Picking the Ballad's Bones (2 page)

In Walter Scott the writer, the
leadership took a more imaginative and original turn than mere
cattle thieving. In his lifetime he regained the right of the Scots
to wear the tartan, even after it had been so thoroughly
obliterated that clans, including those who had never affected
Highland dress in the past, had to have whole new plaids invented
to fit the fashion newly popularized by the English royalty. He
found the lost crown jewels of Scotland, which you can see to this
day in the treasure room at Edinburgh Castle. He wrote the most
popular novels of his day. And, most important to our story, he
preserved for posterity and in some cases restored and improved
upon the folk ballads of Scotland, the great bloody romantic murder
ballads, and the songs that encompassed the highly embroidered
history of his land. And all that was in addition to holding down a
respectable position in the Scottish superior court and being
sheriff of the whole district to boot.

Scottish sheriffs were a little
different from the ones in the cowboy movies, but they were lawmen
all the same, and Sir Walter was a man of action just as much as
anybody you'd see on the Late Show. And if there was one breach of
conduct that had gotten him riled while he was alive, it was seeing
somebody mistreat a book.

Now, Sir Walter had been an old fellow
when he died, with lots of sickness and disappointment and grief to
wear him down, just like most folks have. He didn't quite know what
to think when he turned over in his grave and found he couldn't get
back to sleep, except that he was a little irritated. He'd woke up
a few times before to greet old friends now and then, welcome them
to the fold, as it were, but mostly he just stayed dead and did
whatever it is good dead people do when they aren't messing around
with the living. But it dawned on him all of a sudden what that
ornery low-class varmint of a ghoul was doing, and that he was
doing it to Sir Walter's own beloved library. Sir Walter had paid a
dear price for that library and for Abbotsford, had ruined himself
putting it all together, and his spirit had been very relieved when
the National Trust for Scotland took over the whole shebang. He'd
gotten up special then to go to the ceremony and wandered around
personally thanking the people, just the way he might have if he
were having a birthday party while he was alive.

But he figured out all of a sudden
that this ghoul was up to something no spirit with any gumption
could just lie there and take, so Sir Walter's spirit, his mortal
remains being long turned to dust, rose itself out of the grave at
Dryburgh Abbey where he was buried and wished itself at Abbotsford.
Without quite knowing what it was wishing, it also wished itself
into a handy suit of armor loafing beside the entrance hall and
wished itself down. The armor already had a sword conveniently
clapped into its metal gloves.

So here you have this deserted mansion
in the middle of the night, and Sir Walter's ghost, mad as a wet
hen, clanking down that long tiled entranceway and into the study
and to the library, clank, clank, clank, swinging that sword a
little to get the rust out of the joints of the armor, ghost eyes
glowing blue fire through the slit in the helmet, clank, clank,
clank, bearing down on that ghoulish crook and demanding in a
quavery Scots burr that chilled the ghoul to his own dead marrow,
"Wha' the devil are ye aboot?" Of course, Sir Walter's ghost had no
idea how close to being right it inadvertently was about the nature
of the ghoul's bosses. Him sort of knowing about the devils well
and truly spooked the ghoul, you should pardon the expression. The
gruesome critter started to drop a first-edition copy of Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Borders on the floor but a glare from the ghost
froze the ghoul so it set the book nicely on the display case and
slunk away, the ghost clanking behind it to see that it did so.
When the ghoul was safely out the door, the border collie guardian
beast came out from under the table and bowwowed bravely at the
departing animated carcass, and even got so brave as to worry a
piece of rotting finger bone it had left behind.

Sir Walter's ghost climbed back up
onto the armor's niche, rearranged it into its original position,
tsked-tsked at the trail of rust chips left on the tiles, and
wafted back to the library. As long as he was up he thought he
might wander through his beloved library again for a while. His
hand itched for a pen. The ghost scene he had just enacted might
seem corny to you and me with me telling it like this, but he
considered it a classic and it gave him an idea for a story he
wished he could write down.

CHAPTER 2

Meanwhile, at Heathrow airport, a
certain redheaded hell-raiser in a flight attendant's uniform
watched a fellow flight attendant whose nametag said "R. McCorley"
carry a wee little bomb off the plane in his carry-on luggage.
McCorley shouldered his way into the cattle-pen maze barriers and
walkways that herded people through the customs line, inserting
himself between the musician, Willie MacKai, who was toting a banjo
in a garment bag, and another musician named Brose Fairchild. They
were bringing up the rear. The deaf girl, Julianne Martin, the dark
growly-looking woman the others called Anna Mae but whose passport
said "Mabel Gunn," the young Randolph couple, Faron and Ellie, and
the chatty old gal named Gussie, who was much older than she had
been a year ago but who was not yet as old as I am, were already
being questioned.

The redhead, whose tag said "T.
Burns," twirled her own flight bag from one finger and rocked one
high heel idly from side to side, her mouth quirking in amusement
as she ambled along behind Brose Fairchild and watched to see what
McCorley would do next.

The Martin girl tried signing to the
first customs officer but he didn't seem to understand, and when
Gunn stepped forward to explain or possibly interpret, he warned
her sternly to stay in line. Meanwhile, Fairchild, the old gal, and
the Randolphs passed by another officer without much incident, but
MacKai was stopped and ordered to unzip the garment bag.

"Anything to declare, miss?" the
officer asked the redhead as she slung her flight bag up onto his
counter.

"Just the usual," she said.

Up ahead, the customs officer was
eyeing the banjo, which was softly playing a line from an old
ballad that started, "Oh, let me in, the soldier cried. Cold haily
windy night—"

"Does it always do this, sir?" the
customs man demanded.

"Sure as hell does, buddy," MacKai was
saying. "And you better believe it cost me a pretty penny to get
that electronics engineer to rig it up this way."

"As you say, sir. However, we can't
allow you to bring this into Britain."

"And just why would that be?" MacKai
asked softly as anxiety welled up inside him that after coming so
far, the devils were finding yet another way to separate him from
the only key to reclaiming the music. At the same time, he knew
that belligerence wouldn't get him far with the authorities so he
tried to sound pleasant.

"We have a description of an
instrument of this sort, self-frailing, I believe it said, as
stolen goods, sir."

"That must be some other banjo they're
talkin' about, officer. See this one here was given to me by . . ."
MacKai tried to explain but the officer nodded to an armed man
behind him who started forward.

"And what do you mean by the usual,
Miss?" T. Burns's official asked.

"You know, a lid of heroin, a few
crystals of crack, and some new stuff—"

"I'm sorry, miss, we don't like joking
about that sort of thing. You'll have to—"

Ordinarily, she would have delighted
in choosing that moment to disappear from sight and memory, leaving
the man with a loaded flight bag, a mountain of paperwork, and
nobody to blame anything on, but McCorley had just opened his own
bag. He pulled something from it and threw it to the floor behind
the customs official. A thick cloud of acrid smoke billowed up from
the floor as if cloaking some particularly bashful
dragon.

"Shee-it!" Fairchild bellowed, and
grabbed the redhead's hand, barreled into MacKai, and plowed the
rest of his party before him with the exception of McCorley, who
lobbed the wee little bomb far enough into the cattle-pen
arrangement to give himself time to escape before the whole works
blew sky-high.

Shouting, coughing, random gunfire,
and an alarm siren mooing throughout the terminal added to the
excitement. No security guards from inside the terminal tried to
stop Willie and his friends from leaving the customs area, however,
because of the nostril-burning day-old-corpse smell of the smoke
that doubled everybody up with coughing. Out in the terminal,
nobody tried to apprehend the fleeing group because plenty of other
people were dancing around trying to find out what the excitement
was all about, was it dangerous, and how to avoid being hurt by it
while enjoying the spectacle as something to write home
about.

Faintly tinkling in the background,
the banjo, half-smothered by the garment bag, played the line from
Loch Lomond that was sung as, "You take the high road and I'll take
the low road."

"How the hell do you get out of here?"
Willie demanded of nobody in particular.

"You heard the banjo," Gussie said.
"They take subways around here. Torchy honey," she hollered back to
the redhead, "You're the local. Which way is the
subway?"

Torchy Burns, as she was sometimes
called, occasionally liked to play by the rules just long enough to
confuse everyone, so she led them to the nearest underground
station.

* * *

"Wait, wait, wait," Sass said. "What
is it with this redheaded lady? Is she a spy or what?"

"Or what," the voice behind the candle
and cowl drawled. "She's one of those Certain Parties I was telling
you about but I'm not supposed to say exactly who or what they are
for fear of offending somebody's mother."

"But if she's one of the Certain
Parties," Minda put in, "why is she helping them so
much?"

"She's a little different from the
other Certain Parties," the cowled voice said. "For one thing,
she's not as reliable. She doesn't much care about right and wrong,
just about doing whatever she feels like at the moment. Not much on
long-range goals, doesn't care if she spreads disease, doesn't care
if she doesn't, doesn't care if what she does kills folks, and
doesn't care if it doesn't. She just likes to see what
happens."

"Where did she get all those drugs?"
another kid wanted to know.

"Why, son, she's got all the drugs and
all the booze and all the other mind-bending, weird-making stuff
anybody'd ever think to look for. She's the source of all of it and
the source of anybody wanting it. She makes any other drug dealer
or vice lord look like an amateur."

"But she helped them," Minda said.
"She helped them get away, didn't she?"

"In about the same way a cat lets a
mouse scuttle out between its paws for a while. And she was still
putting moves on ol' Willie, trying to charm the banjo away from
him just to see if she could."

CHAPTER 3

The musicians followed the flight
attendant blindly since they didn't have time to figure out the
underground schedules. She herded them on and off the underground
and onto a train bound for Scotland. Gussie nearly got a stiff neck
from looking over her shoulder so much and she could tell that the
rest of them were nervous wrecks too by the time they got settled
into the little train compartment, which consisted of two long
benches across from each other in a tiny little room with windows
on one side and a door on the other. Their compartment was the last
one in the car next to the sleeping car.

The train rolled away from the
outskirts of London through all the ugliest, most industrial parts,
dimly seen through growing daylight. How long had it been since
they'd landed? It seemed like only a few minutes and Gussie's heart
was still pitter-patting like mad, but when she asked Anna Mae Gunn
and Anna Mae checked her wristwatch, a big old man's one on a black
waterproof band buckled up to the last notch with the tip end
hacked off with scissors so it wouldn't stick out over Anna Mae's
knobby tanned wrist bones, the time was nearly six in the morning.
Daylight swarmed in on them as they stopped for five minutes every
ten minutes or so at some little podunk village with
daub-and-wattle houses that looked a lot like the ones on the PBS
mysteries Gussie used to like to watch on her nights
off.

Brose Fairchild stared out at the
villages backed by rolling expanses of green and grunted, "Looks
just like Missouri to me. Ain't much more than a Sunday stroll to
get across the whole damn place." He rubbed his gray, red and black
steel-wool hair with both Mississippi mud-colored fists and then
rubbed his eyes as well.

"Don't knock it," Anna Mae Gunn told
him. "We may be glad of it if we have to make a break. Not much
cover though."

If it hadn't been for the
events of the last few months, Gussie would have thought the former
Native American rights activist was being a little overly paranoid,
but in those same months Gussie's daughter and son-in-law had been
wrongfully arrested for trying to help a Scottish musician enter
the country, after which Gussie's own house was burglarized. When
she had gone to a folk festival to raise support for the release of
her children, she had been nearly electrocuted, shot, and arrested,
in that order, before being personally hypnotized into driving
God-only-knew how many miles into the traffic jam from hell from
which she, Willie, Julianne, and a Texas lawman had barely escaped
with the help of Brose, Anna Mae, the Randolphs, a chanteyman named
Hawkins, and a few hints from that crazy banjo Willie MacKai
carried. If that wasn't weird enough, Brose, Anna Mae, the
Randolphs, and Hawkins claimed
they
had been prevented from getting killed or lost
along the Oregon Trail by a series of apparitions Faron had started
calling the Ghosts of the Pioneers, who steered the musicians into
what was supposed to be a permanent and fatal traffic jam. If
Gussie hadn't had almost positive proof that the self-playing banjo
was in fact both bewitched and probably haunted by the ghost of the
late great granddaddy of American folk music, Sam Hawthorne
himself, she would have thought Faron was kidding about the ghosts.
As it was, she took it for the literal truth and a part of the
world as she now knew it. Unfortunately, she not only had to accept
the helpful ghosts, but she also had to accept the insidious
whoever-the-hell-it-was who made the phantom traffic jam. These
troublemakers, they had all come to believe, were responsible for a
variety of circumstances that had virtually extinguished most music
that could even remotely be called folk music from the United
States. It was hard to say whether they'd been able to do the same
thing in Canada since the borders were closed to musicians and
there had been a postal strike for several months.