Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  You know already about the young boy Martin and his Miracle Frances, the thumb bone of St. Francis of Assisi, singer of fish and fowl. You know the songs of his friend the Fool. He was handless, the keeper of seven rabbits that glowed like glowworms in the tunnels of the underground. How the moles below dirt turned bone again to flesh, and Frances, reborn, spoke to those moles who were in some way his mothers and his fathers, and at his request they dug networks of tunnels, each emerging at the base of a Tool Shed, until all one hundred and nine camps had been mapped, and the Fools could march. The roots of oak, buckeye, fir, alder, the lace-runners of mushrooms, wriggled in the tunnels as the Fools passed. They wriggled with relief. Those tunnels echoed as the sheds burned with lunatic music, songs of loonery so weird and so beautiful, humming the ground like a giant jaw harp, that madness got into people right through the soles of their feet.

  You nod. You know these tales. You are impatient for Anja, the girl of all your lullabies, sweet beacon of buckeye and change. You’ve been told the tree itself birthed her, pollen and chlorophyll dusted, from the flesh of a nut—a spontaneous and virgin birth, bark and burl to babe, a sort of miracle, a sort of thank you present from the souls of all things wild and freed. A sign that our kind was again a part of the family of things. You’ve been told that after Anja, the women with egret necks or grizzly bear backs, the men of granite vein bones, of black-tipped tail, of coyote eye and very long smoking pipe—all the forgotten ones, the in-between wild things, returned. Took up residence in collapsed houses. Sold bone broth from the thickets of manzanita, ladled out of impossibly fine baskets. Redrew the lines of our world, remade our mythologies, my fine friends, put us in our place. Because the Fool’s Uprising, and Anja’s birth, had opened the cracks up again, the doorways through the hedge, the rusted trunks and shadows. Let magic come out like an earthquake racing along the rifts of the world. We live now in a place of crossroad crones and woodrat circuses, a world where you have to leave pennies polished with lemon juice at the mouths of badger holes, bee pollen at the bases of oak trees where blue jays are raising their sapphire chicks, vials of fermented huckleberry juice at the openings of sea caves. Ah, yes, you smile and look at each other, you whisper, yes, he tells it well, but what about Anja, the girl who told us we belonged?

  The story goes like this.

  It did not begin with Anja, the brown-skinned babe of unusual beauty and perfect proportions. In fact, she had neither, but we will get to that later. It began with the girl called Wheel, whose mother was a wagon-driving witch, whose father was a spider. It began with the Wheel of legends, not because she was one of the Three, with Iris and Ffion, who gathered the Fools, but because she, my staring sons, was Anja’s true mother, and no buckeye.

  You see, it had been happening all along, a little bit here and there, this Opening of the Cracks. Magic got trapped in a woman’s womb, now and then, like a fine dust. Back then, it was called Deformity. Or it was called Madness. Wheel, you see, was a Fool for a camp in the Alders, and treated as such, as a freak with a hunched back and bones in her feet shaped like wheels. A great menstruation of spider silk. She had already started to let it back in—the wild heart of things, shape-shifting, many-legged, blue-milked, painted in mandalas of fungus and grape-vine. Just by weaving those wheel-tracks through the tree tops, just by singing to them at dusk—the red alders and buckeyes, the Douglas firs and bays. Truly, it must have been in her mother too. She did, after all, invite the love of a spider who became a man just to tumble and hold her in his eight arms all clad in orange velvet. She always knew that all things have faces. She had never forgotten them, like the rest had.

  Well, this Wheel, approximately nine months before the uprising of Fools, she won the love of several trees. They became men just to reach out and hold her hand. She was so surprised by her first suitor that a fit of laughter seized her violently and it lasted well into the night. The poor fellow was humiliated into retreat. He was a hearty young Douglas fir with fine green eyelashes, broad and thick arms, a suit of scaled brown, hair evergreen and spiked in its thousand long matted braids. He left behind his gifts in a whorl of her web and fled: a glass bottle of pure, thick resin the color of the long-extinct fur of the golden beaver of which Boots has seen a single pelt; the perfect skeleton of a red tree vole, those little rodents who once lived exclusively in Douglas fir branches, eating and drinking only pine needles. Wheel giggled only further at the sight of these gifts. It was hard for her to imagine a man, any man, courting her, the hunched and wheeled Fool who produced spider silk in lieu of menstrual blood.

  By the third suitor, the fragrant and smooth-limbed young man who was also a bay laurel, Wheel kept her laughter in, a grin only. The girl had not laughed much in her life, and so had some trouble controlling herself once she finally had cause for mirth. Wheel had accumulated quite a dowry by the time she found the man who was also a buckeye sitting in the area of her web-tent home that she called the breakfast room. There, she drank morning tea made of Douglas fir tips, she ate bay nut cakes and she watched the sun turn part of the sky molten as it rose. It was the only place with a real chair, hoisted up on a thread—an old rocking chair she had found in a pile of wood and cement that had once been a house. The chair didn’t really rock, but it reclined, and that’s how Wheel found the Buckeye, legs crossed, enjoying the rising ember of the sun. He drank something dark and hot, like coffee, though this beverage wafted her way with the smell of dirt.

  “Am I to have no peace?” Wheel said when she found him there, in her quiet morning place, a place meant to be un-breachable. This time she did not feel like laughing at all—at the absurdity of being courted, of being desired by men that were really trees, of being brought gifts of resin, wreath, soap, bone, treated the way women with smooth cheeks, fine figures, straight teeth, soft laughter, are treated, not crippled Fools.

  This time she was annoyed. She did not want the gifts and their clutter, the rhyming words of love. She wanted to sit in her chair, drink her tea, watch the sun, stay separate from the world that had only done her harm. She crossed her arms as she rolled toward him.

  He was the one to laugh. A dark, rich sound, many-limbed and smooth. When he laughed, Wheel saw the lines around his eyes and his mouth, tracks made from mirth. She saw that he was cream-skinned, dark red-haired, lean and graceful. He was so quick, she thought from this angle as he laughed, that his arms or his legs were many, and branching.

  “I’m sorry,” he laughed, “but you aren’t very good at being stern. It doesn’t suit you at all.”

  “If you knew,” said Wheel, “how many of your kind have come trailing mud and roots and old leaf trash across my floors these last weeks, asking for my hand in marriage, as if I were something to be given away, as if I were some rare princess, as if I would make any sort of wife at all, for a man who is really a tree. Well it’s absurd. I’m sick of the intrusions. I’m beginning to think it’s all some kind of sick joke. I do not desire more ridiculous proclamations of love. I’m not made for it.” She rolled backward slightly, tearing up a bay leaf in her fingers.

  “Ah,” said the Buckeye, uncrossing his legs, sipping the hot brewed dirt in the burl of his cup. He looked like he might laugh again, but did not. Wheel noticed that his eyes were green and as textured as a leaf. He showed no signs of moving from her chair.

  “This is not a game to me, this life I have made. I have made this out of necessity. This is the only place I can belong.” Wheel moved closer, and found that the Buckeye smelled sweet and smoky at once, a smell she liked despite herself.

  “We have only come,” he said, “because you’ve beguiled us with your gentleness, because you speak to us at night, because you play old sad songs with stars in them through your teeth, because you build your webs gently between our branches and never harm a twig, because we can feel your hands, and they are stronger and more tender than any woman’s—and we have felt many hands, I can assure you of that. Did you not realize you had called us?�
� Then he laughed again, and stood, and gestured for Wheel to take possession of her chair.

  “And of course,” he finished, as she reluctantly sat, eyeing him, “because your father was a spider. We can’t ignore this.” The Buckeye straightened his waistcoat, which was a rich red-brown, smooth like velvet, but made of no cloth ever seen in this world.

  “What does he have to do with it?” asked Wheel, curling her wheels against the legs of the rocker.

  “He himself was beguiled like we have been. Right out of his natural form and into a body your mother would appreciate in the way that women appreciate the bodies of men, and not spiders.” He winked. His teeth were very straight and flat, like a buck’s.

  Wheel blushed, thinking of her mother’s stories, the eight arms, looking again at the Buckeye who leaned now into the top boughs of a nearby fir.

  “Well,” she said finally. “Maybe I’ll let you stay long enough for tea.” The woodrats who were her oldest friends had scampered up to her broad shoulders by then, and sniffed the air near the Buckeye. He held out a smooth and long fingered hand to one. In it grew, before their eyes, a perfect sweet nut, which was taken into small woodrat hands and eaten promptly.

  “Magnanimous of you,” murmured the Buckeye, and sat down cross-legged at her wheeled feet.

  The next bit, my thistle-thatched lads, my wrinkled grandpas, my fox-pawed ladies, gets just a bit steamy. I’m sure you’d anticipated as much. I’m sure you can imagine better than I can, blushing, tell you. I’m sure you’ve guessed already that they never did have a cup of tea, they didn’t make it so far. No indeed, because that wise and wily Buckeye, impossibly soft in limb and eye—what woman could, in the end, resist?—and thick with a smell of sweet smoke, he put a long-fingered hand on the flesh and bone wheel of Wheel’s right foot. He stroked the spokes as though they were the perfect handful of sunlight his leaves had always craved, as though he were a normal man, not a tree, and this was the most profoundly beautiful foot he’d ever set eyes on.

  Ladies, you can imagine the sensation that then rushed through that lonely girl’s chest—or maybe you can’t, never having been quite so different, quite so alone. What followed is too sweet for my words. What followed filled the whole day and the whole star-web of night, it engulfed and held Wheel until she knew not if she was buckeye bark and leaf, and he knew not if he was wheeled, webbed, curved as a human woman, and as strong. What followed called the stars down to rest on those great swathes of web that tented through the treetops, silken as buckeyes, round as wheels.

  I leave them, the lovers, for your imagination, entwined. The great cracking open of the heart, like a glossy nut.

  Like all entwined lovers, the robins, the chickadees and the thrushes of dawn found them. The Buckeye left her with kisses on her wheels while she was still asleep. In the cup made by his body in the web, he left behind a big, perfect buckeye nut, polished to the gleam of a planet. It was hinged, and inside carved with minute detail—a whole network of buckeye roots, winding and branched as city streets, such a vast expanse of pathways carved in that that single nut, they looked finer than hairs.

  Indeed and of course, solid as any nut, there was a baby growing in her, and she knew it right away, how the balance had changed in her wheels. She carried that baby through the treetops, singing, spying on the robins and owls to see how they raised their eggs, their chicks. She watched the raccoons who nested up high, and the squirrels. How they ate the afterbirth, when it was over.

  When Iris and Ffion found her, four and a half months later, Wheel was just getting round, her belly smooth and brown-tinged as a buckeye. No one tells you this part: that of all three of those famed witches, one was with child, rolling about pregnant and moody as a wind. It has been said, by those who know this version of the tale, that it was only because of her pregnancy, the mammalian tempers, intuitions, dreams, that swept her like fires, that the Fools of all camps were drawn in and grew brave enough to follow. It was because of her aches, her cravings, and that carved buckeye she kept always in her pocket, growing dreamy when she touched it, that she found the boy Martin underground, his handless Fool friend, the seven knowing hares, the thumb bone of St. Francis and the scraps of his wooden Chinook. And you know, of course, that without them no tunnel could have been dug or followed, and then no songs, humming eerie and twanging through the ground, no fires, no delightful and devastating waves of madness.

  But no one except Iris and Ffion knew that Wheel was pregnant. She kept it quiet. Didn’t want to be judged—a woman alone and with child. And no one guessed, since she was already curved in impossible places; no one knew that the great wheel of her belly was in fact the child Anja.

  When it was time, the water broken, the contractions coming, she found herself wheeling out alone into the woods, on the ground, no webs to follow and feel safe upon. It was like being pulled, but by nothing she could see. She found herself at the base of a wide buckeye, in the heart of a buckeye grove, their branches a nest of silver and green, the ground around them sweet and smoky in its scent with the decay of fallen leaves. She fell down on her knees, screaming her sudden pain, and the carved nut rolled from her pocket. It rolled right to the base of the tree, touched it, and the bark, they say, curled back just like a door.

  Inside stood a woman all cream-gray from her toes to her hair, and speckled with freckles the shade of buckeyes. She wore a big red shawl around her waist, nothing else. Her hair was piled in a wiry cream-mass on her head, and she was very old. Wheel had never seen a woman so vibrant in all her life, let alone one so old.

  Deep in the root rooms of that buckeye grove, where everything smelled sweet and smoked and damp, like the man who had loved her nine months past, Wheel gave birth. The child came out in a soft-skinned buckeye pod. The woman in red rubbed Wheel’s stomach and feet throughout, ordered her when to breathe and to push, like any good midwife, though of course she was really a tree. She knew, more than any of us do, what it was to bear children, a thousand at a time.

  The babe called Anja that people gathered at the base of the buckeye to see, saying that she’d been born right out of the tree, was of course really the child of Wheel, and carried up to the branches and open air by the woman in red. Word spread fast, first among the great horned and the barn owls, then among the voles and rabbits and blue-bellied lizards they hunted, then the badgers, the foxes, the skunks, the anise swallowtail butterflies.

  This is the point at which, in the lullabies, we say the first doors creaked open. The little gnarled people who were also chaparral bushes, stones, roots of dandelions, the brown and long-nosed people who were forgotten dreams and deities and wights of marsh, mud and nettle patch—they heard the singing underground, smelled the smoke and flames of the Tool Sheds burning, and crept out finally to see this baby growing in a buckeye shell, wrapped in a very quotidian checkered wool blanket. They brought gifts for the little Anja—buckeyes which they called her brothers and sisters, the sweetest pieces of stone, petal, ceramic, that they’d been coveting for centuries. A few of the Fools were brave enough to join those wild ranks, that truly dirt-smelling lot, clothed in tunics and dresses the same rich colors as their homes—green dandelion stems, brown gopher holes, blue pockets of sky. Everyone cried, like you are crying now, madam, and you too, sir. Even, they say, the sun paused and looked, and the moon too, as she rose at the other end of the horizon. The ashes from all the burnt Tool Sheds were heaped in the shirt loads at the base of that tree, and Anja cooed slightly, enjoying the attention.

  But you see now, those old lullabies are not quite right. Anja was not born of the buckeye. We are not mothered nor forgiven by trees.

  It was not that our kind was forgiven all in one go, and thus emerged Anja, proof of the erasure of our sins. The load of those sins is quite big and bulky to carry, but we must. It does no good to blame those before you for the world you have inherited, and then do nothing for it. No, our sins were not erased by Anja, not then or now. Anja was borne by a
human woman, Wheel. It is true that she was fathered by a Buckeye, but the only reason for such a fathering was the woman Wheel, how she in her solitude sang to the trees at dusk, stroked and told tales to the woodrats, left gifts out for the stars. You see, she earned the love of the Buckeye, she earned it so completely that he walked out of his own bark and roots to love her in hers. It is true, little Anja was born just as the doors at the edges of the bramble-thickets, fallen houses, stone walls, were opening, but she was mostly the product of a mother’s hard work, her lonely strength, her utter strangeness, her body once called deformed, her eyes which saw the faces of the spiders and the trees and called them family.

  This is a story with a moral, my mother hens, my father ferns, my purple flowered lasses. But I’m no moral teller, I’ll let you find it resting in your teeth. I’ll leave you with it like we left the lovers, buckeye-slick and twined, full up and rich.

  As for the babe called Anja, all I can tell you for certain is of that unconventional christening—owl watched, badger blessed, stroked by old underground hands. After that, her mother took her wandering the treetops. They say a whole village of men and women who were once Fools lived up there with Wheel and her daughter. That they made a home in the center of a great pinwheeling web attached to the tops of a vast buckeye grove, that it was like the striped silk floor of a circus tent, whorled with spider-silk nests where people slept, ladders where they descended, towers where they climbed higher to drink honey wine, make jokes and play cards closer to the wheeling stars. They say Wheel was a sort of Queen, her daughter a princess, with her arms curving oddly like a buckeye’s, cream-pale and freckled everywhere. That she had five legs, all wheeled, slender and graceful as roots, which she kept under a skirt of silver so smooth it looked like moving water.