Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  It took me a year to stop watching the faces of the people in the camp I called mine. I pretended, when I was there pirouetting by the fire pit, doing my job as their Fool, that they were not real, that each cackle and hiss, each leer, each expression of disgust and release, was mechanical, like the bodies of the computers my mother collected. Then, I only felt afraid, but not hateful, and I could go to sleep in this body they called deformed, even loving my wheels, because the people were machines in my mind, and knew nothing of what it meant to be truly alive, to feel the dirt spinning under your soles.

  I danced and made music as their Fool for three years, until I was twelve. I danced every night before they went to bed. They said I was their nightmare-catcher, and they would sleep sweetly after watching me, after listening to that eerie twanging. The rest of the day, I kept out of sight in the alder wood, learning the different personalities of the orange-bellied newts who walked the creek, the woodrats in the nests, eating my pail of scraps from last night’s dinner. I never tried to run, because there were guards posted along the edges of the wood, where it met the open meadows, day and night. It was dangerous, that world; people from outside wanted what you had inside, even your piles of trash. That’s what they made us think.

  The morning I turned twelve, I woke up by the woodrat nests with pain in my abdomen, in the bowl of my hips. It was dull and cramping. I thought of the women who slipped out of their encampments to see my mother for herbs to ease their bleeding and their cramps. I knew what it meant, when a woman begins to bleed. I sat up, afraid, and went to gather the plants my mother used—wild blackberry leaves, the bark of the yellow willow. All morning, I waited for the first blood to come. I drank my tea, and the pain eased. When I finally felt something wet on my thigh, I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want it to be true—me, alone, a Fool who was also a Woman. With my fingers I felt along the inside of my leg, and found fine threads there against my skin instead of blood. I looked down. Spidersilk lined my leg, moving briskly out of me in delicate tendrils. I only stared, and gathered it up around my hands as it came.

  I had two fistfuls, soft and coiled, before I realized that the feeling in my chest, around my mouth, was joy. The part of me—a small seed as heavy and dark as iron—that had believed them when they said I was made from the poison of power plant flumes, that my mother was a lying witch and nobody is fathered by a spider, that part of me dissolved. All that was left in its place was a dense ball of spidersilk, my inheritance.

  The black phoebes darted from the alder branches, chasing insects that hovered over the creek, and I played with those wheels of web around my fists. The woodrats helped me carry strands up into the pale branches. They scuttled up the trunks and tied the webs there with gray paws. I found that I could climb them. I could roll up on two strands with my wheels, each piece a track like the railroad ties you see, covered now in weeds, dark orange cuts and lines through old city edges. The webs fit into the grooves of my feet, around the fleshy spokes. They held my weight, sideways in the air, ascending. My hunched back, hands dangling toward the ground, my gait always cumbersome because of that arch in my spine, it became perfect. I could pull myself along on the tracks of two strands, feet rolling, hands climbing. My back became the curving horizon, planetary and smooth, that turned my whole body into a spoked wheel and a spider at once.

  I thought of my father, all dressed in orange velvet, with eight orange sleeves. I thought of the web my mother watched for eight days on the wheel of our cart, while the elk ate down the nettle stalks rampant between the decayed bodies of airplanes, collapsed at the edges of the tarmacs like giant dragonflies. I knew then, climbing my own silk through the trees, testing my speed and my strength, scaring the gray squirrels right off their branches, that my mother, whatever her flaws, was no liar.

  They must have come looking for me that evening, to be their Fool, when I didn’t roll down quietly through the alders to the center of the camp, past the wooden planter boxes of leek and carrot. They must have come to the place I always slept, next to the woodrat nests, and found only the thick web I left behind, between each twiggy lodge. I wove and rolled my way out on wheels and webs. The woodrats ran ahead, across the open meadow, past the sentinels. They carried strands in their teeth, up into the next copse of trees on the hill, bishop pines. At dusk, as the stars pushed out their silver mouths and breathed upon us, I wheeled on two tracks of spidersilk above the guards, above the encampment, above the trees, and free.

  The three woodrats slept in my pockets as we rolled through the treetops and spooked the ravens out of their nests. I didn’t know how many miles I’d gone from that place where I was the Fool, the nightmare-catcher, the daughter of the witch whose bones lay black under the ground, before I stopped, and made myself a proper canopy web. They hunted, for a while. I watched from above, curled in the old nests of great-horned owls. Their dogs sniffed the ground for me and howled at the treetops. But no one thought to look up, to strain their eyes for a gleam of spidersilk between the sun-green leaves.

  And so I was gone from them. I lived in the canopy, in hammocks of silk, travelling my own train tracks through air. I ate the fruits of the trees—black walnuts, peppernuts, plums, apples, nuthatch eggs—and was satisfied. My only friends were the woodrats. Down below, things continued as they were—the camps, scared at their edges, the Fools dancing by fires, the old cars, airplanes, hotels, caving in with weeds and the weight of passing clouds. One day, I knew would drop down on a line. I would be brave, I would gather with me all the Fools who were lonesome, who carried the nightmares of our kind on their twisted shoulders. One day, I would be brave for my mother. I would show them the spider-strands of my body, the freedom of wheels, the kinship of woodrats. But back then, I was only a girl, and afraid, alone with the dawn birds, the dusk stars, the newborn leaves.

  NO ONE FISHED ANYMORE, NOT AFTER THE SALMON RAN FULL OF poison. A small girl with a milky blue eye was the only one left alive the morning after the coho were roasted and eaten along their autumn spawning run. I grew up in the Buckeye Knot, which was closest to that Camp, where everyone lay dead in their beds. The Master of my Camp ordered us to set fire to the tarps and tents and bodies. It was in an alder wood, damp by the creek, so only the encampment burned, along with several woodrat lodges. No one could sleep for days, watching that smoke, how it moved against the treetops and the sky in piscine shapes.

  A fish ban was enacted. No stories, no songs, no mention of names—coho, Chinook, steelhead, bluegill, perch. Certainly no fishing, no touching those bodies which were thick with the remnant poisons of other times, when everything toxic had been poured into the water and forgotten.

  This was the only explanation anyone could come up with—the poison from Before, it was circling back from whirlpools out in the ocean. The fish carried it in their fat, in their livers and eggs. Only the blind-eyed girl didn’t fit. She complicated the story. She had eaten the fish, too.

  In the Buckeye Knot, pale-trunked and green, people muttered in their canvas shelters, their wood, car-door and tarp houses, kept bright and neat despite the constant fall of leaves, about witches. They whispered about the Fool with wheels for feet, and how she had disappeared only a few weeks before the poisoning. They whispered about the burning, and the black bones, and sipped at old spice jars full of the rough brandy made up north, from the half-wrecked vineyards.

  I don’t know about the other fathers, but I know that mine kept telling fish-tales to me all the same. He told them quietly, at night, so no one would hear. We climbed up a big buckeye together, one with dozens of thick branches grown like a mat, and my father made up constellations in the shape of fish. Salmon were our favorite to find out of stars, whole migrations of them.

  “Whenever we ban things,” whispered my father, “we come to hate them. We don’t mind killing them for the sake of it, for fun. The whole world has been poisoned; fish are only messengers.”

  The autumn after the deadly spawn, the coho came
again. Every last one was netted up and killed. The bodies made a pink and silver pile that stank, and was burned. That year, my mother died.

  For years afterward, the coho were slaughtered until there were none left at all, and I dreamed about fish. Little ones no bigger than slips of light, big ones like my father said lived in the ocean, as big as the trucks I sometimes saw, growing into the roadsides with their coronas of teasel and broom. I dreamed of climbing inside those big fish. In my dreams, they showed me the bottom of the ocean: pale blue light, the thick salt and murk, metal hulls of steam ships.

  When I was nine, and good enough with a knife, my father let me carve a small rod out of a buckeye twig, even though all fishing equipment had been buried in a box in a hole and covered, like a grave. I strung it with gut and a hook made of the big rosethorns people from the Camps near the old towns traded, stripped from bushes in wild front gardens.

  That winter, I sat with my short fishing pole at the openings of gopher holes. I fed the thorn-hook and line into a hole, and waited. I was four when fishing was banned, when the salmon and trout were killed, and then stopped spawning altogether. I couldn’t really remember what it was like to sit with a real pole by the green water of a lake, line dangling through the currents, waiting for a bite. But I thought about it all the time; the string, with you at one end and the fish at the other. How still you sat, just waiting for the line to go taut, that pathway to the underwater, to the dark and wet places where fish live, breathing in the water.

  It was a game—the buckeye twig, the twine and thorn, dipped into badger tunnels or excavated mole hills. I liked to be alone, and quiet. I was covered in so many freckles that the other children called me Mudface-Martin. I was glad they couldn’t see the freckles on my chest, on my thighs and upper arms—I was speckled everywhere. Like stars, said my father, and called me Starboy. We hunted for fish on my arms too, making up new brown-dotted constellations.

  “I’m full of quiet,” I told my father. “If I’m not quiet, I think mom is still here.” It was an infection from a cut in her foot that killed her, where she stepped on an old and rusty nail, but when I was a boy, I always thought she had gone wherever the salmon had gone. She was with them where they vanished, and if I fished, she might be found, resting with them. When I was quiet, I felt full of hope; I could push all of her living movement and laughter out of my mind, her jokes and her fast way of talking, how many curls she had, half matted into auburn tails. How they always bounced and fell from their braids and knots.

  Stillness, and the magic of fish; I filled up my head with them the winter I was nine. My father let me sneak off with my buckeye twig and thorn because I always came back glowing, as if I’d actually caught something. Really, I just sat in the tall grass, pole in hand, by the tunnel of some creature, and dreamed. Dreamed I was underground riding the backs of fish, underwater against silver scales, thrashing upstream with the coho, and my mom was there too, shrieking with joy.

  Seeing her that way didn’t both me. It was how they’d burned her body that bothered me—how all her red curls and loud voice just went away in the flames, on the pyre, and when it was over she was ashes, which the Master of Fires swept into a big glass jar, the kind salvaged from empty houses. He placed the jar full of gray ash on the shelf in the Dead Room, next to all the other jars of people from the Buckeye Knot who had died.

  She was just like a tree that had burned, or the white ash in a firepit. Irrevocably gone: the evidence of her absence in those labeled and shelved jars, in that damp clay-smelling room of cob.

  I’d heard stories of other Camps that buried their dead in the ground. At least then, I thought to myself one morning, wiggling my fishing line gently in the hole of a gopher as the January sun began to dry the dew from the grass, you don’t have to see what happens to the body. You can imagine them down there, speaking with roots and stones.

  Looking back on that morning, I recognize the signs—something wild had been in the air, even before dawn. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Instead, I took my old felt blanket outside to look at the stars. Though father and I came nightly to arrange them, I couldn’t recognize any as I sat, wrapped in the itch of wool, peering up. A dizziness, queer and lost, shook me, and I went in again and lay awake, watching shadows made by the moon move across the floor of their circular home. They touched the wooden platform floor, the canvas and felt walls. Father slept heavily, and once said, “Mary”, in that voice I remembered from when mother was alive, the sweet voice my father would call her with.

  It made me cry, and then I thought of the Fool dancing by the firepit the night before, like he did every night, with his seven hares on leashes, flipping their ears at his handless command. I remembered the look on the Fool’s face—blank except for his eyes, which pooled and snapped with more grief than I could fathom, until I realized that I carried the same grief when I thought of my mother—that the Fool and I might be similar. I wondered what made that man a Fool, and not myself or my father. It couldn’t only be because he had been born handless; it couldn’t be that a Devil took his hands, like people said. What Devil could command seven gentle, gold-coated hares to dance and flare their black tails, eyes wild? There was nothing evil in that, not as far as I was concerned.

  All of these thoughts sat with me that January morning as I fished in a gopher hole. They were shifting, subversive, uneasy thoughts that tipped and tilted through my heart like glass marbles. A twist of wool from my cap began to itch, so I set down my fishing rod for a moment to scratch and straighten. The buckeye pole lurched across the ground, then, pulled by its suddenly taut string. I snatched it seconds before it vanished entirely into the hole in the ground.

  A great weight tugged from below. Not a stone or a root, but a moving weight that lurched and wiggled. Gently, with sweating hands, I pulled at the buckeye rod. I didn’t want to startle the Thing, or hurt it. I imagined that I’d hooked a badger by accident, or maybe an exceptionally strong mole. I figured I’d ease it aboveground, unhook the barb, and place it back in the hole. It might be nice to touch a mole’s dark fur. My mother had worn moleskin gloves in the winters—ones she had killed and skinned, tanned and sewn, herself. The people used to seek her out for all their sewing jobs. I loved to hold her hand in winter, when it was covered in moleskin, soft and rich.

  Preoccupied with the memory of mole-soft hands, I didn’t notice at first the smooth and scaled nose that emerged from the hole, breaking free clods of soil. When I did see it, all at once, I yelped and dropped the pole and pulled the whole body up with my bare hands, gingerly, like a newborn wet with birth.

  The fish was half as big as me, and heavy. Slick as clay and polished wood. It kept coming and coming, breaking a bigger hole in the ground, tail long and curved. I collapsed beside it where it lay, twitching its tail in the grass. The fish was hinged, carved, polished. It looked like a dark dream, like starlight and freckles and all the constellations my father and I had made.

  “Hello,” I said finally, unsure. The fish bucked and writhed. The hinge at its tail, brass and bright, flickered in the sun. I wanted to reach out my hands and hold the fish, stroke its scales, which looked at once alive and carved on by a knife. I wondered suddenly if I’d killed it, pulling it out of the ground, where it must have been at home, breathing through the dirt like other fish breathe through water. I didn’t want it to be dead, but I also didn’t want to put it back underground, where I couldn’t watch it: finned, scaled, tapered as a leaf.

  The whole meadow, swaying with purple needlegrass and an old hiking path through it, snapped then, like a linen in the wind. The fish’s mouth burst open. An old man, brown-bearded, in brown robes, as small as a gopher, wriggled out of those jaws like a breech-birth, feet first.

  “Been looking for a way up for ages,” said the small man. Tousle-haired, like he had been through a storm. He patted the nose of the fish, prone, beside him.

  “Is it a real fish, sir?” It just came out; I couldn’t help myself,
though I knew it might be rude, though I knew that a man the size of a gopher emerging from the dirt was more sensational, even, than a three-foot fish, polished and hinged. But it was the way my imagination suddenly touched the world under my hands, like the two were connected by a ribbon of living muscle, that filled me up, that fixed my young green eyes on the fish and less on the miraculously small man, brown and neat as a monk.

  “Real? What an odd child you are. Do you see it thrashing in the grass, seeking dirt to breathe through, poor chit? Do un-real things thrash for air?” The small man pushed his beard aside and began gathering together a high mound of dirt. His hands small as blackberries moved fast, nails square and worn as a gardener’s. “What the hell are you doing, just staring? My fish will die. Come help, your hands will do the job much quicker.” The man gestured toward the mound of dirt he was piling up from all around him—soil from mole hill, gopher tunnel, grass root. “It’s like an oxygen mask, a water bubble. We can bury her gills in this.”

  “But sir, it’s hinged, it’s made of wood and clay.”

  “Indeed,” replied the little robed man, and pointed again to the mound. I crouched and scooped up handfuls of dirt. Within a matter of minutes, we had created a loose and loamy pile. We didn’t speak as we scraped and sifted. Only the scrub jays in the trees overhead quipped and hawed and darted on bright blue wings. We patted and mounded the dirt up around the fish’s gills. She lay quiet at last, breathing gently.