Picking the Ballad's Bones (33 page)

"Hi, there. I haven't met you before
but I'm Dan. What do you play? Wait till you see what these guys
who came with us do. You're going to love it."

"Call me Rosa," Giorgio's widow said,
arching her neck coquettishly.

"Hi, I'm Terry," the dark woman said,
linking her arm with Dan's as she dropped an African drum on his
foot.

But Dan picked the instrument up and
walked over to Theo, where he could better hear the interplay
between the telephone-amplified banjo and the violin. "Cool," he
said, and began pounding out a march rhythm on the African
drum.

One of the Gypsies who had been
searching the house saw the instruments the Africans were piling in
the center of the room and swooped down to scoop up a fine
concertina, which he began playing along with Dan's drumming, Uncle
Theo's fiddling, and the telephone-transmitted banjo.

The same song played over
and over until every Gypsy
and each of the
newcomers who didn't have an instrument joined in stamping their
feet, swaying from side to side, clapping their hands, or snapping
their fingers to the music as if compelled by the cellular pied
piper. After the song had repeated enough times, Faron began
singing the lyrics and Ellie and Terry joined in with harmonies.
But when they got to the first refrain, "The flowers of the forest
are a' wede awa'" which Terry hastily whispered to Ellie meant
"weeded out" in Scots, a new instrument joined the others. Dan
looked up from his drumming, eyes slitted in ecstasy to say,
'Way
cool. I was
wondering how we could get some bagpipes in with this!"

The pipe music skirled closer
accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats. Suddenly the banjo sounded
much louder, much closer. Outside the cottage the setting sun
gleamed saffron and scarlet in the mud puddles along the road,
cloaking the clouds with bold gory glory. Ellie, standing nearest
the open door, felt the wind rise and saw the trees bow down as if
more traffic were coming up the road, the weeds flattening as if
pressed by tires—or hooves or feet.

The music outdoors grew
louder and louder until suddenly the pipes whined to a halt and the
door burst open, admitting a biting cold wind.

Giorgio's wife, Terry and Dan, Uncle
Theo and the Gypsy man with the concertina, Gachero, the other
Africans, and the three Norwegians all crowded into the doorway,
their hair whipped across their faces as the wind forced them back
inside.

Ellie hung on to the doorframe longer
than the others, restraining her hair with her hands and peering
down the road. Though she saw no pipers or horses, she did seem to
make out, very dimly, the shadowy outline of a small curly-haired
woman carrying a somewhat more distinct form that looked
like—

"Faron, it's Gussie and the banjo. But
there's something wrong with them."

A long derisive laugh erupted in
Ellie's face and a slatternly woman with messy red hair and
bloodshot eyes sauntered into the room carrying a bottle of
scotch.

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here," she
said and added, allowing her tacky faded pink chenille bathrobe to
fall open across her thighs as she sat cross-legged on one of the
kitchen chairs, "What the hell do we care? What the hell do we
care?" To the wind that had just blown in with her, she said,
"Well, I'll be blessed if it ain't the Bold Buccleuch. H'lo there,
Buck. What are you doing above the dirt at this hour? Did you bring
back that banjo just for little old me? Buck, I'm touched that you
remembered, after all these years!"

She laughed again. "You know, little
dears, I'm almost sorry I got you into this. The boss says I'm
washed up, that debauchery is going out of fashion. Oh, don't
worry, Rosa, there'll always be a market for the product I've been
supplying to your people for distribution."

Rosa glared at her and spat, the glob
landing on the bright red lacquer on the nail of Torchy's right big
toe. Torchy, unmindful, rubbed it away with the ball of her other
foot.

"They say people are going to stop all
the freewheeling fucking around I worked so hard to promote and
that blessed Pestilence Devil ruined with his nasty little STD
plagues. They say all the important people are going to stop doing
drugs and drinking so they can concentrate on really serious power
mongering. What's going to be left for a poor girl to do? They
don't care if I'm left here playing nursemaid to you suckers for
the next seven years until time for me to deliver you up to
them."

"That wasn't the deal!" Faron said.
"Gussie said that if they played by your rules and got back all the
songs and the seven songs for every song they lived through, like
you said, they could come back and we could try to take the songs
home again."

Torchy shrugged. "So I
lied. I do that, didn't you notice? It's part of my stock in trade,
along with wine, women (or men, depending on your preference—both
for that matter), and song. Crap, I don't know why I let the boss
talk me into it. I'm not nearly as good a negotiator as those guys,
you know? I just want to have a good time and they're always
scheming, always playing games. I
must
have been stoned to let them talk me into helping them get rid of
music. It was the best part of Fairie and the
only
thing they let me bring with
me. It was"—she sniffed and sniveled and began to sob—"it was kind
of like my
dowry,
you know? All I had left of my glamor besides, of course, my
incredibly sexy appearance, and now they're taking it
away!"

"Oh, don't cry," Dan said, patting her
on the shoulder. "There's always rock and roll."

"Not for long," she sobbed. "That's
next. Ummm, that feels good," she writhed like a cat as he massaged
her shoulders.

"So why don't you just bring everybody
back if you don't want to stick around here?" Dan asked.

"Yeah," Faron said. "If
you've got nothing against the music after all, let us go. All we
want is to sing a few songs and make a few
bucks
."

Torchy laughed bitterly.
"You know there's more to it than that. Maybe, if you were all mine
and only mine, I could bring them back. But you're not. The music
keeps these poor saps here in this age connected with all that went
before—with Buck here and Sir Walter," she nodded at the shadows,
which were assuming ghostly form now that the sunset was rapidly
fading. "It keeps people
human
.
Hell's bells, it almost keeps
me
human and I'm not."

"Could we ask the Wizard Michael to
bring them back?" Ellie asked.

Torchy shook her head.
"Nope. They're stuck there the whole seven years and then you can
bet my boss
will
be here to collect them. And if I don't deliver them, my ass
is in hot lava. Mick the Wiz can't do much of anything without my
help. I thought you knew that. His power was mostly earthly except
for a little inspiration from me. I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen,
but I'm all the magic you've got and I just can't get involved
anymore." She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. "I just wanted you
to know how rotten I feel about it all."

"What you mean is that you
just got snockered
and
were feeling maudlin," said Gussie's voice within her now
ghosty-looking form.

"That too," Torchy said. "But at least
with you and the banjo in never-never land with the ghosties and
such, I'm off the hook about bringing you back. And Rosa and her
gang can take care of the others, so I guess it's ta for now,
luvvies. Pip pip, cheerio, and all that."

"Wait," Dan said. "What if we did have
our own magic? Would you let us try to use it without getting in
our way?"

"Honey, you got
nothin'
as powerful as
me," she said.

"Maybe we do. You said yourself that
music was not only some of your strongest stuff, but it was also a
force for the other side. Maybe we could use that."

Torchy's eyebrow lifted.
"Maybe."

"Would you stand in our
way?"

"Depends on what you're going to
do."

"Wouldn't it be better for you," Ellie
said gently, "if you didn't know and we just sort of snuck one past
you?"

"Good point," said Torchy, standing up
with her robe's hem daintily held in two fingers and her bottle of
scotch clutched in the other. "I'm going to go powder my nose—and
throw up. Plot quickly, darlings."

Terry Pruitt's eyes were shining as
she looked up at Dan. "Are you thinking what I'm
thinking?"

"Yeah, but a lot depends on Brose and
Anna Mae and them. How many songs have they gotten back already,
Ellie?" he asked.

Faron flipped open a
notebook and said, "Counting today? With the primary ballads,
variants, seven freebies per each retrieved ballad, and all of the
associated songs, five hundred forty-five
.
Plus three
instrumentals
I
couldn't find any words for."

Rosa asked suspiciously, "What is
this? What you doing? You going to call the cops?"

"Of course not, Rosa," Dan said. "Cops
don't usually know any magic—or music. But Gachero and his buddies
and Torun and her friends taught us this cool custom, something
they do in Iceland and in some parts of Scotland. I think it might
help. Give me your hand."

"Why? I don't understand."

Gachero said, in an
Oxford-educated voice, "You see, Rosa, it is simply a matter of
synchronicity. The Icelandic peoples believe that they contact
their ancestors by forming a line of life, a sort of a snake dance,
and chanting and singing all of their sagas and songs from the
beginning of memory. Thus they keep their history, their national
personality, their spirits, alive. I see no reason why such a
tactic might not be useful here."

"Makes sense to me. You only keep the
songs alive by singing them and maybe we can bring Gussie and
Willie and the others back by singing the songs they're bringing
back to life."

Rosa grabbed Theo's hand and said,
"This is sensible. My family, we are great musicians, great menders
of musical instruments. Then I marry that Giorgio. I think, poor
boy, to be so hurt and I find I am married to a dead man who
poisons what he claims to protect. Music doesn't pay so good, but
is part of the Gypsy soul."

The Africans, the Gypsies, the
Norwegians, Dan, Terry, Faron, and Ellie all formed a line. Ellie
was on the end and she felt large, sausage-sized fingers grasp her
own, though no one was on that side of her. The fingers let go of
hers long enough to slap her on the behind, then rejoined hers
innocently, as if it had been one of the Gypsies who had done it.
But then, she had not yet been formally introduced to the Bold
Buccleuch's ghost.

Theo removed Rosa's hand so that it
linked with his belt, and did the same with Torun on the other
side, freeing his hands for his violin. On the center of the table,
the banjo suddenly appeared, as solid as it ever had been though
slightly glowing around the edges.

A bagpipe wheezed into its first groan
as Dan, Terry, and Gachero picked up hand drums while the
concertina playing Gypsy also attached himself to the people on
either side of him in a way that wouldn't interfere with his
playing.

A long sigh of silence
throbbed through the cottage, then the banjo chimed the first notes
of "The Gypsy Rover" and everyone began to sing, even the
Africans
and the Norwegians, who watched
everybody else's lips. And when all of the words were exhausted to
the version that Faron and Ellie knew, Gachero sang a similar song
in a Kenyan dialect, and an Icelandic one, and Torun and the others
sang variants they knew, until the banjo changed tunes
again.

For seven nights and seven days they
sang and danced, until their limbs were so weary and their throats
so raw, their hands so sore, they could barely move, but still they
sang the songs and danced, always linked, always following the
banjo. The first two nights, the Bold Buccleuch and his men, Gussie
and Sir Walter, and Jeannie Gordon, Glenlogie, the Widow Hetherton,
and Neighbor Cuddy solidified gradually to be seen dancing among
their living partners, though by morning the ghosts faded once
more.

But by the third morning, the forms
that belonged to Gussie, to Glenlogie, the Widow, and Jock who had
spurned the Flower of Northumberland remained visible, though
see-throughish and shadowy, in the dim light filtering through the
curtains.

Every once in a while someone would
detach from the line and get water or drinks or food for the
others, to be chewed and swallowed during pauses between songs or
phrases. Now and then one dancer would bow out for a brief rest or
to massage the limbs of the others, but never more than one at a
time broke the line for all the seven days and seven
nights.

During some of the wilder murder
ballads or drinking songs, a whirling, high-kicking mote of light
cavorted in front of them and around them, and a raucous laugh rose
over the singing, a familiar voice shouting, "I can't stand still
for this, luvvies, but I can sure as hell dance to it!"