The bluesman and Grandma would’ve got along just fine, she decided.
Once they came out from under the trees, they could walk abreast on the shorter grass. Robert broke off playing when Staley gave her scarecrow a little curtsey by way of greeting.
“How well do you know that fellow?” he asked.
Staley smiled. “About four years-ever since I put him up.”
“The clothes were yours?”
She nodded.
“And you collected the wood for his limbs?”
She nodded again. “Why are you asking all these questions?”
“Because he’s halfway alive.”
“You mean the branches sprouting?”
“No, I mean he’s got the start of an individual spirit, growing there in the straw and applewood.”
Staley regarded the scarecrow in a new light. Now that it had been pointed out, she could feel the faint pulse of life in its straw breast. Sentient life, not quite fully formed, but hidden there as surely as there’d been a boy hidden in the raggedy hare she’d lost in the city.
“But, how…?” she began, her voice trailing off.
Robert turned in a slow circle, taking in the whole of the meadow. Her trailer, the vegetable garden.
“You’ve played a lot of music in here,” he said. “Paid a lot of attention to the rhythms of the meadow, the forest, how you and your belongings fit into it. It’s got so’s you’ve put so much hoodoo in this place I’m surprised you only ever called over those two feuding spirits.”
William nodded. “Hell, even I feel something.”
Staley did, too, except it was what she always felt when she was here.
“I thought it was home I was feeling,” she said.
“It is,” Robert said. “But you’ve played it up so powerful it’s no wonder the devil took notice.”
Staley shot a glance at her scarecrow which made Robert smile.
“Oh, he’s more subtle than that,” he told her. “He’s going to come up at you from the backside, like pushing through a couple of feuding spirits to wreck a little havoc with the things you love.” He gave her fiddlecase a considering look. “You know what you’ve got to do.”
Staley sighed. “Jump the groove.”
“That’s right. Break the pattern. Don’t give the devil something he can hold on to. Nothing’s easier to trip a body up than habits and patterns. Why do you think the Gypsy people consider settling down to be so stressful? Only way they can rest is by travelling.”
“You’re saying I should go? That I’ve got to leave this place?”
Robert raised an eyebrow. “You a Romany girl now?”
“No.”
“Then find your own groove to jump.”
Staley sighed again. Intellectually, she understood what Robert was getting at. But how to put it into practice? She played the way she played because… well, that was the way she played. Especially here, in this place. She took the music from her surroundings, digging deep and deeper into the relationships between earth and sky, forest and meadow, her trailer and the garden and the tattered figure of the scarecrow watching over it all. Where was she supposed to find a music still true to all of this, but different enough to break the pattern of four summers immersed in its quiet joys and mysteries?
“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said.
“You can try,” Robert told her.
“I suppose. But what if I call something worse over?”
“You didn’t call anything over. Those spirits were sent.”
Staley shook her head. “This fiddle of Grandma’s plays a calling-on music-I can hear it whenever I play.”
“I don’t deny that,” Robert said. “But you’ve got to put some intent into that call, and from what you’ve been telling me, you didn’t intend to bring anything over last night.”
“So when those blackbirds gather to her fiddling,” William said, “it’s because she’s invited them?”
Robert shrugged. “Crows and ravens are a whole different circumstance. They live on the outside of where we are and they learned a long time ago how to take advantage of the things we do, making their own hoodoo with the bits and pieces we leave behind.”
That made sense to Staley. She’d never deliberately called up the blackbirds, but they came all the same. Only not here. That was why she’d always thought it was safe to play whatever she wanted around the trailer. She’d see them from time to time, mostly going after her garden, or sneaking off with a bit of this or that for their nests, but they didn’t gather here. The closest roost was out by the highway.
She glanced at Robert to find his gaze on her, steady but mild. She wanted to say, How do I know the devil’s not being so subtle that he’s persuading me through you? But they’d been talking long enough. And whatever else Robert was, she doubted he was the devil.
Kneeling on the grass, she cracked open her fiddlecase. Took out her bow, tightened the frog, rosined the hairs. Finally she picked up the blue spirit fiddle her grandmother had given her and stood up again. She ran a finger across the strings. The E was a touch flat. She gave its fine tuner a twist, and tried again. This time all four strings rang true.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, bringing the fiddle up under her chin.
“Not like that,” Robert told her. “Dig a little with your heart before you start in on playing. You can’t jump the groove until you know where it’s at.”
True, she thought.
William gave her an encouraging nod, then walked over to the trailer and sat down on the steps. After a moment Robert joined him, one hand closed around the neck of his guitar, damping the strings.
Staley took a breath and let it out, slow. She held the fiddle in the crook of her arm, bow dangling from her index finger, and closed her eyes, trying to get a feel of where the meadow was today, how she fit into it. She swayed slightly where she stood. Toe on heel, she removed one shoe, then the other, digging through the blades of grass with her bare toes until she was in direct contact with the earth.
What do I hear? she thought. What do I feel?
Woodpecker hammering a dead tree limb, deeper in the woods. The smell of grass rising up from by her feet. Herbs from the garden, mint, basil, thyme. The flutter and sweet chirps of chickadees and finches. A faint breeze on her cheek. The soft helicopter approach of a hummingbird, feeding on the purple bergamot that grew along the edge of the vegetable and herb beds. The sudden chatter of a red squirrel out by the woodpile. Something crawling across her foot. An ant, maybe. Or a small beetle. The hoarse croak of a crow, off in the fields somewhere. The sun, warm on her face and arms. The fat buzz of a bee.
She knew instinctively how she could make a music of it all, catch it with notes drawn from her fiddle and send it spiralling off into the late afternoon air. That was the groove Robert kept talking about. So where did she go to jump it?
The first thing she heard was what Robert would do, bottleneck slides and bass lines, complicated chord patterns that were both melody and rhythm and sounded far simpler than they were to play. But while she could relate to what his take would be-could certainly appreciate it and even harmonize with it-that music wasn’t hers. Following that route wouldn’t be so much jumping her own groove as becoming someone else, being who they were, playing the music they would play.
She had to be herself, but still play with a stranger’s hand. How did a person even begin to do that?
She concentrated again on what this place meant to her, distilling the input of sounds and smells and all to their essence. What, she asked herself, was the first thing she thought of when she came back here in the spring from her winter wanderings? She called up the fields in her mind’s eye, the forest and her meadow, hidden away in it, and it came to her.
Green.
Buds on the trees and new growth pushing up through the browned grasses and weeds that had died off during the winter. The first shoots of crocuses and daffodils, fiddlehead ferns and trilliums growing in the forest shade.