Fishbone's Song (6 page)

Like me with the doe standing by the pond with the jewels of water going out and out. I would own, would see her, know her all the rest of my life.

Fourth Song: The Long Road

Burning, burning,

up the long, long road.

Burning, burning,

up the long, long road.

Never knowing day by day,

whether to swear or whether to pray.

Moonshine makes a heavy load,

up the long, wrong road.

F
ishbone has a lot of rules where he makes things right in your head, but some of them you don't understand at first.

If you kill it, you eat it.

Don't think about bad things if you don't want bad things to happen.

If you think something is red, it's red.

If you think about something small a lot of the time, it will get bigger, but if you think about something big, a lot of the time it will still get bigger. Like fish. Or debt.

A house is something to keep things out, not to
keep things in. Like weather. And biting flies. And some snakes.

Always stay hungry. It makes you see things better. Especially if you're hunting. Or trying to think up a new idea. Orville and Wilbur Wright were always hungry when they were working on how to fly. Stayed in a shed, Fishbone said, with slab walls, and had eggs to cook and eat, eggs in a board shelf with a hole for each egg, and every egg was numbered. Number said when it was laid, told how fresh it was. That was hunger, Fishbone said—fat, full people don't number eggs. Just eat them. Anybody who numbers his eggs is hungry. All the time. When I asked how he knew about Orville and Wilbur and their eggs, he looked at me like I was going to be the big part of a wise guy and then shrugged and smiled and said he saw it in a magazine picture of the inside of their shack. Was still true, even if Fishbone wasn't there to count the eggs himself.

A room is as big as you want it to be in your head.

And there it was. A change had started in me just before that about the room. Not the same change as later but a change. The thing is, what with one thing and another, it seemed like everything was changing for me. On me. About me. Don't know how old I was because I never quite knew when I was born. Might have been twelve, plus a little. Fat side of twelve. But I'd taken to having dreams I didn't understand about families I'd never had, about girls I'd never known, about parts of girls I'd never seen. About parts.

About.

Dumb dreams.

But I couldn't seem to stop them and one evening on the porch I told Fishbone about them. About the dreams and he said, what else?

What else what, I asked.

What else would you dream about? Comes a
time, comes a time when you've never had a car and your voice is changing. What else are you going to dream about? Came to me, came to me later than you because I never knew peace until I was older. Still young when I went to Korea and got shot some and then cars and running white lightning up that damn road and never knowing time for real dreaming until later, older, when I was in New Orleans swamping out the flops and juke joints, and then it was all there, all there in flat light night and day for to see and smell and feel. Touch. Couldn't dream. Didn't dare to dream. Too real.

Too real.

Remember one woman, lady, one lady named Clair. Called herself C. Just that, C. Hard to say if she was pretty or not. She was . . . everything. And nothing. Hit your eyes, your brain, your breath like a storm. Worked in one of the houses he cleaned and sold everything about herself. Sold what she was for what you had. All that she was for all that
you had. Used to sit and play soft music on a guitar, everything propped on top of the guitar. Had a snake tattooed around her neck. The tattooed snake ran down the center of her chest, down and down and you didn't see where it was going unless you were someone else. He never saw where it went. They said she used to have a live snake there, around her neck and down, but it died so she had the tattoo done.

Once you'd seen C, Fishbone said, there was no more dreaming about cars or families or girls or parts of things. It was all real. Too real for dreaming. Now go and fetch cool water from the creek and make nighttime coffee so it will be there cold in the morning to wash the night taste out of our mouths.

And I did.

And that night I dreamed about rooms. Or a room. My room. And how big it was getting to be.

I slept in one corner of the cabin behind a short
wall that came out from the sidewall of the cabin. Not a room so much as a slot. Fishbone slept on the other side of the cabin in the same kind of slot. I slept on an old strap-iron cot just wide enough for one person with iron ends that were decorated with little designs so it looked like the little posts that held up the ends of the bed were stuck in a kind of flower. Fishbone said the cot belonged to an old Confederate soldier from the Civil War name of Season, or maybe Ceesen. He never spelled it. Said the old soldier died in the cot when he was over a hundred years old and he was alone and they didn't find the body for going on a week. Not here but in another cabin-shack. During a warm summer month. And the body went off, he said, as bodies and other meat does when it's warm, so after they found him and buried him in a rubber sack—Fishbone said it was before they had plastic—nobody wanted anything to do with any of the old soldier's stuff. Said it smelled too bad. So they burned
the shack with all his stuff in it. Bed too. Fishbone came along later, maybe a year later, and the bed was still there, standing in the ashes, only rusted a little after the fire took off the finish a bit. But all there, springs and all. And the stink was gone. Burned away.

Fishbone took it home, never one to waste anything. Still had the box he might have found me in when I was a baby. Still had old work boots so worn they were falling to pieces. Said he might need the leather from the tops to fix other things that wore out or were broke, the way cowboys who were rustling cattle in the old days sewed old boot tops together to make pouches to carry cartridges on the side of their saddles. I had used the sleeve of an old canvas jacket to make a quiver to hold arrows, held up with a piece of clothesline rope over my shoulder, so I understood how he could have taken the cot. Used the cot.

He slept on it for twenty years, was still sleeping
on it when he found or got me. Kept me in a box on the floor. Same box he might have found me in. Or not. And when I got too big to sleep in the box, he had another cot, a little bigger, and he put me in the old soldier's bed and moved to the other one.

Still the same.

Still the same now. Box in back of the stove with my baby stains in it to hold stove wood. Probably never be moved again. Old boots in the corner by the door. The same. Old coats hanging on nails, just the same.

But the dreams changed. I dreamed of my room first as it was, and then out, out and out and wider, until it was bigger and bigger, outside the cabin, outside and out until it was all of everything. All of it—all I could see and be in—all felt like my room. My own room, my own place to be. To be.

Told Fishbone about it, about the dream, and for a few minutes he looked at me, like he was studying on something. And maybe not something
he liked much. Like when he talked about getting shot some in Korea. Then he leaned back in the rocker and closed his eyes.

Thought at first you were a familiar, he said.

What's a familiar, I asked.

Witching thing, he said.

I don't understand.

Don't suspect that you do. Don't suspect on it at all. There's a lot of things you don't understand. It's because you're young. Ain't had time to understand a lot of things, being young and all.

I waited. It was the only way with him. It never helped to push on a thing. You had to wait for an answer. Problem was, sometimes you had to wait a long time. Might be he'd answer right away, might be in an hour when he took some 'shine, might be tomorrow. Might be never, like some of the questions I asked him about women. Grown women. And what it was that made a man think on them so much. He never did answer. Just looked off into
away and sipped 'shine and smiled. Dozing, he said, dozing on his memories. Some you might like to get shed of, wear them off, burn them. But now and again a memory was so fine you wanted to keep it. Like a warm cloud you could doze on. Just sit in the chair, and sip on a jar of good 'shine and close your eyes and doze on the memory. Part of getting old, he said. Maybe the best part of getting old.

This time wasn't so long. Took a sip of 'shine from the jar, really just a lip wetter, said you came three ways. In a box, from family and guv'ment, and from a witching stump. Can't pick one because they're all the right way at different times. After you were here with me and learned to suck a milk rag, then a calf bottle, one night I took you to a ghost stump glowing in the dark, and put you on the ground to see if you were a familiar. See if the light jumped from the stump into you. It was on a cold night, soft cold, and you caterwauled some.
Sounded like an old hog stuck in a gate. Might have been the cold. You were partial to being warm when you were small, and I maybe had a bit too much 'shine in me that night. Wasn't so good at controlling it then, like I am now. So I held the blanket open a bit to see if the light jumped into you, but it didn't. It didn't. You just got cold and let out more noise. So you ain't. Ain't a familiar.

Again I thought. Again. What's a familiar, I said. Or who?

They help witches work when it comes to casting spells. Sometimes be a little boy, sometimes a little girl, sometimes a cat, and now and again just a candle. Lit, of course. Candle won't work unless it's lit. And it helps if it's a beeswax candle or tallow. Not store wax.

You believe in all that, I said. Witches and the like.

There are things we don't understand to know. To know. And maybe if we don't know about how a
thing is, how it works, how it can be—just because we don't know how it is doesn't mean it's not real.

And so there are witches, I said.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've never seen one, known one, but I've heard. Heard things that don't make a lot of sense. Knew an old lady once, could touch her elbow and tell you if it's going to rain. Tell you when. To the hour. Some can take a willow fork and walk around and tell you if there's water and how deep down it is. Seen that many times. The stick bends down when they find water. Sometimes bends down so hard it strips the bark off in the man's hand. They call it witching water, or divining water, but I don't know if they're witches or not. Just know I don't understand it. And I can't do it.

And I'm not one. I can't hold a stick and find water.

No, no. He shook his head, sipped his 'shine. No. And you ain't a familiar either, or it would have showed by now. But you have these dreams, thick
dreams, that don't make a lot of sense, except. Except they do, they kind of do make sense. They come from thinking of things, thinking of things around you, and I think that just means you can see. See out and around and front and back. See new and old things. You dream-see your cot, your sleeping place, your living place, going out and out. Getting bigger, and I think it means you are more, want more.

So what do I do, I asked.

Was me, he said, smiling that soft, no-tooth smile. Was me, I'd go out and out and see where it led to. Go find the edge of the dream.

And so I did.

Took the bow and a sleeve-quiver with a half-dozen cane arrows and forty or fifty strike-anywhere wooden matches, what Fishbone called Lucifer fire sticks, and an old steel pot with a bent handle, and at the last minute a small role of stovepipe wire I found on a nail on the back of the cabin. Fishbone
had talked of making small rabbit and squirrel snares with the wire, and I had a thought of trying it.

Also took a small paper pouch of wheat flour and corn flour mixed. Maybe two cups worth.

Didn't know where I would go or for sure why. Was just going to go, go see. Go and do. What Fishbone said. Go to the edge of the dream, wherever that turned out to be, and even starting loose that way, nothing hard in my thinking. Even that way, I found myself hunting. It was that I couldn't not hunt, if that makes any sense at all. I could walk in the woods, could think I was just walking in the woods along the creek, where I started, but inside of four steps I was hunting. Looking deep in the water, not just at the surface, looking deep in the creek for fish or crayfish or big leopard frogs. Looking not just at the bushes on the shore or out ahead of me, but looking inside, deep into each bush, looking for that line or motion that didn't
belong, wasn't part of the natural line or motion. Studying tree limbs for a jerk or twitch or shape that wasn't part of the limb, part of the tree. Might be a grouse or a squirrel on a tree limb, or a grouse or a rabbit on the ground. A sound that didn't fit, a line that didn't fit, wasn't part of the natural line or sound. Might be alive. Might be, might be . . . something.

Might be food.

And even not to kill.

Not yet.

Not to kill everything or even anything. Later, later, but not yet, not now. Just moving, moving through and around and of the woods and trees and brush and water, fitting in, making myself part of that natural line, natural sound, natural feeling.

Hunting.

To see and feel and know the woods. Moving out to the edge, to the edge of what there is to know, to know more, understand more, see more, learn more.

Hunting.

To know. To learn. To see and feel and hear and look inside, inside of everything you see. Not just the surface of the water, but deep down into it; not just the squirrel or the rabbit or the grouse but inside it, inside to where you know, know the arrow will hit and will kill and will make food where there was no food.

To the edge of all you know.

To hunt.

To be a hunter. To see the edge of your dream, go right to the edge of your dream and then through it. Through the edge of all you know and think and into the next thing, the next part.