broad felt hat which he had threaded with wild irises. She was probably right in thinking so.
“This cart, my girl, has travelled distances on its wheels you can’t imagine. On the highways, freeways, all the broken up asphalt, the fireroads, dirt roads, desert wastes. Oh my poor child, how big it is. Oh my children, how sad it is. You wouldn’t understand this kind of sadness, not yet. Some places, there’s not a soul but the crows and rats and raccoons, and old houses full of wine glasses that have not broken even as maples have grown through the roofs. I don’t know why some places stay whole, and others break into a million bits. You are blessed here, the soil is fertile, the nettles grow thick, the bobcats hunt for brush rabbits at dawn, the Fools rose up from their camps and because of it the egret-women and buckeye-men, they’ve come back.”
Mouse kept polishing her fingers over the spoon, but was leaning forward. Boots’ voice has a rasp to it; he’s the one who smokes most of our tobacco. Henrymoss felt Jay’s shoulder against his, electric there, like a blue light was under his skin, as blue as her hair. He felt dizzy as he listened. Her smell of berries and a girl’s sweat tangled in his imagination with Boots’ words.
“My little loves,” continued Boots, “this is the Place Where All the Waters Run to, did you know that? Your Bay is like a big kidney, draining out all the land and what the waters bring across, from the high mountains where the snow is and the clouds drop their rains, through all the flat Valley. Oh the Valley, our wheels moan when they cross it on the old interstate now slick with dust and shattered glass—there is a great grief in that place, my little ones, because so much was covered up with that black stuff, that asphalt, so much water was dammed and is still dammed, or dried up. Oh my poor little ones, my heart, the Valley has had its soul taken out, with no more hope of Flood. I have heard, it is said, that long ago there were tules. It was a waterscape of egrets and beavers and the leaping legs of frogs, the cottonwoods, the wild grapes, the birds who came every winter. Can you imagine, your soul cut from your body and dried up in puddles, after such fullness? I have never seen so many ghosts, so many straight lines of old fields where they once grew food in squares like the squares of houses.” Boots stopped suddenly, looked around at their solemn faces and their sweaty hands on the china plates. He laughed and began to ladle soup with meat into the saucers.
“But as to these dishes, well. It is said, my willowy chits, because I say it, that at a crossroads heading into an old desert town named for an older saint, we three pilgrims, then seeking a Boot of Kidskin and Cactus Thorn, a Bell that Rang the Neck of a Longhorn Cow, and the Perch of the Dusky Hawk, we came across an old woman.”
The children took small slurps of the soup, richer than anything they’d ever tasted.
“You could tell she’d been a looker,” interjected Bells, swallowing his wine and pushing the long braid of his hair over his shoulder. “She’d been fierce, with eyebrows, now wild with age, that bushed and flared, dark red skirts of leather that we thought she might have dyed with blood.” He winked at Henrymoss, who blushed. Boots laughed again.
“Yes, Bells, we all know you had a thing for that old wench, you’d have taken her to bed with you if she’d been a few decades younger, eh?” Bells wiggled his middle finger at Boots and finished slurping his soup through the holes in his teeth. Then he picked up a pair of chimes and began to tickle them with his fingers as Boots kept on with his telling. The children sat, soup spoons still, listening. We always do have that effect.
“This woman may or may not have also been some cast-off dream, some goddess of another people and time, part red-fox, part patroness of kilns and glazes. All I can say, my small fellows, is that she lived at a crossroads in a truck rusted completely orange, so that it looked like an ember, and there she kept trunks of the most beautiful china you’ve ever seen. Twelve bighorn sheep pulled her truck, and four more pulled her trunks of china, on little perfect red wheels. Don’t ask me why all that porcelain didn’t break. She told us she always set up shop at intersections, stayed for a moon or two, then carried on. Her plates and silver she had collected from empty houses and collapsed restaurants as far as the roads and her sheep would take her. She was a bit like us, really, just gathering dishware instead of boots, bells and perches.” Boots came and sat down right beside Henrymoss. The boy inhaled, and smelled his tang of sweat and also that something sweet and dry, which always hangs around Boots, like sage.
“This was years ago,” Boots continued. “One uprising of Fools will loosen the screws everywhere, as far as the fault zones stretch, fractured like broken bones. One uprising is like sending alcohol through a fresh wound, it seeps down all the rifts and cracks, wakes things up. A searing awakening. So, it was after that, of course, and who knows what hole in what abandoned city she’d walked from. Anyhow, mainly we liked that china, because we liked the idea of entertaining guests. Hospitality, that’s an ancient virtue, one hard to come by now. What are pilgrims without stories to tell, and how can tales be told if a feast is not hosted, and must not one’s guests eat off the best plates? Well, we traded for those dishes, this box of silver. Traded things far worse than blood, my child.”
Mouse gasped a little, despite herself.
“Like several dreams, for instance, cut whole cloth from the psyche. She took one from each of us, a snip of transparent blue scissors. And she took a pair of very special boots, made from the skin of a pronghorn antelope six hundred years old and long extinct by then, a bicycle bell, the limb where a northern spotted owl had perched in the Douglas fir forests of the river far to the North, where the Redwoods once grew. These are like organs to us, you understand—like giving away part of your heart. But what, after all, is the point, if not to trade one precious thing for another, and keep moving?
“So there you have it. We wanted to be gracious hosts, feeding tales and tidbits from smooth-painted porcelain. It seemed so genteel, so outlandish, so important.”
Dusk had come by the time Boots fell silent. Stars
pushed out here and there straight above them, like the eyes of gray foxes, yellow and clear. Only Mouse had finished her soup, having a big appetite and more courage than anyone supposed. The other children had barely lifted a spoon. The way Boots spoke, and Bells tinkered with his chimes, and Perches lifted his hands, just so, against the flames of the fire, shaping shadows on the side of the blue and gold cart, had them fixated. Ours is a subtle hypnosis. The brothers Samfir and Jeremiah held hands in the growing dark, not certain if the feeling roosting in their chests was panic or wonder.
“They’re not poison,” laughed Bells, putting down his chimes. “Won’t turn you to stones or songbirds or sap, don’t you fear! Finish up, it’ll have gone cold. Eh, Boots? Hosts must tell tales after dinner, not before or during. You ruin the meal.”
Mouse watched as the others dipped in and tasted it, so rich and spiced, so good they almost choked. Flavors no one had tasted in the villages for centuries—cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom. The buttery flesh of quail changed to something exotic.
Perches reached his arm straight into the air, suddenly, and a northern spotted owl landed there, hooting gently.
“She is the last known in the world,” murmured Boots. “He seeks the Perch where her mate will land, to give her a perfect egg. He may never come; she may never find him. It was her Perch he gave away to the woman with the orange truck for the china.” The owl looked at each of them, one at a time, and her black eyes were peaceful and bright.
It was then that Henrymoss spotted his mother and father, his little sister and his aunt; that Jay saw her grandparents, Mouse her father and uncles, Samfir and Jeremiah their parents, and amidst them others from the village called Nettleburn because of the thick stands that grew up at its edges in late winter in spring. The women knew how to cook the nettles into tinctures, teas and liquors; how to cook them with eggs, with ground up seeds; every imaginable way, and pounded and spun to string too. No one got stiff joints in old age, from all the nettle stings. The people of Nettleburn were gathering at the edge of the field, stepping through the nettles, trailing out from the village like wisps of smoke.
Henrymoss saw Alice, the woman with three fingers on each hand who played flutes when there were dances in the meadow. She always walked with a cane and a gopher snake sleeping against her neck. Mouse saw the girl people called Little-Wheel, whispering about the Wheel of all the stories, because she was hunched, one hand twisted and curled so much it looked like a wheel, though it didn’t really have spokes, and it didn’t spin. Jay saw the man who baked cakes from peppernuts and acorns and traded them in pretty packages tied with red string for nettle liquor. He was walking holding the hand of Jocelyn Strong, once called Joe, who now wore long skin gowns and wild roses in his pony-tail. Jeremiah saw the woman Anise who’d come to Nettleburn as a teenager, run away from somewhere north where the forests were darker and knives still easy to come by. She was tall and long of limb, with breasts that stood up and moved against the edges of her shirt, black hair always in three braids thick as ropes. He was only eleven but he always found her with his eyes, and it made him feel hot down to his heels. His brother Samfir spotted the man who was a sole reader, Old Bishop they called him, because he burned the resin of bishop pines when you showed him your bare feet and he traced their roads of lines with his twelve fingers, told you what they said though he was blind, and got himself around in a wooden cart pulled by gray geese; his legs were shrunken, spindly as brambles. There were others between—someone’s sister breast-feeding a baby and chewing a dandelion root, someone else’s son flirting with the daughter of the man who baked the peppernut cakes, always in leather aprons and a bit round from eating lots of them.
Behind them all, Mouse saw the Wild Folk, who everyone was afraid of but also deferred to, like deer to lions. They’d heard too, that Something New Had Come. They looked mostly like villagers, but their shadows in the moon and firelight made Mouse shiver. They had the shadows of wild things—mushrooms, wolves, coyotes, stags, egrets, mountain lions, hazel trees. Their bodies were part creature too, part vegetable, but part person as well, crowned with the pieces of a shattered world: headdresses of electrical wiring or broken lightbulbs, crowns of gutter piping, waistcoats of shredded plastic bags cut and folded like lace.
“Look what you’ve brought,” whispered Bells to Henrymoss, who turned red and looked pleased. He felt Jay’s eyes on his face, so blue he knew if he looked at her he wouldn’t be able to look away, so he didn’t. Bells stood, smoothed his brown robes, raised a shining bell as black as the round black eyes of the owl seated on Perches’ left shoulder, and rang it once.
The sound moved through the bones of everyone gathered around that blue and gold cart, that hot embered fire. It moved through everyone like water turned to wine. It was heady; it took them by the spine.
“Closer my pretty Fools, closer you nettle-stung ramblers, you nursing mothers and keening fathers look, your children are braver than you. They’ve eaten from our china, they’ve eaten from our silver knives, our forks and spoons. Gather round, we ask for nothing from you, only that you listen if you are brave. Hospitality is a high art and good for any foolish soul. We feed you tales; I will ring and tell, Boots will polish each one like a shoe, Perches, he will make for you the shadows, owl-winged, a puppetry of feather and of hand. We are humble pilgrims long on the road. Let us rest our wheels near your hamlet for a little while, let us ring you our Bells, walk for you the Boots of our tales, show you the highest winged places where the owl and the kestrel perch in your lonesome soul.” Bells’ voice rang through his missing teeth like a bell, deep and clanging and stirring up all the dust in all the attics of all the hearts.
The ragged crowd of thirty, maybe more, inched nearer. Blankets were laid, nettle liquor sent to the front to be handed to Boots.
“Henrymoss,” said Bells, and the boy lurched, and Jay’s hair touched his cheek.
“Yessir?” A gasp.
“A gift for your mother, for raising such a curious and reckless little lad, who’d be the first to sit at the fire of strangers.” It was a tiny bell the size of a hazelnut and similarly shaped, a cream-gold color, with a wooden clapper. When Henrymoss rang it softly, the sound pierced with sweetness, sweeter than any lemon blossom growing in some abandoned lot, a piercing sweetness that was full of thirst. His mother looked up from where she sat in the front of the crowd on a felted blanket edged with yellow embroidered flowers. Jay took Henrymoss’s hand in hers right then, fast, both their palms damp, and he was so full with the feeling of her hot fingers that he didn’t notice how his mother looked straight past him and at Bells, how her hand loosened from his father’s hand, how her eyes turned bright and flushed.
Bells winked at her, and we began our tale.
“It is said, my sweet-blossomed lot, that in the beginning, the universe rang like a bell as it perched in the dark, waiting for its boots.”
I KNOW, MY WIND-WORN FRIENDS, MY HAWK-EYED LADIES, THAT THE story of Anja Born of the Buckeye is a household standard, a lullaby for your wrinkly mewling babes, your restless six year olds, the ditty you sing while scrubbing your pants in the creek or gathering twigs for the fire. It’s that sweet story we use to make us happy, when sad ghosts pick up and walk the cracked Highways before dawn; when women with the hunched backs of grizzlies come out of their tunnels and take, now and then, a line of laundry, a pet dog, a wayward daughter. You tell yourselves the sweet song of Anja because sometimes you wish for Before, when the Tool Sheds stood, when cracks in the sidewalks had not been pried open, when the souls of all wild things were still in forced hibernation. Because you know by now, my sorry lot of fools, that living in a world where rocks have wants and will trip you up with a cane of quartz, a cackle, if you ignore their desires, is exhausting work, and quite unsettling. It might be easier to just go to sleep, to shut it out, to stop listening. You find you can understand how things got to be so, before they Broke, and sometimes you long for those times, and so you tell y
ourselves the happy story of Anja, to make it easier, to make it worthwhile, to smooth over the bumps. Because it is sweet, and it is pleasing, like the new salmonberry blossoms, such a dark pink.
Well, my barefoot black-eyed does, my tatterdemalion crowd, you sinners and you saints, I have here in this cart the true story of Anja Born of the Buckeye, the version told me while Boots was out tramping and Perches out climbing to the tops of trees to feel that aerie air, to dream those aviary dreams. It was told me by an owl who may or may not have once been a woman, who may or may not once have been there when Anja herself was born.
This is not your lullaby, though it is close. I’m sorry to disappoint, but I will, and that’s just that. Same rootstock. It takes place only just after the uprising that was stirred like a pot of root stew by Iris, Ffion and Wheel—only a matter of hours, really. Like waiting for a ready seed to pop its head above the soil line.
You know already, of course, about the gathering of Fools—handless, three-breasted, wheeled, blue-skinned men and women, people who had the touch of otherworldliness upon them, the doorways of wildness open in their guts. How the woodrats and brush rabbits, the coyotes and salamanders followed those marching Fools by the dozens through the tunnels, how the owls followed them through the air. How they set fire to the Sheds that were full of Tools, and with that fire a fierce and tree-shaking fervor danced and sang through all those who were full of smallness and hate and greed. It sent them straight to a madness from which they would never return. This is the Power of Fools, the line they walk, the pact they’ve made with lunacy and her mother, the great silver moving moon, solace of all things chained and silenced in the world. The greatest power of Fools is madness. It is a thing they can swallow and sing. It does not break them as they are already hitched open. It does, however, break a man made only of greed, a woman made only of power.
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