The Onion Girl (7 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“So you don't look in mirrors at all?” he asks. “You don't primp and preen before a big date?”
I shake my head. “I don't really go out on many dates—so you see, it's nothing personal. And I'm usually too busy to worry about how I look. People can take me as I am or not. Their choice.”
“I choose to take you.”
I give up on my drawing and close my sketchbook. The root he's leaning against curves around behind me in a long fat twist of wood. When I lean back on it, it's like we're sitting on some enormous woodland couch. I hold my sketchbook closed on my lap and study him for a moment.
“So are you one of Joe's cousins?” I ask.
Something passes over his features quicker than I can read.
“I'm a cousin,” he says.
I didn't know the difference then.
“And what do you do—when you're not chatting up strangers you meet in the woods?”
“It depends on the day of the week,” he tells me. “On Gormdays I go riding my bike along the hedgeroads. Soowieday I always have a coffee with my friend the Tattersnake and browse the bookstores in Mabon. When the Wiggly comes, I usually sleep in late because there's so much to do at night.”
He keeps a straight face, but I don't buy any of it.
“You're making all that up.”
“I did, I did!” he cries. “I made every bit of it up!”
He leaps to his feet and throws a handful of leaves at me, dancing back out of range in case I mean to retaliate. I stay where I am and brush the leaves from my hair and clothes.
“Except I do have a friend,” he adds.
“This Tattersnake, I'm assuming.”
He shakes his head. “Oh, no. You can't be friends with the Tattersnake. That's like trying to be friends with the stars or the moon—ever so filled with the potential for disappointment.”
“Why's that?”
“Because they're so bright, and they hang so very high.”
“So Tattersnake lives in the sky?” I ask.
“It's not a name, it's a title,” he corrects me. “Like I'm the Boyce.”
“Which you never did explain.”
“That's true. I didn't.”
I can see that this is one of those conversations that could go on forever, but nothing ever really gets said.
“Well, I'm glad you have a friend,” I tell him.
He nods, then gives me an expectant look.
“What?” I say.
“Aren't you going to try to guess who it is?”
“I couldn't even begin.”
“That's right. I forgot. You're new here. You don't know anybody.”
“I know Joe,” I say. “And I've met a few people in Mabon. Do you know Sophie? She's one of my best friends back in the World As It Is.”
“Everyone in Mabon knows Sophie,” he begins. His voice trails off as his gaze strays over my shoulder, then he simply says, “Jolene.”
“That's your friend's name?” I ask.
His only reply is to turn around and bolt. He's so fast that for one moment all I can do is sit there, watching his little figure suddenly dwindle off into the distance, disappearing among the trunks of the giant trees. I wonder, was it something I said? Except then I hear the breathing, slow and deep and steady, the way you'd imagine a big stone outcrop to breathe if it could. When I turn around it's to find a woman the size of a bear standing behind me. Bigger, even. She seems as tall as the trees, though maybe that's only because of my vantage point.
I scramble to my feet, but standing doesn't help. She still looms over
me and I feel no bigger than a child, and about as powerful. Her legs and arms are like tree trunks, her torso massive. I feel like she could just pick me up and put me in a pocket if she had one. I don't see any in the buckskin dress she's wearing. It's the size of a small tent but still only comes down to her knees.
She looks more Native than Toby did. Broad-faced and dark-eyed, skin a reddish brown, hair hanging over her ample breasts in two long, dark braids that are decorated with beads and small, brightly colored feathers that must have come from orioles and jays and cardinals. She's barefoot and doesn't so much seem to be standing where she is so much as growing out of the ground the way the trees do.
I can't read the look she's giving me. Is she angry, finding me here in the woods? Maybe they belong to her and I'm trespassing. Toby sure didn't stick around to find out, or maybe he already knew. I wish he'd bothered to warn me. Then I remember the last thing he said before he bolted.
“Is … is that your name?” I ask. “Jolene?”
She gives me a slow nod. “People call me that. Animandeg asked me to look in on you.”
There's only one person that would have asked anyone to check out for me that I can think of.
“Do you mean Joe?” I ask.
My relief is immediate when she gives me another of those slow nods. I still don't know why Toby ran off at the sight of her, but at least now I know she's not going to eat me or something.
“That name you used,” I say.
“Animandeg?”
“Yes. Is that Kickaha for ‘crazy dog'?”
I know that's what they call Joe up on the rez.
She shrugs. “A truer translation would be ‘crow dog,' but since crows are all half-mad anyway, I suppose it's close enough.”
Crow Dog actually makes sense, since when Joe's in his mythic-face mode, sometimes he's got a crow's head on his shoulders, other times that of a wolf or a coyote. Mind you, Crazy Dog always made sense, too, since Joe can play the fool as readily as the wise man.
“So I guess you're another of Joe's cousins,” I say.
She studies me for a moment. “Who else has been claiming kinship to Animandeg?”
“There was only the little fellow who ran off when you came,” I tell her. “He said he was Toby Childers, the Boyce.”
“And he said he was our cousin?”
This seems important to her, so I go back over that part of my conversation with Toby.
“Actually, no,” I admit. “He just said he was a cousin—the same way he said he was the Boyce.”
She seems to relax when I say that. She takes a step forward and I swear I can feel a tremor in the ground when she moves. It makes me wonder why I never heard her approach. When she sits down, there's another one, followed by a distant rumble that seems to come from deep underground. All her movements are slow, but liquid. She may be large, but she's comfortable in her body and knows it well.
I sit back down and pick up my sketchbook from where I dropped it. Jolene has such a beautiful face, I want to draw it, but I don't have the nerve to ask if it's okay. When she doesn't say anything for a while, I start to feel a little nervous again, which is odd, since I can usually be as comfortable not talking with someone as talking with them. But everything feels akilter at the moment, so I try to think of something to say.
“What does that mean, ‘the Boyce'?” I settle on. “It doesn't sound Kickaha.”
“It's Gallic,” she tells me. “It means ‘one who lives in the woods.'”
“Gallic? You mean French?”
Again one of her slow nods. Then she adds, “You seem surprised.”
“I just thought this place was, I don't know. The Native spiritworld. Joe sometimes calls it
manidò-akì,
so I guess that's what makes me think it's particular to the Kickaha.”
That gets me a smile. “That is one of its names. But at the same time it's the heart home of all spirit, not simply that of one clan, or one people. It's as if the Christians claimed heaven for their own.”
“Actually, they do.”
She laughs. “That's right, they do, don't they? It's like making war in the Peacemaker's name—they get so many things wrong. Crazy Crow says that's the trouble with writing stories down. Everything gets locked into history, even mistakes, and the stories can't breathe anymore.”
I'm getting confused now. “By Crazy Crow, do you mean Joe?” I ask.
She smiles. “I don't think so. But Crow's an old name among the cousins. Old Crow, Crazy Crow, Crow Dog, the crow girls. And it doesn't
help that they keep stepping into each other's stories, wearing each other's faces. I think maybe only Cody's worse than them.”
“And Cody is?”
“Coyote. The dog with a thousand names.”
“I know some of those stories,” I tell her.
She laughs. “Everybody does.”
Since she doesn't seem to mind answering questions, I keep asking them.
“What do you mean by the cousins?” I ask.
“Now that can be confusing, too. It's like asking Bear to give you one name for honey when he has a hundred hundred of them, one for every flower the bees have visited and then all the combinations you can get when their pollen gets mixed up in the hive.”
“I can get like that talking about colors,” I tell her.
“That's right, you're a painter. That's a good way to tell a story—everybody can find their own way through when they look at a picture.”
“You were telling me about the cousins.”
“Well, now. When we say the cousins, we're usually talking about ourselves. You know, the People. The ones who were here first when Raven made the world. But sometimes we mean anyone who has a bit of our old blood in them. And sometimes we mean those who have a shape close to our own. So when Bear sees some old grizzly scratching his ass against a pine tree, he'd call him a cousin. But he's not a direct relation, you see.”
“I think so.” That makes me think of Toby again. “So the little man who ran off when you arrived. When he called himself a cousin, what did he mean?”
“I don't really know,” Jolene says. “Not without talking to him. But he wouldn't be claiming blood kinship, unless he's looking for trouble.”
“Why would that be trouble?”
“It's like someone saying they're your friend when they're not, and trading in on that to maybe take advantage of you. To be trusted on someone else's word and loyalty instead of your own.”
I certainly trusted him quickly enough, I think, even with his talk of penises and girlfriends and all.
“Who would your cousins be?” I ask. “I mean, if it's not being rude to ask.”
She laughs. “You can ask, but I don't know the answer. I've just been
who I am for a very long time. Alberta says I must have just come out of the ground, because I've always got a bit of dirt on me.”
“Alberta,” I say. “She's a deer woman, right?”
“Now how would you know that?”
It's coming back to me now, where I've heard some of these names before. Jolene and Bear, Alberta and Crazy Crow.
“There was a storyteller named Jack Daw,” I say, “who used to live in a bus near the Tombs. He's been gone for a few years and there's a redheaded girl named Katy Bean living in the bus now, but when he was around, he used to tell me all these great stories about the animal people like you're talking about. How they were here first, and how they're still walking around today, still a part of stories. Alberta was in a couple of them. And so were some of those other names you've mentioned. And you were, too—or at least he had a character in his stories that was named Jolene. He used to say she could be as little as a minute or as big as a mountain, depending on … well, I'm not really sure what.”
“Oh, Jack,” Jolene says. She looks sad when she says his name. “But that was me, I guess. Sometimes I'm big and sometimes I'm small.”
“I miss Jack. I always wondered where he went.”
“We all miss him,” Jolene says.
“Do you know if he's all right?”
“He went into the Grace,” she tells me.
“What's that?”
“It's where we came from. It's where we all go to when our time's done.”
I've never heard it put like that before. The Grace. A wave of sadness comes over me, realizing that Jack's dead. Doesn't matter if maybe he's okay, because he's still gone on. For those of us left behind, we only have our memories of him left to hold on to. I guess the small comfort I can take out of all of it is this: maybe I'll get to see him again when it's my turn to die.
Because that's one thing I'm sure of, being here in this wood, traveling to Mabon. We have spirits. We have a soul. Something that survives when the body's done.

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