Bone Dance

Now she greeted me and sat on the porch floor at my feet, her arms wrapped around her knees and a half-empty mug in one hand. I could smell the tea, but I wasn’t sure what kind it was. The undisciplined mass of her dark hair dwarfed her sharp-featured little face. She wore a huge, busy-patterned cotton tunic bound with three different sashes around her hips, black leggings with holes in both knees, and sneakers with the toes cut out. It was all a concession to country life; none of it trailed behind her, after all.

I hadn’t realized that we’d been sitting in silence until Sherrea said, “Did you take a vow not to ask questions, or what?”

“Huh?”

“Oh, that’s a question. Don’t you want to know where you are, or who these people are, or why I brought you here, or anything!”

“Sure, if you want to tell me.”

She set her chin on her knees and stared at me. “What happened to your head, Sparrow?” she said. “What’s going on in there, that nothing comes out anymore? Or is there nothing to come out?”

“My head’s fine.” A thought shot to the surface: I know; I’ve met it. But it was gone before I got a good look at it.

“It is not. You never used to tell anybody anything, but at least you had a personality. Now you’re even locked that up. I’m your friend, you idiot! You can be rude to me!”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. It was a hot day, and a damp one, and inhaling was like breathing soup. “I don’t have anything to be rude to you about. And if I’ve locked anything up, it’s more than I know.”

She sighed. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you don’t know you’ve done it. In which case, you did it because some part of you had to. In which case, you have an even screwier sense of personal property than I thought you did.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” I said, smiling.

“The hell it is. What do you think you own?”

Sweat trickled under my shirt, cold as ice water. “Nothing.”

After a moment she said, “That’s what I mean. You own exactly what everybody else owns. Your body, for starts. Nobody can make any claims on it but you. You can choose to give control of it to somebody else, temporarily, like you did back in the City. Which, by the way, took more guts than sense. But it took a lot of guts. But when that’s over, your body’s still yours, you haven’t given a bit of it away.

“And you own your mind. Everything you think is your property, and it’s yours whether you build a fence around it or not. Nobody can cross into it, nobody can make you change anything in it, and nobody can hurt you there, unless you let them. Whatever Beano did to your body, he bounced clean off your mind and didn’t even leave a dent. Unless you put him inside the property line yourself.”

I’d opened my eyes, and was looking at the porch ceiling. “You should bring all this up with Frances. A Horseman’s perspective is probably a little different.”

“I did bring it up with Frances,” Sher said caustically. “I thought somebody ought to. Fu

“But she can steal bodies. That’s hard on the first part of your theory.”

“And I could strangle you dead, right this minute. That would be stealing, too. I’ll give you half an exception for the Horsemen, but after that I’ll say it again: They can kill ya, but they can’t own ya. And until you’re dead, you belong to you and nobody can change that. You don’t have to lock your brain in a box to be sure of it.”

She stopped, and I dropped my gaze from the ceiling to her face. “Okay,” I said.

She threw her mug at the lawn and stomped off the porch.

As my endurance came back, and my flexibility, I began to walk instead of sit. Outside the second ring of houses (my estimate had been low; there were thirty-nine), I found barns and sheds and stables and workshops. Beyond those were pastureland and cultivated fields. Grain did its foot-rooted wind dance there; corn thrashed its jungle leaves; beans waggled long green or purple or yellow fingers; summer squash ripened furiously in a pinwheel of tropical-looking vegetation. Here, too, there were always people, cultivating, hoeing weeds, spreading things, raking things, trimming, harvesting. It all seemed as ritual as a pre-Bang Catholic mass, and as intelligible to outsiders.

One morning, when I’d gone farther than I had before and was feeling the effects, I sat down in the shade of a tree next to a field. Five people were hoeing up and down the rows of something I didn’t recognize. One of them reached the end of the row nearest me, looked up, smiled, and came over.

“Hi,” she said, dropping down onto the grass. “Sparrow, isn’t it? I’m Kris.” She pulled her straw hat off to reveal a brush of hair the color of the hat. She tugged a banda

“Looks like hard work,” I said, nodding back out into the sun.

“Goddess, it is. Especially this part of the year. Harvesting isn’t any easier, but it’s more fun, and you have something to show for it right away. Every year about now I start wishing it was winter.”

This was a reasonable line of conversation, not too personal. “What is that out there?”

“Sugar beets. We voted to do ’em this year instead of tobacco, thank Goddess. Don’t get me wrong — I love to smoke. But I’ll pay for my tobacco and be glad to. It’s a good cash crop, but the hand labor is murder, and no matter how careful we are, we always have trouble with the tomatoes when we grow it. Turns out we’ll make as much on the beets, anyway, so I can afford to buy my smokes.”

“Oh,” I said. Every word of that speech had made perfect sense, but I still wasn’t sure what had gone on.

Her grin broke out again. “That’s right, Sher said you were strictly a City-dweller. And we were supposed to be patient when you walked through the basil and fell in the flowerbeds.”

“You’ve been lucky so far. The state I’ve been in, the flowerbeds could have fought me off.”

“Yeah. What does Josh say, are you doing all right?”

My own fault; I’d introduced the subject. “Fine.” I stood up. “I should be getting back, I think.”

“Me, too — back to swingin’ dat hoe. Ugh. You coming to the whoop tonight?”

“Whoop?”

“We’ve never figured out a better name for it. In the town circle. There’ll be some drumming and dancing and singing and shouting, and food, and a bonfire… what can I say? A whoop.”

“I don’t think I’m quite up to dancing.”

She flashed white teeth. “We’ll pretend you’re an ancestor. Sit by the fire and we’ll feed you and ask which song you want to hear next.”

“I’ll see,” I said.

I didn’t think I’d be there. But when I got back to the farmhouse, I found the kitchen in a state of cheerful uproar, and the inhabitants united on the question of where I was going to spend my evening.

“Better take it easy if you don’t want to wear out before the whoop,” said Mags, who was poking holes in a piecrust. She was a plump, wide-eyed, snub-nosed Latina. I would have thought she was about sixteen, if Josh hadn’t told me that her son was twelve. The son, Paulo, was shelling beans at the table. He was tall for his age, dark and thin, and stared at me solemnly every time I appeared.