The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  The hush holds even after she slips away, then it’s as though the Greatwood lets out a breath it’s been holding. I hear squirrels chattering again. A jay scolding in the distance. The deep whoosh of a raven’s wings as he passes overhead, followed by a hoarse croak when he’s out of sight.

  I ask Nanabozho about her the next time I see him and he just smiles. “That was only Nokomis,” he tells me, “doing her mysterious earth mother thing.”

  “Well, it worked for me.”

  “Works for everybody,” he says. “No surprise, when you think about it.”

  I lift my brows in a question.

  “Well, maybe Raven made the world,” he says, “but Nokomis has been taking care of it ever since.”

  “You mean she really is … ?”

  Nanabozho grins, laughter filling his blue-gray eyes. “You bet. Hey, somebody’s got to do it, and nobody else wants the job.”

  “I think we should all help her. I sure would.”

  He looks serious then. “Next time you see her, you tell her that. She could sure use an extra pair of hands or two.”

  There are others that don’t approach, but I figure it’s mostly because they’re shy. Deer women stepping daintily between the trees, bolting when I call out to them, but coming back cautiously once they think I’m not looking at them anymore. A few times I’ve seen a small, quick-footed man with a hare’s long ears hanging across his shoulders like braids. He always gives me a quick, nervous smile, but keeps his distance as he goes along his way. More recently I’ve seen a regular gang of little twig people that look like they’ve stepped out of an Ellen Went-worth painting. She illustrated my favorite book of fairy tales when I was a kid and now I know for sure she was rendering from life. It’s hard to figure what keeps them together—no more than moss and vines, it seems, from the glimpses I get of them. They have high sweet voices and giggle a lot, waving to me and smiling, but they keep their distance, too, which is too bad. I’d love to do some serious studies of them, rather than the quick gesture drawings that’re all they give me time to do as they go trooping by.

  And then there’s Toby. I don’t see him for a while after that day when he ran off at Jolene’s approach, but one afternoon I’m sketching after a long day in the rehab and suddenly he’s there.

  “Hey!” Toby cries.

  I take a step back, startled. He appears to have simply stepped out of nowhere.

  “Where did you come from?” I ask.

  He gives me a mischievous grin.

  “Maybe I came right out of that tree,” he says.

  I smile as he collapses beside me, leaning over my arm to look at my sketchbook. I’ve been drawing fungi again today and I’ve already filled a half-dozen pages. Next trip to Mabon, I’m going to pick up some colors—pastels or colored pencils, or maybe just a stick of red chalk.

  “I didn’t know that you lived in a tree,” I say.

  He leans back against the root and shrugs.

  “There’s a lot about me that you don’t know.”

  “This is true,” I say.

  I turn to look at him lounging beside me, enjoying his merry features and the curious whisper of something wise and knowing that occasionally crosses his mischievous gaze.

  “In fact,” I add, “I don’t really know anything about you at all.”

  “Ask me anything,” he says, as magnanimously as might some ancient king, granting a boon.

  “Okay. What’s the deal with you and Jolene? Why did you take off the way you did when she arrived?”

  He gets a funny look and I get the feeling he doesn’t want to answer.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I guess that was prying. I’m too nosy for my own good. It’s just this gift I have, you see—being curious, I mean—and it’s not one of my more endearing ones.”

  “It’s not that,” he says.

  I can’t help myself. “Then what is it?” I have to ask.

  Still he hesitates. He looks away and won’t meet my gaze and I realize that I’m still, howsoever inadvertently, venturing into some private place. I try to back out again before I make him too uncomfortable. I know what it’s like to have secrets you’re not ready to share.

  “Never mind,” I tell him. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s because I’m not real,” he says suddenly.

  He turns to me, gaze searching my face for a reaction. I’m guessing all he finds is confusion, because that’s what I’m feeling.

  “What do you mean you’re not real?”

  He shrugs. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “You’re real. Somewhere out there”—he waves his hand vaguely in the air in a gesture that encompasses pretty much everything, but I know what he means—“you have a body that’s sleeping while you go gallivanting about here. You’re real. You have a life. A spirit.”

  “You seem to have plenty of spirit to me,” I tell him.

  But he doesn’t crack even a small smile.

  “Somebody made me up,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. A lonely child. A writer. An artist. Somebody. And then when they grew up, or the story was done, or the painting was finished, they let me go. They forgot about me and here I am. Not real. With nothing to call my own, no place to be my home, and who knows how long I have before I just fade away.”

  “Are you saying you were somebody’s imaginary friend?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeats. “I don’t remember.”

  What he’s saying reminds me of Isabelle’s numena, those spirits she called up from someplace else with her paintings. The paintings were like a door that opened up into our world and let them in, and then they could live forever, unchanged, unless something happened to their painting.

  “I’ve heard of them,” he says when I tell him about the numena, “but I don’t think it’s the same.”

  “But why does this make you run away from someone like Jolene?” I ask.

  “Because she’s one of the People and they’re too real,” he tells me.

  “You’re losing me again.”

  “You know about the animal people, the ones who were here first at the beginning of the world?”

  “Sure. Like the crow girls. Or Lucius.”

  He nods. “When someone like me is near them, the sheer potency of their presence makes me even less real. If I spent enough time in the company of one of the People, I’d fade away completely.”

  “Really?”

  He gives me another nod. “I’ll fade anyway, but they’ll just make it happen quicker.”

  “Do they know that?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Why should they care about something like me?”

  I can’t imagine Jolene or Lucius, and certainly not Joe, being so callous and say as much.

  “Your friend Joe’s something else again,” Toby says.

  “I thought he was one of the People.”

  Toby nods. “Second generation. I heard that his father was a crow and his mother a canid. She was related to the Red Dog clan that welcomed the spirits of the corn and squash and first introduced them to you humans.”

  Crow and dog, I’m thinking. That explains the features he sometimes wears in the dreamlands. I try to imagine how his parents got together. You’ve got this bird and you’ve got this dog …

  “But how—?” I begin.

  He laughs, the first bit of his old humor I’ve seen since we started this discussion.

  “They made him when they were in human shape,” he says, still grinning.

  “Of course.”

  “But that’s a rare thing,” he goes on. “Two of the People from such different clans having a child, I mean.”

  “I thought at least a third of the animals and people living in the world right now had some mixed blood in them.”

  He nods. “But his parents were pure bloods, and that’s different. The clans of the People are pretty ins
ular. They mate with humans, or cousins to their clan when they’re in animal form, but hardly ever so directly outside of the clan.”

  “So would you fade around Joe?” I ask.

  “Probably.”

  “If he knew, he wouldn’t put you at risk.”

  Toby just gives me another of those shrugs of his. He’s good at them. Very cool and casual.

  “We just run when we see them,” he says.

  I focus on the “we.”

  “Are there a lot of you?” I ask.

  “More than there are heart homes in the spiritworld. Any one person can make hundreds of us. All they need is imagination. But it requires belief to sustain us, and with that people aren’t quite so generous.”

  Again like Isabelle’s numena, I think. Though not quite the same. Once created, her numena live forever, unchanged.

  “But do the people who make you even know?” I ask.

  “They should know the stories.”

  I know what he’s talking about, all those old folk tales about faerie fading away because we stopped believing in them.

  “But they don’t necessarily know the stories are real, do they?”

  “And there’s the irony,” he says. “For we’re dependent on their belief all the same. And most of us are ephemeral—fading soon after we’re made. It’s very sad.”

  “Well, I guess,” I say. “But I still don’t understand why the—what should I call it?—the hyper-reality of the animal people diminishes you. How would something like that even work?”

  “I think it’s like believing in Faerie.”

  “I thought this was Faerie.”

  He nods. “Except the truth is, this place is whatever you call it. Faerie. The spiritworld. Manidò-akì. People find. what they expect to find here. In many places it becomes what you expect it to be.”

  I give him a slow nod. “Joe’s told me about some of that.”

  “But the other Faerie,” he goes on, “is the one in which people like me live. The one that exists because people believe in it. When they lose their belief, we just fade away.”

  “Like the stories about the old gods,” I say, thinking aloud. We’re back to those old folk tales again. “Or how every time a child says she doesn’t believe in faerie, a faerie dies.”

  He nods.

  I realize that for all my penchant in believing that there’s more to the world than what we can see, that folk tales and fairy tales are based on real, if forgotten events, I never accepted that part of it as being real.

  “But that’s horrible,” I tell him.

  “Yet it’s the life we’ve been given,” he says. “And since it’s the only one we can have, we’ve learned to take what we can get.”

  I study him for a long moment, then lift a hand and trail my fingers from the curly hair at his brow, down the length of his cheek.

  “I don’t believe it,” I tell him.

  “It’s not a matter of believing or not. It simply is.”

  But I shake my head, firm on this.

  “One’s origins don’t matter,” I say. “Once you exist, you are. If a tree, a stone, a house, can have a spirit, then so do you.”

  Now he shakes his head.

  “Maybe it’d help if you tried to believe,” I say.

  That wakes a laugh. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I know I am. It would be so unfair otherwise.”

  “That’s not the best of arguments. We don’t live in a fair world.”

  “Maybe not,” I say. “But isn’t that all the more reason for us to work at making it one?”

  “You argue well.”

  “It’s not something I’m debating,” I tell him, and repeat, “it’s what I believe.”

  We fall quiet then. Toby seems more relaxed since we started this conversation, as though this was something he had to get out of the way before our friendship could continue. Or maybe it’s simply his mercurial nature. He doesn’t seem able to focus on any one thing for too long a period of time. I’ve been accused of that myself, but it’s never bothered me. You could have a lot worse said about you.

  As for me, I’m mulling what I’ve just learned. It explains a lot, about a great many things, but it also sends my brain off on a hundred other tangents, each of them filled with an ever-expanding tangle of questions. I settle on the simplest one to ask first.

  “So what are you called?” I ask him. “You and these other so-called ephemeral people?”

  “We are the Eadar. Creatures of Meadhon, the middleworld.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know that geasan wakes in between places?”

  “Geasan?”

  “Magic.”

  I nod. Both Sophie and Joe have explained this to me. Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.

  “Meadhon is the grandmother of between,” he explains. “The half-world or middleworld one needs to pass through from your world to reach this one. Thin as gauze in some places, wide as the Great Plains of Nydian in others. Some think that all the geasan called up in either this world or yours is drawn from Meadhon. Without passing through the middleworld, you could never be sitting here talking to me.”

  “You mean dreams? But I thought all of this”—I lift a hand—“was the dream.”

  He smiles. “No. The dream is what carries you here. The spiritworld is as real as your own world, only someplace else. It’s the middleworld that provides all the doors between, but it’s a chancy place with no real boundaries and not a great deal to commend it, except for its service as a passageway. The difference between the middleworld and the worlds it joins is like the difference between the People and the Eadar. Except it has a purpose, as do the People, while we are merely whims, long-lived only if we capture the fancy of enough believers.”

  His voice has been changing throughout this conversation, having transformed from the somewhat innocent and happy little fellow I first met to someone with the same merry face, but the sound of an old man, full of a knowledge that has brought him only a resigned sadness, rather than any understanding or even intellectual pleasure. The whisper of wisdom I’ve noticed in his eyes from time to time has come to the fore.

  “Who are you really?” I find myself asking.

  “The face under the bark,” he says. “The child that the Green Woman abandoned to follow the ghost of Grian Eun, the sun bird.” He lifts the hand with the tattoo of the thunderbolt on its back. “This is the sign of her luck medicine,” he adds. “Borrowed from the Grandfather Thunders. And this”—he lifts the other with the thunderbolt encircled—“is that luck swallowed by the earth—the way it looked before Raven pulled the rounded turtle shell that is the world out of the darkness. Though some say it’s the moon that is Nokomis’s heart, and that luck is a twisting snake, not a thunderbolt.”

  His dark brown eyes study me for a long moment before he asks, “And who are you, really?”

  “Just who I said I am. A painter. A visitor here. A stranger, really, nothing more.”

  “And the light burns so bright in you because … ?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  He nods gravely. Then it’s as though someone has passed a hand over his features, transforming them once more. He grins and points upward.

  “Do you want to climb a tree?” he asks. “The twigs at the very top are fat with magic. We could gather up a handful each and become wizards.”

  I start to comment on this abrupt change, but then decide it’s not my place to say who he should be, how he should act. It’s not like who he sees in me is the whole story either. He knows nothing of the Broken Girl I really am. If I’m going to wear a mask, I have to let others wear their own, and not comment when they decide to trade one for another, and then back again.

  But it serves as a healthy reminder that nothing is necessarily what it seems, not here, not in the world where the Broken Girl is sleeping, drea
ming she’s able to walk and paint and live a normal life.

  “Come on, come on,” he’s saying.

  He’s on his feet now patting the tree bark.

  I give that enormous tree trunk a dubious look. The bark’s rough and there are plenty of hand- and toeholds, but the first branches seem to be miles away, and I don’t think I have the courage to clamber up into its heights.

  “I don’t think so,” I tell him.

  “Oh, it’s easy. It’s fun.”

  He goes scurrying like a squirrel, two or three yards up the side of the tree, then peers back down at me, expectant.

  “Not today, anyway,” I say. “I have to go now.”

  Before he can argue me out of it, I wake myself up.

  But we keep talking about it on other visits and finally I put my sketchbook in its plastic shopping bag, put the loops of its handle through my belt so that it’s hanging behind me, and I follow him up one of the trees. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, although I’m climbing straight up, fingers and toes finding easy purchase in the bumps and crevices of the rough bark, I don’t feel perpendicular to the ground at all. It’s more as if I’m going up a gentle slope. And I’ve already decided that if I fall, I’ll just wake myself up before I hit the ground, so what’s the worry?

  I don’t fall. Don’t even come close. I just follow Toby, up and up. We’re like a pair of Jacks climbing a beanstalk, because when we finally reach the immense first branches, there’s another world up there. The dreamworld’s an amazing place, no question, but this might be the most amazing part of it I’ve found to date. I don’t know how many times I looked up into the heights of these giant trees, never guessing there was all of this up here.

  The branches are as broad as a two-lane highway and slightly flat on top, so that we can walk along them, side by side, going higher and higher, pulling ourselves up onto the next levels of branches by way of tangled nests of vines that hang here and there like clusters of ropes. As we rise from branch to higher branch, the twilight gives way to a deep yellow light and then we find actual patches of grass growing on those broad branches, swaths of wildflowers, little pools of clear water from which we can take a drink, other pools where the water’s sat too long and is thick with algae. Frogs peer up at us out of the slimy green, invisible except for their eyes and the triangular tops of their heads.