Fishbone's Song (2 page)

He looks just about like Fishbone, far as I could tell in the dark: old, with a hacked-down beard. Except he might move a little easier than Fishbone, who moves slow, and now and then has a left limp. I asked him once if the limp was because he got shot some in the place called Korea, but he just looked off at the sky and had that smile. Soft smile. Like he was remembering something good, which didn't make sense if you're thinking about getting shot some.

Only one time he talked about it was when he drank over half a jar of 'shine sitting in the rocker on the porch and told the story-song about the first
time he had what he called deep love, book love, magazine love, going to marry her forever love, for sure and true love. But. The army come and took him to go to the place called Korea, where he said he liked to froze to death, was never so cold. So cold that when he got shot, some of the blood froze on the way out and plugged the holes in him so he didn't bleed out and kept him alive just long enough. Just long enough for them to throw him across the hood of a jeep bouncing down a frozen road, tied down with two other men who were already dead and frozen stiff. Heard the bullets hitting the frozen bodies. Just long enough to get him to a doctor who fixed the holes in him. Just long enough for him to get back across the ocean in a plane, and find his first deep love that he thought would last forever had up and taken to a new man who hadn't gotten shot some in the place called Korea.

His story-songs were like going up a stairway or a ladder where at the ground there was just a
touch of something you knew would be good, and if you waited and climbed it, there would be something good at the top.

His best story-songs, the ones where he went in his thinking to the small smiles and looking off into the clouds, came when he sat in the chair and drank half a jar of 'shine. Didn't last long. Like burning a candle at the top of that ladder. Get up there, get the good story, then the 'shine would be too much, and the candle would burn out, and he would get quiet again, looking off into private places until his old eyes closed on the memories and he would sleep.

Sit there and snore, Old Blue dog next to the chair sleeping with him, sleeping like he'd been poured onto and into the porch, snoring the same exact sound as Fishbone. Like he'd been drinking 'shine with Fishbone. Thing is, he wasn't old. Had three dogs since I came, or maybe four, coming on five, all flop-eared, drooling hounds so full of
love they'd come up and put their head under your hand to feel like they were being petted, move their head back and forth for the feeling.

Every one named Old Blue. Fishbone said all hounds had to be named that. Old Blue. Because of a song that had a line that said, “Old Blue, you good dog, you.” Named right off, as soon as they came to us—and that's what happened; they just came to us. They'd show up all covered with mud and tick and fly bites and move in, and as soon as they were there, they'd get next to Fishbone and stick there like they'd been there all their lives, act all old and tired, and sleep next to Fishbone and the rocker unless I went to go hunting. Then they'd jump up and hit out of the front of the cabin like they were on fire.

They were good to go with if you watched them, watched and listened to them and knew how they acted, and that would tell you things. Where an animal might be, and what kind of animal it was;
one sound if they saw a squirrel, another sound—almost like a bell—if they treed a coon or bear, and just howled murder if they saw and chased a deer.

I asked Fishbone once where they came from when they just showed up, and he said God sent them, said God made them in the forest out of spare parts of other animals, leftovers, and that's why they were so floppy and loose skinned, and they roamed the woods until they saw a place they liked and they moved in and sat down. Of course I knew that people used them, hunted with them, and that sometimes they ran and got so far they didn't come back; that's how the people lost them. They'd start to run a deer and go so far and fast they wound up belonging to us.

Or maybe I should say they came and laid down. Next to the rocker, sleeping when Fishbone sipped 'shine and did his word-songs, and they went to getting fed scraps and cooked guts from fish and animals I hunted, which we mixed with boiled
rice. Went to getting fed and petted. Fishbone said it was the onliest true love there is in the world, the way a dog loved, unless you found the right woman, which he thought he did twice. But was wrong. Or he said some had the true love of Jesus, but he wasn't one of them, though he thought maybe that was as good as the dogs' love. Clean, he said, clear and clean and no chains holding. I sat by a tree for a time one afternoon in the sun with Old Blue number three with his head in my lap and wondered if I had the true love of Jesus but no feeling came, and I thought maybe you had to be older, or know more. Maybe later, I figured, when Jesus got to know me better or I got to know him. Fishbone said He was everywhere and that if I listened to him when he sat in the rocker and talked and learned about things, it all might come to me. Or might not. He said it had not come to him, the true love, either with a woman or Jesus, but it was still there, out there, for the lucky ones.
In the meantime he said the love from a dog would help me to understand about it.

Love.

I'm not sure when I started to learn things from Fishbone. Might have been right away when I came to him, however that happened. I can't remember much from the first times except that when I was, I think, three or four, he taught me how to pee off the porch on the downwind side so it wouldn't splatter back on my legs, and to use the outhouse and magazine paper to wipe, because if I did it again in the yard, the dog would eat it and lick my mouth afterward and give me worms in the butt. I don't know if all that is just perfectly true, but every dog we've had has licked my mouth if he caught me off guard, so I figured it wasn't worth taking a chance. I don't want worms in my butt.

After that first learning that I can remember, things kind of came so fast it was all I could do to catch up.

First the woods. The old cabin we lived in was just barely not the woods, made out of old slab boards left from a sawmill some place far off and long ago. Weathered and gray, and according to Fishbone, older than him, and so full of gaps, he said you could throw a cat through the wall without hurting it. So I asked him kind of snotty, did he ever throw a cat through a wall, because when I was young and didn't understand how his story-songs worked, I was kind of snotty, or as he said, I was part of a know-it-all. And he had a look he gave me that had no smile in it when he thought I was being part of a know-it-all. And since it was the only time he looked even a little cross or sideways at me, I stopped being that way every chance I got.

So I was already in the woods, more or less, sleeping in the cabin with the night sounds and the bugs all part of me, and it was just natural to fold into it like it was home, my bed, my warm green woods bed.

Second Song: Devil Love

She found my heart,

and took it.

Found my soul,

and shook it.

Found my song,

and spoke it.

Found my life,

and broke it.

Dance on, devil woman.

Dance on, devil love.

I
was never afraid of the woods.

Never felt out of place the way you can be with people, schools, crowds, ratchety noise—the way it was when the state came to take me and put me in those places with those things and people. Had to fight sometimes. Had a big fight with a boy twice my size, beat me all to hell and gone, just for being different. He thought because I was down I was done, but I got up and clipped him with my thick mail-order boots, and he went to puking and left me alone after that.

Still didn't like it. Even when they opened my
brain and put in good things. Taught me to read. The little school was in a hill town and had one old computer which I never got to use, or even learned how to use. Boy in the school said that he knew of a place where they had more, many computers, and they could play games on them and talk all over the world on them, but I wasn't sure he was telling the truth; he also said he had an uncle who could dead-lift six hundred and ninety pounds with one hand, so believing him was a stretch.

But this little school with bad ceilings and a leaky roof had books. A whole room full of books on shelves, and an old woman who had soft blue hair and wore glasses on a cord around her neck who was in charge of the books, and she thought you should read them. No, that's not quite right. She loved the books, and when she touched them, it was like she was petting them, and she taught me how to read, made me read, made me want to read, made me love to read. Did it all in two
months and twenty-six days, which was all I was in that place until they sent me on back to Fishbone.

In the shack.

In the woods.

But the old woman with the glasses on a cord around her neck and hair that smelled blue didn't forget me. Every month when the man from the state came with bullet money from Fishbone getting shot some in Korea, and kid money so I could be “raised in a goodly manner,” and grocery fixins, the old woman sent one or two books on up with him. I'd send back any books I'd read and we'd trade back and forth.

History books, poetry books, western books, nature books, even some by an English writer named Shakespeare. Poems that didn't rhyme and were hard to read until I found they were supposed to be a play, and if you said the words out loud, they made more sense. Sometimes made you feel new about some things.

Old Blue numbers three and four both thought I was crazy when I came to spouting Shakespeare poems that didn't rhyme off the porch, but Fishbone seemed to like them. Didn't say so, but closed his eyes and smiled and nodded and shuffled his feet the way he did when he was doing his own songs his own self. Word-songs. Same smile, and even bigger when Shakespeare came to working on love talk.

He must have known about the woods. Shakespeare. To have all those words rumbling around and to be able to bring them out in the way he did, the dance of them, he must have known how it was in the woods.

How green and still it could be, and how it could smell and sound so that it was inside you, part of you.

Could be the best part of you.

Like home. Like my home.

I folded into the woods not long after I learned
about using the outhouse and peeing on the downwind side of the porch. I remember walking off the porch and down to the creek and sitting on the sand at the side of the clear, rippling water, and putting my hand in and seeing the way it wiggled my fingers, made them look all wavy.

Everything else disappeared. Just gone, clean and gone like there was never anything else. Just the woods. From that day on every chance I got—and that was all the time—I went into the trees. I'd take just one step in, move to the left and then right around a tree, and I was there: Home. Moving quiet, like a knife through water. Warm, green, leafy light all around me, sounds of birds all before and after me, in the woods.
In
the woods . . .

First just to look. But by the time I was six, I started in to hunting with Fishbone rules. Fishbone had a way to do everything, all things—way to think, way to cook, way to see, way to live, way to be.

And his hunting rules were simple.

If you killed it, you had to eat it. You could eat it raw or you could eat it cold or you could eat it cooked, but if you killed something, you had to use it for food.

I learned that when I started. I made a small spear out of cane, sharpened it to a needle point with the kitchen knife, and worked down the creek bank looking for anything that moved. I was thinking of crayfish but couldn't find any, so I tried spearing some chubs flashing in the shallows, but they were too fast for me. Downstream a little more I found and speared a frog. Not a big bullfrog like we later got out of the swamp one hill over. You could fry the legs, big as chicken drumsticks almost, wrapped in flour or cracker crumbs, legs jumping and twitching in the pan as they fried, and tasting good, completely good, when they were done and crisp, sprinkled with salt.

This first frog was small. Come shooting off the
bank like he was shot from a spring, went underwater and stopped. Just stopped in clear water wasn't four inches deep. I poked the cane spear down and got him, pinned him to the bottom, killed him. Then I reached down and grabbed him with my free hand, and took him back up to the cabin to show Fishbone.

Good, he nodded. Now eat him.

The frog, I asked.

Yes, boy, he said. You killed it, you eat it.

The whole frog, I asked, thinking I don't believe I can get the whole frog down and hold it, guts and skin and all. Thought of the tongue, sticky and kind of long, and it almost made me puke but he shook his head.

On frogs just the back legs, he said, cut them off and wash them in the creek and bring them in and fry them in a little bacon grease until they crackle, then eat them.

But I said there aren't two bites. No meat at all.

Then you shouldn't have killed it.

Lessons learned. Don't pee into the wind, don't get worms in your butt, and if you kill something, you had to eat it. I had to cut the legs off the body of the frog. Bright green and shiny skin with black spots, cut them off just where they joined the little body, then wash them clean and dust them with flour, same as with a big frog.

Looked so small. Little spindly legs hardly big enough to see sitting in the pan. Then scoop bacon grease out of the can by the sink where we pour it after we cook bacon. Solid and gray-brown, two spoons tastes all salty and bacony.

Then outside to pick up the axe and split wood for the cook stove. Big axe, double-bladed Collins almost impossible for a six-year-old to pick up, and then worse to have to swing it, again and again, to split enough wood for a hot fire; then carry it in, light the fire, get the stove hot, put the pan with grease and tiny frog legs over the hottest part, and
fry them until they stop jumping and jerking and twitching, until they crackle.