Summer 2007
Traveling Magic
There are coyote in The Balcones Canyonlands Preserve in West Travis
County, Texas. One family, with three cubs. As always, the alpha
female is the only one to breed. Her two sisters will help her rear the
cubs to maturity. She is a young female, less than two years old, and
her sisters are her littermates: this family, barely more than
striplings themselves, have fought hard to establish themselves in this
reserve, managed for deer and birds, but not for coyote. Most Texans
still shoot first, and ask themselves only afterwards if the beautiful
golden corpse in front of them could possibly have posed a risk to
livestock or pets.
This alpha female is unique. If you could see her, in the settling
light that follows sunrise, as she and one of her sisters head out to
hunt the forest edge for small mammals and unfledged birds, you would
see what makes her into the
rari
canis. She has green eyes. Green as jade, greener than Texan
grass.
She crests the hill-line and looks back, blinking into the light of the
mid-morning and - as she drops her head and closes her eyes, to scent
the air for other predators, for prey, for the currents all around that
shape a world as full of odor as of color-her eyes change.
Far away, the train pulls out of Austin station. It labors slowly,
weighted with passengers, freighted with love, hate, expectation, fear,
regret.
“
My baby’s on that train. Heading
north to the cold-lands; off to college and who knows if she’ll come
back to me?”
When the coyote opens her eyes again, the green has gone: they are
simply yellow.
The train rolls.
In a booth in a Chicago club, a jaded critic sips latte and slits his
eyes against the brightness of the alto sax held by the woman on the
stage. It is too early in the day to play jazz. She is too young
to play jazz. She is a she. The sax is too bright and shiny. He sighs,
feels the pull of the scar tissue against his re-activating ulcer and
drinks morosely of his medicinal milk.
Frannie Moore lifts the sax. In the moments before they swing in behind
her, the band hears the train sliding its way through the windy city.
The noise is subliminal, visceral: if you play here a lot it becomes
part of the music. Frannie breathes deep and opens her heart to the
world.
After a couple of minutes, maybe five, maybe seven, the critic stops
staring and starts writing. He covers sheet after sheet of notepad,
sometimes turning two or three pages over together in his haste,
sometimes writing off the edge of the page onto the greasy wooden
table. Later, when he tries to decipher what wired his hindbrain to his
writing hand without bothering the intellect in between, this is all he
can recover: “
We’ve
had blues, we’ve had mellow, we’ve had the golden age. What else can
there be? The greens. When Frannie Moore plays, you hear the green
heart of this planet, singing out to you from within the core of this
woman’s being. She brings mockingbirds and honeysuckle and puts them
right down on the table with your coffee and smokes. She carries you
out to the end of the branch where the dew-drop hangs from the freshest
leaf you’ll ever see in your life, and she lets you hear that dew-drop
fall. You don’t just hear it hit the forest floor, she can make you
know how it sounds as it’s falling through the air. This is music like
we’ve never heard before - if you want to feel evolution in action,
then hear Frannie Moore and know that the blues are dead. Long live the
greens.”
Frannie lowers the sax. Behind her, the band is silent.
…
“
My girl wants to be a journalist.
She’s going to win the Pulitzer one day. Is she ever going to come back
here for some semi-loco guitarist? God I hope so. I’m not gonna
stand in her way, but I’m following that train in my mind. My heart is
going north with her.”
…
On the other side of Buffalo there is a garden, so far beyond manicured
that it looks as though it has had a lift and tuck and liposuction. The
train roars along the bottom edge of a lawn that is as
precision-trimmed as a GI buzz cut. The panes of a custom-made glass
house vibrate gently as the carriages pass.
Inside the greenhouse, the rose grower is deliberately not watching the
opening of his rose. He has set the spray of three perfect buds under
the infra-red bulb, balanced by a daylight bulb on one side and the
blue light from a halogen bulb on the other. He knows that he could
simply prise the petals open with his fingers to see if he has
succeeded, but he is a perfectionist and he wants the bloom to open of
its own accord. An impatient perfectionist though, of its own accord
but in his time, to his schedule. Hence the array of light and heat, to
trick this rose into revealing its secrets.
He has planned this for over two decades: breeding and grafting,
hybridising. The rose will be scarlet, like fresh blood. Richly
scented, with a bottom note of rare spices. The stamens will be as
golden as the crown of Heaven. All this is true of a dozen fine roses,
but there will be one difference between his rose and all the rest. The
innermost ring of petals, closest to the gold heart, will not be red,
but red and white. They will be white petals that bleed the
reddest notes of the martyrdom of Christ. White as the Lamb of
God. This rose will be called The Nazerene.
More than twenty years of failure have twisted the rose grower into
something less than human. He has forgotten what made him conceive the
rose in his soul. He can only remember the craft that has shaped it in
his hands. He is standing with his back to the buds, watching, but not
seeing, the train pass. As the last carriage swings away, he turns to
look at what he has wrought.
Under the trickery of heat and light the topmost bud has opened. It
holds its shape perfectly, revealing the perfection of form that he
craves. He peers forward, seeing the apparent raggedness of the inner
petals, shockingly white, startlingly red. But he barely registers them
in his grief and pain because inside the glorious red and white array,
the stamens are as green as grasshoppers. He tears the bud from the
stem, dropping it to the floor and twisting his foot compulsively on it
until it is no more than a damp smear, redolent of tea and
cinnamon. He turns away, barely able to walk from the glasshouse,
shoulders bowed against the weight of failure. His finger flicks the
light switch, amputating at source the tropicality that brought the bud
to maturity.
Tomorrow, when he returns, he will find the lower buds have opened too,
under the natural light that floods the glass walls. They have golden
hearts. He will never again see the green heart of the red rose.
The train travels. New passengers join, original ones leave.The start
point branches to a thousand destinations, the trains spread across two
nations like the streams of a delta, carrying hopes and fears, wishes
and promises.
“
She’s my green eyed cat, my girl, my
luck. You think I should have gone with her? Maybe so. But look, she’s
going to college … she doesn’t need me hanging around there. I’m just a
guitar-hack, ax-man; I’ve got gigs here that pay the rent. Up there,
could I find work? I dunno. I don’t want to drag her down. If she
comes back to me after college, then I’m goin’ to cherish her forever,
but if she don’t … then nobody’s ever going to be able to say that I
ruined her chances. She’s the first person from hereabouts that’s going
to college. I’ll bide my time here, she’ll come back, I’m sure of it.”
Outside Toronto, where the sidings lurk in the shade of evening, a
drunk sits near the tracks. His bottle is empty. It has been empty for
a while now. He is empty too. It has been a long time since there was
anything to fill him up. He sprawls with the graceless pain of the
habitual drunkard, bottle loosely held to his chest. Passing trains
cast bars of shadow and light over him. After a while, a long while, he
realises there is something new. Something so small it hardly
counts. A speck of green. He lifts the bottle and peers
inside. At the bottom is a firefly. The cold green glow, like a
fairy bonfire, takes him to a place where he once hunted fireflies,
putting them in a jar to hang in the tree outside his bedroom window.
He smiles. After a while he falls asleep, cradling the fiery glow
of his magic bottle.
As she steps down onto Union Station, Toronto is dark and cold. In the
small group of travellers, the tall girl with sun-tanned skin and a
backpack stands out. She is calm in the middle of the ragged bustle,
the movement of people too tired to be enthusiastic, but happy to have
arrived. She looks around with frank interest in her new world.
“
I want to write her a song. I’m
going to write her the song that will bring her home to me. Travelling
magic’s going to take my heart to her and bring her back safe to me, my
green-eyed girl.”
Overhead, in the station roof, is a bird. In cleaner places it might be
called a dove, but here in the station, it is a pigeon. It is
predominantly white, although there is a feral suggestion in the long
pinion feathers with betraying notes of marbled grey and dun. It is
tired. It blinks one pink eye and ruffles its feathers, preparatory to
sleep. The girl hoists her pack. The movement rouses the bird, and once
more it lifts its head, glancing down, observing her shivering form as
it crosses the station floor. As it settles again to sleep, its gaze
crosses the station. It has emerald green eyes.
As well as writing for the UK's premier sustainability journal, Green
Futures, Pushcart-nominated Kay Sexton
has recently completed “Green Thought in an Urban Shad,” a words and
pictures exhibition with painter Fion Gunn that was shown in London,
Dublin and Beijing. She is a finalist in the University of
Hertfordshire Writing Award. Kay blogs about writing fiction at
http://writingneuroses.blogspot.com/ and has a regular column at
www.moondance.org.
I wrote “Traveling Magic” in 2004, as an homage to John Coltrane, whose
“Blue Train” has been begging me to write a train story for as long as
I can remember. Most of the stories I write about jazz are
inspired by a particular track which plays in my head until I get the
fiction down on paper and then stops. This story and track are
unique because the opening bars of “Blue Train” still pop into my head
at all hours of the day and night – although I’m not complaining; if
you have to be haunted by a piece of music, this is a good one to
choose.