Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (43 page)

“I don’t know anything else—’cept maybe waiting tables and the like.”

“I see that could be a problem,” Hickory says.

I look at her for a long time. Those dark eyes look back, but she can’t hold my gaze for long and she finally turns away. I’m thinking to myself, this looks like my Aunt Hickory, and the voice sounds like my Aunt Hickory, but the words I’m hearing aren’t what the Hickory I know would be saying. That Hickory, she’d never back down, not for nobody, never call it quits on somebody else’s say-so, and she’d never expect anybody else to be any different.

“I guess the one thing I never asked you,” I say, “is why did you live up in that old cabin all on your ownsome for so many years?”

“I loved those pine woods.”

“I know you did. But you didn’t always live in ’em. You went away a time, didn’t you?”

She nods. “That was before you was born.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere special. I was just travelling. I…” She looks up and there’s something in those dark eyes of hers that I’ve never seen before. “I had the same dream you did, Darlene. I wanted to be a singer so bad. I wanted to hear my voice coming back at me from the radio. I wanted to be up on that big stage at the Opry and see the crowd looking back at me, calling my name and loving me. But it never happened. I never got no further than playing the jukejoints and the honkytonks and the road bars where the people are more interested in getting drunk and sticking their hands up your dress than they are in listening to you sing.”

She sighed. “I got all used up, Darlene. I got to where I’d be playing on those dinky little stages and
I
didn’t even care what I was singing about anymore. So finally I just took myself home. I was only thirty years old, but I was all used up. I didn’t tell nobody where I’d been or what I’d done or how I’d failed. I didn’t want to talk to any of them about any of that, didn’t want to talk to them at all because I’d look at those Piney Woods people and I’d see the same damn faces that looked up at me when I was playing out my heart in the honkytonks and they didn’t care any more now than they did then.

“So I moved me up into the hills. Built that cabin of mine. Listened to the wind in the pines until I could finally start to sing and play and love the music again.”

“You never told me any of this,” I say.

“No, I didn’t. Why should I? Was it going to make any difference to your dreams?”

I shook my head. “I guess not.”

“When you took to that old guitar of mine the way you did, my heart near’ broke. I was so happy for you, but I was scared—oh, I was scared bad. But then I thought, maybe it’ll be different for her. Maybe when she leaves the hills and starts singing, people are gonna listen. I wanted to spare you the hurt, I’ll tell you that, Darlene, but I didn’t want to risk stealing your chance at joy neither. But now…”

Her voice trails off.

“But now,” I say, finishing what she left unsaid, “here I am anyway and I don’t even have those pines to keep my company.”

Hickory nods. “It ain’t fair. I hear the music they play on the radio now and they don’t have half the heart of the old mountain songs you and me sing. Why don’t people want to hear them anymore?”

“Well, you know what Dolly says: ‘Life ain’t all a dance.’”

“Isn’t that the sorry truth.”

“But there’s still people who want to hear the old songs,” I say. “There’s just not so many of them. I get worn out some days, trying like I’ve done all these years, but then I’ll play a gig somewhere and the people are really listening and I think maybe it’s not so important to be really big and popular and all. Maybe there’s something to be said for pleasing just a few folks, if it means you get to stay true to what you want to do. I don’t mean a body should stop aiming high, but maybe we shouldn’t feel so bad when things don’t work out the way we want ’em to. Maybe we should be grateful for what we got, for what we had.”

“Like all those afternoons we spent playing music with only the pines to hear us.”

I smile. “Those were the best times I ever had. I wouldn’t change ’em for anything.”

“Me, neither.”

“And you know,” I say. “There’s people with a whole lot less. I’d like to be doing better than I am, but hell, at least I’m still making a living. Got me an album and I’m working on another, even if I do have to pay for it all myself.”

Hickory gives me a long look and then just shakes her head. “You’re really something, aren’t you just?”

“Nothing you didn’t teach me to be.”

“I been a damn fool,” Hickory says. She sets Earle aside and stands up. “I can see that now.”

“What’re you doing?” I ask. But I know and I’m already standing myself.

“Come give your old aunt a hug,” Hickory says.

There’s a moment when I can feel her in my arms, solid as one of those pines growing up in the hills where she first taught me to sing and play. I can smell woodsmoke and cigarette smoke on her, something like apple blossoms and the scent of those pines.

“You do me proud, girl,” she whispers in my ear.

And then I’m holding only air. Standing there alone, all strolloped up in my wig and rhinestone dress, holding nothing but air.

8

I know I won’t be able to sleep and there’s no point in trying. I’m feeling so damn restless and sorry—not for myself, but for all the broken dreams that wear people down until there’s nothing left of ’em but ashes and smoke. I’m not going to let that happen to me.

I end up sitting back on the sofa with my guitar on my lap—the same small-bodied Martin guitar my Aunt Hickory gave a dreamy-eyed girl all those years ago. I start to pick a few old tunes. “Over the Waterfall.” “The Arkansas Traveler.” Then the music drifts into something I never heard before and I realize I’m making up a melody. About as soon as I realize that, the words start slipping and sliding through my head and before I know it, I’ve got me a new song.

I look out the window of my little apartment. The wind’s died down, but the snow’s still coming, laying a soft blanket that takes the sharp edge off everything I can see. It’s so quiet. Late night quiet. Drifting snow quiet. I get a pencil from the kitchen and I write out the words to that new song, write the chords in. I reread the last lines of the chorus:

But my Aunt Hickory loved me,

and nothing else mattered

nothing else mattered at all.

There’s room on the album for one more song. First thing in the morning I’m going to give Tommy Norton a call and book some time at High Lonesome Sounds. That’s the nice thing about doing things your own way—you answer to yourself and no one else. If I want to hold off on pressing the CDs for my new album to add another song, I can. I can do any damn thing I want, so long as I keep true to myself and the music.

Maybe I’m never going to be the big star the little girl with the cardboard suitcase and guitar thought she’d be when she left the pine hills all those years ago and came looking for fame and fortune here in the big city. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s other rewards, smaller ones, but more lasting. Like knowing my Aunt Hickory loves me and she told me I do her proud.

Pixel Pixies

Only when Mistress Holly had retired to her apartment above the store would Dick Bobbins peep out from behind the furnace where he’d spent the day dreaming and drowsing and reading the books he borrowed from the shelves upstairs. He would carefully check the basement for unexpected visitors and listen for a telltale floorboard to creak from above. Only when he was very very sure that the mistress, and especially her little dog, had both, indeed, gone upstairs, would he creep all the way out of his hidden hobhole.

Every night, he followed the same routine.

Standing on the cement floor, he brushed the sleeves of his drab little jacket and combed his curly brown hair with his fingers. Rubbing his palms briskly together, he plucked last night’s borrowed book from his hidey-hole and made his way up the steep basement steps to the store. Standing only two feet high, this might have been an arduous process all on its own, but he was quick and agile, as a hob should be, and in no time at all he’d be standing in amongst the books, considering where to begin the night’s work.

There was dusting and sweeping to do, books to be put away. Lovely books. It didn’t matter to Dick if they were serious leather-bound tomes or paperbacks with garish covers. He loved them all, for they were filled with words, and words were magic to this hob. Wise and clever humans had used some marvelous spell to imbue each book with every kind of story and character you could imagine, and many you couldn’t. If you knew the key to unlock the words, you could experience them all.

Sometimes Dick would remember a time when he hadn’t been able to read. All he could do then was riffle the pages and try to smell the stories out of them. But now, oh now, he was a magician, too, for he could unearth the hidden enchantment in the books any time he wanted to. They were his nourishment and his joy, weren’t they just.

So first he worked, earning his keep. Then he would choose a new book from those that had come into the store while he was in his hobhole, drowsing away the day. Sitting on top of one of the bookcases, he’d read until it got light outside and it was time to return to his hiding place behind the furnace, the book under his arm in case he woke early and wanted to finish the story while he waited for the mistress to go to bed once more.

* * *

I hate computers.

Not when they do what they’re supposed to. Not even when I’m the one who’s made some stupid mistake, like deleting a file I didn’t intend to, or exiting one without saving it. I’ve still got a few of those old war-horse programs on my machine that doesn’t pop up a reminder asking if I want to save the file I was working on.

No, it’s when they seem to have a mind of their own. The keyboard freezing for no apparent reason. Getting an error message that you’re out of disc space when you know you’ve got at least a couple of gigs free. Passwords becoming temporarily, and certainly arbitrarily, obsolete. Those and a hundred other, usually minor, but always annoying, irritations.

Sometimes it’s enough to make you want to pick up the nearest component of the machine and fling it against the wall.

For all the effort they save, the little tasks that they automate and their wonderful storage capacity, at times like this—when everything’s going as wrong as it can go—their benefits can’t come close to outweighing their annoyances.

My present situation was partly my own fault. I’d been updating my inventory all afternoon and before saving the file and backing it up, I’d decided to go on the Internet to check some of my competitors’ prices. The used book business, which is what I’m in, has probably the most arbitrary pricing in the world. Though I suppose that can be expanded to include any business specializing in collectibles.

I logged on without any trouble and went merrily browsing through listings on the various book search pages, making notes on the particularly interesting items, a few of which I actually had in stock. It wasn’t until I tried to exit my browser that the trouble started. My browser wouldn’t close and I couldn’t switch to another window. Nor could I log off the Internet.

Deciding it had something to do with the page I was on—I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I make no pretence to being more than vaguely competent when it comes to knowing how the software actually interfaces with the hardware—I called up the drop-down menu of “My Favourites” and clicked on my own home page. What I got was a fan shrine to pro wrestling star Steve Austin.

I tried again and ended up at a commercial software site.

The third time I was taken to the site of someone named Cindy Margolis—the most downloaded woman on the Internet, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Not on this computer, my dear.

I made another attempt to get off-line, then tried to access my home page again. Each time I found myself in some new outlandish and unrelated site.

Finally I tried one of the links on the last page I’d reached. It was supposed to bring me to Netscape’s home page. Instead I found myself on the web site of a real estate company in Santa Fe, looking at a cluster of pictures of the vaguely Spanish-styled houses that they were selling.

I sighed, tried to break my Internet connection for what felt like the hundredth time, but the “Connect To” window still wouldn’t come up.

I could have rebooted, of course. That would have gotten me off-line. But it would also mean that I’d lose the whole afternoon’s work because, being the stupid woman I was, I hadn’t had the foresight to save the stupid file before I went gadding about on the stupid Internet.

“Oh, you stupid machine,” I muttered.

From the front window display where she was napping, I heard Snippet, my Jack Russell terrier, stir. I turned to reassure her that, yes, she was still my perfect little dog. When I swiveled my chair to face the computer again, I realized that there was a woman standing on the other side of the counter.

I’d seen her come into the store earlier, but I’d lost track of everything in my one-sided battle of wits with the computer—it having the wits, of course. She was a very striking woman, her dark brown hair falling in Pre-Raphaelite curls that were streaked with green, her eyes both warm and distant, like an odd mix of a perfect summer’s day and the mystery you can feel swell up inside you when you look up into the stars on a crisp, clear autumn night. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t quite place it. She wasn’t one of my regulars.

She gave me a sympathetic smile.

“I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got into the computers,” she said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Try putting your sweater on inside out.”

My face had to be registering the confusion I was feeling, but she simply continued to smile.

“I know it sounds silly,” she said. “But humour me. Give it a try.”

Anyone in retail knows, you get all kinds. And the secondhand market gets more than its fair share, trust me on that. If there’s a loopy person anywhere within a hundred blocks of my store, you can bet they’ll eventually find their way inside. The woman standing on the other side of my counter looked harmless enough, if somewhat exotic, but you just never know anymore, do you?