The Singing Bone Read online

  “That’s okay, Stuart-Stuart,” Alice called. “Tell your mother thank you. I’ve gotta book.”

  When he went back in the house, Stuart repeated what Alice told him. “She had to book,” he told his mother.

  “Book? What’s that mean?” his father asked.

  “Go.” Stuart looked at the floor. “She had to leave.”

  “Did you wash your hands, Stuart?” his mother wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Stuart lied.

  “ ‘Book.’ Interesting,” Stuart’s father said. “Does she ever magazine?”

  “Dad. You are a cornball.”

  At dinner, Stuart said, “Alice is a jerk,” and Molly hit him on the back of the head.

  “Why is Alice suddenly a jerk?” Molly’s mother asked. “Don’t hit your brother.” She put down her silverware and looked at her children, their pretty pink faces distorted by belligerence.

  “Stu has a crush on Alice.” Molly nudged her little brother with her elbow. “Don’t you?”

  “You’re ugly!” Stuart spilled some of his milk when he put the glass down too hard. He thought he was going to cry.

  “Stuart! Go to your room. You too, Molly. You’re behaving terribly, both of you.” She looked from Molly to Stuart to her husband, who was reading the newspaper. She would have liked to tell him to leave the table, too.

  That night, Stuart lay in bed and thought about Alice looking up at the stars. It was like she was waiting for a beam of light to sweep her away. Stuart drifted off to sleep imagining beautiful Alice Pearson trapped in a beam of light, her long legs limp, her feet lifting off the ground, her arms hanging by her sides.

  3

  ALICE, SEPTEMBER 1999

  Alice is in the university’s library with headphones on. She’s listening to a recording of “The Miller’s Daughter” and taking notes. Murder Ballad 10, she writes. American. Bentonville, Arkansas, 1958. Alice taps her pen against the writing pad in front of her. She closes her eyes and listens to the singer tell the story: Two sisters have the same lover, but the lover favors the younger sister. The older becomes jealous, so she takes her sister to walk by the sea and then pushes her into the water. The younger floats to the miller’s house. This is where the story always diverges, Alice thinks. She holds her breath as she listens: “If you’ll give me your diamond rings ten/ Bow and bend to me-o/ But she wouldn’t give him her diamond rings ten/ And so he shoved her in again.”

  No magical corpse. Miller murders girl. American. Bentonville, Arkansas, 1958. She underlines Miller twice.

  Alice’s topic is the magical corpse, but Alice’s corpses aren’t vampires, though she wonders if she ought to do a little research there, too. That morning, she turned to a fresh sheet in her notebook and wrote: The magical corpse is one who’s met a violent death—usually by murder—and is returned to life as part of the natural world. When returned, the corpse reveals the secret of its death. It might be returned as an animal—i.e., Grimm’s “ Juniper Tree”: My mother, she killed me. / My father, he ate me. / My sister gathered all my bones, tied them in a silken scarf, and laid them beneath the juniper tree. / Tweet, tweet, what a pretty bird am I. (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 720). Check “The Singing Bone”(780). Alice doesn’t know what she’ll do with the research yet—­perhaps turn it into a paper and then a book.

  It didn’t take her long to find her key; that’s how she thinks of ­ballads—as her key. The way the tale changes, erodes, transforms, and re-emerges tells her everything about the people listening. She’s a folklorist, after all. Her world is rich in shifting narratives, half-truths, magical revelations. Hidden keys that open impossible worlds are not unfamiliar to her. Bluebeard, she writes. Robber Bridegroom.

  Alice listens to two more American recordings. In both of them, the miller kills the girl. Alice wonders when the story changed. In the older versions, the girl’s body is fashioned into a harp or a fiddle. When the instrument is played, it reveals the girl’s killer. In Nigeria, the sisters are turned into brothers and the instrument becomes a fish that leaps from the water when anyone travels past and sings, “Your brother is buried here, your brother is buried here.” In the Grimm version of “The Singing Bone,” a brother kills a brother so that he might marry the king’s daughter. It is only later that the younger brother’s bones are turned into a horn that tells the story of his death, and then the murderer is stitched into a sack and thrown in the river.

  Alice admires the simplicity of revenge in folklore. The sister is burned, the brother is drowned, and there’s no question about whether it is right or wrong.

  She knows the Nigerian tale will not be included in Child Ballads, which only cover Scottish, English, and a smattering of American ballads. She’s found several versions in Faroe, but they aren’t translated into English, French, or German, and Alice isn’t familiar enough with the Nordic languages to make an educated guess about the ending. She’ll have to find someone to work with, and then she’ll bring tales in—“The Juniper Tree,” “The Robber Bridegroom,” maybe—and then she’ll go further: Give me a magical corpse in a film. Give me a magical corpse in popular culture. She’s making a list, drawing arrows, circling words and crossing them out. She thinks of the new Japanese horror film she went to see the other night, Ringu, where the dead woman climbs out of a well, her black hair falling in a wet curtain in front of her face, her white gown heavy with water and earth. Alice would like to include it—as a side note, perhaps. There’s so much folklore in the film. The truth is revealed through otherwise nonmagical (one might even say “every day,” she writes) contemporary items: a telephone, the ubiquitous black plastic VHS tape.

  Work is the only way Alice can focus. Something’s coming—a door has been left open. Cold air is creeping in. She can feel it in her back—her cervical spine is knitting itself into a hard stump of rope. No matter how many laps she does in the pool, the sensation is working its way down, towards the lumbar. Tomorrow, Alice thinks, I’ll have white hair, a dowager’s hump. No one would notice that Professor Alice Wood is distracted, drifting. The creases at the front of her wool trousers are sharp. Her mohair coat is brushed. Her shirt is pressed. Every night, she rubs the small lines at the corners of her mouth with an expensive cream from a pink glass jar.

  The versions from the British Isles—“Binorie,” “The Bonnie Bows of London,” “The Cruel Sister,” “The Twa’ Sisters”—all keep the magical instrument.

  And what did he do with her hair so fine? He made of it strings for his violin.

  There was a message on Alice’s answering machine that morning from someone named Hans Loomis. The name is familiar. She was leaving the house when he called and she stood in her doorway listening. He said he was making a movie. When he said that, she decided the call couldn’t really be for her. It was some perverse mistake.

  And what did he do with her arms so long? He made them bows for his violin.

  Alice reminds herself that everyone she’d once known in this part of New York wouldn’t recognize her—or they’d be in prison. Or dead. Every day since she’s been back, a large part of her brain works at pretending she doesn’t miss the palm trees and postcard-ready blue sky of California, that she won’t be recognized, her name won’t be called from across a supermarket aisle: Alice, is that really you? The eyes saying: I thought you were dead. I assumed you were dead, anyway, I mean, after everything.

  Outside, the bright autumn leaves are dark with water. The first brilliant colors of September made her believe she could be happy here. But then the rain, the cold. And that phone call. She tries not to think about it. She changed her name. She changed her life. She’s not Alice Pearson—she’s Professor Alice Wood, and if someone did recognize her in the grocery store, well, she’d just say it was a mistake.

  And what did he do with her nose so thin? He made it a bridge for his violin.

  It was twenty years ago! Who would remember?

  There’s a boy standing at the library window. He’s wearing
a black-hooded sweatshirt, a jacket with the sheen of fake leather. His pants are baggy and black. She starts when she sees him. He’s looking right at her, but then she decides it’s her mood. He turns quickly and walks away.

  Alice slips the LP back into its browning sleeve and places an album of Scottish ballads on the turntable. She listens to the “The Twa Sisters,” and has to concentrate on the lyrics. The woman’s words, round with accent, are alien and roll away from her. They’re a wall of vowel sounds, but she lifts the needle and plays it again, and this time she understands—Sometimes she sunk, sometimes she swam, until she came to the miller’s dam, bow and bend to me—and writes: girl already dead by the time she reaches the miller’s dam. Body broken up to make harp. Alice can’t help but lightly touch her sternum. She lays her palm on her breastbone and imagines it as the pillar of a harp. The miller turns the girl’s hair into the strings, and when it’s played, the harp reveals the killer—her own sister! Alice underlines sister murderer, not miller, and then sits back in her chair.

  From where she sits, Alice can see the circulation desk. The boy in black is there. He’s talking to the librarian, looking through his backpack—for his ID? Alice wonders, but he doesn’t look like one of the students. He’s a little too—what? No, she decides, it’s not what he looks like, it’s something else—something she can’t pin down. Alice is watching him with the intensity of a cat, but then he’s gone. She looks at the window again to see if she can catch sight of him, but he must have gone the other way.

  She breathes, folds her sweater around her, lifts the needle of the album, and sets it down again at the start of the song.

  Jobs like this don’t come every day, she told herself when she got the phone call about her position. Jobs like this don’t come every month, year—lifetime. It’s a new department. There’s no tenure, of course, that would be too much to hope for—but there’s the promise of it one day, or at least the opportunity, and she’s not an adjunct either. She has health insurance, a nice apartment. What she doesn’t have are friends, but she might make some. She doesn’t like to think about her friend Nola back in California, or what she might be doing—having lunch somewhere outside, tipping her sunglasses back on her head, lifting her wineglass to Alice. “To the future,” she said. And she certainly cannot think of Abe, how he’d offered to come with her if she’d just— “If you’d just ask, Alice,” he said, putting a book down. “You’ll call me when you get there at least—”

  “Of course I will,” she said, laughing. But she hadn’t. Still.

  On the last night, when they were going to sleep, he held her close. He said: “You know, there’s a part of you that I can’t find.”

  “What do you mean?” She pulled away from him. She wanted to look into his eyes, but the room was dark.

  “We’ve been together all this time, and sometimes I still don’t know who you are.”

  She wanted to say Yes you do, but she didn’t like the feeling in the back of her throat. It made Alice angry to feel this way, as if she were being peeled back. Examined. “You can’t completely know another person,” she said instead, and when he didn’t say anything, when he didn’t make some small conciliatory remark that would help smooth things over, she grew frustrated.

  “This is different,” he said. “You’re—”

  But she stopped him. “You’ve been very good to me.” It was final, and it was so easy, after all. It was like setting something back on a shelf in a shop.

  “Good to you?” He turned so that his back was towards her, and then he got up and went out to the living room. In the morning, they walked silently around each other until it was time to go to the airport. There were moments when she wanted to turn to him in the car and say Yes. Yes, Abe. Come with me. I’ll fill in the blank spaces for you—but she never could. But he was right. He didn’t know her. He didn’t even know where she was from. She told him Vermont. But that wasn’t true. She’d grown up less than an hour away from here. This was home. Alice usually safe-guarded against men like Abe. She chose men who were married, brutally handsome, indifferent. She chose men who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—see the blank spaces.

  • • •

  The song ends, and the needle falls into the last groove and skips. Alice closes her eyes. The sound is a door pulling away from its latch in the bedroom she shared with Molly that winter. It is icy rain ticking against the windowpanes. It is the sound of Allegra chopping wood in the yard below. In the gray light, they wake to the sound of the door opening, the ax, to the ice on the windowpane. Alice raises her head from her pillow and peers into Molly’s face. “It’s all right,” she says. “Molly, it’s fine,” but Molly’s face is pale, her breath is short. She shakes her head, turns in the bed, her back to Alice. Her yellow hair spills out across the pillow. Alice touches the light curls at the ends. The roots look nearly black in the early light. “Molly,” she whispers. “Molly, don’t.” She feels him climb onto the bed behind her, his fingers on her spine. He reaches for Alice, rolls her roughly onto her back. He holds her face in his hands. “Look at me.”

  Bow and bend to me. Bow down to me.

  4

  Hans wants to keep things small. With his first films, when he was still discovering his voice, it was just him and his camera—filming, talking to people, roaming. Every summer, he left the city, choosing a direction randomly. Friends came along, girlfriends, riding in the car next to him, the windows open, road maps and soda cans littering the backseat. Some of the girls stayed for the whole summer trip—others left at the first city, getting a bus back home or taking off on their own, thumb out, walking backwards. It was a different world then. With the ones who stayed, he drove farther and farther away, with no set return date. Most people had jobs, families, obligations. Hans was the odd one. He had no family. Both of his parents were dead, and he had no passion for any work but filmmaking. When he was a child, his mother told him that he was a seeker, a wanderer. It was true. “You were always wandering off,” she said. “You’d see something in the distance and run towards it. Most children just look. I always had to catch you and pull you back.”

  Those summers, he went to towns no one had ever heard of but the people who lived there. He visited on the Fourth of July, his camera beside him on the grass, his tape recorder in a bag, until he struck up a conversation with someone and asked if he could film. He said he wasn’t using the footage for anything in particular, and he really wasn’t—not then. He said it was for a class assignment or he was only getting used to this new camera. He carried a Super 8mm.

  Sometimes he would be invited into a home or onto a porch. He liked that. Sitting in a stranger’s house with a glass of beer sweating beside him, cigarette lit and the smell of dinner, he asked people about their lives—about their children who were in Vietnam, what they thought of the moon landing. One night, standing in a yard in Alabama, he looked up at the moon and thought about the art of the interview. Let people talk, he thought, and if you let them talk for long enough, they will tell you what’s important to them.

  In the fall, when he moved back to the city, he reviewed his footage. He supported himself by working as a furniture mover, living in an East Village walk-up, eating in diners because there were so many roaches he couldn’t bring food home. He paced himself through the coldest months with the great books—he read Tolstoy and Joyce in bars. But he read the Beats, too, and he was inspired by them. He planned his road trips—those long days with the car radio on, a road map open on the seat next to him.

  The child of a Swiss mother and an American father, his early life was transient. For a time they’d settled just outside Washington, D.C., and sometimes he dreamed of that—the small brick house, the oblong backyard, the comfort of clean sheets, and the rituals of family life. It didn’t seem natural to be alone so early, but here he was, without siblings. He had an aunt in Nevada and an uncle in Germany. He didn’t really know either—they were photographs, his aunt a shadow in a blue coat from a
long-ago birthday party.

  When Hans turned thirty, he wanted to make something more, something bigger. He took all the years of filming and found the most compelling stories—missing children, families in tumult, runaways, drugs, religion, violence. He began piecing a longer film together, something he thought of as a portrait of the American landscape.

  America, I Love You had modest success. It won a few contests and made it to film festivals. It brought him some money and recognition—not a lot—but enough to make his next film, a piece on a small ­family-run circus in the Midwest. That film won awards, gained him reviews that used phrases like “a fading pastoral landscape,” and “a family caught between what was and what will be.” Hans realized he was interested in group formation, in conformity and deviance, and the shifting boundaries of each. He wanted to investigate norms within isolated groups and communities. He pitched a five-part television show—Life Space—that examined a ­California commune’s relationship to family, labor, education, and worship. Life Space was a success. Hans was invited to give lectures and sit on social symposiums. He saw his photograph in Variety, his name in the New York Times. He made more films. Some were big. He taught workshops on film, he was invited to parties. But Hans didn’t like the noise of celebrity. He chose to stay in New York, and since he liked to walk in the park, where he could see the seasons shift, he found an apartment on the Upper West Side. He made no show of his own success. His mind, as it always had been, was on his work, was on the idea. In a way, he remained the outsider—the status he had claimed so long ago. It provided him entrance into outsider groups—like The Doing, the Christian fundamentalist sect who lived in West Virginia.

  Death Christ exposed The Doing, who promoted themselves in the media as a charitable organization. They did missionary work in Uganda, ran an adoption agency, set up food banks in depressed communities, sent medical aid to emergency sites—but everything they did had a shadow side. In Uganda, they set up army training camps. The adoptions were fraudulent, the babies sold to them on the black market. They used their food banks as recruitment centers and kept their name clean with the medical aid. There were rumors when group members left, but it wasn’t until the murder of a prominent ex-member that Hans got involved. The murder brought the group under criminal investigation, and in the final days of filming at their compound in West Virginia, with ATF agents surrounding them, a small war broke out between The Doing and the ATF. Hans kept filming—and so did Ariel, who did not move from her spot. She lay on her stomach with her camera. That was who Hans needed for the trip upstate: calm under fire Ariel, with her red curls and her bubblegum.