Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen Page A

all different. All told by the stove in cold times or on the porch on summer evenings while he was sipping ’shine from an old jelly jar or doing what he called “hogging around” in the garden.
    First story I heard I was a baby still in birth blood in a wooden beer crate down where the creek crossed under the county firebreak trail. The trail was right on the edge of being a road that sometimes people would use to come into the dark woods, the old woods, for their own reasons, sometimes dark reasons.
    Ugly, he said.
    Ugly and wrinkled like a baby pink rat and squalling like a hog stuck in a fence. He found me from the noise I made just before a bear got me. Fishbone was working the creek for chubs or maybe a turtle to eat, and he yelled at the bear that was dragging the crate away, and it dropped the crate and ran off, and Fishbone took the crate and me home with him. Was the crate that was in his mind first, he said; it had iron corners bracing good clear pine wood slats that would work just near perfect in back of the stove to hold wood. When he got to it and saw me, saw what it was that had been squalling and screaming, he just took it all home, crate, baby, and all. Thought, he said, that the baby wouldn’t last long anyway and he’d bury it when it passed and still have the crate for the back of the stove. Like any other thing that came drifting down the creek that he could find to use.
    I was, he said, like Moses in the Bulrushes, drifting down a river . . .
    Which sounded made up until I learned to read and found the story in a big leather book. But I still don’t know what a bulrush is except it’s something to do with water and has nothing to do with bulls. Or me, for all that.
    Could have been a tale like the story about his name, about the stuck bone or the small gar fish hook. Especially when you heard the other stories about how he had a second or third or fourth cousin who had a daughter who found herself with a baby she didn’t much want or know how to raise. It— I , that is—went from cousin to sister to cousin, until finally I came down to being with Fishbone who was already old, so very old, and he didn’t have anything to do for the rest of his life except live in a tumbledown cracky-shack in the woods, and so I had a home.
    Third story was I was left with a note in a cardboard box on a church step. The God man who found me there knew somebody from the familythat took in kids, and they knew somebody else who could take a kid, but none of them could have any more kids to care for. I wound up with a state woman who looked for blood family and that brought her, finally, to Fishbone, and since we come from some same kind of family blood, I was given to him.
    To raise.
    And other stories about being found where fairy families had left me under the side of a night-glowing old stump in a shallow hole. Fishbone was looped on ’shine and since he could feel and see things of mystery when he was on ’shine, he saw me there, in the glow from the stump. He took me home thinking I was witched and could see things ahead and maybe bring him good luck, like a piece of clear rock candy or a double yolk egg when you crack it in the pan. If the yolks don’t break before they fry . . .
    All mixed stories and seemed to be made up except:
    Except.
    In back of the stove is the wooden beer crate with good pine slat sides and steel-braced corners and some old stains that might have been left by my birth blood.
    And.
    When they come to get me and made me go to school for a year and a little more until they knew I could never fit in, had some big words about how I could never fit in and brought me back to live with Fishbone, with my family, but in the meantime taught me to read. Right there, right then, I saw an old letter from the state said they would send a little check to Fishbone once a month to raise me in a “goodly manner.”
    And.
    When I came