Fishbone's Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

enough to touch my tongue, andit burned so bad I thought my mouth was on fire. Still don’t see how Fishbone can sit there and sip it steady from a jar like he does and it never seems to hurt him much. I did that and it would turn my brain to mush. ’Course I’m still young, maybe ten or eleven or twelve depending on which true story about how I came to be with Fishbone. Maybe you had to be older to take the ’shine and strong coffee even when they’re sucked through a sugar lump.
    Didn’t seem to hurt him much, the ’shine—mouth or brain or body—but then he’s old; old, he says, as dirt. That may be why. Like leather or hard wood or rust iron. Just plain tough.
    But it sure makes his songs come easier. The ’shine.
    Third Song: Barefoot Blues
    Two-dollar shoes,
    two-dollar shoes.
    Pinch my toes, make me sing the blues.
    Can’t do nothing,
    but moan and wail.
    Man come along and throw me in jail.
    All for stealing,
    them two-dollar shoes.
    Can’t do nothing but sing them blues.

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Stovesmoke
    S ometimes it was not hunting and it was more like going into something. Something you knew. Something you wore like part of you, like the trees and grass and the water in the creek and ponds and the brush were your clothes, your skin. You. It was all you.
    Tried to tell Fishbone about it, how it felt now that I had come into it, knew more about it. At first I thought it didn’t go in his thinking. He smiled a bit. No teeth smile; had his eyes closed like he was seeing something in there, in his thinking, and hadn’t heard a word I said.
    But I was wrong. Usually I was. Wrong. When it came to thinking that I was out ahead of Fishbone, I was almost always wrong.
    It can all be like that, he said, everything about you, your life, what you do, what you did, what you’re going to do. Everything you see, feel, hear—everything you do. Everything you are. Your life, all your life you’ll wear it, he said, if you do it right, right in how you see and know your own right, know it in how you think yourself.
    Everything, all that you are or ever going to be, will be like a cloak, he said and smiled—just as a cloak of many colors.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Arrows.
    I got a little older, eight and up a bit, or maybe nine and up, and I came to where I could make them better, so they’d fly better and not turn all sideways. I was working near the bog swamp just down from the shack, looking for crayfish or biggerbullfrogs, and I found two big shypoke wings, a left and right, with the big end feathers still stuck on them. Fishbone said there were other names for the birds, big swamp birds that had long sharp beaks and ate frogs and small fish and now and then a small snake. Called them herons, he said, some people, and white ones were called egrets, but he said he had never heard them called anything but shypoke. Just lying there in the water-grass, the wing ends. One out to either side so you could almost see the big bird between them except it was gone. Head, guts, bones, legs—all gone. Small tracks around them, around the wings, like an Old Blue hound only much smaller. Maybe half the size of my palm where the Old Blue hounds made a track in soft water-grass or creek mud bigger than my whole hand. More than not a fox, red or gray, caught the bird and killed him to carry off, but the wings were too much to handle, so the fox took them off and left them.
    Feathers. In books. In one of them I came to see an old drawing of some men who ran with Robin Hood—just in the story of him, not for real—and they had arrow holders on their backs called quivers and in the drawing each arrow in the quiver had feathers on it.
    So I had the feathers from the shypoke wings and I wasn’t sure what they would do for the arrow, but every drawing showing arrows in the book showed them with feathers on the back end. There had to be something to them. And I had