Sympathy for the Devil (8 page)

What do I hear? she thought. What do I feel?

Woodpecker hammering a dead tree limb, deeper in the woods. The smell of grass rising up from by her feet. Herbs from the garden, mint, basil, thyme. The flutter and sweet chirps of chickadees and finches. A faint breeze on her cheek. The soft helicopter approach of a hummingbird, feeding on the purple bergamot that grew along the edge of the vegetable and herb beds. The sudden chatter of a red squirrel out by the woodpile. Something crawling across her foot. An ant, maybe. Or a small beetle. The hoarse croak of a crow, off in the fields somewhere. The sun, warm on her face and arms. The fat buzz of a bee.

She knew instinctively how she could make a music of it all, catch it with notes drawn from her fiddle and send it spiralling off into the late afternoon air. That was the groove Robert kept talking about. So where did she go to jump it?

The first thing she heard was what Robert would do, bottleneck slides and bass lines, complicated chord patterns that were both melody and rhythm and sounded far simpler than they were to play. But while she could relate to what his take would be--could certainly appreciate it and even harmonize with it--that music wasn't hers. Following that route wouldn't be so much jumping her own groove as becoming someone else, being who they were, playing the music they would play.

She had to be herself, but still play with a stranger's hand. How did a person even begin to do that?

She concentrated again on what this place meant to her, distilling the input of sounds and smells and all to their essence. What, she asked herself, was the first thing she thought of when she came back here in the spring from her winter wanderings? She called up the fields in her mind's eye, the forest and her meadow, hidden away in it, and it came to her.

Green.

Buds on the trees and new growth pushing up through the browned grasses and weeds that had died off during the winter. The first shoots of crocuses and daffodils, fiddlehead ferns and trilliums growing in the forest shade.

She came here to immerse herself in a green world. Starting in April when the colour was but a vague hue brushing the landscape through to deep summer when the fields and forest ran riot with verdant growth. Come September when the meadows browned and the deciduous trees began to turn red and gold and yellow, that was when she started to pack up the trailer, put things away, ready her knapsack, feet itchy to hit the road once more.

Eyes still closed, she lifted her fiddle back up under her chin. Pulling her bow across the strings, she called up an autumn music. She put into it deer foraging in the cedars. Her scarecrow standing alone, guarding the empty vegetable and herb beds. Geese flying in formation overhead. Frosts and naked tree limbs. Milkweed pods bursting open and a thousand seeds parachuting across the fields. Brambles that stuck to the legs of your overalls.

She played music that was brown and yellow, faded colours and greys. It was still this place. It was still her. But it was a groove she didn't normally explore with her music. Certainly not here. This was her green home. A green world. But all you had to do was look under the green to see memories of the winter past. A fallen tree stretched out along the forest floor, moss-covered and rotting. A dead limb poking through the leaves of a tree, the one branch that didn't make it through the winter. The browned grass of last autumn, covered over by new growth, but not mulch yet.

And it wasn't simply memories. There were shadowings of the winter to come, too, even in this swelter of summer and green. She wasn't alone in her annual migrations south, but those that remained were already beginning their preparations. Foraging, gathering. The sunflowers were going to seed. There were fruits on the apple trees, still green and hard, but they would ripen. The berry bushes were beginning to put forth their crop. Seeds were forming, nuts hardening.

It was another world, another groove.

She played it out until she could almost feel a change in the air--a crispness, dry and bittersweet. Opening her eyes, she turned to look at the trailer. Is this what you meant? she wanted to ask Robert. But he wasn't there. She took bow from strings and stood there, silent, taking it all in.

Robert and William were gone, and so was the summer. The grass was browned underfoot. The fruit and leaves from her scarecrow's apple limbs were fallen away, the garden finished for the year.

What had she done now? Called up the autumn? Lost a few months of her life, standing here in her meadow, playing an unfamiliar music?

Or had she called herself away?

She knew nothing of the otherworld except for what people had told her about it. Grandma. Malicorne. A man named Rupert who lived in the desert, far to the south. Beyond the fact that spirits lived there who could cross over into our world, everything they had to say about the place was vague.

Right now, all she knew was that this didn't feel like her meadow so much as an echo of it. How it might appear in the otherworld.

The place where the spirit people lived and her fiddle had come from.

Grandma had told her it was a place sensible people didn't go. Rupert had warned her that while it was easy to stray over into it, it wasn't so easy to leave behind once you were there.

How could this have happened? How--

Movement startled her. She took a step back as a hare came bounding out of the woods to take refuge under her trailer. A moment later a large dog burst into the meadow, chasing it. The dog rushed the trailer, bending low and growling deep in its chest as it tried to fit itself into the narrow space. Giving a sudden yelp, it scrabbled away as a rattler came sliding out from under the trailer. The snake took a shot at the dog, but the dog had changed into a mongoose, shifting so fast Staley never saw it happen. The mongoose's teeth clamped on the rattler, but it, too, transformed, becoming a boa constrictor, fattening, lengthening, forcing the mongoose's jaws open, wrapping its growing length around the smaller mammal's body, squeezing.

Staley didn't need a lot of considering time to work out what was going on here. Maybe she'd fiddled herself over into the otherworld, but it was obvious that also she'd pulled those two hoodoo men along with her when she'd come.

"Hey, you!" she cried.

The animals froze, turned to look at her. She was a little surprised that they'd actually stopped to listen to her.

"Don't you have no
sense
?" she asked them. "What's any of this going to prove?"

She looked from one to the other, trapped by the dark malevolence in their eyes and suddenly wished she'd left well enough along. What business of hers was it if they killed each other? She'd gotten them back here where they belonged. Best thing now was that they forgot she ever existed.

For a long moment she was sure that wasn't going to happen. It was like playing in a bar when a fight broke out at the edge of the stage. The smart musician didn't get involved. She just stepped back, kept her instrument safe, and let them work it out between themselves until the bouncer showed up. Trouble was, there was no bouncer here. It was just the three of them and she didn't even have a mike stand she could hit them with.

She didn't know what she'd have done if they'd broken off their own fight and come after her. Luckily, she didn't have to find out. The mongoose became a sparrow and slipped out of the snake's grip, darting away into the forest. A half second later a hawk was in pursuit and she on her own again. At least she thought she was.

A low chuckle from behind her made her turn.

The newcomer looked like he'd just stepped down out of the hills, tall and lean, a raggedy hillbilly in jeans and a flannel shirt, cowboy boots on his feet. There were acne scars on his cheeks and he wore his dark hair slicked back in a ducktail. His eyes were the clearest blue she could ever remember seeing, filled with a curious mix of distant skies and good humour. He had one hand in his pocket, the other holding the handle of a battered, black guitar case.

"You ever see such foolishness?" he asked. "You think they'd learn, but I reckon they've been at it now for about as long as the day is wide."

Staley liked the sound of his voice. It held an easy-going lilt that reminded her of her daddy's cousins who lived up past Hazard, deep in the hills.

She laughed. "Long as the day is wide?" she asked.

"Well, you know. Start to finish, the day only holds so many hours, but you go sideways and it stretches on forever."

"I've never heard of time running sideways."

"I'm sure you must know a hundred things I've never heard of."

"I suppose."

"You new around here?" he asked.

Staley glanced back at her trailer, then returned her gaze to him.

"In a manner of speaking," she said. "I'm not entirely sure how I got here and even less sure as to how I'll get back to where I come from."

"I can show you," he told her. "But maybe you'd favour me with a tune first? Been a long time since I got to pick with a fiddler."

The thing that no one told you about the otherworld, Staley realized, is how everything took on a dreamlike quality when you were here. She knew she should be focusing on getting back to the summer meadow where Robert and William were waiting for her, but there just didn't seem to be any hurry about it.

"So what do you say?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I guess...."

I'm already feeling a little dozy from the sun and fresh air when Staley begins to play her fiddle. It doesn't sound a whole lot different from the kinds of things she usually plays, but then what do I really know about music? Don't ask me to discuss it. I either like it or I don't. But Robert seems pleased with what she's doing, nodding to himself, has a little smile starting up there in the corner of his mouth.

I can see his left hand shaping chords on the neck of his guitar, but he doesn't strum the strings. Just follows what she's doing in his head, I guess.

I look at Staley a little longer, smiling as well to see her standing there so straight-backed in her overalls, barefoot in the grass, the sun glowing golden on her short hair. After awhile I lean back against the door of the trailer again and close my eyes. I'm drifting on the music, not really thinking much of anything, when I realize the sound of the fiddle's starting to fade away.

"Shit," I hear Robert say.

I open my eyes, but before I can turn to look at him, I see Staley's gone. It's the damnedest thing. I can still hear her fiddling, only it's getting fainter and fainter like she's walking away and I can't see a sign of her anywhere. I can't imagine a person could run as fast as she'd have to to disappear like this and still keep playing that sleepy music.

When Robert stands up, I scramble to my feet as well.

"What's going on?" I ask him.

"She let it take her away."

"What do you mean? Take her away where?"

But he doesn't answer. He's looking into the woods and then I see them too. A rabbit being chased by some ugly old dog. Might be the same rabbit that ran off on us in the city, but I can't tell. It comes tearing out from under the trees, running straight across the meadow towards us, and then it just disappears.

I blink, not sure I actually saw what I just saw. But then the same thing happens to the dog. It's like it goes through some door I can't see. There one minute, gone the next.

"Well, she managed to pull them back across," Robert says. "But I don't like this. I don't like this at all."

Hearing him talk like that makes me real nervous.

"Why?" I ask him. "This is what we wanted, right? She was going to play some music to put things back the way they were. Wasn't that the plan?"

He nods. "But her going over wasn't."

"I don't get it."

Robert turns to look at me. "How's she going to get back?"

"Same way she went away--right?"

He answers with a shrug and then I get a bad feeling. It's like what happened with Malicorne and Jake, I realize. Stepped away, right out of the world, and they never came back. The only difference is, they meant to go.

"She won't know what to do," Robert says softly. "She'll be upset and maybe a little scared, and then he's going to show up, offer to show her the way back."

I don't have to ask who he's talking about.

"But she'll know better than to bargain with him," I say.

"We can hope."

"We've got to be able to do better than that," I tell him.

"I'm open to suggestions."

I look at that guitar in his hands.

"You could call her back," I say.

Robert shakes his head. "The devil, he's got himself a guitar, too."

"I don't know what that means."

"Think about it," Robert says. "Whose music is she going to know to follow?"

The stranger laid his guitar case on the grass and opened it up. The instrument he took out was an old Martin D-45 with the pearl inlaid "CD MARTIN" logo on the headstock--a classic, pre-war picker's guitar.

"Don't see many of those anymore," Staley said.

"They didn't make all that many." He smiled. "Though I'll tell you, I've never seen me a blue fiddle like you've got, not ever."

"Got it from my grandma."

"Well, she had taste. Give me an A, would you?"

Staley ran her bow across the A string of her fiddle and the stranger quickly tuned up to it.

"You ever play any contests?" he asked as he finished tuning.

He ran his pick across the strings, fingering an A minor chord. The guitar had a big, rich sound with lots of bottom end.

"I don't believe in contests," Staley said. "I think they take all the pleasure out of a music."

"Oh, I didn't mean nothing serious. More like swapping tunes, taking turns 'till one of you stumps the other player. Just for fun, like."

Staley shrugged.

"'Course to make it interesting," he added, "we could put a small wager on the outcome."

"What kind of wager would we be talking about here?"

Staley didn't know why she was even asking that, why she hadn't just shut down this idea of a contest right from the get-go. It was like something in the air was turning her head all around.