The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “When you put it like that …”

  This tramp through the woods would be much more pleasant if we hadn’t been driven to it by that bunch of yahoos. Although I know they’re long gone, I can’t help starting every time a squirrel runs through some dry leaves, or a jay gives us a sudden scolding. Geordie still has trouble believing it even happened and can’t stop talking about those three morons—“ … just shooting at us like that. Maybe they were only kidding around, but they could kill someone …”

  Like it’d matter to them, I think, but all I do is nod in agreement as he goes on. Just because I grew up with guys like that doesn’t mean the bizarre makeup of what passes for their brains makes any sense to me either.

  We’ve finished the apple juice and eaten one of the chocolate bars by the time we reach the stream. I rinse out the juice container and fill it up with water.

  “Are you sure that’ll be drinkable?” Geordie asks.

  “No, but what’s our choice? Besides, it’s coming down from the mountains. The most we’ll have to worry about is squirrel poop.”

  I take a long drink, then pretend to retch. Geordie steps forward, features full of concern, then he whacks me on my shoulder when I grin at him. He finishes the water in the juice container and then we fill it again.

  Neither of us have a watch, but by the height of the sun I figure it must be past six. It’ll start to get dark soon. I don’t say anything as we keep walking along the trail, but I’m not planning to keep walking once it gets dark. It’s easy enough to get turned around in these hills in the daytime. There’s no way I’ll take the chance at night.

  The mosquitoes come as the light starts to leak from the sky. They don’t bother me, but they’re driving Geordie crazy.

  “Stop swatting at them,” I tell him. “That just eggs them on.”

  “If I stop swatting them, they’ll suck every drop of blood out of me,” he says, squishing another that was on his temple. He gives the bloody goop between his fingers a disgusted look. “How come they don’t bite you?”

  “It’s just this gift I have. My blood’s not appealing to either biting bugs or creatures of the night.”

  “Right.”

  “Actually,” I tell him. “That’s not entirely true. My real gift is that whenever I’m around bugs, I always manage to be with someone who tastes better than I do.”

  Happily, just as the twilight begins to really deepen, when Geordie’s going completely mad from the bugs and I’m seriously looking for a place to camp out, we come up over a ridge and find somebody’s hunt camp. It’s no more than a one-room cabin, log walls, with a flat tin roof that overhangs a woodpile, but it’ll do us just fine. For one thing it’s got shutters on the window and a door that closes. We can leave the bugs outside.

  Geordie gives it a dubious look.

  “What if whoever owns it shows up?” he asks.

  I know he’s thinking about the yahoos that chased us into the woods in the first place.

  “It’s not hunting season,” I tell him. “And look around. Nobody except for mice have been here in ages.”

  We sweep it out, find blankets in a tin-lined chest, get a fire started in the cast-iron woodstove. With a candle burning on the windowsill, it’s actually cozy. Geordie finds some cans of brown beans, stew, and soup in the cupboard and we make a supper of the beans and some vegetable soup. We leave a couple of dollars on the shelf to pay for what we’ve used. In the morning I plan to go out and scavenge some kindling to replenish the box beside the woodpile. It’s just common politeness.

  I guess this is the night that something romantic could have started between us, but we get to telling war stories about our family life, going into more detail than we ever have before about how we ended up on the streets and the kinds of things we had to do to survive, and I guess that kind of puts a damper on any ardor the situation might have otherwise generated. I mean, it’s about as intimate as you can get, sitting together on the bed, heads leaning against each other’s on the backboard as we talk, and it certainly cements the fact that we’re going to be best friends pretty much forever, but when we’ve finally dismantled those walls we’ve both got there inside us to keep the rest of the world at bay, there’s not a whole lot left over to start thinking about boyfriend/girlfriend stuff.

  The truth is, I’m years from actually being able to have a physical relationship with a guy, and I still can’t maintain one. And I guess Geordie sensed that. Or maybe I’m just not his type. As the years go by I see that whenever he does fall for someone, she’s usually tall and gorgeous. Though at one point my looks come into the conversation, I can’t remember quite how, and he just shakes his head at how I feel about the way I look.

  “I don’t know where you get that idea,” he says. “You’re beautiful.”

  “Right. In a scare-the-children kind of way.”

  “You can’t tell me a guy’s never told you that before.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Just before they come. They only ever want one thing.”

  Geordie sighs. “Maybe a lot of guys do,” he says. “But not all of them. Some want the rest of the package, too.”

  “Well, I’ve never met one of them.”

  I’m not looking at him, and with just the candle across the room on the windowsill, there’s not much light to judge reactions anyway. But years later I find myself coming back to this conversation, wondering if there was hurt in his eyes. Wondering if he’d have said more if he wasn’t carrying around his own baggage. Sophie once told me that the only reason he goes for girls who are so different from me is that he can’t have me.

  “I’m sure,” I told her.

  “Oh, it’s nothing he’d even know himself,” she said. “It’s a subconscious thing. But I can tell.”

  “Because of your faerie blood.”

  She pulled a face. “No. Because I have eyes to see and I know the both of you so well.”

  But I didn’t consider it then, and since I’m the Broken Girl and he’s got a whole other life with Tanya, it’s too late for it now.

  In the morning, we have the rest of the beans for breakfast, spooning them up with our chips. Too late we realize that now we might not have anything to eat later in the day. We don’t have anything to open the cans with and it really wouldn’t be right to take the can opener from this hunt camp. My penknife hasn’t got a strong enough blade to work as a makeshift one, and Geordie doesn’t even have a pocketknife, but we end up taking a can of stew and another one of the brown beans anyway, figuring we’ll worry about how to open them when the time comes.

  We leave more money for the food we’re taking and put in a good load of kindling before we go. When we’re out looking for the kindling, we find another stream in back of the cabin and use it to wash up and rinse out the cans we used. I’m able to get the worst of the pine sap out of my hair, though it could still use a good shampooing. And then we’re tramping through the woods again.

  It’s overcast today arid a little cooler, but the temperature’s still pleasant and it makes the hike more comfortable, except that there are still mosquitoes here under the trees—I guess the cloudy skies make them think it’s dinnertime. Though there aren’t as many as there were last night and walking briskly keeps them from being too much of a bother, Geordie’s still flapping his hand around his head. It’s a good thing they weren’t in the trees yesterday. He’d probably have fallen off his branch while swatting at them.

  The trail leaving the hunt camp is more defined than the one we took to get to it, and after an hour or so the tall pines start to give way to cedars, aspen, birch, and other less easily recognized scrub trees. When we come to what must be a parking spot for whoever owns the hunt camp—a rough rectangle of cleared ground—the trail becomes a track, two ruts with a grassy hump in the middle that runs off in the distance.

  We follow it for another twenty minutes, finally coming to a gate, with a gravel road on the other side of it. Geordie grins at me.

  “
We’re not lost,” he says.

  “At least not in the bush.”

  “Well, I’m impressed. If I’d been leading the way, we’d still be wandering in circles. You weren’t kidding when you said you had a great sense of direction.”

  I give him a little curtsy. “It’s just this gift I have, kind sir.”

  I climb over the gate, then take Geordie’s fiddlecase from him so he can follow. We look up and down the road. The skies have gotten more overcast, making it impossible to place the sun, but I can feel a tug pulling me to the right. I really do have this gift. when it comes to finding my way around, even if I’ve never been somewhere before.

  “That way,” I say.

  Geordie smiles. “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “Yeah, right,” I tell him, handing back his fiddlecase. “Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Enough to try to hammer our way into one of those cans?”

  “Not yet.”

  I lead us down the road to the left.

  “Now if we hear an engine—” I start.

  “I’ll be over that fence and into the bush before you can say ‘The De’il’s Run Away wi’ the Excise Man.’”

  I laugh. “I’ll never be saying that. I can’t even remember it.”

  A misting rain starts up an hour or so later, but it doesn’t wreck our mood. We were already friends before the walls came down and we let each other all the way into our heads. The closeness we’re feeling now doesn’t feel like it’ll ever go away. When we get back to Newford, I insist to Sophie and Wendy that we make him an honorary member of our gang of small fierce women instead of our token boy mascot.

  Geordie pulls a jersey and a jacket out of his knapsack and offers me my choice. I take the jersey and he puts on the jacket. With moisture clouding our hair and leaving a cool damp layer on our faces, we continue to follow the road until, topping another rise, we see the outskirts of Tyson below us. Five hundred yards ahead, the gravel road joins an asphalt one, but we don’t have to follow it down. I know where we are now. Right below us is Hillbilly Holler, the white trash part of Tyson where I grew up. I know how to get down to it through the fields and woods.

  “You okay?” Geordie asks.

  I turn to him, then look back down the hillside. I can’t begin to describe the conflicting emotions that are coursing through me, but okay doesn’t describe any of them.

  “Not really,” I admit, where I wouldn’t have before. “But we’ve come this far, so we might as well finish it.”

  He doesn’t say anything, just reaches out and lays a hand on my shoulder, gives it a squeeze. I offer him a little smile in return and then we set off again.

  TYSON, JUNE

  I’m not really sure what I was expecting. That everything would be the same, I guess. But of course nothing is, and how could it have been?

  The first inkling I get is when we come up through the fields behind the house and I see that my old tree’s gone. All that’s left of that huge old friendly monster is a blackened and charred stump. What wood remains is rotted and covered in fungus and ants. I remember how, even as a little kid, I used to sneak out of the house, day or night, whenever I needed to escape, and I’d just lie under that tree, staring up through its boughs.

  I knew everybody who lived in its branches. The moths sleeping away the day, almost invisible against the bark, and the line of ants that were always marching up or down the trunk. The constant rivalry between the red squirrels and chipmunks. The old crow that used to visit it every afternoon and the jays that would scold me when I approached. Wrens and sparrows were constantly flitting from branch to branch. Sometimes there would be a raccoon, watching me from the lower branches.

  I’d follow their various adventures the way other people follow soap operas, making up stories about why they did the things they did. And at night I’d find the stars through its branches and pretend they were faerie, or at least faerie lights.

  A long time ago, some farmer cleared all this land for pasture. But he spared that tree. Probably it was already big at that time, had lived a communal life with all its brothers and sisters in the forest for decades. Then it had this new life, overlooking the pasture, providing shade for the cattle and something for them to rub up against to ease an itch. The cows went, the farmer probably lost his land to the bank, and slowly the forest started to reclaim the cleared land, which is how things were when the lost little girl I was came out to find comfort under the spread of its branches. I don’t know if I could have survived my childhood without the friendship of that tree.

  All gone now. Tree. Little girl.

  I guess I’ve been standing here forever, looking at the blackened stump. I hear Geordie clear his throat and the sound makes me blink. I feel like I’ve come out of a dream.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I figure this is going to be the echoing question of the day.

  “This was my friend,” I tell him, pointing at the stump. “Probably the only real friend I had when I was growing up.”

  Stuff goes on behind his eyes, it’s hard to tell exactly what. Sympathy for the kid I was. His own unhappy memories. Probably both. He nods but doesn’t say anything.

  The misting rain has eased off, but it’s still overcast. I look past the stump and feel my chest go tight when I see the back of the house. It hasn’t changed at all, except it looks a little more worn-out than I remember it. I can see my window—there still aren’t any curtains on it. As we get closer, I realize it’s not because whoever’s living here now is as poor as we were, but because the place is deserted. The lawn in the backyard is overgrown—if you can call that tangle of weeds a lawn—and everything has an abandoned look about it.

  We walk by the outhouse. The door’s on an angle, hanging off one hinge.

  “Did you really have to use that?” Geordie asks.

  I nod. “We didn’t have indoor plumbing except for a hand pump in the kitchen. Of course the outhouse was in better shape when I was living here.”

  But not by much.

  I realize that, in many ways, the house and yard haven’t changed much at all. This was always a shabby, unkempt place, with junked cars in the front yard, an old fridge, machinery debris and other rubbish in the back. Inside there was cheap, hand-me-down furniture. What we weren’t given, we got out of the trash.

  My parents never believed in more than the most basic upkeep, and that was done by us kids under their vague direction, and usually as a punishment—at least for the boys. I cleaned inside the house and did yardwork because I couldn’t stand to live the way we would if I didn’t. But mostly, it was a way for me to forget my terrors—burying them under fierce bouts of sweeping and cleaning and weeding.

  The real difference I sense here now is a lack of menace, and isn’t that a sad thing to realize?

  “How could I have left her here?” I say, my voice a bare mumble.

  Geordie touches my arm but I hardly feel the contact. I’m overwhelmed by despair for my little sister. That I left her in this place of horror. That I fled for safety with no thought as to what would happen to her, left behind and abandoned by her only protector. I’m as much of a monster as my oldest brother Del.

  Where is she now?

  I’m not going to find the answer here. I don’t know what ever made me think I would. This place has obviously been deserted for months, even years perhaps. Maybe as soon as I ran away that last time, they just upped and moved themselves. Certainly no one lives here now.

  But we proceed anyway, step onto the lawn and wind our way in between the hulks of rusting machinery until we get to the back of the house, the tall wet grass and weeds making our pants wet up to our knees. The screening’s all torn out and hanging loose. The window in the back door is broken.

  “Do you want to go in?” Geordie asks.

  I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak. I know the place has been abandoned, and I don’t sense the menace that was a part of my dai
ly life here when I was growing up, but I’m terrified all the same. Of what, I can’t exactly explain. Ghosts, I suppose. Not of people dead, but of the people we were. My family. Myself. I’m eight years old again, coming home, scared that there’ll be no one there except for my brother.

  It doesn’t matter that I’m not alone or eight years old anymore. Or that the house is empty. My brain knows all of that. But my heart doesn’t.

  Instead of going in, I lead the way around to the front. Once upon a time somebody loved this house. I know that because of the remains of flower beds and gardens that I could find when I was a child. I tried to nourish them, but there’s not much left now. Raggedy tulip foliage topped by dead flower heads that should have been cut off back in May after they’d bloomed. A few hardy perennials are still present, but obviously losing their struggle with the weeds. Irises and lilies. Some lavender. And then there’s the rosebush that used to grow alongside the porch by the front door. It was already a feral tangle of thorns and small blossoms when I was living here. Now it’s spread across the top of the porch and growing up the whole side of the house, a Sleeping Beauty thicket that might one day swallow the house like kudzu.

  I look across the Old Grange Road to Margaret Sweeney’s house. She’s always hated my family. I guess it was because we were the most direct representation of the white trash that moved into these houses that got built on what used to be her family farm. Her home was the original farmhouse, pretty much as run-down now as any of the other structures in what the local people call Hillbilly Holler, except, for all its worn and frayed edges, you can tell that it’s a house somebody still loves. The yard’s tidy, the lawn is cut, the garden beds are weeded and full of flowers. The house might need paint and repairs, but the windows gleam, showing the pretty curtains hanging on the other side of the glass. And there aren’t junked cars and trash all over the front yard.

  When I look at how she’s struggled to keep up the place, I can understand her animosity without even trying. I guess I always did.