“What does she collect them for?”
“To preserve the things that are in danger of being lost to the world,” Cerin said.
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m not sure of the exact details,” Cerin went on, “but it had something to do with the spirits of endangered species.”
“Giving them a new life,” Meran said.
“Or a second chance.”
“But there’s no desert around here,” I said. “What would this Bone Woman being doing up here?”
Meran smiled. “I remember John saying that she’s been seen as often riding shotgun in an eighteen-wheeler as walking down a dry wash.”
“And besides,” Cerin added. “Any place is a desert when there’s more going on underground than on the surface.”
That described Newford perfectly. And who lived a more hidden life than the street people? They were right in front of us every day, but most people didn’t even see them anymore. And who was more deserving of a second chance than someone like Ellie who’d never even gotten a fair first chance?
“Too many of us live desert lives,” Cerin said, and I knew just what he meant.
The gig went well. I was a little bemused, but I didn’t make any major mistakes. Amy complained that her regulators had sounded too buzzy in the monitors, but that was just Amy. They’d sounded great to me, their counterpointing chords giving the tunes a real punch whenever they came in.
The Kelledys’ set was pure magic. Amy and I watched them from the stage wings and felt higher as they took their final bow than we had when the applause had been directed at us.
I begged off getting together with them after the show, regretfully pleading tiredness. I was tired, but leaving the theatre, I headed for an abandoned factory in the Tombs instead of home. When I got up on the roof of the building, the moon was full. It looked like a saucer of buttery gold, bathing everything in a warm yellow light. I heard a soft voice on the far side of the roof near the Bone Woman’s squat. It wasn’t exactly singing, but not chanting either. A murmuring, sliding sound that raised the hairs at the nape of my neck.
I walked a little nearer, staying in the shadows of the cornices, until I could see the Bone Woman. I paused then, laying my fiddlecase quietly on the roof and sliding down so that I was sitting with my back against the cornice.
The Bone Woman had one of her skeleton sculptures set out in front of her and she was singing over it. The dog shape was complete now, all the bones wired in place and gleaming in the moonlight. I couldn’t make out the words of her song. Either there were none, or she was using a language I’d never heard before. As I watched, she stood, raising her arms up above the wired skeleton, and her voice grew louder.
The scene was peaceful—soothing, in the same way that the Kelledys’ company could be—but eerie as well. The Bone Woman’s voice had the cadence of one of the medicine chants I’d heard at a powwow up on the Kickaha rez—the same nasal tones and ringing quality. But that powwow hadn’t prepared me for what came next.
At first I wasn’t sure that I was really seeing it. The empty spaces between the skeleton’s bones seemed to gather volume and fill out, as though flesh were forming on the bones. Then there was fur, highlit by the moonlight, and I couldn’t deny it any more. I saw a bewhiskered muzzle lift skyward, ears twitch, a tail curl up, thick-haired and strong. The powerful chest began to move rhythmically, at first in time to the Bone Woman’s song, then breathing of its own accord.
The Bone Woman hadn’t been making dogs in her squat, I realized as I watched the miraculous change occur. She’d been making wolves.
The newly animated creature’s eyes snapped open and it leapt up, running to the edge of the roof. There it stood with its forelegs on the cornice. Arcing its neck, the wolf pointed its nose at the moon and howled.
I sat there, already stunned, but the transformation still wasn’t complete. As the wolf howled, it began to change again. Fur to human skin. Lupine shape, to that of a young woman. Howl to merry laughter. And as she turned, I recognized her features.
“Ellie,” I breathed.
She still had the same horsy-features, the same skinny body, all bones and angles, but she was beautiful. She blazed with the fire of a spirit that had never been hurt, never been abused, never been degraded. She gave me a radiant smile and then leapt from the edge of the roof.
I held my breath, but she didn’t fall. She walked out across the city’s skyline, out across the urban desert of rooftops and chimneys, off and away, running now, laughter trailing behind her until she was swallowed by the horizon.
I stared out at the night sky long after she had disappeared, then slowly stood up and walked across the roof to where the Bone Woman was sitting outside the door of her squat. She tracked my approach, but there was neither welcome nor dismissal in those small dark eyes. It was like the first time I’d come up to her; as far as she was concerned, I wasn’t there at all.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
She looked through, past me.
“Can you teach me that song? I want to help, too.”
Still no response.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
Finally her gaze focused on me.
“You don’t have their need,” she said.
Her voice was thick with an accent I couldn’t place. I waited for her to go on, to explain what she meant, but once again, she ignored me. The pinpoints of black that passed for eyes in that round moon face looked away into a place where I didn’t belong.
Finally, I did the only thing left for me to do. I collected my fiddlecase and went on home.
Some things haven’t changed. Ellie’s still living on the streets and I still share my lunch with her when I’m down in her part of town. There’s nothing the Bone Woman can do to change what this life has done to the Ellie Spinks of the world.
But what I saw that night gives me hope for the next turn of the wheel. I know now that no matter how downtrodden someone like Ellie might be, at least somewhere a piece of her is running free. Somewhere that wild and innocent part of her spirit is being preserved with those of the wolf and the rattlesnake and all the other creatures whose spirit-bones La Huesera collects from the desert—deserts natural, and of our own making.
Spirit-bones. Collected and preserved, nurtured in the belly of the Bone Woman’s song, until we learn to welcome them upon their terms, rather than our own.
Author’s note: The idea of la Huesera comes from the folklore of the American Southwest. My thanks to Clarissa Pinkola Estés for making me aware of the tale.
The Lincoln Train (1995)
MAUREEN F. MCHUGH
MAUREEN MCHUGH (b. 1959) began publishing short fiction in the late 1980s and published her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, in 1992. It won the Lambda and the James Tiptree, Jr. awards and was a finalist for both the Hugo and the Nebula. She has published three more novels—Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis—and two collections of short stories, Mothers and Other Monsters and After the Apocalypse. In recent years, she has been working on Alternate Reality Game projects, such as I Love Bees.
OLDIERS OF THE G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house the lilacs are blooming. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I want to go home but that house is not ours anymore. I smooth my black dress. On the train platform we are all in mourning.
The train will take us to St. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. They say we will walk, but I don’t know how my mother will do that. She has been poorly since the winter of ’62. I check my bag with our water and pr
ovisions.
“Julia Adelaide,” my mother says, “I think we should go home.”
“We’ve come to catch the train,” I say, very sharp.
I’m Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it.
I wait. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. God sends us nothing we cannot bear. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can’t even speak. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending—
“When are we going home?” my mother says.
“Soon,” I say because it is easy.
But she won’t remember and in a moment she’ll ask again. And again and again, through this long long train ride to St. Louis. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it’s not my fault either. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine.
I wish I were someone else.
The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. I don’t know how I will get our valise on. If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. The notice said no family Negroes could come to the station, although I see their faces here and there through the crowd.
The train stops outside the station to take on water.
“Is it your father?” my mother says diffidently. “Do you see him on the train?”
“No, Mother,” I say. “We are taking the train.”
“Are we going to see your father?” she asks.
It doesn’t matter what I say to her, she’ll forget it in a few minutes, but I cannot say yes to her. I cannot say that we will see my father even to give her a few moments of joy.
“Are we going to see your father?” she asks again.
“No,” I say.
“Where are we going?”
I have carefully explained it all to her and she cried, every time I did. People are pushing down the platform toward the train, and I am trying to decide if I should move my valise toward the front of the platform. Why are they in such a hurry to get on the train? It is taking us all away.
“Where are we going? Julia Adelaide, you will answer me this moment,” my mother says, her voice too full of quaver to quite sound like her own.
“I’m Clara,” I say. “We’re going to St. Louis.”
“St. Louis,” she says. “We don’t need to go to St. Louis. We can’t get through the lines, Julia, and I . . . I am quite indisposed. Let’s go back home now, this is foolish.”
We cannot go back home. General Dodge has made it clear that if we did not show up at the train platform this morning and get our names checked off the list, he would arrest every man in town, and then he would shoot every tenth man. The town knows to believe him, General Dodge was put in charge of the trains into Washington, and he did the same thing then. He arrested men and held them and every time the train was fired upon he hanged a man.
There is a shout and I can only see the crowd moving like a wave, pouring off the edge of the platform. Everyone is afraid there will not be room. I grab the valise and I grab my mother’s arm and pull them both. The valise is so heavy that my fingers hurt, and the weight of our water and food is heavy on my arm. My mother is small and when I put her in bed at night she is all tiny like a child, but now she refuses to move, pulling against me and opening her mouth wide, her mouth pink inside and wet and open in a wail I can just barely hear over the shouting crowd. I don’t know if I should let go of the valise to pull her, or for a moment I think of letting go of her, letting someone else get her on the train and finding her later.
A man in the crowd shoves her hard from behind. His face is twisted in wrath. What is he so angry at? My mother falls into me, and the crowd pushes us. I am trying to hold on to the valise, but my gloves are slippery, and I can only hold with my right hand, with my left I am trying to hold up my mother. The crowd is pushing all around us, trying to push us toward the edge of the platform.
The train toots as if it were moving. There is shouting all around us. My mother is fallen against me, her face pressed against my bosom, turned up toward me. She is so frightened. Her face is pressed against me in improper intimacy, as if she were my child. My mother as my child. I am filled with revulsion and horror. The pressure against us begins to lessen. I still have a hold of the valise. We’ll be all right. Let the others push around, I’ll wait and get the valise on somehow. They won’t leave us travel without anything.
My mother’s eyes close. Her wrinkled face looks up, the skin under her eyes making little pouches, as if it were a second blind eyelid. Everything is so grotesque. I am having a spell. I wish I could be somewhere where I could get away and close the windows. I have had these spells since they told us that my father was dead, where everything is full of horror and strangeness.
The person behind me is crowding into my back and I want to tell them to give way, but I cannot. People around us are crying out. I cannot see anything but the people pushed against me. People are still pushing, but now they are not pushing toward the side of the platform but toward the front, where the train will be when we are allowed to board.
Wait, I call out but there’s no way for me to tell if I’ve really called out or not. I can’t hear anything until the train whistles. The train has moved? They brought the train into the station? I can’t tell, not without letting go of my mother and the valise. My mother is being pulled down into this mass. I feel her sliding against me. Her eyes are closed. She is a huge doll, limp in my arms. She is not even trying to hold herself up. She has given up to this moment.
I can’t hold on to my mother and the valise. So I let go of the valise.
Oh merciful god.
I do not know how I will get through this moment.
The crowd around me is a thing that presses me and pushes me up, pulls me down. I cannot breathe for the pressure. I see specks in front of my eyes, white sparks, too bright, like metal and like light. My feet aren’t under me. I am buoyed by the crowd and my feet are behind me. I am unable to stand, unable to fall. I think my mother is against me, but I can’t tell, and in this mass I don’t know how she can breathe.
I think I am going to die.
All the noise around me does not seem like noise anymore. It is something else, some element, like water or something, surrounding me and overpowering me.
It is like that for a long time, until finally I have my feet under me, and I’m leaning against people. I feel myself sink, but I can’t stop myself. The platform is solid. My whole body feels bruised and roughly used.
My mother is not with me. My mother is a bundle of black on the ground, and I crawl to her. I wish I could say that as I crawl to her I feel concern for her condition, but at this moment I am no more than base animal nature and I crawl to her because she is mine and there is nothing else in the world I can identify as mine. Her skirt is rucked up so that her ankles and calves are showing. Her face is black. At first I think it is something about her clothes, but it is her face, so full of blood that it is black.
People are still getting on the train, but there are people on the platform around us, left behind. And other things. A surpris
ing number of shoes, all badly used. Wraps, too. Bags. Bundles and people.
I try raising her arms above her head, to force breath into her lungs. Her arms are thin, but they don’t go the way I want them to. I read in the newspaper that when President Lincoln was shot, he stopped breathing, and his personal physician started him breathing again. But maybe the newspaper was wrong, or maybe it is more complicated than I understand, or maybe it doesn’t always work. She doesn’t breathe.
I sit on the platform and try to think of what to do next. My head is empty of useful thoughts. Empty of prayers.
“Ma’am?”
It’s a soldier of the G.A.R.
“Yes sir?” I say. It is difficult to look up at him, to look up into the sun.
He hunkers down but does not touch her. At least he doesn’t touch her. “Do you have anyone staying behind?”
Like cousins or something? Someone who is not “recalcitrant” in their handling of their Negroes? “Not in town,” I say.
“Did she worship?” he asks, in his northern way.
“Yes sir,” I say, “she did. She was a Methodist, and you should contact the preacher. The Reverend Robert Ewald, sir.”
“I’ll see to it, ma’am. Now you’ll have to get on the train.”
“And leave her?” I say.
“Yes ma’am, the train will be leaving. I’m sorry ma’am.”
“But I can’t,” I say.
He takes my elbow and helps me stand. And I let him.
“We are not really recalcitrant,” I say. “Where were Zeke and Rachel supposed to go? Were we supposed to throw them out?”
He helps me climb onto the train. People stare at me as I get on, and I realize I must be all in disarray. I stand under all their gazes, trying to get my bonnet on straight and smoothing my dress. I do not know what to do with my eyes or hands.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 Page 32
