The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  But none of that’s important right now. So maybe I’m not in love with Alex. So what? He’s still my friend. He opened his heart to me and it’s like I didn’t even hear him.

  “Alex!” I call after him.

  He pauses and turns. There’s nothing hopeful in the way he looks, there’s not even curiosity. I get up from where I’ve been sitting and go to where he’s standing.

  “I’ve got to let this all sink in,” I tell him. “You caught me off guard. I mean, I never even guessed you felt the way you do.”

  “I understand,” he says.

  “No, you don’t. You’re the best friend I ever had. I just never thought of us as a couple. Doesn’t mean all of a sudden I hate you or something.”

  He shrugs. “I never should have said anything,” he says.

  I shake my head. “No. What you should have done is said something a lot sooner. The way I see it, your big problem is you keep everything all bottled up inside. You’ve got to let people know what you’re thinking.”

  “That wouldn’t change anything.”

  “How do you know? When I was a kid I had the hugest crush on you. And later, I kept expecting you to ask me out, but you never did. Got so’s I just never thought of you in terms of boyfriend material.”

  “So what’re you saying?”

  I smile. “I don’t know. You could ask me to go to a movie or something.”

  “Do you want to go to a movie?”

  “Maybe. Let me buy you breakfast and we’ll talk about it.”

  9

  So I’m trying to do like Lillie says, talk about stuff that means something to me, or at least I do it with her. She asks me once what I’d like to do with my life, because she can’t see much future in my being a bouncer for a strip joint for the rest of my life. I tell her I’ve always wanted to paint and instead of laughing, she goes out and buys me a little tin of watercolours and a pad of paper. I give it a go and she tells me I’m terrible, like I don’t know it, but takes the first piece I do and hangs it on her fridge.

  Another time I tell her about this castle I used to dream about when I was a kid, the most useless castle you could imagine, just these walls and a garden in them that’s gone all wild, but when I was there, nobody could hurt me, nobody at all.

  She gives me an odd look and says, “With old castle rock for the walls.”

  10

  So I guess Alex was right. I must have been looking for ghosts in All Souls—or at least I found one. Except it wasn’t the ghost of someone who’d died and been buried in there. It was the ghost of a kid, a kid that was still living somewhere in an enclosed wild garden, secreted deep in his grown-up mind, a kid fooling around in trees full of grackles, hidden from the hurting world, held safe by moonlight and vines.

  But you know, hiding’s not always the answer. Because the more Alex talks to me, the more he opens up, the more I see him the way I did when I was a little girl, when I’d daydream about how he and I were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

  I guess we were both carrying around ghosts.

  In the Pines

  Life ain’t all a dance.

  —attributed to Dolly Parton

  1

  It’s celebrity night at the Standish and we have us some lineup. There are two Elvises—a young one, with the swiveling hips and a perfect sneer, and a white-suited one, circa the Vegas years. A Buddy Holly who sounds right but could’ve lost fifty pounds if he really wanted to look the part. A Marilyn Monroe who has her boyfriend with her; he’d be wearing a JFK mask for her finale, when she sings “Happy Birthday” to him in a breathless voice. Lonesome George Clark has come out of semi-retirement to reprise his old Hank Williams show and then there’s me, doing my Dolly Parton tribute for the first time in the three years since I gave it up and tried to make it on my own.

  I don’t really mind doing it. I’ve kind of missed Dolly, to tell you the truth, and it’s all for a good cause—a benefit to raise money for the Crowsea Home for Battered Women—which is how they convinced me to do that old act of mine one more time.

  I do a pretty good version of Dolly. I’m not as pretty as her, and I don’t have her hair—hey, who does?—but I’ve got the figure, while the wig, makeup and rhinestone dress take care of the rest. I can mimic her singing, though my natural voice is lower, and I sure as hell play the guitar better—I don’t know who she’s kidding with those fingernails of hers.

  But in the end, the looks never mattered. It was always the songs. The first time I heard her sing them, I just plain fell in love. “Jolene.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “My Blue Tears.” I planned to do a half hour of those old hits with a couple of mountain songs thrown in for good measure. The only one from my old act that I was dropping was “I Will Always Love You.” Thanks to the success Whitney Houston had with it, people weren’t going to be thinking Tennessee cabins and Dolly anymore when they heard it.

  I’m slated to follow the fat Elvis—maybe they wanted to stick all the rhinestones together in one part of the show?—with Lonesome George finishing up after me. Since Lonesome George and I are sharing the same backup band, we’re going to close the show with a duet on “Muleskinner Blues.” The thought of it makes me smile and not just because I’ll get to do a little bit of yodeling. With everything Dolly’s done over the years, even she never got to sing with Hank Williams—senior, of course. Junior parties a little too hearty for my tastes.

  So I’m standing there in the wings of the Standish, watching Marilyn slink and grind her way through a song—the girl is good—when I get this feeling that something was going to happen.

  I’m kind of partial to premonitions. The last time I felt one this strong was the night John Narraway died. We were working late on my first album at Tommy Norton’s High Lonesome Sounds and had finally called it quits some time after midnight when the feeling hit me. It starts with a hum or a buzz, like I’ve got a fly or a bee caught in my ear, and then everything seems…oh, I don’t know. Clearer somehow. Precise. Like I could look at Johnny’s fiddle bow that night and see every one of those horse hairs, separate and on its own.

  The trouble with these feelings is that while I know something’s going to happen, I don’t know what. I get a big feeling or a little one, but after that I’m on my own. Truth is, I never figure out what it’s all about until after the fact, which doesn’t make it exactly the most useful talent a girl can have. I don’t even know if it’s something good or something bad that’s coming, just that it’s coming. Real helpful, right?

  So I’m standing there and Marilyn’s brought her boyfriend out for the big finish to her act and I know something’s going to happen, but I don’t know what. I get real twitchy all through the fat Elvis’s act and then it’s time for me to go up and the buzzing’s just swelling up so big inside me that I feel like I’m fit to burst with anticipation.

  We open with “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” It goes over pretty well and we kick straight into “Jolene” before the applause dies off. The third song we do is the first song I ever learned, that old mountain song, “In the Pines.” I don’t play it the same as most people I’ve heard do—I learned it from my Aunt Hickory, with this lonesome barred F# minor chord coming right in after the D that opens every line. I remember cursing for weeks before I could finally get my fingers around that damn chord and make it sound like it was supposed to.

  So we’re into the chorus now—

  In the pines, in the pines,

  Where the sun never shines

  And the shiverin’ cold winds blow.

  —and I’m looking out into the crowd and I can’t see much, what with the spotlights in my eyes and all, but damned if I don’t see her sitting there in the third row, my Aunt Hickory, big as life, grinning right back up at me, except she’s dead, she’s been dead fifteen years now, and it’s all I can do to get through the chorus and let the band take an instrumental break.

  2

  The Aunt—that’s what everybody in thos
e parts called her, ’cept me, I guess. I don’t know if it was because they didn’t know her name, or because she made them feel uneasy, but nobody used the name that had been scratched onto her rusty mailbox, down on Dirt Creek Road. That just said Hickory Jones.

  I loved the sound of her name. It had a ring to it like it was pulled straight out of one of those old mountain songs. Like Shady Groves. Or Tom Dooley.

  She lived by her own self in a one-room log cabin, up the hill behind the Piney Woods Trailer Park, a tall, big-boned woman with angular features and her chestnut hair cropped close to her head. Half the boys in the park had hair longer than hers, slicked back and shiny. She dressed like a man in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, barefoot in the summer, big old workboots on those callused feet when the weather turned mean and the snows came.

  She really was my aunt. She and Mama shared the same mother except Hickory had Kickaha blood, you could see it in the deep coppery colour of her skin. Mama’s father was white trash, same as mine, though that’s an opinion I never shared out loud with anyone, not even Hickory. My Daddy never needed much of a reason to give us kids a licking. Lord knows what he’d have done if we’d given him a real excuse.

  I never could figure out what it was about Hickory that made people feel so damn twitchy around her. Mama said it was because of the way Hickory dressed.

  “I know she’s my sister,” Mama would say, “but she looks like some no account hobo, tramping the rail lines. It’s just ain’t right. Man looks at her, he can’t even tell she’s got herself a pair of titties under that shirt.”

  Breasts were a big topic of conversation in Piney Woods when I was growing up and I remember wishing I had a big old shirt like Hickory’s when my own chest began to swell and it seemed like it was never gonna stop. Mama acted like it was a real blessing, but I hated them. “You can’t have too much of a good thing,” she told me when she heard me complaining. “You just pray they keep growing awhile longer, Darlene, ’cause if they do, you mark my words. You’re gonna have your pick of a man.”

  Yeah, but what kind of a man? I wanted to know. It wasn’t just the boys looking at me, or what they’d say; it was the men, too. Everybody staring down at my chest when they were talking to me, ’stead of looking me in the face. I could see them just itching to grab themselves a handful.

  “You just shut your mouth, girl,” Mama would say if I didn’t let it go.

  Hickory never told me to shut my mouth. But then I guess she didn’t have to put up with me twenty-four hours a day, neither. She just stayed up by her cabin, growing her greens and potatoes in a little plot out back, running trap lines or taking to the hills with her squirrel gun for meat. Maybe once a month she’d head into town to pick up some coffee or flour, whatever the land couldn’t provide for her. She’d walk the five miles in, then walk the whole way back, didn’t matter how heavy that pack of hers might be or what the weather was like.

  I guess that’s really what people didn’t like about her—just living the way she did, she showed she didn’t need nobody, she could do it all on her own, and back then that was frowned upon for a woman. They thought she was queer—and I don’t just mean tetched in the head, though they thought that, too. No, they told stories about how she’d sleep with other women, how she could raise the dead and was friends with the devil and just about any other kind of foolish idea they could come up with.

  ’Course I wasn’t supposed to go up to her cabin—none of us kids were, especially the girls—but I went anyways. Hickory played the five-string banjo and I’d go up and listen to her sing those old lonesome songs that nobody wanted to hear anymore. There was no polish to Hickory’s singing, not like they put on music today, but she could hold a note long and true and she could play that banjo so sweet that it made you want to cry or laugh, depending on the mood of the tune.

  See, Hickory’s where I got started in music. First I’d go up just to listen and maybe sing along a little, though back then I had less polish in my voice than Hickory did. After a time I got an itching to play an instrument too and that’s when Hickory took down this little old 1919 Martin guitar from where it hung on the rafters and when I’d sneak up to her cabin after that I’d play that guitar until my fingers ached and I’d be crying from how much they hurt, but I never gave up. Didn’t get me nowhere, but I can say this much: whatever else’s happened to me in this life, I never gave up the music. Not for anything, not for anyone.

  And the pain went away.

  “That’s the thing,” Hickory told me. “Doesn’t matter how bad it gets, the pain goes away. Sometimes you got to die to stop hurting, but the hurting stops.”

  I guess the real reason nobody bothered her is that they were scared of her, scared of the big dark-skinned cousins who’d come down from the rez to visit her sometimes, scared of the simples and charms she could make, scared of what they saw in her eyes when she gave them that hard look of hers. Because Hickory didn’t back down, not never, not for nobody.

  3

  I fully expect Hickory to be no more than an apparition. I’d look away, then back, and she’d be gone. I mean what else could happen? She was long dead and I might believe in a lot of things, but ghosts aren’t one of them.

  But by the time the boys finish their break and it’s time for me to step back up to the mike for another verse, there she is, still sitting in the third row, still grinning up at me. I’ll tell you, I near’ choke right about then, all the words I ever knew to any song just up and fly away. There’s a couple of ragged bars in the music where I don’t know if I’ll be finishing the song or not and I can feel the concern of the boys playing there on stage behind me. But Hickory she just gives me a look with those dark brown eyes of hers, that look she used to give me all those years ago when I’d run up so hard against the wall of a new chord or a particularly tricky line of melody that I just wanted to throw the guitar down and give it all up.

  That look had always shamed me into going on and it does the same for me tonight. I shoot the boys an apologetic look, and lean right into the last verse like it never went away on me.

  The longest train that I ever saw

  Was nineteen coaches long,

  And the only girl I ever loved

  She’s on that train and gone.

  I don’t know what anyone else is thinking when I sing those words, but looking at Hickory I know that, just like me, she isn’t thinking of trains or girlfriends. Those old songs have a way of connecting you to something deeper than what they seem to be talking about, and that’s what’s happening for the two of us here. We’re thinking of old losses and regrets, of all the things that might have been, but never were. We’re thinking of the night lying thick in the pines around her cabin, lying thick under those heavy boughs even in the middle of the day, because just like the night hides in the day’s shadows, there’s lots of things that never go away. Things you don’t ever want to go away. Sometimes when that wind blows through the pines, you shiver, but it’s not from the cold.

  4

  I was fifteen when I left home. I showed up on Hickory’s doorstep with a cardboard suitcase in one hand and that guitar she’d given me in the other, not heading for Nashville like I always thought I would, but planning to take the bus to Newford instead. A man who’d heard me sing at the roadhouse just down a-ways from Piney Woods had offered me a job in a honkytonk he owned in the city. I’m pretty sure he knew I was lying about my age, but he didn’t seem to care anymore than I did.

  Hickory was rolling herself a cigarette when I arrived. She finished the job and lit a match on her thumbnail, looking at me in that considering way of hers as she got the cigarette going.

  “That time already,” she said finally, blowing out a blue-grey wreath of smoke on the heel of her words.

  I nodded.

  “Didn’t think it’d come so soon,” she told me. “Thought we had us another couple of years together, easy.”

  “I can’t wait, Aunt Hickory. I got me a singing job in t
he city—a real singing job, in a honkytonk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Hickory wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with me, just letting me know that she was listening but that she hadn’t heard anything worthwhile hearing yet.

  “I’ll be making forty dollars a week, plus room and board.”

  “Where you gonna live?” Hickory asked, taking a drag from her cigarette. “In your boss’s house?”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am. I’m going to have my own room, right upstairs of the honkytonk.”

  “He know how old you are?”

  “Sure,” I said with a grin. “Eighteen.”

  “Give or take a few years.”

  I shrugged. “He’s got no trouble with it.”

  “Well, what about your schooling?” Hickory asked. “You’ve been doing so well. I always thought you’d be the first one in the family to finish high school. I was looking forward to that—you know, to bragging about you and all.”

  I had to smile. Who was she going to brag to?

  “Were you going to come to the graduation ceremony?” I asked instead.

  “Was thinking on it.”

  “I’m going to be a singer, Aunt Hickory. All the schooling I’m ever going to need I learned from you.”

  Hickory sighed. She took a final drag from her cigarette then stubbed it out on the edge of her stair, storing the butt in her pocket.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Are you running from something or running to something?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “A big difference. Running away’s only a partial solution. Sooner or later, whatever you’re running from is going to catch up to you again. Comes a time you’re going to have to face it, so it might as well be now. But running to something…well.”