Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas (i read books txt) 📕

“Ah,” he says. “Well, no poison here. Just something to calm the boy down. See?” He takes the bottle from me and uncorks it. He takes a swig of it himself, then holds it out to me to sniff. It doesn’t smell evil. This place is different than Bobba’s. It’s a good home. There isn’t any magic here except the kind that comes from goodness. It’s a warmth that fills me all over.

“It’s safe,” he tells Tommy. “But it won’t taste real good, so pinch your nose.”

Tommy does and Chester gives him a glug. Tommy coughs, and Chester makes him drink again.

“I feel kinda loopy,” he says.

“Good,” says Chester. “Then I guess we’re ready to start.”

It takes a lot of blood to set the bones right. The cut is nasty, blue with infection. Tommy screams and cries, even with the medicine. Lance brings cool rags for Tommy’s head. He’s screaming so loud. I’m scared he’s going to die.

“Sing him one of your songs,” says Lance.

So I do. I sing him the nothingsong. It’s wordless, but I sing a story into it this time. I figure maybe I should be sick of stories by now, with all the trouble they’ve gotten me into. But I don’t think stories are good or bad in themselves. It’s like the way the Preacher uses the Book—and all the strange and confusing and lovely things in it—for evil, when its stories can be used just as easy for good. Or the way Gruff lied to me about Moon Haven, how bad it hurt me when I found out. But maybe Gruff’s stories weren’t lies, not really. Maybe they were just the truth about how things should be, how maybe a derelict little orphan girl like me needed a place like the Half-Moon Inn he dreamed up for me. Maybe sometimes the story is more about the teller, and the hearer too, than ever it is about the story itself.

I sing Tommy the story of what the nothingsong has always been to me. About a ghost girl, a girl from the moon. She came down just a tiny thing, no bigger than a fleck of starlight. She was born on earth in a cut of sugarcane. A farmer found her one day and brought her home to his wife. They raised the little ghost girl until she was normal-person-sized and the prettiest girl in all the land. Kings and princes and lords and merchants from all over the world came to woo her, but she didn’t like a one of them. They all smelled bad or talked about politics or bored her with stories of killing wolves and tigers, stories that the girl wished had ended with the tigers and wolves winning, stuffing their bellies full of these awful men.

But there was one boy, barely sixteen, who rode into the ghost girl’s village. He had silver hair and walked with a cane, but the cane had a sword in it. He didn’t bore her talking about all the stuff he killed, or about what was happening at court and all that other junk. Instead, he sang her a song. And the song was the story of her whole life, only said quicker and more beautiful than she could have ever said it herself. The music and the words and the young man’s voice, all of it together scooped her heart up and took it away. It was the singing boy she would marry.

It didn’t work though. Just when it was time for the wedding ceremony, the ghost girl’s parents came back from the moon. They said she had to come back home. The moon missed her, it needed her light, there wasn’t anybody else in the whole starry night that could give enough glow to the moon. It had to be her.

So she waved good-bye to the boy she loved and to her earth parents and floated up into the sky, and that was that.

Sure, the song doesn’t have any words to it. But that’s what it’s about. Anyone with a half a brain can tell that. What else could a song so beautiful be about except a ghost girl and her journey to the moon?

When I finish singing, I realize that everybody’s looking at me. Tommy’s eyes seem soft, and there isn’t a mark of pain in his face. Chester looks at me with wide blue eyes, stitches and thread still in his hand. Lance sits quiet in the corner. All from my little song. Maybe Momma left me a little more magic than I thought.

“Please sing it again,” says Chester.

And I do.

Soon Tommy’s leg is all stitched up and he’s snoozing soft and snoring. Lance has been cooking, and he serves up a big beef stew that smells wonderful, that doesn’t have any beets in it or bad magic. It’s real food, rich and thick. We eat and eat and eat.

“Is Tommy gonna be okay?” I ask.

“Looks like it, darling,” says Chester. “You did a miracle by singing like that. It put him right at peace, let me do my work without him fighting me one bit.”

“Never heard another song like it,” says Lance.

“Momma taught it to me,” I say.

“She must have been one heck of a woman,” says Lance.

“She was,” I say. But then I think about Momma talking about cursing folks, about poisoning fields and turning wine to blood. “I mean, I think she was. I used to think she was the greatest woman in the world, the best and most prettiest. But I’m not so sure anymore.”

“No one’s ever quite who you wish they were,” says Chester.

“I just miss her a lot is all,” I say.

I think I’m going to start crying again and I don’t want to so I got to think of something else to say real fast.

“I love your house,” I say.

Chester laughs. “Lance here built it himself, about two years back. We used to live in town.”

“You lived