Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  When the air got thin in my lungs and dry, and Lyoobov had to slow her wheeling between the cream and pollen colors of the granite, the tall straight pines redolent of some burnt sweetness, I smelled the fires of other people. It had been a long time since I had smelled the fires of other people. I saw places on the ground smudged with footprints made by wide thick soles. I saw the tracks of deer too, a black bear, all mixed in, a great shifting pattern, and I grew uneasy. So many animal tracks. We have creatures here, near Nettleburn, but they are very shy. They hide from us. Well, from you, not from me. They still do not trust you. Here, there were tracks everywhere, even ones like a mountain lion makes.

  Up on the top of the next ridge, I saw a tall metal set of poles and bars, a black square with a little box on top with windows, and two sets of cables heading down toward us, then trailing off into the stones and grasses. The box on top was grown everywhere with a fringe of grass and columbine flowers, all scarlet and orange. I saw a face in the broken window, a young woman’s, hair in a coiled black mat on top of her head, skin like the darkness of the soil where my mother pulled me out. A bird flashed out the broken window, a jay, calling the way they do to warn of bobcats sneaking in the underbrush. The woman climbed fast as any red-furred squirrel, down a dark pole, and came toward us. I leaned into Lyoobov’s shoulder and she rustled her trunked nose against my hair, breathing out a warm breath that smelled of earth and firelight and comfort.

  I held out the opened body of the goldfinch as the woman came to stand before us, weeping tears that moved blue against her dark cheeks, at the sight of Lyoobov.

  “You’ve found us,” she said. “Nobody finds us but the ones we want. Which has been nobody, no, not anybody but you.” She said this to Lyoobov, touching her trunk. Her hair, close up, was a dense forest, felted like wool is felted, rope after rope and twined with green lace lichen, teeth of tiny bear cubs, a red plastic string from some far away kitchen. Such things hold their color almost forever.

  “We don’t know what we’re here for,” said Lyoobov, said I, through the petaled pages of her book. The woman smiled. She took the goldfinch in her hands and tucked it deep into the folds of her hair.

  “Come along,” she said.

  Lyoobov rolled, the crunching of granite dust, and I walked, leaning into her because I knew that she knew how to be brave among strangers. Her leathery skin smelled of honey and dust after rain. It soothed me. We followed the woman who introduced herself as Sare. I watched the dirt and found that when she walked she did not leave the footprints of a woman, but rather those of a small bear. The red plastic cord in her hair glinted like a line of blood. I still couldn’t tell you if the feeling in me, in my chest, under my ribs, was fear or joy.

  Moving all dark as bearfur and smooth as honey from wild hives, Sare took us higher and over a ridge of granite. It was like a big torn-up spine, ancient and bare to the sharp blue sky. When we crossed it, I felt the way your ears do slipping into a lake: dark green and deep, newts showing you their orange bellies all around like moving candleflames. My head felt thick. The trees became twisted around us, wind-made, thin, wending between smooth granite once licked by the great tongues of glaciers. Shadows moved across the stone ground in whorls like birds were passing in front of the sun, but it was only those curved trees, silver-barked, resinous.

  Suddenly there were small circular structures through the trees made of bone. A man wearing a marmot-fur hat hung strips of fish to smoke over a fire. I thought this was a village of Wild Folk, not people at all, living not just bear-women alone but all mixed. Even the trees—lodgepole, white pine, juniper—they seemed to look out from their bark. I watched for slender men to unfurl from their trunks but none did. I didn’t feel afraid because they are more like me than you are—the woodrat women out in the scrub who have every last fallen coin (pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters), the small robin men in woodlands who ask that you sing up the worms. I know them though you are afraid and run after you leave them the requisite eggs, buttons, scraps of dream.

  Each hut, I saw, was made all of one kind of bone—entirely crow, entirely deer, entirely weasel. The structures were pale as snow.

  When the people there saw us arrive, the day became all at once a flood of feasting, a flood of those people who kept murmuring the name Anja, and quieter, Lyoobov.

  “No one here from down there across the Valley to the Bay, not since Anja, Anja and her man. Anja, Anja.”

  It became a chant into the smoke of a dozen juniper-wood fires where a deer was roasted, and lily bulbs, and wild onions, and these people, they all gathered, dressed in soft wools and soft skins. They were only people, not Wild Folk, I saw: the way their eyes rested gently on me, on Lyoobov, taking us in the way people take in other people, which is very different than a raccoon or a woman with egret wings and egret legs, who read you for the layers of you under your skin.

  They knew to feed Lyoobov hot embers, glowing as if they were apricots on fire; they knew that this was her favorite food, that she would smoke through her ears and the shape of those tendrils would rise up in the form of lost alphabets, which curved and moved like vines, hoofprint, the branches of trees. Those tendrils made me wonder if maybe all words, all languages, like the ones I know best from the teeth of the moles and the fir boughs, have been absorbed back into the dirt or the plum pits or the bellies of mountain lions, but are not all the way gone.

  At one point in the evening, as someone passed around thimbleberry mead and the fires moved hotly with the shapes of wild mustangs and condors, Sare touched my shoulder and she said, “Your bird, your little goldfinch map, yellow as a lemon, she has the seed of Anja in her liver.” Between her thumb and forefinger she held up a small red bead. It matched the plastic red string in her hair.

  “I don’t know much about Anja. I didn’t really listen to human stories, when I was small,” I said to her, but I said it the way black bears speak, which I learned from the beehives that remembered the cadence of those dark muzzles that once came romping down through the woods. She paused. A red flush moved through her cheeks the color of earth. She fidgeted her fingers on the bead, looked to see if anyone had heard—looked at the man who had been smoking fish when we arrived, her father.

  “No, but you will, and more besides. You’ll get to know her very roots,” she replied in human words. Then added, bear-touched but soft as a whisper: “there’s an old Juniper, said she told her story to it like a person to another person. Under the bark. I’ll bet you can get the words out. I think she told it for someone of your kind to come and to hear.” She handed me the red bead, and then a tiny bear claw from her hair.

  I went alone. Nobody noticed me going. I had just my silver coffeepot hitched on a string over my back, like always. Lyoobov stayed, eating the embers one by one, letting smoke spell poems into the night from her coiled trunk, her ears. She let the women come and rub her gray skin with the oils of pine nuts and wildflower essences. The shadows from the fire leapt onto the wind-shaped pines. I held that red seed and I walked through the dark, feeling ahead with my feet.

  It wasn’t hard to find the tree Sare meant because it was ancient and its trunk silver as all the stars, as time. The hard blue-dusted berries were thick, everywhere, a thousand blue earths. I picked up handfuls and stuck them through the top of my coffeepot. The whole tree in my ears thundered like a fast heart. It creaked in the wind. It wanted me near, under the rounded spires of branch, up to the trunk, my body a warmth to keep company through the night. I set the red bead into a crease of the trunk. I smelled the bark. I found that to the left of my feet, in the shadows, was a darker shadow, like a hole. I crawled to see and it was just as wide as my shoulders, gaping, darker than any night can be dark. I went in because Sare told me that I would be able to hear the stories and bring them back.

  I’ve wanted, I’ve always wanted, to do one single thing you all approved of.

  The bear tooth Sare gave me glowed. I saw the inside of that Juniper. Time had
carved waterways of lines, the color soft as firelight or amber. The patterns of stars seemed to be glinting wherever I looked in that hollow of bark, which went deep down below in root tunnels, and up further than that glowing tooth could shed light. That’s when the voice started. It unpeeled from the layers of bark and echoed. It was, and was not, human. It was juniper berry blue in my mind where I held it as it spoke, in my hands where I felt it, dusty, weathered. Steeped and smoked with the centuries of Juniper growing, Juniper seeking water, Juniper breathing and releasing the thin air. It was her, the tree, whispering.

  “Little child,” came that voice, and a smell of soft smoke. “Little child. You are only a little child.” All along the inner bark, stars gleamed, in familiar and unfamiliar constellations, from the old stories which I had never before understood—the one in the shape of a wheel which we call Wheel, after the long ago Fool; the one like an owl, for Margaret, with a bell in its claws; the one like a fiddle, for Rose; the tiny cluster, for the Holy Beggars. And more, gleaming and shifting all around me, ones I couldn’t name. I felt I might have clambered into the beginning of a world.

  “I’m Poppy,” I said, deep inside the tree now, in a ruckled chamber whorled with bark. “I am little, it’s true.”

  “You have come to learn the true story of Anja.” This time, the voice was nearer, and I turned. In the shadows, on the walls of her trunk, was a woman. She was all hunched up, rounded like the blue berries I’d stuffed into my silver coffeepot. Then she seemed to peel right off the wall, a dark shade. She came and she sat opposite me. In the glow of the juniper bark around us, I saw an ancient little lady with a dozen spindly arms lined as juniper branches, with a spiking mass of hair like spired juniper needles. White hairs grew on her chin. Her eyes were all patched with cataracts, but she had a good set of teeth. I noticed this, I don’t know why, maybe because they flashed.

  “Yes,” I stammered.

  “But do you even know your own?”

  “Well enough,” I replied, staring into my coffeepot because her eyes were too strange, and milky. “My mother found me in the earth, only really I am part of Lyoobov, and Lyoobov is part of me—”

  “But who is Lyoobov, and how, and why?”

  “Lyoobov was born out of the dream of Rose, a long time ago, Before the Fall. But what have I got to do with Anja?”

  “You were there at the beginning, because Lyoobov was there. You are here now, at the end. But what about the middle, little child, little Poppy, little heart? How can you ask for Anja, without everything that came before? How can you know a whole world, without every tattered thread?”

  The silvery bark of the juniper’s inner trunk was shifting, the stars scattered there wheeling, like they might across a whole night, not a single moment. I had no words at all.

  “Did you know that some stars are only memories of light, already dead? Like the voices of people, echoing long after they are gone?”

  There were figures coalescing against the bark, the way the Juniper-woman’s had, ghosts that one by one peeled away, edged in stars. Rose. The Holy Beggars. St. Margaret, with owl wings. Wheel. Martin. Ffion.

  “When you hear a story, little child, it has been folded and unfolded a hundred times in the mouths of its tellers. But the truest stories come right from the source.”

  The starry ghosts gathered, and waited, glinting.

  One by one, they told their tales, just pieces of them, the way people do. You don’t remember your whole life all at once. If someone asks you to tell a story, it turns around a central point, a moment or a day or a loss. I sat, and listened, and into my coffeepot, beside the juniper berries, fell the voices of stars, which were also ghosts, and long ago, people.

  THEY ALWAYS SAID THE GIRL WAS AS MAD AS BIRDS WHEN SHE CAME into town for a cup of coffee, a sack of licorice chews. They said you could hear her talking under her breath, and when you stood close, it wasn’t a human sound at all, but a broken, high chirping. No one knew where she lived, if it was up the hill and past the place where the asphalt streets and the houses stopped, into the scrub and the forest: lupine, madrone, oak. Now and then a woman slipping her shoes on at the front porch saw the girl come down from the mountain fire-road at dawn, oak leaves in her hair. At school, the children whispered that she lived underground, in the roots of trees, or maybe under their parents’ cars, in the dark small places that couldn’t be seen. The boutique owners busily swept their doorsteps when she passed by in the same linen dress, the same long-sleeved undershirt, day after day. Her dress always dragged its wide hem and collected dirt. The owner of the kitchen-supply store complained that she left a highway of birdshit on the sidewalk in her wake, because all the downtown pigeons, all the little blackbirds, they liked to fly after her and land on her shoulders or in her hair. There was only one man at the coffeeshop who would let her in and serve her a cup. He worked on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so that’s when she came, making sing-song cheeps under her breath. His family had come from another place, and his skin was not the same color as everyone else’s, so he knew, he whispered to her over the cash register, handing her change, what it was like to not be allowed to belong.

  I was the only one who knew her secret, because I was the only one who smiled and watched her without feeling afraid, without feeling tight in my stomach and stiff in my neck. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to see more clearly, to see the things that have been there all along. Often, this is the province of children, before they’ve learned to believe that people have souls and birds do not.

  I knew that she had birds under her long skirt. The kind that feed on the ground: towhees, dark-headed juncos, chickadees, sparrows. The humble birds, all simple feathered browns and blacks, the kinds everyone forgets. They bustled along with her everywhere, held in the dark shadow of her dress, chittering and feeding on street crumbs and the bits of rosehip or blackberry she now and then dropped from her fingers. That’s who she talked to in high chirrups. The edges of her dress moved with their small, feathered forms, so many of them around her that I imagined an impossibly ample space in the dark shadow of her skirt: scrub and nest and forest, all there in the darkness of her legs.

  They weren’t pretty birds. Maybe that’s why no one noticed them: no one looked long enough to see them. They were battered—a towhee with a nick in her wing, a junco with a crooked beak, a white crowned sparrow with a missing foot. They were shabby, like her—tousled and threadbare and worn in. That’s why I followed her home one Thursday afternoon. I snuck right out of the schoolyard at recess. I wasn’t afraid. It was a gentle shabbiness, and she didn’t look that much older than me, even though she was threadbare. That day, I was eleven. I still liked to build mud-dams across the creek, with sticks for towers and ivy leaves for flags. The other girls sat in the corner together and laughed about bras.

  I followed her up the path with brick steps that led out of downtown. It wound between houses, straight up hill, one of the old lanes built when a train came through, and people who lived high up the mountain needed a quick path to dash down in the morning and not be late. Ahead of me, I could see dozens of tiny bird feet next to her bare ones. A hum of chips and cheeps came from her skirt, a relaxed sound, as they fed on small seeds and bugs in the dirt. She kept walking, up and up, taking the narrow roads—Rose, Edgemont, Tenderfoot—until we reached the dusty mountain fire-trail called Old Railroad Grade. She walked at an even pace and sipped from her paper coffee cup. She never looked back at me, but the birds under her skirt did, so she must have known I was there the whole time, not just at the end, when she stood at a junction, and I crept behind a sawed-down Douglas fir log, and she said,

  “You know they are very sensitive. The whole world passes through them each time they sing.” Her voice sounded like my grandmother’s, as cracked and soft as sturdy shoes. “Inside a towhee’s body is the whole town, the whole mountain, tiny and veined. Would you like to see?”

  From the dusty junction in the trail where the madrones reach
ed their smooth orange arms down like bare muscles, she looked straight at me. I stood up and brushed my hands over my corduroy pants, trying not to look out of place.

  “Yes,” I said, and climbed over the log toward her. The sound of white-crowned sparrows came from her mouth. She swallowed more of her coffee. Up close, we were the same height, and she looked young but with hundreds of lines around her eyes. She smelled like the rainstorms that lash you full of a wild desire to trade in your skin for a different one.

  I still don’t know how it really happened, even all these years later, and I’ve thought about it every single day.

  “Come in,” she said, and went first, under the hem and into her own skirt, so that suddenly it was a tent with nobody wearing it, and we were both inside, well beyond its linen bounds, in a field by a dirt trail grown along its sides with elderberry and blackberry and rosehip. All around us, the sparrows and towhees and juncos poked at the earth, scratched up the worms, picked off the last drying berries. All together, their gentle cheeps made a din.

  “They are reading the whole ground like you read a book, and the whole sky too. It’s full of hawks and airplanes.”

  Faster than I could believe, and without scattering more than a few of that brown and black river of feathers, she grabbed a junco, squeezed its throat until it was dead, and opened it down the middle with a sharp fingernail.

  “Look,” she said, and held out her hands where the junco lay, perfectly halved like an open fruit still attached at the rind. Instead of pink lungs I saw tiny, coiled streets and the dark-veined passageways of earth beneath them, where worms and moles move. I saw the seeds of all the brambles and wild grasses, sprouting their different roots, instead of a heart. I saw iridescent plumes of poison from car engines that coiled like arteries, I saw the shadows of bobcats and foxes and weasels, gods on the hunt, where the ribs should have been, where the kidney and gizzards go. I saw the whole mountain, and the town at its base curving in the topographic lines of intestine and liver-vein. Up close, my nose to the wishbone, tipped with blood, I even saw the roof of my own house, where my dad and I would sit and watch the stars.