Firebirds Soaring (23 page)

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Authors: Sharyn November

BOOK: Firebirds Soaring
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dolly Tess Virginia Johnson was fourteen and I was twenty-one when we met. Seven adult years is not much, but that seven-year difference set us apart in authority and role. I was a caregiver, she was in care. Her anger was monumental, equal only to her beauty and intelligence. Her anger ruled, for she had had to survive birth and her first three years with an untrustworthy mother and then the brutal anonymity of the child welfare system: how brutal her circumstances had been all her life I did not find out until decades later, after her death, when I read her own written account of the abuses heaped on her in ten years in an unfit foster home. When I met Dolly, it was her birthday. On her thirteenth birthday, her gift was that her foster mother called the social worker and had Dolly taken from the home; she had been in thirteen placements in the twelve months before I met her. When I first saw her she was shouting her defiance to the world, and her courage and spirit shone like halogen.
Dolly lived in defiance of disaster all her life. Her courage helped her raise a family, upgrade her education, and live in hope. Yet in her late forties she died of a gunshot wound her relatives still believe was not self-inflicted. In movies or books, a classic locked-room mystery calls for a brilliant detective to unravel every thread: in real life, the death of a native woman in a small northern city was written off as a drunken suicide.
From Dolly and young women like her I learned the meaning of courage and the importance of hope, and their stories, learned when I was younger than I thought I was at the time, shaped my adult life. When I heard of Dolly’s death, the extinguishing of that unparallelled spirit, I thought I had nothing in me but the anger I wanted to express on her behalf—but a few days later, without thinking, I wrote this story. It is for all the children who live in courage and hope despite their circumstances, and who, like Dolly, win control of their own lives as a reward.
Margo Lanagan
FERRYMAN
“
W
rap your pa some lunch up, Sharon,” says Ma.
“What, one of these bunnocks? Two?”
“Take him two. And a good fat strip of smoke. And the hard cheese, all that’s left. Here’s his lemon.” She whacks the cork into the bottle with the flat of her hand.
I wrap the heavy bottle thickly, so it won’t break if it drops. I put it in the carry-cloth and the bunnocks and other foods on top, in such a way that nothing squashes anything else.
“Here I go.”
Ma crosses from her sweeping and kisses my right cheek. “Take that for him and this for you.” She kisses my left. “And tell him about those pigeons; that’ll give him spirit till this evening.”
“I will.” I lift the door in the floor.
I used to need light; I used to be frightened. Not anymore. Now I step down and my heart bumps along as normal; I close the lid on myself without a flinch.
I start up with “The Ballad of Priest and Lamb.” The stairway is good for singing; it has a peculiar echo. Also, Ma likes to hear me as I go. “It brightens my ears, your singing,” she says, “and it can’t do any harm to those below, can it?”
Down I go. Down and down, down and round, round and round I go, and all is black around me and the invisible stone stairs take my feet down. I sing with more passion the lower I go, and more experimenting, where no one can hear me. And then there begins to be light, and I sing quieter; then I’m right down to humming, so as not to draw attention when I get there.
Out into the smells and the red twilight I go. It’s mostly the fire-river that stinks, the fumes wafting over from way off to the right before its flames mingle with the tears that make it navigable. But the others have their own smells, too. Styx water is sharp and bites inside your nostrils. Lethe water is sweet as hedge roses and makes you feel sleepy.
Down the slope I go to the ferry, across the velvety hell-moss badged here and there with flat red liverworts. The dead are lined up in their groups looking dumbly about; once they’ve had their drink, Pa says, “You can push them around like tired sheep. Separate them out, herd them up as you desire. Pile them into cairns if you want to! Stack them like wood—they’ll stay however you put them. They’ll only mutter and move their heads side to side like birds.”
The first time I saw them, I turned and ran for the stairs. I was only little then. Pa caught up to me and grabbed me by the back of my pinafore. “What the blazes?” he said.
“They’re horrible!” I covered my face and struggled as he carried me back.
“What’s horrible about them? Come along and tell me.” And he took me right close and made me examine their hairlessness and look into their empty eyes and touch them, even. Their skin was without print or prickle, slippery as a green river stone. “See?” said Pa. “There’s nothing to them, is there?”
“Little girl!” a woman had called from among the dead. “So sweet!”
My father reached into the crowd and pulled her out by her arm. “Did you not drink all your drink, madam?” he said severely.
She made a face. “It tasted foul.” Then she turned and beamed upon me. “What lovely hair you have! Ah, youth!”
Which I don’t. I have thick, brown, straight hair, chopped off as short as Ma will let me—and sometimes shorter when it really gives me the growls.
My dad had put me down and gone for a cup. He made the woman drink the lot, in spite of her faces and gagging. “Do you want to suffer?” he said. “Do you want to feel everything and scream with pain? There’s a lot of fire to walk through, you know, on the way to the Blessed Place.”
“I’m suffering now,” she said, but vaguely, and by the time she finished the cup, I was no longer visible to her—nothing was. She went in among the others and swayed there like a tall, thin plant among plants. And I’ve never feared them since, the dead. My fear dried up out of me, watching that woman’s self go.
Here comes Pa now, striding up the slope away from the line of dead. “How’s my miss, this noontide? How’s my Scowling Sarah?”
Some say my dad is ugly. I say, his kind of work would turn anyone ugly, all the gloom and doom of it. And anyway, I don’t care—my dad is my dad. He can be ugly as a sackful of bumholes and still I’ll love him.
Right now his hunger buzzes about him like a cloud of blowflies. “Here.” I slip the carry-cloth off my shoulder. “And there’s two fat pigeons for supper, in a pie.”
“Two fat pigeons in one fat pie? You set a wicked snare, Sharon Armstrong.”
“You look buggered.” I sit on the moss beside him. “And that’s a long queue. Want some help, after?”
“If you would, my angel.”
Donk,
says the cork out of the bottle. Pa’s face and neck and forearms are all brown wrinkled leather.
He works his way through a bunnock, then the meat, the cheese, the second bunnock. He’s neat and methodical from first bite to last sup of the lemon.
When he’s done, he goes off a way and turns his back to pee into the lemon bottle, for you can’t leave your earthly wastes down here or they’ll sully the waters. He brings it back corked and wrapped and tucks it into the carry-cloth next to a rock on the slope. “Well, then.”
I scramble up from the thick dry moss and we set off down the springy slope to the river.
A couple of hours in, I’m getting bored. I’ve been checking the arrivals, sending off the ones without coin and taking the coin from under those tongues that have it, giving the paid ones their drink and checking there’s nothing in their eyes, no hope or thought or anything, and keeping them neat in their groups with my stick and my voice. Pa has rowed hard, across and back, across and back. He’s nearly to the end of the queue. Maybe I can go up home now?
But in his hurry, Pa has splashed some tears onto the deck. As he steps back to let the next group of the dead file aboard, he slips on that wetness and disappears over the side, into the woeful river, so quickly he doesn’t have time to shout.
“Pa!” I push my way through the slippery dead. “No!”
He comes up spluttering. Most of his hair has washed away.
“Thank God!” I grab his hot, wet wrist. “I thought you were dead and drowned!”
“Oh, I’m dead all right,” he says.
I pull him up out of the river. The tears and the fire have eaten his clothes to rags and slicked the hairs to his body. He looks almost like one of
them
. “Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!”
“Calm yourself, daughter. There’s nothing to be done.”
“But look at you, Pa! You walk and talk. You’re more yourself than any of these are theirs.” I’m trying to get his rags decent across his front, over his terrible bald willy.
“I must go upstairs to die properly.” He takes his hands from his head and looks at the sloughed-off hairs on them. “Oh, Sharon, always remember this! A moment’s carelessness is all it takes.”
I fling myself at him and sob. He’s slimed with dissolving skin and barely warm, and he has no heartbeat.
He lays his hand on my head, and I let go of him. His face, even without hair, is the same ugly, loving face; his eyes are the same eyes. “Come.” He leads the way off the punt. “It doesn’t do to delay these things.”
I follow him, pausing only to pick up the carry-cloth in my shaking arms. “Can you not stay down here, where we can visit you and be with you? You’re very like your earthly form. Even with the hair gone—”
“What, you’d have me wander the banks of Cocytus forever?”
“Not forever. Just until—I don’t know. Just not now, just not to lose you altogether.”
His hand is sticky on my cheek. “No, lovely. I must get myself coined and buried and do the thing properly. You of all people would know that.”
“But, Pa!”
He lays a slimy finger on my lips. “It’s my time, Sharon,” he says into my spilling eyes. “And I will take my love of you and your mother with me, into all eternity; you know that.”
I know it’s not true, and so does he. How many dead have we seen, drinking all memory to nowhere? But I wipe away my tears and follow him.
We start up the stairs, and soon it’s dark. He isn’t breathing; all I can hear is the sound of his feet on the stone steps, which is unbearable, like someone tonguing chewed food in an open mouth.
He must have heard my thoughts. “Sing me something, Scowling Sarah. Sing me that autumn song, with all the wind and the birds in it.”
Which I’m glad to do, to cover the dead-feet sounds and to pretend we’re not here like this, to push aside my fear of what’s to come, to keep my own feet moving from step to step.
We follow the echoes up and up, and when I reach the end of the song, “Beautiful,” he says. “Let’s have that again from the very start.”
So I sing it again. I have to break off, though, near to the end. The trapdoor is above us, leaking light around its edges.
“Oh, my pa!” I hold his terrible flesh and cry. “Don’t come up! Just stay here on the stair! I will bring you your food and your drink. We can come down and sit with you. We will
have
you, at least—”
“Go on, now.” He plucks my arms from his neck, from his waist, from his neck again. “Fetch your mother for me.”
“Just, even—” My mind is floating out of my head like smoke. “Even if you could stay for the pigeon! For the pie! Just that little while! I will bring it down to you, on the platter—”
“What’s all this noise?” The trapdoor opens. Ma gives a shout of fright seeing Pa, and yes, in the cooler earthly light, his face is—well, it is clear that he is dead.
“Forgive me, wife,” says his pale, wet mouth. His teeth show through his cheeks, and his eyes are unsteady in his shiny head. “I have gone and killed myself, and it is no one’s fault but my own.” He has no breath, as I said. The voice, I can hear in this realer air, comes from somewhere else than his lungs, somewhere else, perhaps, than his body completely.
Ma kneels slowly and reaches, slowly, into the top of the stair.
“Charence Armstrong,” she weeps at him, her voice soft and unbelieving, “how could you do this?”
“He fell in the Acheron, Ma; he slipped and fell!”
“How could you be so stupid?” she tells him gently, searching the mess for the face she loves. “Come to me.”
“As soon as I step up there I am dead,” he says. “You must come down to me, sweet wife, and make your farewells.”
There’s hardly the room for it, but down she comes onto the stairs, her face so angry and intense it frightens me. And then they are like the youngest of lovers in the first fire of love, kissing, kissing, holding each other tight as if they’d crush together into one. She doesn’t seem to mind the slime, the baldness of him, the visibility of his bones. The ragged crying all around us in the hole—that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. I lean and howl against them, and at last they take me in, lock me in with them.
Finally we untangle ourselves, three wrecks of persons on the stairs. “Come, then,” says my father. “There is nothing for it.”

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