Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (19 page)

Willie said nothing but
seemed to recover his spirits, sol
emnly
intoning "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" as he sprinkled a
pinch of the alleged fairy dust over his head and
did a little pirouette, then repeated the nursery rhyme as he
sprinkled first Julie, then Anna Mae, Terry, and Brose. Gussie
couldn't help giggling as he sprinkled her, and Dan ducked out of
the way, but Terry held him by the ribs and Willie sprinkled both
of them. He sprinkled Faron, who pretended to flutter around
the room, which normally Ellie would have found
amusing.

When he sprinkled her, he kissed her on the
nose, then announced, "Each of us havin' been duly sprinkled, I now
pronounce us all Methodists."

Ellie roused herself enough to help pack the
van with all the instruments Gussie had bought, sleeping bags and
pillows for the trip and the bag of groceries with plenty of bags
of chips and Oreos, plus the trail food Willie had picked up at the
store and the diet drinks everybody wanted. Bear hugs were
exchanged all around, and then Willie, Brose, Anna Mae, Juli,
Terry, Dan, and Gussie piled into the van and drove off, Juli
waving through the back window until the van turned a corner.

"Well," Elite's mom said with a deep sigh,
"I sure hope they'll be all right, and I'm gonna miss 'em, but we
have some heavy planning to do if we're going to get this meetin'
together. Honey, Daddy and I are going to go over to the Richardses
this evenin', and I think you kids ought to come with us and tell
Morgan and Leeann more about what's been goin' on."

She shrugged, not trusting herself to talk.
She knew she was going to cry. Faron said, "I'll go over there with
you. You comin', hon, or are you too tired?" Ellie shook her head
and turned away as her eyes started filling.

The inside of the house looked so empty, as
familiar as it always had, and at the same time as alien and barren
as the face of the moon. She threw herself down on the bed she'd
had when she was a little girl, in the room where she, Juli, Anna
Mae, Gussie, and Terry had all took turns using the bed and
sleeping on the floor while the guys slept on foam pads on the
living room and kitchen floor. She'd miss tripping over bodies in
the morning. She waited until she heard the front door close, and
the car start, to have her cry and let it all out. When it had
dwindled down to exhausted sniffles, her hands again went to her
pockets for comfort, and she drew out the banjo strings and pegs as
if they were jewels and took the piece of torn vellum that had been
the banjo's head and smoothed it lovingly, reading the words
inscribed on it in blocky, childish printing, "May the Circle Be
Unbroken," repeating it aloud like a mantra.

She straightened the kinks at the ends of
the strings with her fingers and noted with surprise that the
strings weren't wiry or plastic at all. They were like long curling
hair, wound around a central core. She'd never seen any strings
like them. Back in Scotland, the tiny ends of these same strings,
strings that always stayed in tune no matter what the banjo played,
were a magic charm to bring her friends back from the lives of the
ballad characters they inhabited. Surely they still had some magic
in them. She braided them into a bracelet and twisted it around her
wrist. It felt soft and light, like a curl of her own hair. The
pegs were fragile looking as china or ivory, but appeared to be
some kind of bone. Funny, no one had ever mentioned that
before.

She fell asleep and dreamed, instantly
recognizing the turn her dream was taking and saying to herself
inside the dream, "Oh, yeah, this must be the ballad of 'The Cruel
Sister.' " In the dream a woman who looked like Anna Mae, wearing a
long old-fashioned dress, and an expression that would have done
any one of Torchy's co-workers credit, was pushing a woman who
looked like Juli into a stream. The clothes of the woman who looked
like Juli were also old-fashioned, heavy, with long skirts that
bubbled and belled out in the water, and slowly sank with the
weight as the Anna Mae-woman pried loose her clinging hands from
the bank, taking a fistful of water-sleeked fair hair and plunging
the disbelieving, pleading face under the water before releasing
her. Ellie knew with perfect dream logic that it was because both
of them were in love with Willie. Juli flailed and cried and went
down three times as her clothing dragged her under, and Ellie tried
to wake up and reach her, but no matter how often she thought she
was awake, when she tried to move, she found it was as if she had
no body. Juli's body tumbled in the current, spinning around and
around until she reached a big waterwheel and an old
daub-and-wattle building that looked like something out of
Shakespeare. "She floated till she came to the miller's mill-pond,"
a voice sang in Ellie's head.

And then a shadow fell over the water, and a
big man who looked like Brose hauled Juli's dripping body from the
stream. Ellie saw him pull out a knife, but somehow she wasn't
grossed out even though she knew when he laid the body on the bank
and raised his knife, then lowered it, that he was carving into the
drowned woman's body. He held up a curved bone, as smooth and white
as if it had never been part of a flesh-and-blood body, and the
line, "He made a harp of her breastbone. / Each note could melt a
heart of stone," sang through her head. Like an Indian in a western
movie, he held up a sheaf of her hair, which was thicker, longer,
and more golden blond than the real Juli's was, and the words came,
"He made the strings of her long golden hair." And finally, "He
made the pegs from her little finger bones" sang through her head
as Brose began attaching small objects to the top of the harp.

The dream got fuzzy then, and she seemed to
doze until she heard the tune of the song again and realized she
was looking at a man in a room full of dismembered and partially
assembled instruments hung like meat in a freeze locker all over
what looked like the inside of a garage. The man stood over a
workbench that held a broken white harp. Ellie knew it was the harp
from her last dream—she could see the golden gleam of the dangling
strings and the bone white gleam of the instrument's body. She
didn't know the man, but he was not young, even though his hair was
mostly black. He had a hawkish nose and a lean, gnarled body in
baggy-seated jeans and a plaid shirt with the elbows out. Around
his neck a leather bag hung, bobbing in time with his movements. He
was whistling The Cruel Sister song as he bent over a piece of what
looked like white cloth, carefully lettering words, "May the—" in
an awkward, childish block printing.

"Ellie, honey?" Faron's voice was soft in
her ear, and his fingers kneaded her back.

She woke and turned over to face him,
feeling the imprint of the banjo pegs on her cheek and chest, the
softness of the bracelet around her wrist.

"I just had a dream," she told him, "and I
reread the message on Lazarus's head again 'May the Circle Be
Unbroken'—see? I think I dreamed about the luthier who made
Lazarus, Faron. Sam had the banjo made from an older instrument,
I'm just sure of it, and I think it's up to us to have these pieces
made into something else. It's not just that Lazarus protected us
all that time, it's like having it remade is part of bringing the
songs back."

Faron touched the pegs thoughtfully. "If
your folks will loan us their car for a day or two, I think we
should drive up to Arkansas and see some old friends of mine. Did I
ever tell you about Callie and Aldin? They left good jobs as
scientists to become luthiers. I wonder if they're still building
instruments. Maybe they couldn't make another banjo out of these,
but they might be able to make something."

* * *

A cold rain was falling by the time the van
pulled into the tribal center at Anadarko, Oklahoma, and the sky
outside the van's steamy windows was dark, though it was barely
four in the afternoon.

"Maybe we should wait here with you
tonight," Brose said. "Might be nobody you know is around,
and—"

Anna Mae gave him an impatient look and
shouldered her knapsack.

Juli had been drawing hearts with
eighth-note flags on them in the fog on the window, and now she
said quietly, "I wish we didn't have to split up too, Anna
Mae."

"Well, we do," Anna Mae said through tight
lips, and swung the door open. She wore a beat-up pair of Faron's
old blue jeans and one of Barry's T-shirts with Molly's zip-front
hooded sweatshirt over it. The rain pelted her lank dark hair,
which was braided on either side of her face and tied with rubber
bands. Rivulets ran down her face, and Brose, catching her eye,
disregarded her surly attitude and grinned at her, giving her a
thumbs-up sign of encouragement. She'd do fine. She was the most
organized and determined of all of them, and the most driven.
During their travels she had always been the one to arrange the
harmony parts, to urge the others to learn new skills, to ask
questions of the musicians they were learning from, and to arrange
the practical details—not because she was bossy but because it
occurred to her that sooner or later those problems would have to
be faced, and she was a problem-facin' kind of woman. She reminded
him of all of the witches, wise women, ladies, queens, and clever
peasant girls he'd been a part of during his sojourn in the ballad
times, and he had expressed concern for her only because he knew
that even the most together lady likes to have somebody give a damn
once in a while. After she jumped from the van, she gave him a
twist of a smile and a roll of her eyes and hiked her pack up
farther onto her back.

Gussie parked and hopped out to join her,
Julianne right behind her. Even Willie, who Brose suspected had a
sneaking admiration for her, climbed out to say good-bye.

"I see you got your extra clothes," Gussie
said, and rummaged in her purse. "Now, here's some money from the
gambling winnings. Let me know through the Curtises if you need
more, and I'll get it to you."

Anna Mae tucked one wad into her jeans
pocket and another into the hastily sewn pouch she wore around her
neck like a medicine pouch. Brose had seen her tuck her devil's
tear and the tightly rolled baggie of fairy dust into the same
pouch earlier. When she finished tucking, she looked up, a little
embarrassed to see them all still standing there. "Well, so long,"
she said finally, her mouth tight, her eyes full of excitement—and
reluctance. Kinda like a paratrooper must look before the first
jump, Brose thought.

"Wait a minute," Julianne said, "I want a
hug." The two women embraced, then Gussie hugged Anna Mae too,
followed by Terry and, more enthusiastically, by Dan, who was a
hugging sort of guy on general principle.

Willie held her lightly, kissed her on the
cheek, and said, "You be careful, now, darlin'."

Then it was Brose's turn, and he enveloped
her in the biggest bear hug he could muster and kissed her on the
mouth while her hard skinny arms threatened to cut him in half,
they were so full of both warmth and tension.

Then without another word she turned on her
heel and strode up the sidewalk to the main building. She hadn't
taken a guitar with her. She wouldn't need it for Indian songs, and
if there were no more drums, she could pound on almost
anything.

As they piled back in the van, Willie said
to Terry, who had been holding the map for Gussie as she drove,
"I'll ride shotgun this time, darlin'. I'm gettin' out next."

The next leg of the trip the van echoed with
silence as if it were one of the abandoned castles they'd visited
in Britain, and it took Brose a while to figure out what was the
matter. The banjo wasn't twanging away in the background, as it had
almost every day since he'd met Willie out in the middle of the
desert right after the banjo came into Willie's possession. First
the banjo, then Anna Mae—their absence left a hole big enough for a
storm to blow through.

"Just drop me off anywhere and I'll hitch to
the Texas border, darlin'. No need for you to go out of your way
none. I can find my way around," Willie told Gussie. He sounded so
itchy to be gone you'd have thought he was covered with fleas.

Brose leaned forward between the two front
seats of the van. "Long as we're not goin' out of our way for you,
why don't you forget hitchin' to the Texas border and we'll let you
off at Oklahoma City so you can catch a bus, MacKai. Hitchin' may
be even more hazardous to your health than it was when we was
kids."

"That's right, Willie," Gussie said. "Stay
with us awhile, hon. It won't seem quite right without you."

"Okay, darlin', but I think I'll take a nap
now. Reckon you can find your way into the city okay?"

She could and did. The rain continued to
fall, and traffic was comparatively light as they pulled into the
parking lot across the street from the bus station. Gussie gave
Willie a wad of money before he left the van.

"Where you buyin' the ticket for, buddy?"
Brose asked.

"I don't know. Wichita Falls, maybe. I just
gotta be home for a while. I feel like a battery that's been out of
its charger a little too long. Probably I'll end up back at the
ranch eventually."

He leaned over and gave Gussie a kiss on the
cheek, but before any of the rest of them could scramble from the
van, he grabbed a guitar and strode off toward the lights of the
bus station, looking as alone and disconnected from them as any
stranger.

They swung back east and drove steadily into
the night. By midnight they reached the Southeast corner of
Missouri. Since there were only five of them left, they pulled into
a campground, almost empty now that winter was coming on, and put
down the backseats and spread out sleeping bags Barry had insisted
they bring along. The lodgepole pines, bare fifty or sixty feet up
the trunks before branching out into foliage, sighed and heaved
above the roof of the van, and a little creek gabbed and gossiped
on its way to the Weosha River.