Green Angel (3 page)

my knees, not caring about sticks and stones. I could feel the thorns I had sewn onto my jacket and leggings stabbing through me. I wanted my family more than I ever thought I J i O could want anything. Any bit of them, any piece would suffice. If it were only a ghost that I'd found, that would have been enough for me. I wouldn't have asked for more. If it were nothing more than mist I could neither touch nor hold, formed into the shapes of those I loved, so be it. As long as I could see my sister, my mother, my father, I would pay any price. Accept any answer. But it was no one I loved there before me. Not in spirit or in body. It wasn't a ghost or an angel or an enemy. It wasn't mist or cloud or memory. It was only a dog, a huge white greyhound. She was standing motionless, the scattered leaves on the ground turning to powder beneath her paws. I grabbed Onion to make sure he wouldn't charge only to be snapped up by the larger dog in one bite. I carried mv sister's terrier and the basket j of chestnuts through the woods. I had traded away nearly everything that was worth trading, but I still had to eat.

I had to quiet my churning stomach. Later, I would pound the chestnuts into flour and bake bread, but if I needed to defend myself against this strange dog on the way home, the chestnuts would work as well as stones when put to use with my slingshot. Onion growled all the way home, so I knew the other dog was following. But I couldn't see her. I didn't hear a thing. She was a stray, like so many others, but something more as well. She was a ghostdog, mist through the woods, a pale cloud, silent and graceful. When I went inside the house, I could still feel her out in the yard. I put my hand on the cool glass of the windowpane, and there she was. She felt exactly like sorrow. That night I baked, and while the loaves of chestnut bread cooled on the rack, I went out to the porch. I alone sat on the steps where I used to sit with my sister, back when we thought the world was ours. If Aurora walked through the gate o o now, she wouldn't recognize me. She'd run from the ink on my skin; she'd shy from my choppy hair and the thorns that covered me, head to toe, front to back. It seemed so long ago that we used to sit side by side, shoulders touching as we shelled peas for supper. Whenever we husked corn, we would toss the corn silk on each other's heads and laugh until we were dizzy. We were so certain of our futures back then. We were so sure of how we would fill up those blank, white pages. We would grow old together, marry brothers, live in houses so near to each other, we would be able to hear one another singing lullabies to the children we would surely have someday. A few stars came out and shone, glittering and far away. The ashes had all fallen to the ground and I could see the moon, silver in the sky. Like a patch of moonlight, just as white, there was the dog in the garden. I waited, because I knew it would take time before she approached. I didn't blame her for keeping her distance. After a while, my legs began to cramp up. I wanted to go inside and bolt the door. I wanted to & sleep and close my burning eyes. But I stayed where I was, on the porch, in the moonlight. I dredged up whatever patience I'd once had, back when I was Green. At last the white dog came closer. I didn't say anything. I was afraid I might scare her away. I knew what it felt like to be alone. I knew what it was not to trust anyone. All the same, I reached out my hand, the only part of me that wasn't covered with thorns. Now that the dog was beside me, I noticed that her paws were singed, the skin patchy and oozmg and black. Greyhounds were meant to run, but every step must have brought this one agony. When the greyhound rested her muzzle in my outstretched hand, I understood why I'd thought she was sorrow. I would have never guessed that a dog could cry, but this one did. Maybe she'd been burned by embers, like the ones in my eyes, or maybe she'd lost everyone she'd ever cared about, the way I had. I called her Ghost. When I said her name aloud she looked up at me, and when I went inside she followed the way ghosts do, silent, but there all the same. She curled up on the stone hearth, which was cool on her burned paws. Then she slept as though she hadn't had any rest for days, her feet racing through her dreams. My own dreams were empty that night, devoid of moonlight. Even when I closed my eyes, my sister was always just out of reach. I started in my sleep and sat up, hitting my head. I was still sleeping in the pile of quilts under the dining room table. I'd been avoiding the room I'd shared with my sister; now I dragged along the pillows and quilt and went to open the bedroom door. There was moonlight streaming through the window, and before I knew it I'd fallen asleep in my sister's bed. In the morning, it was as if Ghost had always been there. She ate from the same bowl as Onion, and the terrier didn't seem to mind. I found a salve in my mother's medicine cabinet, made from Saint-John's-wort and yarrow. I understood that a greyhound was not a greyhound unless it could run. I called the white dog to me, and she let me apply the ointment and wrap bandages around her paws. That next night, Ghost slept at the foot of my sister's bed. I woke only once. I thought I had felt the dog running in her sleep. I thought I heard the sound of weeping, but when I stroked the greyhound's face, there were no tears. The next time we went into the woods, I brought along a loaf of bread and a thermos of cold, clear well-water. I had planned to go back to where the old trees grew, to gather the last of the chestnuts, but Ghost had other ideas. She wouldn't follow. She led. Her paws were still so tender, she couldn't manage any more than a trot; still, I had to run to keep up with her. In no time my heart was pounding in my chest. How fast she must be when she ran at full speed. How much she must miss racing like mist. How sad that she was forced to plod through the woods with me as I stumbled through the brambles with my eyes that only saw half of what was there, with my nail-studded boots that slowed me down. Before I realized where we were headed, we had arrived at my neighbor's house. The house was dark, and the front gate moved back and forth in the breeze. The yard was littered with debris, broken branches, black apples, clods of mud. Nothing grew in this place but nettles, tall and bitter, stinging to the touch. This was the house that belonged to the neighbor who had thrown stones when Aurora took apples from her orchard. We had hooted and stuck out our tongues and made faces at her. We had run across her meadow laughing, but late at night we had wondered if she was a witch who might put a spell on us for eating the golden delicious apples we had gathered. Now that I was beside my neighbor's door, I noticed a pile of the same white stones I had found in my yard, the ones that had been carefully aimed to chase away the looters, the ones that looked like moonstones. I hadn't given a moment's thought to this old woman, but she had obviously remembered me. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I pushed it open. I went into the house and there she was in her kitchen with nothing to eat but birdseed. Soot covered everything. The clocks no longer told time. Have you come to return my stones? my neighbor asked. I have something better to give you in return, I told her. I left the bread and the thermos of water on the table, then I took the broom, the mop, the bucket, and began to clean. I was good at it by now. With one touch, I could tell what needed care. The books on the shelf were thick with dust. The floors were coated with muck. The paintings on the wall appeared black, until they were wiped clean to reveal women whose faces resembled my neighbor, younger, prettier relatives who looked down upon me kindly for rescuing them from the ashes. When I had finished my work, everything in my neighbor's house gleamed. I had repaid my debt to her. Now I was the only thing covered in ashes. Ashes stuck to my skin, my choppy hair, the thorns on my clothes, my black tattoos. Green, the old woman said to me. She had eaten every crumb of the bread I'd baked and drank every drop of water from my well. I wouldn't have guessed she knew me well enough to know my name, but it was too late to call me that now. That's who I used to be, I told her. Now my name is Ash. Whatever your name is, I have a gift for you in return. It's out on my porch. There was only a big bag of birdseed, but I carried it with me. Once I'd reached home, I left the birdseed in the garden. I guessed it was worthless. I assumed it was all the old woman had. My hands hurt from cleaning my neighbor's house. My feet ached in my father's old boots. My skin hurt from the sharpness of the pins. I had no time for worthless gifts. o Onion followed me into the house, but Ghost would not come inside for her dinner. I fell asleep in my sister's bed, exhausted. I woke once, and when I looked in the garden I saw the greyhound, white as the moon. She was tossing the bag of birdseed into the air as though it were a toy, shaking it with her teeth. In the morning, there were a hundred birds in the garden. I sat on the porch where I used to sit with Aurora and listened as they sang a hundred different songs. The birds had converged from everywhere, from the deepest woods, from the charred canyons of the city. There were cardinals as red as cherries, jays as blue as the sky used to be, crows with night-black feathers, swallows with graceful wings, flocks of sparrows, mourning doves the color of tears. When the hundred birds were finished eating, the garden was littered with the husks of pumpkin and barley seeds. Something else had been left behind as well. Two baby sparrows, dusty and ash-covered, their wings too singed to fly. I took off my jacket and shook out the thorns, then carried the sparrows nestled in the jacket's lining. I brought them into the warm kitchen. That night I dug until I found some juicy worms. Is it all right to eat those? I heard someone say. It was Heather Jones in her white dress, so skinny she looked like a ghost herself. She reeked of gin, and looked woozy. Her legs were covered with sores and little burns. Still, she smiled at me as though we had once been friends. I realized that Heather was prepared to eat worms. That's how famished she was. I brought out some tins of beans, a loaf of bread, a few asparagus. I wished I'd had more. I'd been trying and failing to fish down at the river, and I couldn't think of anything else I could spare. Then I remembered something I'd stored away. I ran and found a dress that had belonged to my mother, soft blue denim that wouldn't be so easily-torn by the brambles in the woods. Heather held the dress up to her carefully, as if it were made out of sapphires. Oh, she said. How beautiful. I thought about how jealous I'd been of her. She'd been one of the prettiest girls in school. By now we could hear music from the forgetting shack. We could smell the billows of smoke. I'm late, Heather said. You don't have to go if you don't want to. It was as polite as I had ever been, and this was as good an invitation as I could manage, but Heather just laughed. She was unsteady on her feet. When you looked closely, you could see that her features were fine. So close to her, I could smell liquor and dirt. Don't you hearP Heather insisted when I let her know she could stay. They're waiting for me. Heather ran off with the blue dress, and there was nothing I could do about it. She thought they were waiting for her. She thought she could dance her sorrow awav. She must have believed she could j forget that her mother and father had also gone into the city that day. I went inside to mash the worms into a paste. My hands were even uglier now from digging, from cleaning the old woman's floors, from chopping wood. I hardly recognized them as my own. I wondered if I was only a black cloud, a spray of mist, a stone, and nothing more. I studied the black roses ringed with thorns that I had inked onto my skin. I was Ash, and these were my hands. But when I fed the worm paste to the baby sparrows they didn't care if my hands were ugly, that my burning eyes could hardly see, that my long, black hair was hacked off, lying in a pile in a corner. When I patted the dogs, they didn't care if my boots were old, if there was dirt under my nails, if there were thorns in my clothes, sharp as knives. Wrhen I swept my neighbor's floor, she had not cared that I was covered with ashes. Every day I baked two loaves of bread, one to share with the dogs and the sparrows, one for my neighbor on the other side of the hill. My days were divided into tasks. I collected chestnuts in the morning, baked at noon, and late m the day I visited the piles of remembrance stones in the woods, white and black and silver. In the evenings, I took out my pins. I was covered now, my feet were covered with thorns, my legs with black vines, my arms with dozens of black roses. There were two ravens on my shoulders, and after propping up a mirror, I'd managed a bat at the nape of my neck. Every now and then I found room for a black leaf or an inky bud about to bloom. As I worked, the sparrows nested in the pile of hair in the corner. A sparrow wasn't a sparrow unless it could rise into the sky, even I knew that. Soon enough the fledglings' singed feathers had fallen out, but I didn't guess how strong their wings had become until they began to flit around the house. I didn't know what they had been busy weaving in their nest until they presented me with their gift a fishing net made from the strands of my own black hair. I went down to the river that very night, as far away from the forgetting shack as I could. The moon was full. Streams of silver light reminded me of my sister. She would often dance while the rest of us worked in the garden. I used to tease her for being lazy. I used to call her names and tell her she'd never amount to anything if she didn't pay attention and work harder. Now I understood that she was working hard at dancing, at laughing, at being moonlight. She wasn't like poor Heather, forgetting with every step she took. My sister was learning the world as she danced. She was understanding the earth, the air, the fire of her own blood, the falling rain that made her laugh and dance even more wildly. My vision was so bad, it didn't matter if I went fishing in the day or the night. In fact, my weak eyes preferred the moonlight. Night was better, colder, lonelier. But I was hardly alone. The dogs had followed me and the sparrows had fluttered behind, enjoying their first flight beyond the confines of the house. Perhaps the fish would be more likely to drift into my net while they slept. I dipped my fingers into the cool water. I could feel the currents and the dreams of the fish, fluid and silver, like my own dreams had once been. I had tried to go fishing several times and had always failed at the task. But this time was different. It was the net that must have called the fish, dark and floating in the water, a broken part of me. I caught three fish and placed them in a bucket of river water. I wrung out the black net and folded it into my pocket. The dogs followed me, the sparrows flew above me, the shining fish swam in the bucket I carried home. I cooked one fish for the dogs and the sparrows and me, another for my neighbor, and the third I kept in the bucket on my porch, where it swam in river water like a fallen star. That night I dreamed of Aurora, but she didn't recognize me. Where is my sister? she called out. What have you done with herP Aurora still didn't know me by my new name. She backed away from the thorns and the nails and the black roses. I tried to run to her, but the vines around my legs pulled me down. I tried to reach out to her, but the thorns on my skin pinned me to the wall. I heard someone crying, and when I awoke the cry was in my own mouth. I went to the window