One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel

by Olivia Hawker

  He said, I’ve come over to help you bring in the harvest, since your daddy’s off to jail and all. Can’t just let the corn rot in the field. That would be a waste.

  Sorry my pa killed your pa, I said.

  The skin between Clyde’s eyebrows pinched together for a second and he smiled, but with only one side of his mouth. He said, You don’t sound awful sorry about it.

  Neither do you, I said.

  He wasn’t inclined to speak more about his dead father or my living one, so we let the subject drop.

  I said, Your ma’s real angry that you’ve come over to help.

  How d’you know that?

  It just makes sense that she’d be sore over what all happened, and wouldn’t like you coming around, I said.

  Sore don’t hardly go far enough, Clyde said, but quietly, under his breath, so I couldn’t be sure he intended me to hear.

  Your ma don’t like me much.

  My mother doesn’t think twice about you.

  There was something wary in his voice when he spoke those words. He meant them, and they were the truth. But he could sense what I already felt coming. There would come a day—and soon—when Clyde’s mother would think of little else but me. Every seed puts down roots in its own time and grows to its greenest power.

  I bent and gathered the first cut stalks, arranging them in a sheaf.

  What are you doing? Clyde asked.

  Since he had eyes to see, I didn’t bother to answer. I went on gathering until Clyde found a stalk that was still green enough to bend. He handed it to me, and I twisted it around the waist of my sheaf and stood it upright in the field. We went on working together, Clyde cutting the corn and me gathering the sheaves. That was the way it had to be—the two of us joined together in our work, doing what our mothers couldn’t bring themselves to do. For there were too many small lives now that depended on us alone. My brothers and my little sister; the sheep and cattle, the horses, the hens. Even the seeds relied on us. It was our work to gather and put by. It was we who would plant when the time came, and we who would tend the crops as they grew.

  Clyde was one who did what needed doing, even when grief sought to drown him. And I labored beside him in the cornfield because I was like he was—just as he was like the corn—ready to be twisted free of my cob and dream through the dark of winter, ready to rise up green and new to a life that was my own.

  The scythe swung in long, smooth arcs, flashing in a perfect rhythm. When I wrapped my arms around the sheaves, the stalks felt dry against my cheek. They rattled in my ear. You can’t just let the corn rot in the field; what needs doing can’t be stopped. The seasons don’t cease to change because we haven’t the time to plant or tend or harvest, because grief like a hailstorm comes up sudden and frightens us with its noise. Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.

  CLYDE

  What needs doing can’t be stopped. Clyde leaned on the stone wall of the sheepfold, watching the flock as it milled inside. The animals were dust gray, and blocky and thick beneath a crust of sage twigs and barbed seeds. They crowded at the gate, bleating to be let out to feed. It was the first truly cold morning the Bighorns had seen in months; summer had reached its end, and soon the rains would come, followed quickly by the first of many snows. Each time a sheep called out in protest, a plume of silver steam rose from its muzzle to hang above the fold, and the early-morning light refracted within that cloud, so the air just above the animals’ backs glowed in the rising sun.

  Clyde and his father had worked hard to split the flock evenly, breeding half to lamb in spring, half to give birth in the fall. The breeding flock had finally matured enough that there was never a lack of good, fresh meat, except in the depths of winter. Now he could see that the fall-lambing ewes were almost ready to drop. Their bellies hung low and distended. White fissures showed through cracks in their dirty outer fleece, and deep hollows had formed at their flanks where the lambs within had turned. In a matter of days, the first lambs of autumn would arrive. He must shear the mothers now, before their offspring came. There was no time to mourn for his father—no time for contemplation, nor even for anger. There was time only to sharpen his shears and set to work. What needs doing cannot be stopped.

  When the shears were ready, Clyde climbed inside the pen and opened the gate just enough to allow one sheep through at a time. The herd ran one by one toward the pasture, but the fat ewes Clyde kept back. They gathered in a far corner, pawing at the ground, their breaths rising in a rapid spate. Dark eyes rolled to watch him as he moved—as he reached for the shears and tucked them under one arm. The ewes darted away when he stepped toward them, no matter how slowly he moved. The animals circled their pen, heads high and defiant, scolding in their deep, harsh tones.

  Substance had had a way with sheep. Not in the same sense that Clyde had a way with horses—the quietness of movement, the watchful eye, the comfort of mutual understanding. Substance’s way was to stride and grasp, to capture. Dominate. When he would lay hold of the ewes for shearing or the young lambs for castration, the animals would strain and scream. Their eyes would turn to bloodshot half moons; flailing hooves would churn the ground; but there was never any escape. There was only a froth of desperation at the creatures’ mouths, tongues showing pale—so pale they were almost white. But the work would be done, quick and efficient, over in a moment, and each sheep would be released to stagger back toward the fold.

  Clyde had helped with the shearing, of course, but he had never caught the ewes himself. He tried to imagine the task: Bulling in among the frightened animals the way his father had done. Reaching out to find only fleece; digging fingers in, as a hawk’s talons locked in the soft belly of a rabbit. The sheep’s pain as her fleece was wrenched this way and that—or her leg, her ear, whichever part came readily to hand.

  There must be a better way, he thought as he watched the sheep watching him. They were gentle creatures, as horses were, and the mistrust they gave him now was not without reason. They had suffered much at Substance’s hands. You could earn a horse’s trust through slow touch and quiet speech, through never concealing your intentions—loading every gesture with honesty. Why shouldn’t the same be true of sheep?

  Clyde stretched his hands to either side, palms out, as far as he could reach with the shears tucked beneath an arm. He took one slow step toward the ewes, then another. They shrank back into their corner. As he drew nearer, one cautious foot at a time, the ewes jostled and bleated, fighting to be the first to break away. The slower Clyde moved, the more easily the ewes evaded his hands. But they were also beginning to settle; Clyde could tell that much. Now when their dark eyes tracked his progress around the pen it was with calculation, not fear. One ewe stood still enough that Clyde touched her back. His hand rested there, palm down and open, just long enough to feel her trembling.

  “Are these ready for lambing?”

  Clyde started and turned, and found his mother standing beside the gate. The ewe he had touched cried out and ran.

  “Any day now.”

  Nettie Mae shielded her eyes with one hand and watched the horizon for a moment, the weak sun rising in a thin, cold sky. “It’s early for it yet.”

  “Maybe so, but the lambs are coming all the same. I got to get these sheared up before, or the fleeces will be ruined.”

  Nettie Mae kept her silence, watching Clyde as he stood there, as he waited for his mother to say something more, to do something. But she only looked at him, then at the sheep—dispassionate, with the faintest air of offense at the ewes’ audacity, this inconvenient business of lambing weeks earlier than expected.

  When he thought his mother would say nothing more, Clyde adjusted the shears under his arm and turned to his sheep again. But Nettie Mae spoke up at once.

  “You know, that Cora woman came over to talk at me yesterday.”

  Across the pasture, at the base of a foothill dry and brown from the summer heat, stood the Bemis house.
It was small and pale, cladded in old, fading pine, but the peak of its roof shone brightly in the morning sun. No one moved in the garden outside, nor around the sheds where the animals waited.

  After a moment, Clyde said, “Did she?”

  “Can you imagine—she asked me to care for her children. To share our food and our goods with her, to see her through the winter. She took what was mine by rights, and got my husband killed in the bargain. Now she comes begging for my charity.”

  Wary, Clyde said, “Maybe she does need help, Mother. After all, she’s got three small children to look after.”

  “And a big girl to help care for them—though that Beulah isn’t much good, I dare say. Always mooning about the pasture, picking flowers and doing Heaven knows what in the hills. Anyway, that woman’s worries are none of mine. If Cora Bemis wanted an easy ride through the coming winter, then she shouldn’t have helped herself to another woman’s husband.”

  “Mother, maybe we ought to lend a hand over at the Bemis place.”

  Nettie Mae’s face hardened; Clyde knew he had overstepped.

  “Only till their harvest is in,” he added. “What can it hurt?”

  “I promise you, that woman didn’t stop to ask herself What can it hurt? before she went prowling after your father.”

  “How do you know Father didn’t go prowling after her?”

  “Don’t you backtalk me, Clyde.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him over the stone wall—a hard stare, cold as the oncoming season. It sent a shiver of sickness right down into Clyde’s middle. Nettie Mae had never looked at him that way before, with such open hostility that he felt suddenly disoriented. The mother he had always loved and respected had never given him reason to believe that she hated him. But hate was what he saw in her now, hanging around her head, impossible to ignore—like the steam and the morning light glowing above the pen, an emanation fiery enough to blind him. Clyde would have flinched from the presence of his mother’s anger or slunk to the horse shed to cry from the shock and fear of it—this realization that the woman who had soothed and nurtured him all his life could look at him that way, as if she would sooner spit on him than suffer him to speak. Then he remembered that he was the man of the homestead now, and sixteen at any rate. Too old for crying and carrying-on, too wise to believe his mother never hated and couldn’t be made to despise her only living son.

  Clyde made himself stand his ground. He watched her calmly, saying nothing, patient and still while the ewes circled his legs and moaned with the pressure of the life inside their bellies. It was Nettie Mae who looked away first, she who stooped to pick up the basket at her feet. It was her harvesting basket, wide and shallow. The familiar knife hung from its rim, short, curve bladed, tied with a leather string. Nettie Mae turned her back on Clyde abruptly and stalked away to the garden, where ripe squashes weighed down the drying vines.

  Clyde considered the Bemis homestead again. Across the yellow pasture, he could see their garden, ready for the harvest as the Webber garden was. But no one moved inside the high deer fence—nothing moved but the broad leaves of pole beans wreathing their willow towers, stirred by the wind. There was a patch of corn out back of the house; Clyde could see the edge of it between house and cowshed, the tall stalks faded of their color. That corn needed harvesting within days, or it would surely spoil. Rain would come soon, lifting the strong, flat hand of heat that had pressed down upon the prairie all summer long. But when the rains came, they would lace the ears of corn with rot beneath the skin of their husks, and then the crows would follow.

  Clyde finished the shearing well before noon and carried the heavy fleeces to the long shed. Soon his mother would pick and wash and card the wool, and then she would sequester herself at her spinning wheel, the only place in the world where Clyde ever saw the hard parts of Nettie Mae soften. He paused in the shed’s pleasant darkness—despite the cool morning, the day had rapidly gone to heat—and breathed in the sharp, close odor of fleece. It hung in the dim space of the shed: lanolin, oily and forcefully present, a compelling reek still rich with the warmth of the animals’ bodies. The smell flooded him with grief and a strange, salient anxiety he couldn’t understand. That was the smell of his mother at peace, in the rare moments when she laid down the burdens of her life—a scent of wheel and treadle, the whisper of wool sliding through her callused fingers. Lanolin was the smell of Substance Webber, whose hands never touched but seized and took and held in an inescapable fist. The wool of frightened sheep clutched in Substance’s fingers, the steel trap that was his living flesh, the pain of being caught by him when your legs flailed and your eyes rolled white and you knew you were helpless to stop him. Clyde remembered a spring rain, some two years before, when he had pulled on a new sweater his mother had knitted and gone out to see to his chores, and the drops of rain had raised a smell of raw wool from his shoulders, so the odor followed him from the coop to the horse paddock and back again. Thoughts of his father had chased him, too, and he had stood in the rain smelling like an animal, stilled like an animal that knows it can’t escape the slaughter. He had thought, If I am ever a father someday, I won’t be a father like you.

  The scythe hung from its pegs, spanned above the door. He took it down and found the leather belt that held his jug and whetstone. Outside, he pumped water into the animals’ trough and allowed the last gush to fill the clay jug to its brim. Then he sank to his knees and caught the final trickle of water in his mouth. It was tepid and tasted of earth, for the crisp snows of the Bighorns had long since melted and the river was running low.

  When he straightened, Clyde saw his mother in the garden. She had already taken in all the squashes from the vines and now she stood there, staring back at him, a bundle of long weeds trailing from one hand. Even across a great distance, Clyde could read the same hardness in her eyes that he had seen that morning. She must understand what it means, he thought. The belt, the scythe, the whetstone. Well, let her seethe. I won’t see little ones go hungry if I can help it.

  Clyde led the Bemises’ dun calf out of the barn, where he had shut it up the previous night. The runaway heifer had come foraging through the sheep pasture the evening before; it had been the work of a moment to catch it from Joe Buck’s back and lock it up where his mother couldn’t see, with a good armful of hay to keep it quiet until morning. Then he slung his blade over one shoulder and headed across the pasture. The Bemis homestead had come alive while he’d been occupied with the sheep. Cora, in a faded rose-pink dress, was sweeping out the hen coop while the little children played in the yard, chasing the chickens to and fro. The girl was hanging wash on a line to dry.

  The two families had never been especially close—Substance and Nettie Mae were both inclined to keep to themselves, and the Bemises had always seemed content with the distance between the farms. Even so, they were the only people for twenty miles in any direction, and a handful of friendly encounters couldn’t be avoided entirely—a benign routine of How do you do. Clyde had grown familiar enough with the sight of the girl to notice that she had changed since the last time he’d seen her at close range. That must have been months gone by, when Clyde had passed the girl on the river trail, he heading toward the shade of the cottonwoods, she returning from a wade in the shallows with her skirt still tied up around her knees. The girl was thin, as ever, but she had grown a little taller and there was something carved and set about her features, as if her chin and cheeks and nose had made up their minds about how they ought to look and were committed now to their purpose. As she bent to take a wet, heavy sheet from her basket, her wrist slipped free of its calico sleeve, showing itself pale and refined to Clyde’s startled eye. He looked away, embarrassed by his own interest, the keenness with which he longed to study that wrist, its slender shape and the slight curve of bone along its side. He whistled to distract himself—a birdcall, though no birds called back from the sage.

  He went straight to the corn patch as if he had worked the Bemis land a h
undred times before. The corn fell easily to his scythe. The stalks were thoroughly dry, and Clyde’s blade was sharp. He had always enjoyed scything. It was easy work, a pleasant task with a simple, soothing rhythm—the turn and turn of your body, the momentum of the tool’s arc. The frequent pauses, with sweat cooling on your brow, to draw your whetstone down the blade.

  After a time, when plenty of stalks lay felled around his feet, the girl spoke from the edge of the corn patch, and Clyde jumped in surprise.

  “Hello.”

  Heart pounding, Clyde turned to face her. She stood with her hands behind her back, so he couldn’t see those fascinating wrists, for which he was grateful. She watched him with a curious zeal, an eager, upturned face that shone with something akin to triumph. Clyde couldn’t think what the girl ought to be so nervy about. Her hair was lank and rather thin, but he liked the color of it, even though he couldn’t exactly name it. Not brown, not yellow, not ash gray. It was like the dun hide of a deer or the soft feathers on a sparrow’s belly.

  “Miss Beulah. I never heard you come up behind me.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘miss.’” She stepped out into the corn patch. Her skirt of blue calico and the pale-green pinafore she wore over it were damp from her efforts at the clothesline. Beneath her feet, dead corn leaves crackled and sighed. She said something more—something about sneaking up on people, and the way she was made, but Clyde was distracted by her nearness and he didn’t really hear the words. All at once, he smelled raw wool again, and remembered the feel of the ewe holding still beneath his hand.