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I did see him again, though.
State Street had been gentrified, and Orpheus, the building, even the parking lot, had fallen to a downtown mall where there was no place for shabbiness or magic—any of the kinds of magic that were made that Fourth of July. These things happen in twice seven long years. But there are lots more places like that, if you care to look.
I was playing at the Greenbriar Bluegrass Festival in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Or rather, my band was. A columnist in Folk Roots magazine described us so:
Bird That Whistles drives traditional bluegrass fans crazy. They have the right instrumentation, the right licks—and they’re likely to apply them to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” or The Who’s “Magic Bus.” If you go to see them, leave your preconceptions at home.
I was sitting in the cookhouse tent that served as the musicians’ green room, drinking coffee and watching the chaos that is thirty-some traditional musicians all tuning and talking and eating at once. Then I saw, over the heads, a raven’s-wing black one with a white streak.
In a few minutes, he stood in front of me. He didn’t look five minutes older than he had at Orpheus. He wasn’t nervous, exactly, but he wasn’t at ease, either.
“Hi,” I said. “How’d you find me?”
“With this,” he answered, smiling a little. He held out an article clipped from a Richmond, Virginia paper. It was about the festival, and the photo was of Bird That Whistles.
“I’m glad you did.”
He glanced down suddenly. “I wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking over what you told me.”
I knew what he was talking about. “All this time?”
Now it was the real thing, his appealing grin. “It’s a damned big subject. But I thought you’d like to know…well, sometimes I understand it.”
“Only sometimes?”
“Rowan and Thorn, John, have mercy! I’m a slow learner.”
“The hell you are. Can you stick around? You could meet the band, do some tunes.”
“I wish I could,” he said, and I think he meant it.
“Hey, wait a minute.” I pulled a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and rummaged in my banjo case for a pen.
“What’s that?” he asked, as I wrote.
“My address. I’m living in Detroit now, God help me. If you ever need anything—or even if you just want to jam—let me know, will you?” And I slid the napkin across the table to him.
He reached out, hesitated, traced the edges of the paper with one long, thin finger. “Why are you giving me this?”
I studied that bent black-and-white head, the green eyes half-veiled with his lids and following the motion of his finger. “You decide,” I told him.
“All right,” he said softly, “I will.” If there wasn’t something suspiciously like a quaver in his voice, then I’ve never heard one. He picked up the napkin. “I won’t lose this,” he said, with an odd intensity. He put out his right hand, and I shook it. Then he turned and pushed through the crowd. I saw his head at the door of the tent; then he was gone.
I stared at the top of the table for a long time, where the napkin had been, where his finger had traced. Then I took the banjo out of its case and put it into mountain minor tuning.
Make a Joyful Noise
Charles de Lint
Every one thinks we’re sisters, but it’s not as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into the long ago—the long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew of the world—we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we could have been sisters. But neither of us remember parents, and don’t you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our relationship is, I don’t know. We’ve never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that remain unchanged while the world changes all around us.
But that doesn’t stop everyone from thinking they know us. In the Kickaha tradition we’re the tricksters of their crow story cycles, but we’re not really tricksters. We don’t play tricks. Unless our trick is to look like we’d play tricks, and then we don’t.
Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don’t buy into mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just ask Raven. Or Cody.
But gossip, stories, anecdotes…everybody seems to have something to pass on when it comes to us.
These days it’s people like Christy Riddell that tell the stories. He puts us in his books—the way his mentor Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy’s books are actually popular. I suppose we don’t mind so much. It’s kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell brother in our lives, we’d much prefer it to be Geordie. There’s nothing wrong with Christy. It’s just that he’s always been a bit stiff. Geordie’s the one who knows how to have fun and that’s why we get along with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.
