nothing. I watched her until she reached the far end of the street, turned her own corner and then, just like Ellie, was gone as well.
I ended up giving Ellie's sandwich to Johnny Rew, an old wino who's taught me a fiddle tune or two, the odd time I've run into him sober.
***
I started to see the Bone Woman everywhere after that day. I wasn't sure if she was just new to town, or if it was one of those cases where you suddenly see something or someone you've never noticed before and after that you see them all the time. Everybody I talked to about her seemed to know her, but no one was quite sure how long she'd been in the city, or where she lived, or even her name.
I still wasn't calling her the Bone Woman, though I knew by then that bones were all she collected. Old bones, found bones, rattling around together in her shoulderbag until she went off at the end of the day and showed up the next morning, ready to start filling her bag again.
When she wasn't hunting bones, she spent her time with the street's worst cases— people like Ellie that no one else could talk to. She'd get them making things— little pictures or carvings or beadwork, keeping their hands busy. And talking. Someone like Ellie still made no sense to anybody else, but you could tell when she was with the Bone Woman that they were sharing a real dialogue. Which was a good thing, I suppose, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more going on, something if not exactly sinister, then still strange.
It was the bones, I suppose. There were so many. How could she keep finding them the way she did? And what did she do with them?
My brother Christy collects urban legends, the way the Bone Woman collects her bones, rooting them out where you'd never think they could be. But when I told him about her, he just shrugged.
'Who knows why any of them do anything?' he said.
Christy doesn't live on the streets, for all that he haunts them. He's just an observer— always has been ever since we were kids. To him, the street people can be pretty well evenly divided between the sad cases and the crazies. Their stories are too human for him.
'Some of these are big,' I told him. 'The size of a human thighbone.'
'So point her out to the cops.'
'And tell them what?'
A smile touched his lips with just enough superiority in it to get under my skin. He's always been able to do that. Usually, it makes me do something I regret later, which I sometimes think is half his intention. It's not that he wants to see me hurt. It's just part and parcel of that air of authority that all older siblings seem to wear. You know, a raised eyebrow, a way of smiling that says 'You have so much to learn, little brother.'
'If you really want to know what she does with those bones,' he said, 'why don't you follow her home and find out?'
'Maybe I will.'
***
It turned out that the Bone Woman had a squat on the roof of an abandoned factory building in the Tombs. She'd built herself some kind of a shed up there— just a leaning, ramshackle affair of castoff lumber and sheet metal, but it kept out the weather and could easily be heated with a wood-stove in the spring and fall. Come winter, she'd need warmer quarters, but the snows were still a month or so away.
I followed her home one afternoon, then came back the next day when she was out to finally put to rest my fear about these bones she was collecting. The thought that had stuck in my mind was that she was taking something away from the street people like Ellie, people who were already at the bottom rung and deserved to be helped, or at least just left alone. I'd gotten this weird idea that the bones were tied up with the last remnants of vitality that someone like Ellie might have, and the Bone Woman was stealing it from them.
What I found was more innocuous, and at the same time creepier, than I'd expected.
The inside of her squat was littered with bones and wire and dog-shaped skeletons that appeared to be made from the two. Bones held in place by wire, half-connected ribs and skulls and limbs. A pack of bone dogs. Some of the figures were almost complete, others were merely suggestions, but everywhere I looked, the half- finished wire-and-bone skeletons sat or stood or hung suspended from the ceiling. There had to be more than a dozen in various states of creation.
I stood in the doorway, not willing to venture any further, and just stared at them all. I don't know how long I was there, but finally I turned away and made my way back down through the abandoned building and out onto the street.
So now I knew what she did with the bones. But it didn't tell me how she could find so many of them. Surely that many stray dogs didn't die, their bones scattered the length and breadth of the city like so much autumn residue?
***
Amy and I had a gig opening for the Kelledys that night. It didn't take me long to set up. I just adjusted my microphone, laid out my fiddle and whistles on a small table to one side, and then kicked my heels while Amy fussed with her pipes and the complicated tangle of electronics that she used to amplify them.
I've heard it said that all Uillean pipers are a little crazy— that they have to be to play an instrument that looks more like what you'd find in the back or a plumber's truck than an instrument— but I think of them as perfectionists. Every one I've ever met spends more time fiddling with their reeds and adjusting the tuning of their various chanters, drones and regulators than would seem humanly possible.
Amy's no exception. After a while I left her there on the stage, with her red hair falling in her face as she poked and prodded at a new reed she'd made for one of her drones, and wandered into the back where the Kelledys were making their own preparations for the show, which consisted of drinking tea and looking beatific. At least that's the way I always think of the two of them. I don't think I've ever met calmer people.
Jilly likes to think of them as mysterious, attributing all kinds of fairy-tale traits to them. Meran, she's convinced, with the green highlights in her nut-brown hair and her wise brown eyes, is definitely dryad material— the spirit of an oak tree come to life— while Cerin is some sort of wizard figure, a combination of adept and bard. I think the idea amuses them, and they play it up to Jilly. Nothing you can put your finger on, but they seem to get a kick out of spinning a mysterious air about themselves whenever she's around.
I'm far more practical than Jilly— actually, just about anybody's more practical than Jilly, God bless her, but that's another story. I think if you find yourself using the word magic to describe the Kelledys, what you're really talking about is their musical talent. They may seem preternaturally calm offstage, but as soon as they begin to play, that calmness is transformed into a bonfire of energy. There's enchantment then, burning on stage, but it comes from their instrumental skill.
'Geordie,' Meran said after I'd paced back and forth for a few minutes. 'You look a little edgy. Have some tea.'
I had to smile. If the Kelledys had originated from some mysterious elsewhere, then I'd lean more toward them having come from a fiddle tune than Jilly's fairy tales.
'When sick is it tea you want?' I said, quoting the title of an old Irish jig that we all knew in common.
Meran returned my smile. 'It can't hurt. Here.' she added, rummaging around in a bag that was lying by her chair. 'Let me see if I have something that'll ease your nervousness.'
'I'm not nervous.'
'No, of course not,' Cerin put in. 'Geordie just likes to pace, don't you?'
He was smiling as he spoke, but without a hint of Christy's sometimes annoying demeanor.
'No, really. It's just...'
'Just what?' Meran asked as my voice trailed off.
Well, here was the perfect opportunity to put Jilly's theories to the test, I decided. If the Kelledys were in fact as fey as she made them out to be, then they'd be able to explain this business with the bones, wouldn't they?
So I told them about the fat woman and her bones and what I'd found in her squat. They listened with far more reasonableness than I would have if someone had been telling the story to me— especially when I went on to explain the weird feeling I'd been getting from the whole business.
'It's giving me the creeps,' I said, finishing up, 'and I can't even say why.'
