[Laughs.] Well, I think there’s plenty of gossip.
But it’s not mean-spirited. Whenever I hear you talked about, it’s as though you’re a mischievous little sister—even to artists many years your junior.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to rule or serve, only to be allowed to go my own way.
Isn’t that the ambition of all artists? To make their oum mark?
Is it? It seems to me that people make art for all sorts of different reasons. I’m not interested in leaving a body of work behind. But I am interested in promoting communication between everybody—and not only through the arts. And I’m determined to show through my art that there are alternatives to the way the world is these days.
You mean by showing us that there are faerie and magic?
The magical beings in my paintings aren’t the point. The point is that we’re not alone. That we’re surrounded by spirit and spirits. I truly believe that if we do our best to live a good life, to treat each other with kindness and respect, we can make the world a better place. The faerie are a representation of that betterness—is that even a word?
It is now, if you want it to be.
The faerie represent the beauty we don’t see, or even choose to ignore. That’s why I’ll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important.
“Death makes equal the high and low.”
What’s that from?
John Heywood, I believe.
Too bad we have to wait for death to make a balance.
Isn’t that the truth. But to get back to the faerie and the other magical beings in your paintings …
They’re just how I tell the story.
So the faerie aren’t real?
[Smiles.] I never said that.
They (fairy tales) make rivers run
with-wine only to make us remember,
for one wild moment,
that they run with water.
—G. K. CHESTERTON, from Orthodoxy
It was you, it was you, who said that dreams come true
And it was you, it was you, who said that mine would, too
And it was you who said that all I had to do was to believe
But when your ivory towers tumbled down, they tumbled down
on me
—FRED EAGLESMITH
from “It Was You”
It’s the family you choose that counts.
—ANDREW VACHSS
Author’s Note
I hope regular readers of my books will forgive the reappearance in these pages of the short story “In the House of My Enemy,” but having dealt with this element of backstory once already, I didn’t have the heart to recast the events for this book simply to say it in new words. Jilly goes through enough already with what happens to her in this novel.
Special thanks to Holly Cole who, while she didn’t write “The Onion Girl,” which gives this book its title, certainly made the song her own with the interpretation she did on her CD, Dark Dear Heart; Fred Eaglesmith for all those little pieces taken from the edge of life and for making them so heartfelt and real, and for letting me quote from his unrecorded song “It Was You”; Jane B. Winans for sharing her professor’s comments on fairy tales; Gillian O‘Meagher for bravely sharing her own horrendous experiences of surviving a car crash; Paul Brandon for reminding me of Jilly and Natty’s friendship; Andrew and Alice Vachss—Andrew for his ongoing support and Burke, Alice for all those intriguing animal stories; Honey Vachss for inspiration; David Tamulevich and Cat Eldridge for those wonderful packets of CDs they keep sending me, God bless ’em; Charles Vess, Rodger Turner, Pat Caven, Terri Windling, the Kunzies, and the Red Rock Girls for general goodwill and keeping me sane (or happily not, as the case might be); Karen Shaffer for bravely sharing her own war stories, and for kindly vetting the manuscript and being her red-slippered marvelous self; and to MaryAnn, as always, for her love, comfort, and support, her astute reader’s eye and red pen, and for getting me to add those two chapters.
For those readers who continue to write and ask for musical references, inspiration was obviously well served by Holly Cole and Fred Eaglesmith, as noted above. (Which makes me think, I’d like to hear Holly cover a Fred song.) But I was also charmed and swayed by any number of other albums over the year and a half it took to write this book. A few of the highlights were: Places In Between by Terri Hendrix; Covenant and Over and Under by Greg Brown; Transcendental Blues by Steve Earle; The Green World by Dar Williams, Too Much Plenty by Beki Hemingway; Somewhere Near Paterson by Richard Shindell; Fists of Flood by Jennifer Daniels; Broke Down by Slaid Cleaves; and To the Teeth by Ani DiFranco.
When I’m actually sitting down to write that first draft, however, the music tends to be instrumental, or in a language I don’t understand. Along the lines of World and Celtic music, I was listening to: Robert Michaels; Kevin Crawford; Lúnasa (my favorite Celtic group, bar none—thanks, Paul, for that initial introduction); Kathryn Tickell; Lisa Lynne; Alan Stivell’s Back to Breizh; Tone Poems III (a CD of slide and resophonic guitar and mandolin overseen by David Grisman); Kim Angelis; Small Awakenings by Kathryn Briggs; Pipeworks, a wonderful CD of Northumbrian piping by Rua’s Jimmy Young; Los Lobos; Lila Downs (she has the voice of a Latina angel, not to mention a demon); Badi Assad … well, you get the idea. I was all over the place.
This past year or so I also rediscovered the joy of Bill Evans’s recordings for Riverside, particularly Moonbeams and How My Heart Sings!, and I can’t seem to keep Beyond the Missouri Sky by Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell’s Good Dog, Happy Man, or The Tatum Group Masterpieces Volume 8 (featuring Tatum with Ben Webster) out of the player. I also keep returning to CDs by Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, and Lester Young.
The above only scratches the surface, but I hope it will point my fellow music junkies to some of the pleasure I received from those artists.
If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my home page at www.charlesdelint.com.
—Charles de Lint
Ottawa, Autumn 2000
Copyright Acknowledgments:
Chapter Seven originally appeared as a short story called “In the House of My Enemy,” in the collection Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint (Tor Books, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Charles de Lint.
Grateful acknowledgments are made to Fred Eaglesmith and BASH Music for the use of lines from Fred’s song “It Was You.” Copyright © by BASH Music. Lyrics reprinted by permission. For more information about his music, contact Sweetwater Music, General Delivery, Alberton, Ontario, Canada L0R 1A0, or visit his Web site at www.FredEaglesmith.com. For more information about BASH Music, contact them at 1218 17th Ave. South, Nashville, TN 37212, or on the Web at www.bluewatermusic.com.
By Charles de Lint from Tom Doherty Associates
ANGEL OF DARKNESS
DREAMS UNDERFOOT
THE FAIR IN EMAIN MACHA
FORESTS OF THE HEART
FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM
GREENMANTLE
I’LL BE WATCHING YOU
INTO THE GREEN
THE IVORY AND THE HORN
JACK OF KINROWAN
THE LITTLE COUNTRY
MEMORY AND DREAM
MOONHEART
MOONLIGHT AND VINES
MULENGRO
THE ONION GIRL
SOMEPLACE TO BE FLYING
SPIRITS IN THE WIRES
SPIRITWALK
SVAHA
TAPPING THE DREAM TREE
TRADER
WIDDERSHINS
THE WILD WOOD
YARROW
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE ONION GIRL
Copyright © 2001 by Charles de Lint
All rights reserved.
Edited by Terri Windling
> A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429911276
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Lint, Charles.
The onion girl/Charles de Lint.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-87397-2 (hc)
ISBN 0-765-30381-7 (pbk)
1. City and town life–Fiction. 2. Women artists–Fiction.
3. Young Women–Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.D357 O55 2001
813’.54—dc21
2001041445
The Onion Girl Page 58
