down from the shelf and read the story again.
“Aw, shit,” he said as he closed the book.
It was just a story. Katrina would turn up. They’d all share a laugh at how Amy was having him on.
But Katrina didn’t turn up. Not that day, nor the next, nor by the end of the week. She’d vanished from his life as mysteriously as she’d come into it.
That’s why I don’t want to get involved with people, he wanted to tell Amy. Because they just walk out of your life if you don’t do what they want you to do.
No way it had happened as Amy had said it did. But he found himself wondering about what it would be like to be without a soul, wondering if he even had one.
Friday of that week, he found himself back on the island, standing by the statue once again. There were a couple of tattered silk flowers on the stone at its base. He stared at the mermaid’s features for a long time, then he went home and started to phone the members of Marrowbones.
“Well, I kind of thought this was coming,” Amy said when he called to tell her that he was breaking up the band, “except I thought it’d be Johnny or Nicky quitting.”
She was sitting in the windowseat of her apartment’s bay window, back against one side, feet propped up against the other. She was feeling better than she had when she’d seen him on Sunday, but there was still a strangeness inside her. A lost feeling, a sense of the world having shifted underfoot and the rules being all changed.
“So what’re you going to do?” she added when he didn’t respond.
“Hit the road for awhile.”
“Gigging, or just traveling?”
“Little of both, I guess.”
There was another long pause and Amy wondered if he was waiting for her to ask if she could come.
But she was really over him now. Had been for a long time. She wasn’t looking to be anybody’s psychiatrist, or mother. Or matchmaker.
“Well, see you then,” he said.
“Bon voyage,” Amy said.
She cradled the phone. She thought of how he had talked with her the other night up at Hartnett’s Point, opening up, actually
Well, somebody else was going to have to work on those walls and she knew who it had to be. A guy named Matt Casey.
She looked out the window again.
“Good luck,” she said.
Matt was gone for a year. When he came back, the first place he went to was Wolf Island. He stood out by the statue for a long time, not saying anything, just trying to sort out why he was here. He didn’t have much luck, not that year, nor each subsequent year that he came. Finally, almost a decade after Katrina was gone—walked out of his life, turned into a puddle of lake water, went sailing through the air with angels, whatever—he decided to stay overnight, as though being alone in the dark would reveal something that was hidden from the day.
“Lady,” he said, standing in front of the statue, drowned in the thick silence of the night.
He hadn’t brought an offering for the statue—Our Lady of the Harbour, as the baglady had called her. He was just here, looking for something that remained forever out of reach. He wasn’t trying to understand Katrina or the story that Amy had told of her. Not anymore.
“Why am I so empty inside?” he asked.
“I can’t believe you’re going to play with him again,” Lucia said when Amy told her about her new band, Johnny Jump Up.
Amy shrugged. “It’ll just be the three of us—Geordie’s going to be playing fiddle.”
“But he hasn’t changed at all. He’s still so—cold.”
“Not on stage.”
“I suppose not,” Lucia said. “I guess all he’s got going for him is his music.”
Amy nodded sadly.
“I know,” she said.
Paperjack
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Churches aren’t havens of spiritual enlightenment; they enclose the spirit. The way Jilly explains it, organizing Mystery tends to undermine its essence. I’m not so sure I agree, but then I don’t really know enough about it. When it comes to things that can’t be logically explained, I take a step back and leave them to Jilly or my brother Christy —they thrive on that kind of thing. If I had to describe myself as belonging to any church or mystical order, it’d be one devoted to secular humanism. My concerns are for real people and the here and now; the possible existence of God, faeries, or some metaphysical Otherworld just doesn’t fit into my worldview.
Except ...
You knew there’d be an “except,” didn’t you, or else why would I be writing this down?
It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. I’m all for creative expression, but my medium’s music. I’m not an artist like Jilly, or a writer like Christy. But the kinds of things that have been happening to me can’t really be expressed in a fiddle tune—no, that’s not entirely true. I can express them, but the medium is such I can’t be assured that, when I’m playing, listeners hear what I mean them to hear.
That’s how it works with instrumental music, and it’s probably why the best of it is so enduring: the listener takes away whatever he or she wants from it. Say the composer was trying to tell us about the aftermath of some great battle. When we hear it, the music might speak to us of a parent we’ve lost, a friend’s struggle with some debilitating disease, a doe standing at the edge of a forest at twilight, or any of a thousand other unrelated things.
Realistic art like Jilly does—or at least it’s realistically rendered; her subject matter’s right out of some urban update of those Andrew Lang colorcoded fairy tale books that most of us read when we were kids—and the collections of urban legends and stories that my brother writes don’t have that same leeway. What goes down on the canvas or on paper, no matter how skillfully drawn or written, doesn’t allow for much in the way of an alternate interpretation.
So that’s why I’m writing this down: to lay it all out in black and white where maybe I can understand it myself.
For the past week, every afternoon after busking up by the Williamson Street Mall for the lunchtime crowds, I’ve packed up my fiddle case and headed across town to come here to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Once I get here, I sit on the steps about halfway up, take out this notebook, and try to write. The trouble is, I haven’t been able to figure out where to start.
I like it out here on the steps. I’ve played inside the cathedral—just once, for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was okay, but I remember coming in on my own to test the acoustics an hour or so before the rehearsal; ever since then I’ve been a little unsure about how Jilly views this kind of place. My fiddling didn’t feel enclosed. Instead the walls seemed to open the music right up; the cathedral gave the reel I was playing a stately grace—a spiritual grace—that it had never held for me before. I suppose it had more to do with the architect’s design than the presence of God, still I could’ve played there all night only But I’m rambling again. I’ve filled a couple of pages now, which is more than I’ve done all week, except after just rereading what I’ve written so far, I don’t know if any of it’s relevant.
Maybe I should just tell you about Paperjack. I don’t know that it starts with him exactly, but it’s probably as
