Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen

rooms. Or a room. My room. And how big it was getting to be.
    I slept in one corner of the cabin behind a shortwall that came out from the sidewall of the cabin. Not a room so much as a slot. Fishbone slept on the other side of the cabin in the same kind of slot. I slept on an old strap-iron cot just wide enough for one person with iron ends that were decorated with little designs so it looked like the little posts that held up the ends of the bed were stuck in a kind of flower. Fishbone said the cot belonged to an old Confederate soldier from the Civil War name of Season, or maybe Ceesen. He never spelled it. Said the old soldier died in the cot when he was over a hundred years old and he was alone and they didn’t find the body for going on a week. Not here but in another cabin-shack. During a warm summer month. And the body went off, he said, as bodies and other meat does when it’s warm, so after they found him and buried him in a rubber sack—Fishbone said it was before they had plastic—nobody wanted anything to do with any of the old soldier’s stuff. Said it smelled too bad. So they burnedthe shack with all his stuff in it. Bed too. Fishbone came along later, maybe a year later, and the bed was still there, standing in the ashes, only rusted a little after the fire took off the finish a bit. But all there, springs and all. And the stink was gone. Burned away.
    Fishbone took it home, never one to waste anything. Still had the box he might have found me in when I was a baby. Still had old work boots so worn they were falling to pieces. Said he might need the leather from the tops to fix other things that wore out or were broke, the way cowboys who were rustling cattle in the old days sewed old boot tops together to make pouches to carry cartridges on the side of their saddles. I had used the sleeve of an old canvas jacket to make a quiver to hold arrows, held up with a piece of clothesline rope over my shoulder, so I understood how he could have taken the cot. Used the cot.
    He slept on it for twenty years, was still sleepingon it when he found or got me. Kept me in a box on the floor. Same box he might have found me in. Or not. And when I got too big to sleep in the box, he had another cot, a little bigger, and he put me in the old soldier’s bed and moved to the other one.
    Still the same.
    Still the same now. Box in back of the stove with my baby stains in it to hold stove wood. Probably never be moved again. Old boots in the corner by the door. The same. Old coats hanging on nails, just the same.
    But the dreams changed. I dreamed of my room first as it was, and then out, out and out and wider, until it was bigger and bigger, outside the cabin, outside and out until it was all of everything. All of it—all I could see and be in—all felt like my room. My own room, my own place to be. To be.
    Told Fishbone about it, about the dream, and for a few minutes he looked at me, like he was studying on something. And maybe not somethinghe liked much. Like when he talked about getting shot some in Korea. Then he leaned back in the rocker and closed his eyes.
    Thought at first you were a familiar, he said.
    What’s a familiar, I asked.
    Witching thing, he said.
    I don’t understand.
    Don’t suspect that you do. Don’t suspect on it at all. There’s a lot of things you don’t understand. It’s because you’re young. Ain’t had time to understand a lot of things, being young and all.
    I waited. It was the only way with him. It never helped to push on a thing. You had to wait for an answer. Problem was, sometimes you had to wait a long time. Might be he’d answer right away, might be in an hour when he took some ’shine, might be tomorrow. Might be never, like some of the questions I asked him about women. Grown women. And what it was that made a man think on them so much. He never did answer. Just looked off intoaway and sipped ’shine and smiled.