Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  I felt sick. I felt dizzy, but I didn’t want to leave her bird-thick side. She put the body of the junco into her paper coffee cup and secured the plastic lid gently over it. Then she began to tweet and hum.

  “Why would you even want to leave here and come into town where people don’t like you?” I asked, all at once, because I couldn’t think what else to say.

  “This is a library and a blueprint,” she said, gesturing toward the bush and path and meadow full of ground birds. “I bring them to collect your world, so that when it falls, you will remember why.”

  Sometimes collapse is slow, until it is upon you, and even then the faces of the dandelions are as yellow and as pure as fallen stars. I never believed the world would fall, like the girl who was also an old woman with birds under her skirts told me.

  And yet there came a day a decade later, or more, when I saw very clearly that my dreams didn’t fit. That the world was already falling. We ran then, my Ash and I, toward the mountains to the east, where others had run before us, seeking a clarity of being, and of thought. I wished for the maps inside the songbirds, then. I wished for the girl mad as birds to find me then, and show me the way, but she did not.

  Our dreams didn’t fit at the edges the way the straight highways, the power plants, the oil refineries, cellphone boxes, stories printed in newspapers and in books about square homes and square lives and square green lawns trimmed once a week with hired mowers, the way they fit, corner to corner, a great grid that even the dandelions couldn’t break through. It was because of this that we arrived at the place of despair.

  And it could only be because of this that he came.

  All we had left was our music. I played the fiddle, the way my grandpa taught me, all bow and wail and velvet vibrato. My love, he picked his old guitar and put the crooked black top hat on, because it didn’t matter now, now that we had given up, if the world, they told us, had moved beyond top hats, if the world had moved beyond imperfect creatures and un-straightened things. It was winter and the snow came down everywhere around the home we’d made in the dead body of the last old cottonwood in the foothills east of the City. There were no leaves; the branches made bent and antlered songs against the cold winter sky, the moon was too full and the music we played broke our own two hearts all over the ground.

  Under the earth, the badgers and the foxes knew how to sleep and hold their own bodies through the cold, how to make a home in the ground and belong there, how to carry on, because no one had ever expected them to learn to button on suits and pat down their wild hair, sit at desks, at screens all blue and white, and carry home neat lines and numbers and rectangles of paper in their pockets. No, they made their beds from such rectangles of paper, bitten to pieces, from soft grass and dead leaves. They dreamed and their dreams fit as the snow fell on their thick coats: red fur, black fur, grey fur, white fur.

  But my love and I, we had only our music and the snow and our cold cottonwood home, no other way to make ourselves belong. We had our despair, full and complete, a thing we held between us like a loaf of bread we had no choice but to knead and leaven and bake.

  It was then he came, our single dream, through the snow and the bare branches. He came even though there was nowhere for him to fit. He came anyway. He came on perfect wheels of skin and wood and bone; he was a leathery-skinned, ancient, trunked beast, rolling the way no orderly thing, no neat instrument of civilization, should roll. Creature, wagon, tree, with a single candle instead of a horn, to light the way that had been forgotten. His hands were like our hands; they folded a ladder made of his skin down from his wide back, they hustled us up like two frightened owlets who’d lost their mother.

  “I like this music,” was all he said. He held up a book. “You see, your songs are the ones I have here. It’s been a long time, since anyone called.” When he spoke to us it was the saddest, sweetest note on my violin; it was my love’s guitar and the warmth of his crooked top hat, black as crows; and yet it had also in it the falling snow. Beneath us, the creature’s back was warm as any draft horse. We began to play again, and he rolled onward, singing the words in the book he had carried all along, leather-bound just the same as his leathery skin.

  Through that whole full moon night in the snow of winter, in the black bare hands of trees, he rolled on wheels of wood and blood and we played on his back. We took the old roads past the culverted riverbed, through the agricultural fields where we were not supposed to tread. We took the roads where people had walked in the times before cars, the ones sheep wore into the meadows, the ones horses trod, even the ones the bears, so long ago, had walked. He could see them, our wagon-beast, our dream, he could find those ancient and hunted paw-ruts. From his leathern back he sang up their ursine song and we learned the tune until our strings bled the blood of ancient bears, drop by drop, onto the snow.

  It was then that we saw the people following in our wake. It was then I looked behind and saw them all, a thick road back through the snow, a banner unfurled of thousands—black-haired and brown, red and yellow and silver and white, one blue, some barefoot, tennis-shod, booted, in work clothes, in nightdresses, in winter coats. They were walking to reach him, our last and final dream, our desperate creature born in the dead of winter from all the dreams that wouldn’t fit. They were playing a quiet music through the snowfall—sung and slapped, picked on rubber-bands, tapped with the broken parts of cellphones, whistled through metal pipes, hummed on a simple old jaw harp. They carried all the last candles from the pantries, the ones saved for power-outages. They followed the dream of all things living, all things wild, they followed the last paths the bears had once walked toward their dens and favorite acorn groves. In the snow, in the night, our footprints were wagon-wheels of wood and skin and bone. They were tennis shoe and bare foot and fox paw. The ghosts of those ancient bears, they rose, slow and silver and broad, they walked between us.

  In the night, he led, we marched.

  WE CAME AT LAST TO THE CITY AND SAW THAT THERE WAS NO MOON, when there had been one only a mile before. It was a clear night, all crisp and star. The moon had been with us on the road, glowing in the dirt, between the bare buckeye branches and the golden globes of their nuts. They hung like planets in a planetarium, the kind you visit in a city, spending your last dime. We stopped at the outskirts, where the meadows turned to abandoned lots and the dogs stalked each other between tires and a rusted car. On the roads that led from the outskirts to the city center we found that the moon was caught inside each streetlamp, like the thousand reflections it leaves on moving water. Each lamp had a refracted piece in it that glowed and shifted like a firefly caught in a Bell jar. Up above, the sky was dark. The city rose like a hill, with sharp edges of roof and tower peak. It glowed silver in its jagged corners with the blood of moons.

  “What does it mean, grandmother? Have they taken the moon too?” The twins asked her, our old woman with the ceramic pipe always in her teeth, the one she dredged up from the poisoned riverbed. She was not the familial grandmother to any of us. None of us were related by blood at all, not even the twins who together called themselves Blue. No, we were a found family, pieces picked up along the roadside, under the rose brambles in other people’s gardens. The baby who I, too old for such things, nursed—he was one of those left at the back doors of churches by young women. Now that the law has changed, you never know what you might find, peering into cardboard boxes or barrels by the river. It is preferable, though, to the street corner, and the coat-hanger, and the blood all down your thighs. These old breasts of mine, they found the milk still tucked in all my odd corners and stiff bones, and fed him.

  “I don’t know, my Blue boys,” said Grandmother, “I don’t know.”

  It made our hearts all drop, I know it did. I saw it in our faces. Krezki, under his dark hat, always rubbing his fingers on the neck of his fiddle, his long nose moved, his brown eyes wilted. Blue, he went solemn in his two pale faces, the smaller Blue on the shoulders of the bigger Blue. An
d on her two wheels, St. Rosabelle, our rolling icon, she opened her eyes which were always closed, and began to cry. The coyote who followed us from town to town, eating our scraps, chewing the bones of the skinny rabbits and pigeons we caught and cooked, he began to howl then, as the tears fell from her wood and wimple cheeks. Krezki put his fiddle to his shoulder because he could never resist that howl, and together, coyote and violin, they sang out to the moons all trapped in streetlamp glass.

  I rocked the baby at my breast to that old haunted song. St. Rosabelle kept crying, and her wheels creaked. Grandmother pulled a pot from her big pocket and rubbed the spokes and joints with raccoon fat, from the fellow we found last week, road-kill, skull crushed and wet across the ground. The creaking stopped. The moons in the streetlamps flickered and cast the wide silhouettes of raccoons, just for a second, across those city-outskirt lots where we stood in a patch of green weeds. Krezki wailed harder against those old catgut strings with his old horsehair bow. The edges of the city—smokestack, church spire, tall and narrow bank—they shuddered, I saw them do it, I saw them move.

  I smoothed out the ragged hem of my velvet dress, the one I wear like a skin. I held the baby on one arm. I began to dance. Stuart, the man who was really a mask and the ash tree the mask was carved from, began to move the woody joints of his knees. That’s what got the weeds swaying and the owls to pause above us and almost come down to land: Stuart and his slow tree-branch dance. It made my hair stand up; it made Blue fold up all four hands and stare.

  “This is the only and the last place,” said St. Rosabelle, and rolled over to the lamppost, where she leaned her wood and wimple head and stared up at the piece of moon. We were so unused to seeing her eyes, they made us uneasy, how dark and how sad they really were. None of us wanted to ask what she had seen, our daughter born of velvet and nave and the longing of holy water.

  At the edge of the city, we danced. At the edge of the city, in the dandelions and thistles and nettles right up to our knees, we danced, we sang, the coyote howling and nosing at scraps, his tail a black star in the moonless night.

  I HEARD THE SINGING AND THE FIDDLE AT THE EDGE OF MY TOWN like everyone else. I was only a small girl, then, seven years old, but I remember how the strings wailed and shone through the air as the dogs howled in all the backyards.

  “Mama, can we go see? Mama can we?” I said this all night long. The music was green as rain-grass in me, and as sweet. I wanted to take it in my teeth and swallow, like any young creature. I thought the moon watched me, big and soft out the window, so close I could see his eyes. The music got louder as the nights passed. Sometimes a tune snuck up the streets at 3 a.m.

  We lived simply, then, because of how the economy broke, and then the earthquake, and the big sicknesses brought in often by rats, and the crops failed by dry, dry winters, my mother said, teaching me to use the candles carefully, to cherish their small light when it was dark. Nothing for cars to run on, so they sat in driveways or by curbs, grew orange rust spots. We played in them, imagining travels to far away, with wheels spinning. Every family had a stockpile of weapons somewhere, hidden, Just In Case.

  We boiled our water every morning for the day, because it might be toxic otherwise. It felt like a dawn prayer, then: the pot steaming while I sat impatient, waiting for the bubbles to move faster and faster off the bottom until they rolled.

  I remember the sound of the violin above all sounds, like it had the moon and his sad eyes in its belly, on its strings. I waited by the window every night for the music to start, that whole long springtime. My mother didn’t like it, the men and women ragged in the empty lots and parks at the outskirts of the city, by the bay, trailing crows and mutts, singing old haunting songs, making everyone feel like crying, making even the stars look unsettled. Besides, she was worried they might have weapons, more than our men did. People will risk a lot, people will be terrible, if they are starving, if they are afraid. That’s what she said to me, cleaning the dandelion roots, scolding me at the window for my own longing. She said to me that they would bring disease, like rats, from crawling with scum. She said they would poison us forever.

  I already had a fever, at the windowsill, listening to that high and lonesome music, imagining the glowing velvet of their rags.

  I remember that time, the music welling up everywhere, like you remember the perfect morning. The yearning can break you open just like the soft sun and its mild breeze. I remember that time all green-glowing at the edges, tinted with a perfection it never quite had, because afterward there was a massacre. Afterward, there was a real sickness, a falling into ruin, faster than any childhood.

  When I was small, I knew there had been a Decline, that we were part of it. I knew that adults talked about Before with sadness, because of all the sickness, and all the death, but it felt distant, and my life was simple. We had a garden plot in the square, and two ducks. We lived in an apartment with light switches and wires that never worked. I liked to imagine them up there in the ceiling, tangling through the walls, like roads and highways that led somewhere. Magic roads that could make sparks and light and other things I never could understand but had heard of—music coming out of mesh circles, fans, heat. I liked to read books at night, and did lots of other things in the dark in order to save up my candlestubs. I learned to wash and to make an egg, get dressed, clean my teeth, peel a potato, all in the dark, so my candle, stored in a sock by my bed, could be for reading. A raccoon raised her babies in the ceiling, and pigeons sat on the windowsill and listened to me sing, because I liked to sing versions of the stories I read. I went to school in a cold classroom around the corner. The teacher taught us letters and numbers and the division of one thing into the next, with a strong-smelling red pen on a white board.

  I remember the music because it was the last good thing in my life, the last whole thing, green as the hillsides of spring that I could see across the bay, north and east and south, when I stood up on one of the city peaks with my mother, watching fog come in from the ocean.

  After three months of that music, that song and rattle and patter of dancing and of laughter, I snuck out the window, down the fire escape four stories, hopping on other families’ balconies. I ran to the city-edge, down in a grassy patch between parking lots, beside the old raised up highway and the dirty grey waters of the bay. I followed a fiddle reel and the yap of a coyote for blocks and blocks, like I had the sound in my hands, and it was pulling me. I got mud on my boots, wet and dark, down in the marshy grass. It squelched, and I hid in the shadows, watching a group of seven. They gathered around a bonfire. In it burned brambles and logs, an old chair. Rabbits cooked on spits. Two coyotes napped on golden forepaws, ears twitching. Hands reached out to be warmed. Those seven sang and fiddled and laughed—a man with a black top hat, playing the violin; an old woman gnarled and hunched as a burl of wood, smoking a ceramic pipe, with one hand on the wheels of what looked to me like a painted idol-girl; two boys, twins, hair so dark it was blue, one on the shoulders of the other, beating at drums; a white-haired woman in green velvet who nursed a baby from one wrinkled breast, and sang; an impossibly tall and gangly man, masked, dancing a whirl and dervish, so intensely that the air around him whistled.

  They seemed so full of color to me, not just their clothes, but their eyes and their voices, and the way they moved. Like they were incense sticks, glowing and giving off a sweet and heady smoke, the kind to make you uneasy if you aren’t used to it. Not the way people were in the apartments, or when you passed them on the street carrying the basket of rutabagas from the farmstands; everyone looked at each other like the other woman might have cheated and grabbed more than her share of the root vegetables, of the tallow for candles, of the matches, which were of a limited supply.

  I listened to the man in the black top hat play on the violin the saddest song I’d ever heard until the moon was all the way up. That’s when I saw the rest of them; that’s when I saw how the music came from every direction along the water’s edge
, on the old moldering docks and overgrown lawns, up the overpass that no longer held cars, only walkers. Drums played with sticks, dozens of violins, accordions, bamboo flutes, guitars, strange stringed instruments of knobs and sizes I couldn’t name, ululating jaw harps, women ringing big fistfuls of bells. They spilled up from the bay in groups that gathered around small fires, like a set of tiny sprawling camps. The music made no sense all together, close up. It was a chaos of sound, different tunes and melodies and keys and cultures from one fire to the next.

  From inside the city, the pieces wafted in the air, one tune at a time. Here it was a great net of sound, fishing at the stars, at the city itself. I don’t know what for, what great treasure they wanted to catch. But I know they were fishing for something, all gathered, with that woven mat of sound so full of sadness and yearning that all I could do was crouch in the shadows and weep. I did not know the ache of beauty in the world; I did not know the wonder or the umbered eyes of the wild, until that night.

  It was as I cried that I saw the creature. Grey skin as taut and thick as leather, and glistening, with a tapered trunk and delicate ears the shape of a deer’s. He was bigger than the pick-up trucks you now and then see overturned by a road, grown with blackberries, and he had wheels too, wheels that seemed made of his very skin and bone, five in all, of varying sizes, surrounding his belly and curling tail. He had two hands and eyes as big and dark as nuts. Candles sat on his head like horns. He was a dream thing, trundling through the crowds. People threw milk and dried herbs, vials of wine, at his wheeled feet as he passed, like he was a deity or a moving shrine. A man and a woman sat together on top, she with a fiddle, he with a guitar, and the songs they played rang out like embers cracking, like red velvet shoes dancing, like the black tipped tails of foxes in the snow.