The Onion Girl (22 page)
Authors: Charles de Lint
Once upon a time â¦
All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to
the saguaro forests of the American Southwest. Or even the more subtle differences, like how the piney wood hills that back up onto the rez north of Newford are nothing like the cedar and birch forests around Tyler where I grew up, and there's less than a hundred miles between the two.
the saguaro forests of the American Southwest. Or even the more subtle differences, like how the piney wood hills that back up onto the rez north of Newford are nothing like the cedar and birch forests around Tyler where I grew up, and there's less than a hundred miles between the two.
But even when they seem to be the sameâtwo stretches of hemlock woods, a seemingly similar pair of tamarack and scrub tree forestsâthey each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular trees, individual rather than of their species.
So it's no surprise that the Greatwood is so singular. What is surprising is how it also seems to be the sum of all forests at the same time. Never mind the towering heights of its trees, some of them with girths as wide as a Crowsea tenement building. When you step under the shadow of the Greatwood's twilight reaches, you hear a voice you immediately recognize as the deep rumbling murmur that you've heard whispering up from under the individual voices of any forest you've ever been in.
I guess this is what Joe means about the Greatwood being such a close echo of the First Forest, the vast woodland that covered everything when Raven first made the world. When you're standing under this enormous canopy, it's easy to imagine that you've been transported back to the beginnings of time.
These days I spend most of my dreamlands time here in the Greatwood, sticking close to where I first arrived and met Joe. Like the hospital, I have lots of visitors when I'm under its canopy, but they haven't come to say hello to the Broken Girl, studiously looking away from the bandaged shape of her body under the sheets. It's just people passing by, stopping to say hello, standing to look over my shoulder when I'm drawing, happy to share a few quiet moments before they travel on.
I'm meeting most of them for the first time, and don't see them again, but there are a few regulars. These ones are mostly friends of Joe's, or related to him in some way, like Jolene, and this guy who calls himself Nanabozho, who could have been Joe's twin brother with that same canid head on his human shoulders, except his coloring runs more to wolf grays than Joe's chestnut fur and he's got these mismatched eyes: the right one's brown, the left one's a steel-blue gray. Nanabozho's like
Toby, always wanting me to draw him. I don't mind. There's something wonderfully strange about those lupine features looking out at me from under the flat-brimmed hat he wears, the startling juxtapositioning of animal head on a human body, with the long dark braids framing either side of his face.
Toby, always wanting me to draw him. I don't mind. There's something wonderfully strange about those lupine features looking out at me from under the flat-brimmed hat he wears, the startling juxtapositioning of animal head on a human body, with the long dark braids framing either side of his face.
I keep hoping the crow girls will drop by, but the only corbæ I meet are a couple of Jack Daw's cousins, dark-haired siblings with a Kickaha cast to their broad features. They introduce themselves as Candace and Matt, the one ganglier than the other, but handsome in a way Jack never was. While they're chatty, and certainly as friendly as Jack used to be, they're full of gossip instead of the wonderful stories he used to tell. I guess Katy Bean, the red-haired girl who took over Jack's school bus on the edge of the Tombs, inherited his storytelling gift as well as that old bus.
Once, watching me from a distance, I see a woman with a white buffalo's head on her shoulders. The whole forest goes still while she's here. Even the Greatwood's rumbling voice quiets to a barely discernible murmur. I want to talk to her so badly, but my throat goes all dry, and I can barely breathe, never mind get up and go over to where she's standing.
The hush holds even after she slips away, then it's as though the Greatwood lets out a breath it's been holding. I hear squirrels chattering again. A jay scolding in the distance. The deep whoosh of a raven's wings as he passes overhead, followed by a hoarse croak when he's out of sight.
I ask Nanabozho about her the next time I see him and he just smiles. “That was only Nokomis,” he tells me, “doing her mysterious earth mother thing.”
“Well, it worked for me.”
“Works for everybody,” he says. “No surprise, when you think about it.”
I lift my brows in a question.
“Well, maybe Raven made the world,” he says, “but Nokomis has been taking care of it ever since.”
“You mean she really is ⦠?”
Nanabozho grins, laughter filling his blue-gray eyes. “You bet. Hey, somebody's got to do it, and nobody else wants the job.”
“I think we should all help her. I sure would.”
He looks serious then. “Next time you see her, you tell her that. She could sure use an extra pair of hands or two.”
There are others that don't approach, but I figure it's mostly because they're shy. Deer women stepping daintily between the trees, bolting when I call out to them, but coming back cautiously once they think I'm not looking at them anymore. A few times I've seen a small, quick-footed man with a hare's long ears hanging across his shoulders like braids. He always gives me a quick, nervous smile, but keeps his distance as he goes along his way. More recently I've seen a regular gang of little twig people that look like they've stepped out of an Ellen Went-worth painting. She illustrated my favorite book of fairy tales when I was a kid and now I know for sure she was rendering from life. It's hard to figure what keeps them togetherâno more than moss and vines, it seems, from the glimpses I get of them. They have high sweet voices and giggle a lot, waving to me and smiling, but they keep their distance, too, which is too bad. I'd love to do some serious studies of them, rather than the quick gesture drawings that're all they give me time to do as they go trooping by.
And then there's Toby. I don't see him for a while after that day when he ran off at Jolene's approach, but one afternoon I'm sketching after a long day in the rehab and suddenly he's there.
“Hey!” Toby cries.
I take a step back, startled. He appears to have simply stepped out of nowhere.
“Where did you come from?” I ask.
He gives me a mischievous grin.
“Maybe I came right out of that tree,” he says.
I smile as he collapses beside me, leaning over my arm to look at my sketchbook. I've been drawing fungi again today and I've already filled a half-dozen pages. Next trip to Mabon, I'm going to pick up some colorsâpastels or colored pencils, or maybe just a stick of red chalk.
“I didn't know that you lived in a tree,” I say.
He leans back against the root and shrugs.
“There's a lot about me that you don't know.”
“This is true,” I say.
I turn to look at him lounging beside me, enjoying his merry features and the curious whisper of something wise and knowing that occasionally crosses his mischievous gaze.
“In fact,” I add, “I don't really know anything about you at all.”
“Ask me anything,” he says, as magnanimously as might some ancient king, granting a boon.
“Okay. What's the deal with you and Jolene? Why did you take off the way you did when she arrived?”
He gets a funny look and I get the feeling he doesn't want to answer.
“It's okay,” I tell him. “I guess that was prying. I'm too nosy for my own good. It's just this gift I have, you seeâbeing curious, I meanâand it's not one of my more endearing ones.”
“It's not that,” he says.
I can't help myself. “Then what is it?” I have to ask.
Still he hesitates. He looks away and won't meet my gaze and I realize that I'm still, howsoever inadvertently, venturing into some private place. I try to back out again before I make him too uncomfortable. I know what it's like to have secrets you're not ready to share.
“Never mind,” I tell him. “You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”
“It's because I'm not real,” he says suddenly.
He turns to me, gaze searching my face for a reaction. I'm guessing all he finds is confusion, because that's what I'm feeling.
“What do you mean you're not real?”
He shrugs. “You wouldn't understand.”
“Try me.”
“You're real. Somewhere out there”âhe waves his hand vaguely in the air in a gesture that encompasses pretty much everything, but I know what he meansâ“you have a body that's sleeping while you go gallivanting about here. You're real. You have a life. A spirit.”
“You seem to have plenty of spirit to me,” I tell him.
But he doesn't crack even a small smile.
“Somebody made me up,” he says.
“Who?”
“I don't know. A lonely child. A writer. An artist. Somebody. And then when they grew up, or the story was done, or the painting was finished, they let me go. They forgot about me and here I am. Not real. With nothing to call my own, no place to be my home, and who knows how long I have before I just fade away.”
“Are you saying you were somebody's imaginary friend?”
“I don't know,” he repeats. “I don't remember.”
What he's saying reminds me of Isabelle's numena, those spirits she called up from someplace else with her paintings. The paintings were like a door that opened up into our world and let them in, and then they could live forever, unchanged, unless something happened to their painting.
“I've heard of them,” he says when I tell him about the numena, “but I don't think it's the same.”
“But why does this make you run away from someone like Jolene?” I ask.
“Because she's one of the People and they're too real,” he tells me.
“You're losing me again.”
“You know about the animal people, the ones who were here first at the beginning of the world?”
“Sure. Like the crow girls. Or Lucius.”
He nods. “When someone like me is near them, the sheer potency of their presence makes me even less real. If I spent enough time in the company of one of the People, I'd fade away completely.”
“Really?”
He gives me another nod. “I'll fade anyway, but they'll just make it happen quicker.”
“Do they know that?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Why should they care about something like me?”
I can't imagine Jolene or Lucius, and certainly not Joe, being so callous and say as much.
“Your friend Joe's something else again,” Toby says.
“I thought he was one of the People.”
Toby nods. “Second generation. I heard that his father was a crow and his mother a canid. She was related to the Red Dog clan that welcomed the spirits of the corn and squash and first introduced them to you humans.”
Crow and dog, I'm thinking. That explains the features he sometimes wears in the dreamlands. I try to imagine how his parents got together. You've got this bird and you've got this dog â¦
“But howâ?” I begin.
He laughs, the first bit of his old humor I've seen since we started this discussion.
“They made him when they were in human shape,” he says, still grinning.
“Of course.”
“But that's a rare thing,” he goes on. “Two of the People from such different clans having a child, I mean.”
“I thought at least a third of the animals and people living in the world right now had some mixed blood in them.”
He nods. “But his parents were pure bloods, and that's different. The clans of the People are pretty insular. They mate with humans, or cousins to their clan when they're in animal form, but hardly ever so directly outside of the clan.”
“So would you fade around Joe?” I ask.
“Probably.”
“If he knew, he wouldn't put you at risk.”
Toby just gives me another of those shrugs of his. He's good at them. Very cool and casual.
“We just run when we see them,” he says.
I focus on the “we.”
“Are there a lot of you?” I ask.
“More than there are heart homes in the spiritworld. Any one person can make hundreds of us. All they need is imagination. But it requires belief to sustain us, and with that people aren't quite so generous.”
Again like Isabelle's numena, I think. Though not quite the same. Once created, her numena live forever, unchanged.
“But do the people who make you even know?” I ask.
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