Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “My fish,” said the man, folding his knotty hands with the grace of a monk and sitting down with his back to those fine brown scales. “To begin with, my fish is a she. Not an it. Egg-full and lovely as bark, when she’s in her element. I made her myself.” He smiled with pride and took a paper, folded and old, from his pocket. “My blueprints,” he said, and held them out, tiny as mushroom gills, to me. “I keep them on me always, like other people might keep a Bible.”

  “So she isn’t a real fish then, the kind you eat? You know, that used to come up these creeks and spawn?” The blueprints were like moth wings in my hand.

  “My child, she is fully a real fish. What you refer to is a flesh fish. She is part so, Chinook, half-eaten by a grizzly and left to rot under a blue oak, buried up to her gills in humus after only a single winter.”

  “But sir, there are no grizzlies. They are myths, before the Gold-Time, my father told me. That was hundreds of years ago.”

  “And I am hundreds of years old, of course. Would I lie? Really, you are troubled by the oddest things. How old do you think are the roots and bones under the soil? Several centuries, to say the least.” The man snatched the blueprints back and folded them in his pocket, looking stern.

  “Of course,” I said, and stared more closely at the fish, and then at her maker, that buckeye-smooth man, ruckled and grinning again.

  “It was once thought rude to be so inquisitive, you know. I could start prying about all of your freckles, and it might make you squirm, too.”

  “But I just came that way. It’s not like I painted them on.”

  “True, my child. And neither she nor I came as you see us. No, we began as bone and dirt instead of egg and blood. Backwards creatures we are. You are right to pry. I, like her, began as a nub of bone. A saint’s relic, no less. His thumb, brought all the way from Spain and placed in one of those adobe Missions, where they had iron bells and matches between grizzlies and bulls, the missions full of native people, dressed in wool, digging the rows for potatoes, warping and weaving the rough-shod looms. You look at me like I’m lying, like I’m full of horseshit, or maybe like you look at any old man, spinning yarns before you like dark and needled webs.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s only…” I stopped and looked down at my freckled hands. I thought of my father, and the stories he liked to tell between the stars. Thought of my mother, her glass jar of ashes, her moleskin gloves, her boots which were her grandmothers’ from the Time It Fell. Thought of the Fool and his dancing hares, whose chests were sometimes painted green with a watery dye from nettles and rusty nails; how he told tales of Mission Bells like they were planets from a different galaxy, alien and dreamed. “It’s only that it’s usually in scraps and tatters,” I continued. “All the stories. Like a quilt but full of so many holes you mostly just see the Camp in the Buckeye Knot through it, made out of tarps and felts and tires, and not so much the fabrics pieced together. But you know the whole thing. You have the whole blanket on you!” I felt happier than I had anytime since before my mother died. It was like being the only one to discover a persimmon tree bearing orange fruit in the corner of an old backyard, each one an ember of sweetness and crunch; so good you could forget the whole world except for it, and the smell of rain, and the ravens chortling above.

  “I don’t have the whole blanket on by any means, only a humble cloak of moleskin. I’ve been underground, my boy, with my fish, for so many decades. I only know, from that other world, what I saw when I sat, a thumb-relic, on red velvet, under glass. And the glass began to fog and crack after the Mission closed down. I was pillaged from it, along with the velvet, stuffed in the pocket of some gold-rush gambler, but I fell out that same day, when his horse tripped on the road and threw him. It didn’t take long for the rain and dirt to cover me, just like my fish—a bone, mired in the dirt and sinking, mole trod, laced with mycelia. Everything else I know begins underground.”

  “But whose thumb? Which one of the saints were you, sir, or are?”

  “Saint Francis of Assisi, of course, namesake of that great city risen and fell. The man who held passerines on his thumbs, you know, and spoke with the black-cuffed bears, fish and honey-breathed. You may call me Frances, if you like. And your name, lad?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Martin.”

  “Ah yes, like the old Hungarian saint, horse-man and warrior, so generous with his cloak.”

  “I don’t know about him, only the purple martins that build muddy nests.”

  “Indeed,” said Frances, looking unconcerned. “Well in any case, I don’t think I myself was much of a Christian, though they called me one later. I was more a bird-lover. I remember mostly only what a thumb knows—the feet of a sparrow, the foreheads of bears, mint and wild thyme leaves, crushed for tea, rough boots, the hardest and the softest parts of women. You see, my thumbs at least, those ages ago, they were full of un-Christian pleasures.”

  Frances went quiet, then. He touched the belly of his fish gently, straightened the buttons down the front of his moleskin habit, and pulled a pipe out of his pocket. It was bright white, carved from a shrew bone.

  “You don’t look much like a thumb to me,” I said shyly, wanting Frances to continue.

  “No indeed,” said the small man, packing a crush of leaf into his pipe bowl and lighting it with a scrap of ember from his pocket.

  “You carry fire too?” I leaned close to see.

  “Secret,” said Frances. He kept his pocket closed. “We’ve been deep under, my fish and I. To the places where the plates meet and sometimes mate. Magma.” He took a long puff. I stared.

  “I was buried, you see, in the den of a pregnant broad-footed mole. By some fortunate accident of weather and traffic. She dug her nest right where I lay, a cold bone, and used me as a brace, like any root, when she pushed her babies out into the dark. They scrambled all over me as they grew, dripping sweet mole-milk from their snouts and whiskers, right onto my joint. She crooned mole-songs into the dark to them, songs that were sharp and full of stars and the rings of worms. I began to change, to grow, just like her babies. The bone I was before, that ancient thumb, began to splinter and reform, like some strange caterpillar in his cocoon. I grew in her presence, and she became frightened of me as my feet and arms and hands emerged. She took her little ones and fled. I, alone in the mole-den, was a small and naked man, brown as a nut. Not a boy, but an old man, you see. The thumb, after all, was from such a man, already worn.

  “For a while, I followed in the wake of that mole family, eating worms and the occasional bulb. I came to appreciate cultivated fields, where I might come across a potato, even a carrot—sweet as heaven itself. I made myself these robes you see, from the skins of the dead moles one now and then finds, expired in their perfect tunnels. They keep one warm as can be, in the underground. After some time, though I couldn’t possibly say how long, I came across her.” Frances patted the side of his fish. Her tail moved gently on its brass hinge. “She was only Chinook bones then, supple and almost transparent with time. Her tail had been snapped by grizzly teeth, neat as can be. I made her a new skin, new muscles and scales, from the wet clays and the root-wood of oaks. I polished her with my own hands, and gave her scales drawn by mycorhizzae. I found that hinge just laying near the surface of the ground, beside the cement-pour of some foundation. Quite clever, I thought. I named her Lily.

  “My dreams kept me from sleeping much down there. That and the perpetual darkness. I dreamed of Long Before, when I was a thumb bone resting on red velvet, the Mission walls ringing. Boring dreams, really, but they don’t leave me be. And I dream her dreams too, my underworld Chinook, my Lily, since I am in her day and night, with my back to her old bones.” The little man sighed and took a pull at his pipe.

  “It is her dreams that really exhaust me. They are great rivers of salmon, every time, in the thick of the upriver spawn, the jump and thrash of silver bodies in a great Delta of slick water and reeds. They are pushing against the current, up river
s, in the shade of cottonwoods and willows. It is overwhelming, Martin, each dream is river rapids and the paws of grizzlies, fishing. This immense pull inside toward the spawning ground of her birth, like a scream of longing. The bear ate her—a big sow with golden ears and a black snout—right before she could lay her eggs, and dance about a big male, and settle down to die. So every night, her bones dream. I’ve made eggs for her to carry, little wild onion bulbs dyed red with minerals, bright red like her eggs would have been, like a thousand hearts. That way she feels she has a purpose, my Lily.” His voice was full of love and of sadness. I loved the fish right then and there, and Frances too, my very own miracle.

  “Why did you want to come up, then, when you had so many things to do down there, swimming about?”

  “The solitude, my boy, the solitude. My Lily, after all, can’t talk back to me, not the way you can. I am tired of being alone in the dark, plagued by dreams and the sound of my own voice.”

  “But what about her? Aren’t you all she’s got? What will she do, up here?”

  “Maybe,” Frances said, eyes long and quiet, staring through the meadow to the Buckeye Knot, all pleached and pale trunks, “I will make her wings, and gills to breathe the air.”

  “I’ll help you!” I jumped to my feet, full of simple conviction. My knees and calves wobbled, numb from sitting so long on them as I listened. Above, the sun had passed through afternoon and was sinking into dusk. “We can find you old pieces of tin, or thin poles, maybe kites? My father is handy. Maybe the Camp will lend some tools, like the Scissors.” I felt hot in my stomach, on my cheeks, like I’d seen the magma-embers in the heart of the ground with the man who had once been the thumb-bone of St. Francis of Assisi, and had swallowed them whole.

  “Are these good people here, at your Camp?” Frances stood and brushed the dirt from his robe, which reached right to his bare brown feet. There were dark hairs growing all over his toes, more fur than human. He combed his fingers in his beard, shook out knots and a shard of snail shell, iridescent inside.

  It was a question I didn’t know how to answer back then—good or bad? This was all of my world. People were the people of the Buckeye Knot. People were my father, my dead mother, the other children who called me Mudface for my fields of freckles, because they were normal and I was odd.

  “Oh yes,” I replied. “They will want to hear your stories. The Master of the Shed—that’s what we call our leader or chief or whatever, because he has the lock and key to the Shed, where all the tools are for making things, ones people have dug out of piles and ruins—he will help you. The Master of the Shed is powerful, you know.”

  “No, I do not,” said Frances. “But I suppose your hook caught my fish for a reason, like the finger of a God, answering my longing, and there is only one choice.”

  Night gathered cold and clear in the tips of the Douglas fir trees up the western ridge. The dusk sky was as blue and pale and thick as the seedpods of eucalyptus trees, the kinds that lined old residential streets, and as spiced.

  I used my coat to hold the fish, so her gills could be kept covered in dirt. I carried her like it was a sling, gentle. Frances fit in the bowl of my hat, so I carried the jacket with Lily in one hand, the cap open in my other where the small man sat, cross-legged, serene as a monk.

  At the fire pit, the Fool was combing the fur of his hares and getting ready to dance. My father ate soup from a chipped clay bowl and talked with the seamstress, the new one who mended people’s boots and coats with fine gut string. She was laughing, sharp-toothed, black-haired, with a dark mole right between her eyes. There were two-dozen more, hard men with their hard children, hands smudged with fire ash. Their wives sat separate, together with their daughters, some blue eyed like the feathers of kingfishers, some dark with necks like loons, the one girl with her milky blind eye, which had witnessed everyone die around her. The people sat, eating soup from chipped bowls, tied together by their fear, each ring of it like a disturbance in water; the Buckeye Knot held us in like the outermost ring, locked from the world and all the ways it had fallen.

  The Master of the Shed sat in a rocking chair. It was the only chair. The rest of us sat on logs. He brought it out of the toolshed every night to sit on as dinner was made on the fire by women, as the Fool danced. He ate, and watched, running a hand often through his gray hair, kept short and close with the Scissors.

  I could wait no longer. I set down my bowl and stepped into the firelight. “I have a miracle!” I exclaimed. I held up the fish and my cap. Frances looked at me, alarmed. My father glanced up from his soup, away from the laughing teeth of the new seamstress. He stared at the small man, the big wooden fish, me, and his eyes went full of anguish. I felt cold, then. The people sat on their logs, the Master of the Shed on his rocking chair; they all set down their chipped soup bowls and swallowed down the last of the roots in their mouths.

  “Got a dead fish, Mudface? Call that a miracle?” It was the boy who always called me Mudface, bigger than me and flaxen, with strong hands that could break thick pieces of wood. “Trying to poison us?”

  “She is a wooden fish, and no poison at all. Her name is Lily,” Frances said, and stood up in my hand. A woman screamed and put her palm over her daughter’s eyes.

  “Yes,” I continued, not knowing what else to do. “This small fellow made her. They’ve been under the ground, he’s as old as the Missions, you know! Isn’t that a miracle?” But I felt sick suddenly, at all the faces and the firelight, the way the buckeye trees around them cast rippling shadows like a cage, the way the Fool had made himself busy with the ears of his hares, and wouldn’t look up.

  “What things of witches have you got, boy, and where did you dig them up?” The Master of the Shed rose from his rocking chair. It creaked behind him, moving. Frances ran then, out of the cap and up to my shoulder. “What the hell were you thinking?” he hissed, but I could only shake my head in horror. I felt like crying.

  “They are special, Master,” I managed. “They have stories from long ago, and from the underground. Don’t you want to hear them? They are Things We Don’t Know.”

  My father had tears on his cheeks now, watching me stand there, watching how I didn’t take a step back, only held firm to the fish and the perfect old man, small as a mole.

  “And what Things should we know, that we don’t already?” The Master of the Shed was a tall man, and close up, he smelled like the metal of spades, axes, scissors, rust. I took the fish out of my jacket, defiant. I held her up, glistening in the firelight. Her hinged tail flicked.

  “Look, she is beautiful. She is perfect. Not evil. She was here with the grizzlies.” She thrashed for the air of soil. “I’d like to help the small man build wings for her.” Someone laughed. The Master of the Shed, his two hands faster than flames, grabbed the fish and the little man, and held them high.

  “This looks like witchery to me. Maybe same as those poison coho. Vessels of danger, not like us.” The Master of the Shed tightened his hands.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  The Master of the Shed kneed me in the stomach then, and threw Lily and her maker straight into the fire. There was a single scream from the small man, like a branch snapping. The fish lay still.

  When I came to, stomach hollow with pain, the fire was dead, only smoke. I crawled upright, saw the tiny bones of the man, the bigger bones of the fish, and began to cry. They were big sobs that filled my stomach further with pain.

  “Shh,” said a voice from the dark. I went quiet.

  The Fool stepped out of the buckeye shadows. Seven hares followed near his ankles, silver in the night, ears trembling and erect.

  “I put the fire out, when everyone went. So it wouldn’t burn as hot. To save their bones. Bones can always be planted, you know.” He stepped closer and held out his handless arm to help me up. “He said for everyone to leave you here, all night, while they burned. Your father tried to help you but the Master got out his shovels, and swung them, and your dad, h
e ran with the rest.” Close up, I saw the Fool was a young man, no lines on his cheeks. He only moved like an old one, stiff, like sadness spread through all his joints.

  “Thank you,” I said. I took the handless arm and stood. The stumps were round and smooth. The moon through the buckeye branches shone white and thin as a rib-bone. A new noise rustled and cracked its footsteps through the humus. We froze. My father emerged, holding a backpack stuffed full. He took me up in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “You found your fish, my boy, you found it. But you have to leave here, quiet as a mouse. It won’t be safe at all, not after that.” I saw tears on his face, and the solidness of it all hit me then. Salt gathered and fell on my cheeks too.

  “No,” whispered the Fool. “Don’t cry. My hares are good luck you know, and can find their way in any dark, through any maze.” He picked one up into his arms, a female with teats, leggy and soft. She kicked out her back legs once, then calmly sniffed at the air near me.

  “But there are guards at the edges. I’ll never make it,” I said, scrubbing back tears with my wool coat.

  “I saw the hole you pulled them from,” my father said. “I measured it, I shone a light. It is deep and just wide enough for you. Grab all the bones from the fire, and take them down and through. They will lead you through, it is the way of such things.” He handed me the backpack. All three of us, with the seven hares sniffing at them, leaned over the ashes.

  “Get every bone,” hissed the Fool, and sifted out a rib. Scapula, vertebrae, femur and dorsal fin and skull, we picked each out, toe bone and fin, charred and damp. We placed them in the front pouch of the backpack. The moon moved over our heads as we sifted. Soft hare-noses breathed at my feet. Buckeye leaves, a wet humus under them, smelled of rot and smoke, smells that filled me with sadness.

  Only once, my father laid his arm across my shoulders, held my freckled cheek. “The stars match you,” he said. “It should not be this way. A father should not stay behind, but he must, or you will be found. For I cannot fit with you in that hole. It should not be this way,” he finished, though I didn’t know what other way it could have been, even as the Fool, looking up at those words, shook. Hare-quick, hare-soft, his eyes dark.