The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  “Mama be expectin’ me,” Buster said feebly. It was easier than saying, I’m afeared of these woods.

  The mist had come up so hard and fast they could hardly get their bearings. And that hornet sound. Sweet Lord, but it put the hair on the back of Junior Lee’s neck to standing on end.

  “Junior! Buster! Gabor!”

  That was Little Jakub. Where had his voice come from? The mist si-goggled it something fierce. Nothing was straight. Which way was the road? Should they go home? Home was where their mamas were. They wanted their mamas, though they’d never say so.

  Junior Lee saw the glow first. It was off to the right, and he was sure it was the porch light of the company store in the miner camp. “Home’s just over yonder,” he said. “Come on. Hurry!” He didn’t want to be in the woods anymore, and he set off toward the comforting glow. It was so chilly. Junior Lee’s breath came out in puffs. The other boys were behind him. He could hear their footfalls back a ways. The crack of a branch.

  “Keep up!” Junior Lee said and kept walking. But the woods didn’t look right. He was confused. The glow had moved off to his left some. And to his right. It was in two places at once. Three. “You see that?” he said.

  No answer.

  Junior Lee turned back. The boys were not behind him. “Jakub? Buster!” His voice echoed and was swallowed. “Gabor?” Another crack of a branch. Junior Lee whirled around. There was no need to call for the boys. They were there, carried in the arms of the ghosts streaming out of the woods. Jakub’s eyes were still open but unseeing. His head hung at a funny angle from his neck. What was left of Gabor and Buster made Junior Lee vomit into the leaves.

  The ghosts kept coming, more and more. Some of the ghosts were ladies in very old black dresses and with white bonnets on their heads. Some were miners rotted through with the black lung. The glow had been from their headlamps, that third eye pulsing into the gloom. All of them were hungry. Their eyes, ringed in darkness, burned with it.

  They opened their mouths and a liquid coursed from their ruined lips, black and thick, like they’d been chewing tobacco without stopping.

  The ghosts spoke in one voice. “This world will be ours. But first, let us pay tribute.”

  Junior Lee would never have to worry about a mine cave-in, never have to listen for the shrill warning of the canary. He would never work deep underground with his daddy, never wake in the night with a burbling cough, never turn fourteen. The ghosts would make sure of it.

  Junior Lee fell down on his back.

  “Please. Don’t,” the boy whimpered. His lips moved silently, praying to the god his ma and pa told him lived up in the sky. But that sky was infected now, bruised and angry. The birds screeched away from the swirling, seemingly endless hole at its center, and if Junior Lee hadn’t been so terrified, he might’ve marveled at this new sight—the soulless cloud eye shedding tears of blue light into a world that didn’t know it existed.

  The ghosts surrounded Junior Lee.

  They growled and bared their teeth: “All praise the King of Crows.”

  The mountains swallowed up his screams.

  Boley, Oklahoma

  The town of Boley had been founded in 1903 in Creek Nation Indian Territory by descendants of African and Creek Freedmen, and in the subsequent years, it had grown to become a very prosperous town. That was why Mr. S. S. Jones had come to town with his film camera to document Boley’s success, to show others of his brethren that a dream was alive in Oklahoma. His guide, Mr. James Powell, proudly showed off the local bank and the oil derrick that produced more than two thousand barrels of crude per day. Yes, sir, things were very good in Boley.

  It was mid-afternoon now and unseasonably warm on the dusty plains of frontier country. The two men perspired in their suits, ties, and hats, and so they took refuge on the front porch of the general store and sipped glasses of lemonade made cold with ice from Boley’s own ice plant. The two men removed their hats and let the gritty wind cool the sweat beaded along their neatly trimmed hairlines, compliments of Boley’s own, very busy barbershop. The men tipped their heads back and took in all that sky—so much sky it seemed like nothing could ever stop its reach.

  “The land’s been very good to us,” Mr. Powell said proudly.

  “I see that,” Mr. Jones said.

  Mr. Powell couldn’t help noticing that Mr. Jones seemed miles away.

  “Mr. Jones, I don’t mean to pry, but is something on your mind? Are you not enjoying your time here in Boley?”

  “Oh, I’m enjoying my time tremendously. I was just thinking about something peculiar that happened on the trip out here. I guess it’s got me spooked. You ever hear of a town called Edna?”

  Mr. Powell shook his head slowly. “Can’t say as it’s familiar to me. Is it nearby?”

  “Farther east. About forty miles, maybe, on the railroad line.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I passed by it on my way to Stillwater last week. Saw it from the train window, you see. Looked like a nice little town. The train stopped for a few minutes to let some folks on. There were even some children who’d come down to the tracks to wave at us and hear the engineer toot the whistle. A week later, I passed by it again on my way back and…” He shook his head.

  “What is it?”

  Mr. Jones gave Mr. Powell a sideways glance. “Well. It wasn’t there anymore.”

  Mr. Powell smiled with polite confusion. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I.” Mr. Jones stared into his nearly empty glass. “What I mean is, just one week earlier, from my seat on the train, Edna had looked like a nice, thriving little place with wildflowers growing in the tall grass down near the tracks—an explosion of color, pink and orange and purple. But now it looked dead. A ghost town.”

  Mr. Powell didn’t like the word ghost. The residents of Boley were descendants of former slaves. They carried their ghosts inside them. When Mr. Powell looked around at the town of Boley, four thousand souls and counting, he saw the future. He imagined more Boleys in a nation that would finally live up to the ideals it espoused. “Could you have been on a different route, maybe?” he said, trying to be helpful.

  Mr. Jones was resolute. “No, sir. It was the same route. I saw the sign: Edna. But this time? Two big fat vultures circled above the town square. And those wildflowers that had been budding up nice and pretty? Well, Mr. Powell, they were dead as could be. Not a thing growing there, from what I could see.”

  Mr. Powell had grown up in the church. The filmmaker’s story sounded biblical to him, like Sodom or Admah. Still: “Maybe it had to do with the angle of the sun, or maybe there had just been a flood and folks had been forced to evacuate.” He was grasping for answers. The story of the dead town crawled under his skin. He wanted to be rid of the feeling.

  “I even asked one of the porters if he’d noticed the change. But he just said he’d been busy with passengers and hadn’t paid any mind to it,” Mr. Jones continued. “But that town looked… haunted to me, sir.”

  “Goodness. That is something.” Mr. Powell cleared his throat. “Fine day today, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Jones took the polite cue. He swallowed the last of his drink. “Indeed. And that lemonade was mighty refreshing, thank you. I do believe you promised to show me that bank.”

  “Yes, sir. Coming right up!” Mr. Powell left the porch and walked ahead, proudly talking about Boley’s status as one of the nation’s wealthiest towns run by and for black folks. Mr. Jones nodded along. But he remembered something else glimpsed from the train window. Something he was too afraid to mention. The sun had just sunk below the horizon; evening swooped down over the plains. He’d watched the vultures as they’d flown a figure eight, going tighter and lower, until they hovered above a scarecrow-like figure of a man in a coat and a tall hat standing alone on that flat, ashen land. Electricity arced about this man until he, himself, glowed with its energy. The man punched his hands up toward the sky as if he might ri
p the guts from it. The clouds roiled and groaned as if in pain, like it was giving birth to some new horror, and the man in the hat laughed and laughed, as though nothing at all mattered and soon, nothing ever would.

  SOME WOUNDS

  Memphis had been out of New York City only once, when he was around six, and he and his mother had gone to Baltimore to see the cousins. It dawned on him now that it was probably during that trip that his mother had taken him to a Project Buffalo office to be evaluated. Memphis had no memory of going to an office and answering questions about any powers he might have. All he recalled was running barefoot with his cousins and gobbling up spoonfuls of rice and sòs pwa while fireflies blinked against the dusk. It was funny what you chose to remember and what you chose to forget.

  After Harlem, the wide-open space of the South was a shock to Memphis. Everything was so spread out. You could walk for ages and pass nothing at all but some kudzu or an old man rocking on his front porch, a spittoon at his feet. Everywhere he looked, though, Memphis saw something he wished he could tell Isaiah or Theta about. He never realized quite how much of his day he saved up to share with his little brother, or what tiny stories he tucked into a pocket to tell Theta about later, when they were lying in each other’s arms. If you didn’t get to share what you saw, what you experienced, it was almost like it didn’t happen.

  Now that the immediate danger had passed, he took a moment to marvel at how different this part of the country looked from New York City. It was such a big country. A fella could forget that walking the same streets all the time. And each place was different from the last. From the train, he’d seen the tiny mountain towns of West Virginia, the leafy green tobacco fields of North Carolina, and the red earth of Georgia, where his father’s people were from. When this was all over, he hoped to take another train with Isaiah and show him how big it all was. Look it there, he pictured himself saying to his wide-eyed brother. You know why the dirt is red like that? ’Cause it’s wounded and needs a healing.

  “How long you think before we get to Bountiful?” Memphis asked. They’d been walking for some time, and his shirt stuck to his back with a damp sweat.

  “Depends on the trains,” Bill said.

  “My feet are blistered balloons,” Henry complained. “Buh-listered buh-loooons, buh-listered b-b-b-uh-loons,” he sang, drifting into a hum.

  “We haven’t seen anything but railroad tracks and that river for miles now,” Memphis said.

  “That’s not just a river. That’s the Mighty Mississippi,” Henry said.

  “Okay,” Memphis said, annoyed. He wasn’t looking for a geography lesson. All he wanted was to get back to Theta and Isaiah and put things right.

  “The Mississippi is more than two thousand miles long! It goes from Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, like a big scar down the middle of the country.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s looking awfully high, though. It’s been eight months of rain. If the levees break…” Henry whistled. “You don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

  “But the levees’ll hold, right?” Memphis cast a nervous glance at the swollen river.

  Henry shrugged. “The levees are man-made. The river’s the river. It’s got a rebellious, unpredictable spirit.”

  “Swell,” Memphis said under his breath.

  The rich black earth of the Mississippi Delta was fertile and promising and flat. Sun beat down on the bent backs of workers planting seed, some singing to one another as they did, a call-and-response that put Memphis in mind of his days as the Harlem Healer in the storefront church, with his mother looking on proudly in her Sunday hat. The singing was a way to break up the monotony of the labor, Memphis knew, and a way to feel less alone out there under all that sky. Memphis was struck by the lush beauty of Mississippi, and by what he knew it had cost families like his to create it. He’d had ancestors on his father’s side who’d worked the cotton and tobacco fields, who had harvested sugar and rice. Men and women whose labor had made other men and women rich. Looked to him like it was still that way. The anger of the injustice, the beauty of the land, the resilience of the people raised new passion within him. He tried to commit what he saw and felt to memory so that he could write about it later. He no longer felt that he wanted to write; he felt compelled to write. All of it. Whenever they stopped to rest, he hurriedly scribbled down the words that had been playing in his head, and as they traveled the roads, Memphis left copies of these poems here and there, in the hope that they would be found. He thought of them like little seeds. “Like Johnny Appleseed,” he told himself.

  “What’s that about apples?” Henry called over his shoulder.

  “Nothing,” Memphis said.

  The Delta revealed itself like a dream, in wind-stripped wooden shacks and children running after a dog that had treed a squirrel, in migrant workers selling food from the back of a truck, in billboards full of smiling white faces drinking Coca-Cola, and overhead, in clouds so fat with pink-gold light they seemed as if they’d been painted by a heavenly brush. At a crossroads, they waited while a procession of black churchgoers dressed in crisp white crossed in front of them, the ladies with their protective umbrellas held high against the sun, singing on their way to a pond for a mass baptism. “Heard the floods might come like Noah,” a woman at the end of the line explained from under the shade of her parasol. “Don’t wanna be caught unprepared.”

  Back a ways from the road, a mansion rose up, white-columned and black-shuttered. Its many windows stared out, keeping watch over the land like a double row of eyes. “Plantation,” Bill said, frowning. A little farther on, they passed a lean-to where a grizzled man sat on the front porch picking out a blues song about the Devil and the moonlight that did nothing to put them at ease.

  They’d been walking along the railroad tracks for some time when they finally came to a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere with a filling station that doubled as a general store and post office. Memphis started toward the door.

  “Hold up a minute,” Bill said.

  “Why?” Memphis said. He was exhausted and thirsty and impatient.

  “Got to make sure it’s safe to go in,” Bill said. A dark brown man came out of the garage, wiping his fingers on a bandanna, and Bill exhaled in relief. “Afternoon,” he said and gave a courteous nod.

  “Afternoon,” the gentleman returned with a pinch to the brim of his hat and that same dip of the head.

  “Nice day,” Bill said.

  “Yes, sir. That it is.”

  “Feels like rain’s coming, though,” Henry said.

  “Yes, sir. Been rainin’ for months. Just keeps coming down on us. They say the levees gettin’ washed away all up and down the Mississippi. Folks are worried way down to New Orleans. Heard they might even hafta blow up the levees in Plaquemines Parish.”

  Bill shook his head sadly. “Ain’t that something? Cain’t fight Mother Nature.”

  “No, sir. You surely cain’t.”

  Memphis wanted to scream in the face of all this Southern politeness. Why couldn’t they just ask about a ride to Greenville and be done with it?

  “What can I do you for?” the man finally asked.

  “Well, sir, we’re lookin’ to get to Greenville. Got some kinfolk there. Don’t suppose you know anybody headed that way? We’d be mighty grateful for any help,” Bill said.

  “You almost there. ’Nuther thirty mile, give or take, but I hear the river’s washed out parts ’tween here and yon. My cousin, Jesse, has a truck. He’s going thataway and can take you far as Yazoo City.”

  “Much obliged,” Henry and Bill said at the same time.

  “Happy to help. We got to look out for one another, don’t we?”

  “We surely do,” Henry said.

  “I’d like to mail this letter, please. And buy some stamps.” Memphis handed over his latest poem. He fished in his pocket for change. “How much for that?”

  The man blinked at Memphis, taken aback. Henry bristled. I
n his head, he translated New York City speak into Southern speak: If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I get you to mail this letter for me? Memphis’s way was more direct, and Henry preferred it. But it was funny how the things you learned growing up had a way of sticking with you. Memphis had been straightforward; Henry had heard rude.

  “New York City, huh? Never been there.” The man examined the envelope slowly, carefully. It made Henry nervous.

  “We ain’t never been there, neither,” Bill said quickly, cutting Memphis off. “It’s one of them sweepstakes, you see.”

  “Yes,” Henry added. “We hope to win a prize.”

  “That so? What kinda prize?”

  “A jar of Ovaltine,” Henry lied.

  “Huh. Ovaltine. Well, I’ll be sure and post this for you with tomorrow’s mail. That’ll be two cents for postage, and a dime for the stamps.”

  “Maybe you should let Henry and me do all the talking,” Bill said as they waited on the steps of the filling station for Cousin Jesse to arrive.

  “Why?”

  “You talk like a city boy.”

  “People around here pride themselves on their hospitality,” Henry added.

  “You’re saying I was rude?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Henry mumbled.

  “Hmm.” Memphis couldn’t wait to get back to New York City.

  The screen door creaked open. The man came out with a bucket of blue paint and a brush. He leaned a ladder up against the store, then dipped the brush into the paint and swiped it across the porch ceiling, turning it a pale robin’s-egg blue.

  “Looks real nice,” Memphis said. He flashed Henry a look. The look said, Look how polite I am!

  “Haint Blue. To keep the ghosts away,” the man grunted. “Been having some troubles ’round here. Folks say the nights are haunted. Like the past is rising up out its grave to make itself known. You best be careful after dark, now. Don’t go camping in these woods.” He pointed the brush at a truck coming up the path, its tires kicking up dirt. In the back were cages packed with squalling chickens. “That would be Cousin Jesse.”