Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“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.

“That’s all right. I thought I’d stay here.”

“Don’t be a dink. You can’t stay here, and if you did, you wouldn’t have any peace, anyway. Everybody goes who’s not actually dying. If you stay away, they’ll think you’ve got leprosy. Paulo, put those in to boil, gallito. Oh, and slice those peppers into rings for me, please.”

“She’s right,” Josh called, from somewhere beyond the screen door. “You want them to think I did my best, and failed?” He pulled the screen door open and let it bang behind him. His head and shoulders were wet from the pump, and he carried a tub of butter. “As long as you don’t polka, you’ll be fine.”

Their cheerfulness was oppressive. Their assumption that there was nothing that made me different from anyone else in the place except, possibly, my injuries, was alarming. “Nobody will mind,” I said. “I’m not really part of the community.”

Josh turned his head to one side and looked at me, as if he were trying to read me like a thermometer. Then he set the tub down, pulled a stack of flat-bottomed bowls from a shelf, and began to fill them with butter. “If you say you’re not,” he said, “then you’re not. And no one will insist otherwise. But there’s a difference, you know, between being a member of the community and acknowledging that you’re part of that community’s shared experience.

“I know this will sound crazy to you, but showing up tonight—even for a little while—and eating our food and sharing our fire will be taken as an expression of gratitude. No one insists that you be grateful, either, but it would be a nice gesture.”

“I am grateful,” I said, feeling a stirring of distress. “You saved my life.”

Josh’s hands paused over the butter. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “No, never mind. The wrong lecture at the wrong time. Will you come tonight?”

I tried to imagine what I was committing myself to. Would it be more like lunch at China Black’s house, or like the Night Fair? Either one seemed, suddenly, equally frightening. “I’ll come,” I said, because I knew I had to.

“Good,” Mags said. “Then put these in the oven for me, will you? Put a tray under them or they’ll dribble all over. Josh, you better bring those clothes in off the line.”

I took Mags’s advice and lay down in the back bedroom that had changed from the sickroom to Sparrow’s room in the household language. I wondered what would happen if another invalid turned up.

The shadows were long and the sunlight deep gold when someone knocked on my door. I opened it to Mags, who pushed a folded pile of clothes into my arms.

“I just remembered, you don’t have much variety in your wardrobe. You can wear these tonight. Actually, you can keep ‘em. Large Bob said the only way he was ever gonna fit in those pants again was if he stopped eating entirely.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. Say thank you and close the door.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Very much.”

I set the stack on the bed and looked at it. I didn’t mean to keep them, but I didn’t see how I could avoid wearing them tonight. It was a pity; the things I had on were Josh’s, which meant they were huge and had been washed and worn until they were soft as flannel. I didn’t look forward to clothes that hurt. I shook out the first thing on the pile.

It was a pair of black trousers with a stretchy drawstring waist and pleats at the top, made of brushed cotton twill. Underneath them was a cotton shirt, in a style I’d seen the interesting Indians wear in movies. It had an open collar and a low yoke, and wide sleeves gathered into cuffs. The shirt was wine-red, and the buttons on the cuffs and down the front were silver. It looked festive but restrained, and the whole business, once I put them on, felt as if I were proposing to go out in pajamas. Mags had understood about clothes that hurt.

I wish these people would stop understanding everything, I thought irritably. Something in my throat hurt, but I swallowed, and it went away.

The village square—excuse, the circle—was illuminated with lanterns hanging from all the lower tree branches, clusters of torch candles around the plank tables, and the bonfire. It sent almost enough light through the front windows to read by. I went to the kitchen and out the back door, and stood leaning on a porch pillar in the dark half of the night.

“Scared?” said Josh. I hadn’t seen him sitting on the steps.

“I… Yes, actually.”

“Sher said you weren’t a social animal.”

My hands opened and closed on nothing. Words pushed their way out of my mouth, unbidden and unwelcome. “Maybe I am, and there just aren’t any other animals like me.”

“What kind of animal do you think you are?” Josh asked, sounding mildly surprised.

I inhaled with my teeth closed. It made a hiss. “You know,” I whispered.

“What you think you are? Nope. I know what I think you are.”

“And what’s that?”

“A customized human being.”

“Well,” I said. “That was easy.”

Josh stood. I was on the porch and he was on the ground; he had to look up to meet my eyes. “It is easy,” he said. “Identity magic is the oldest and easiest kind there is. It’s what language is for.”