Bone Dance

9.0: The new day begins in darkness

It was not unlike being invalided all over again. The effect wasn’t widespread; the number of people who knew about my emotional collapse was limited. But for several days Sherrea, Theo, Frances, and Josh all behaved as if I was likely to either erupt or evaporate without cause. I expect I needed it.

I needed forbearance from myself, too. It hadn’t been a perfect catharsis; my instincts were still in place, and I had to struggle against a passionate desire to slip back into silence. And my memory was still good. Now that I had a nice, scraped place on my soul to scour them across, the cruder things I’d said or done to protect my privacy came back to me.

The worst was that same night, in the kitchen. Mags was replacing the gasket in the faucet, and I was sharing the lamp oil, reading A Tale of Two Cities at the kitchen table.

“Why are you called Sparrow?” Mags asked suddenly. “Did you name yourself? Is it symbolic? Is it a reference to something?”

I could tell her about waking up on the side of a levee in a tangle of brush, sweating already in the morning sun, and seeing a buff-gray breast and a round black eye bobbing on a twig above me. The word had appeared in my head. That was when I recognized language, that I had it; and that I had no past, that I recalled, to have learned it in. It was my first moment of self-knowledge. How was I supposed to know that Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil?

Cassidy had told me that.

“No,” I said suddenly, “it’s just a name.”

“It doesn’t fit you, you know.”

Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil. Shortly after he’d said that, he’d made me a gift of something and I’d felt trapped by it. Beer. I’d finished his beer. And because of that violation of my principles, my valuable principles, I’d made him believe that I didn’t care about him.

“I mean, sparrows are little and round and brown.”

The last conscious thing Cassidy had done in his life was to try to make me a gift of mine. “They work for the Devil,” I said, my voice breaking up like a clod of earth in water. “Excuse me.” I bolted out the back door.

By some miracle, there was no one in the town circle. I stood leaning against the big central tree, my forehead on my clenched hands, and wept again. This time the storm was silent, and angry. And this time I had to do it alone. However well I told it, no one else would understand the size of my wrongdoing or my grief. There had been a person who’d felt entitled, for the value of a swallow of beer, to deny a friend. It didn’t seem possible to share a life with that person.

The night continued to move around me, the tree continued to hold me up, the earth didn’t open under my feet. Instant oblivion wasn’t offered to me. I would just have to go on.

But I noticed, eventually, that there was an uncommon lot of verbal tiptoeing happening around me. It was Frances who was the first to be polite and self-effacing one time too many. I can’t remember her exact words; I remember that the sentence was even more ornamented and less linear than usual. I said, “I tell you what: I’ll lock myself in my room, and you can slip notes under the door. That way you can think about what you want to say for days before you say it.”

Frances’s eyes opened wide. “Hullo,” she said, gri

Theo slid gradually into quoting from movies again, because he couldn’t help it. I understood how that worked. After all, I’d avoided seeing Theo for weeks because I couldn’t look at him and not think of VU meters and mixing boards. Sherrea simply forgot and cussed me out one day. After that, without comment, we picked up the rhythms of genuine conversation again, genuine argument, and silences that weren’t loaded with anything.

So there was no discomfort, when I went out to the stables looking for a pitchfork, in finding Sherrea propped against the fence of a nearby paddock. There was a certain amount of strangeness, however. She was feeding handfuls of clover to a camel. A two-humped, dark brown, disreputable-looking camel.

“How in the name of… everything did that get here?” I said, in lieu of the sentence I’d been pla

“Isn’t she hot stuff? There’s not a thing we can do with her, but the camels keep hanging on, and they’re so weird we can’t bring ourselves to trade ’em off to somebody who needs ’em.”

“There’s more than one?”

“Oh, yeah. A male, two she-camels, and a calf just this spring.”

“But where from?” I asked again, holding out my hand.

“Put some grass in it, or she’ll just bite you. The land we’re on used to be the zoo. Whenever you’re up for a serious hike, you can see the old buildings — they’re over that ridge a ways. They’re ruined, though. It’s kind of a sad place. When the Engineers set up camp, the tropical animals had already died, and some other species, too. The last tiger died two years ago, and everybody was miserable, even though we all knew it was go

“A tiger?”

“Yeah. He was beautiful. But we just couldn’t find out enough about taking care of tigers, and what we could find out, we couldn’t always use. But the moose and the wild horses did okay on their own, so we let ’em go feral. And you’ll see snow monkeys in the woods, if you watch. The musk oxen were our big success, though.”

The camel looked adoringly at me from under vast, sand-colored lashes, and tried to tear a piece from my sleeve. I pulled another hank of grass and offered that instead. “They’re still here?”

“No, it’s too hot for ’em here now. We were losing too many to disease. But we found out about some people north of Wi

“Who are—?”

The camel bit me.

“She’s really sweet,” Sher said as I rubbed my forearm. “You just don’t want to ignore her.”

“You’re darn right.”

The camel pulled her lips back blissfully once more.

Josh’s brand of tiptoeing wasn’t verbal. It wasn’t even tiptoeing, really; it was a different kind of caution, another sort of concern for my mental state, and it manifested itself in watching me. I’d known he was doing it, but I hadn’t known how thoroughly he was doing it until he stopped. I brought it up one evening, in his surgery, where he’d had an emergency call. Large Bob Beher had broken his left wrist; I assisted at the cast-making. (Josh’s principles of doctor-patient formality were, based on this example, a little slippery; Large Bob referred to the doctor as “Josh, you sonofabitch,” and Josh addressed the patient as “Mr. Beher, you horse’s ass.”)

We were alone, and I was gathering up the last ends of plaster gauze and the pan of chalky water when I said, “Did you think I was going to kill myself?”

Josh looked up from his dishpan full of scary stainless-steel implements. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know you before, you see. But I knew while I was sealing up the outside of you, that something inside was broken. Then, when you… ”

“When I did my imitation of a garden hose all over the carrot patch,” I said.

“Whatever. I couldn’t tell if that helped or hurt. Acceptance of despair sometimes looks like that, too. That’s why people often say of suicides that they seemed so much better the day before.”

“I couldn’t have done it. Frances would have been furious, after I kept… ” I took a moment to decide if I was really going to do what I thought I was. “Josh, do you have any beer?”

He looked affronted. “I have an icebox, don’t I?”

“I’ll tell you the whole story if you want to hear it. But I don’t think I can do it yet without drinking some beer.”