Fishbone's Song Read Free Page A

he thought I was being part of a know-it-all. And since it was the only time he looked even a little cross or sideways at me, I stopped being that way every chance I got.
    So I was already in the woods, more or less, sleeping in the cabin with the night sounds and the bugs all part of me, and it was just natural to fold into it like it was home, my bed, my warm green woods bed.
    Second Song: Devil Love
    She found my heart,
    and took it.
    Found my soul,
    and shook it.
    Found my song,
    and spoke it.
    Found my life,
    and broke it.
    Dance on, devil woman.
    Dance on, devil love.

3
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Woodstime
    I was never afraid of the woods.
    Never felt out of place the way you can be with people, schools, crowds, ratchety noise—the way it was when the state came to take me and put me in those places with those things and people. Had to fight sometimes. Had a big fight with a boy twice my size, beat me all to hell and gone, just for being different. He thought because I was down I was done, but I got up and clipped him with my thick mail-order boots, and he went to puking and left me alone after that.
    Still didn’t like it. Even when they opened mybrain and put in good things. Taught me to read. The little school was in a hill town and had one old computer which I never got to use, or even learned how to use. Boy in the school said that he knew of a place where they had more, many computers, and they could play games on them and talk all over the world on them, but I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth; he also said he had an uncle who could dead-lift six hundred and ninety pounds with one hand, so believing him was a stretch.
    But this little school with bad ceilings and a leaky roof had books. A whole room full of books on shelves, and an old woman who had soft blue hair and wore glasses on a cord around her neck who was in charge of the books, and she thought you should read them. No, that’s not quite right. She loved the books, and when she touched them, it was like she was petting them, and she taught me how to read, made me read, made me want to read, made me love to read. Did it all in twomonths and twenty-six days, which was all I was in that place until they sent me on back to Fishbone.
    In the shack.
    In the woods.
    But the old woman with the glasses on a cord around her neck and hair that smelled blue didn’t forget me. Every month when the man from the state came with bullet money from Fishbone getting shot some in Korea, and kid money so I could be “raised in a goodly manner,” and grocery fixins, the old woman sent one or two books on up with him. I’d send back any books I’d read and we’d trade back and forth.
    History books, poetry books, western books, nature books, even some by an English writer named Shakespeare. Poems that didn’t rhyme and were hard to read until I found they were supposed to be a play, and if you said the words out loud, they made more sense. Sometimes made you feel new about some things.
    Old Blue numbers three and four both thought I was crazy when I came to spouting Shakespeare poems that didn’t rhyme off the porch, but Fishbone seemed to like them. Didn’t say so, but closed his eyes and smiled and nodded and shuffled his feet the way he did when he was doing his own songs his own self. Word-songs. Same smile, and even bigger when Shakespeare came to working on love talk.
    He must have known about the woods. Shakespeare. To have all those words rumbling around and to be able to bring them out in the way he did, the dance of them, he must have known how it was in the woods.
    How green and still it could be, and how it could smell and sound so that it was inside you, part of you.
    Could be the best part of you.
    Like home. Like my home.
    I folded into the woods not long after I learnedabout using the outhouse and peeing on the downwind side of the porch. I remember walking off the porch and down to the creek and sitting on the sand at the side