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

by Olivia Hawker

  When Cora had eaten, she took her sewing basket outside and sat on the porch steps, picking now and then at her mending. The last flush of light spread across the prairie, golden and slow. It shifted to rose and then to violet as night’s impending chill honed its edge against the foothills. The cicadas ceased to hum, and the brief silence they left behind was soon filled by the calls of birds—meadowlarks and finches, thrushes and bluebirds, all settling for the night’s roost. Crickets began singing when the blue-gray dusk descended. The sky had gone deepest purple, pricked here and there by the pinpoints of stars. Across the field, the Webber boy led his sheep toward the stone fold. Now and again, Cora could hear a faint bleat coming gently over the sage. The sounds were distant and small, contained by the vastness of night.

  “Ma?” Beulah had opened the front door and was leaning against the frame—swinging on it with one thin arm, carefree and unconcerned. “Time to get the little ones tucked into bed. Do you want me to do it?”

  “No.” Cora stood with her sewing basket. The light was all but gone from the sky now; there was no point in trying to mend. “No, I’ll do it. It’s my work, after all.”

  The children were sleepy enough that they made no protest while Cora led them through the nighttime routine of washing faces and dressing for bed. She helped little Miranda into her long flannel nightgown, then pulled out the trundle bed while the boys climbed beneath their blankets and snuggled down together.

  “Say,” Charles said, “wasn’t that scythe fine? I swung it better than you, Benjamin.”

  “You didn’t neither.”

  “Either,” Cora corrected. She had always been determined that her children would speak with the culture of city folk, not with the careless drawl of the Wyoming plains. It was a fight she would lose in the end, she knew.

  “Pa never let us swing the scythe,” Benjamin said.

  They all fell silent, then—Cora, the boys, even Miranda on the trundle bed. The boys looked at one another, and something jumped beneath the blankets, Charles slugging Benjamin on the arm, Cora supposed, as punishment for breaking the taboo. No one had spoken of Ernest since the event, the tragedy. All that happened, as Clyde had said. Beulah must have done it, Cora realized—must have sat the children down and explained what had happened, told them all that their father was up in Paintrock, in the jailhouse, and would remain there for two years. A strange lightness struck Cora in her middle, a lifting, pulling sensation that rose up into her chest and toward her throat. She clenched her jaw tightly, for she wasn’t certain what would happen if she opened her mouth and tried to speak. She would either sob or break into wild, hysterical laughter, and she was resolved to do neither in front of her children.

  “Now go to sleep,” she said when the unruly feeling subsided a little. “There’s work to do in the morning. You boys must pull weeds in the garden.”

  The boys groaned in protest, but all three children settled, nearly asleep by the time Cora blew out their candle.

  She found an oil lamp burning in the kitchen, the flame dancing within its glass shade. Beulah had hung a kettle of water over the fire to heat for her bath, and steam was already rising from its spout.

  “Do you want to wash first, Ma?”

  “No, dear. I won’t bathe tonight. I’ve mending I must see to.”

  Cora sat at the kitchen table, close beside the lamp, and worked at her stitches while Beulah took out the tub and filled it with hot water. Then she stripped off her dress and stockings—both dirty from her day’s work—and stepped into the tub.

  “Corn’s all in, in one go,” Beulah said. She stooped to saturate her rag, then squeezed it over her shoulders, careful not to splash the floor.

  “You made a fine job of it.”

  “Clyde made a fine job of it. It was right kind of him to help, for I don’t think I could have done it all by myself. I’m not strong enough yet to swing a sickle.”

  There was something in Beulah’s voice that made Cora look up from her sewing, needled by sudden caution. An eagerness, a breathless excitement.

  “Don’t forget to wash behind your ears,” Cora said, and nothing more. But she watched her daughter bend again to the surface of the water, noting the long strength of Beulah’s coltish legs, the shape of the muscle at the top of her arm, rounding into the shoulder. When the girl straightened, Cora could see the faintest flair to her hips, and noticed for the first time that the flat, ribby chest of childhood had begun to swell. Beulah was fast becoming a woman. There was an undeniable latency in the girl—something supple and powerful waiting to bloom, a fern ready to uncoil from its fiddlehead, a sapling extending its first true bough.

  We can’t stay here, Cora realized with a pang of helpless need. The prairie is no place for a young woman. She needs to be in the city—any city.

  Even the nearest town would do, if Cora couldn’t see Beulah safely back to Saint Louis. Paintrock—twenty miles north, inhabited by no more than three hundred people—was a far cry from a city. But three hundred souls was a great improvement over this unsettling isolation. A girl of Beulah’s age needed society. Friends. From who else could she learn to be a proper woman?

  Not from her mother. That much is certain.

  How long did Cora have before Beulah became a woman in truth? One year, perhaps, two at the most. Ernest would be freed from his cell by that time, and when he returned to the homestead and saw his eldest daughter—a child no more, grown to womanhood—he would understand. Cora would make him see then. There was no hope for any of them here on the prairie, here in this wilderness. If they didn’t return to civilized life, Beulah would suffer, and Cora would surely die. She had been dying already, slowly enough, for eight long years.

  Cora’s needle went astray, stabbing deep into her forefinger. At her gasp, Beulah turned to look over a dripping shoulder.

  “You all right, Ma?”

  “Are you well, Mother?”

  The girl only smiled at Cora’s correction, her grin wide and mischievous.

  Cora sucked the blood from her finger. It tasted hot and metallic, like Substance Webber’s kiss.

  Little wonder Substance died, Cora thought. She took her finger from her mouth and pressed the pad, squeezing another drop of blood from the wound. The prairie is no place where anything may truly live—not a girl, not a woman, not a man.

  The prairie was nothing but death, season in and season out. Dry grasses, gray sage, the hawks falling from the sky to seize whatever small lives struggled in the thin shadows below. Wolves howling at night, eager for the hunt. The brown water racing down a hill face, the sterile winter snow six feet deep.

  Cora was resolved to get her children back to Saint Louis, even though she could no longer claim a place there—if she had ever truly had a place in Saint Louis society. But she had to do it, had to go. She understood that now. With or without Ernest, she would return to Missouri, and take her children with her.

  Beulah especially, before it was too late to save her from the corrupting influence of the wild.

  3

  GRAY AGAINST GRAY

  That year, the rains didn’t sweep in all at once. Nor did they come in from the west as they had done all the years before, when banks of cloud piled up along the white ridge of the distant range across the basin, black and dense and sudden as if a new crop of mountains had grown there overnight. That year, the rains were early but shy. They lingered far to the south, across the plain. I watched them while I led the cows out to pasture or cut cabbages from their stalks, clouds of deepest purple, stretched in long bands, obedient to far-off winds. Banks of cloud so vast, so endlessly mobile, they turned the world as I knew it on its head, so the sky became reality—the solidness, the wholeness—and the earth below was ethereal, shifting through veils of color, parting light with shadow and shadow with light, all the way out to the horizon where a sheet of rain slanted between Heaven and earth, its edges indistinct, swallowing prairie and sky in a motionless blue mist.

 
Day after day, the clouds came nearer till at last they found us. I felt the first drops fall, saw them fall in the garden, raising a smell of renewal from the parched earth. The drops fell upon leaves wilted and exhausted by heat—a light, hollow drumming. Rain left circles of shine on faded green. Circles in a coating of dust. I closed my eyes and tipped my face up to the blurred and purple sky. The rain struck my cheeks, my forehead, my shoulders. When a droplet ran from the edge of my nose and down to the corner of my lips, I put out my tongue to catch it. The rain tasted of a summer season that still hoped it might last. It tasted of fast currents rushing down ravines, a rising river, a long winter that would all too shortly arrive.

  Clyde and I had worked together plenty times more since that day in the corn patch. Every afternoon, in fact, when the most pressing chores at the Webber homestead were finished, Clyde came across the sheep pasture to meet me at the edge of our cow pen, and together we fell into whatever work needed doing, sometimes without either one of us saying a word about it. Most days, there was something tense and distant in Clyde, as if he wasn’t altogether comfortable with my nearness or with my talk. But he kept coming all the same, kept lending his considerable strength to our farm. I stayed quiet out of gratitude and worked alongside him, just as hard as I’d ever worked before—harder, in fact. But the day I tasted the first rains of autumn, I knew I had to tell him what was weighing so heavy on my poor ma’s heart.

  Snow’s gonna be real early this year, I said.

  How do you know?

  I shrugged. He wasn’t apt to like the answer to that question, and wasn’t apt to believe me if I told him the truth.

  I said, We don’t have enough firewood to see us through. I ain’t sure how to get more. I already picked up all the cottonwood branches I could find alongside the river. And the cottonwood trees are too big to cut down without one of those special-made saws. Ma says a body has to go and cut firewood where the trees are smaller and easier to fell, but the nearest pine forests are on the western face of the foothills. I don’t suppose I can get as far as that. Not easily, anyhow.

  Clyde said, There’s no sense in a girl going up to the foothills to cut wood. A bear’d eat you, like as not.

  I laughed at him. A bear wouldn’t eat me.

  Clyde shrugged and went on working. After a minute, I said, I think my ma’s going to venture up into the hills herself for our firewood.

  No sense in that, Clyde said. It’s a dangerous trip for a woman alone. You can get wood up in Paintrock. Lots of fellas cut it and haul it in from the pine forest, and folks can buy it or trade for it.

  But we don’t have a penny to spare, I said. And I don’t think we have much for trading.

  I’m going to town tomorrow for the post. Mother needs more sugar and some other things from the general store, so I’m taking the wagon. If you ain’t got money or goods for trading, then I’ll buy the wood myself, Clyde said.

  He was half turned away, pulling at a board on the cow-pen fence that was loose and needed mending, but I could see the quick, shy smile that came over his face and vanished again. The thought of buying our firewood pleased him, in a secretive way. I couldn’t make out why.

  I said, That’s about the kindest thing you’ve ever offered to do, and you’ve done a heap of kind things for us already.

  I wouldn’t be very neighborly, if I was to let a lone woman and her four children freeze to death.

  I’m not much of a child anymore, I said.

  I know.

  I said, Let me come over to your place, Clyde, and work for you the way you work for us. You know I can work hard.

  He didn’t look up as he pulled the loose board away from its posts and examined the rotted ends. I know, was all he said, and then he tossed the board over his shoulder.

  Then let me lend a hand.

  He did look at me then, so sharp and direct it fairly cut me. You know my mother wouldn’t take kindly to having you around, Beulah.

  Neither of us said any more. We both knew it was true. Nettie Mae harbored a powerful dislike of the Bemis name; she made no exception for me. Clyde and I rummaged in the barn till we found nails and a good plank for mending the fence, and I held the wood in place while he drove the nails deep into the post. The post was still damp from the last rain, and I could see taffy-colored hairs caught in the cracks and in the grain of the wood from where the cows had rubbed against it.

  After the fence, we scraped slime from the insides of rain barrels, readying them for the wet season to come. We didn’t speak then, either. I thought maybe Substance and the corn seed were still weighing on Clyde’s mind. He didn’t like the idea of his father buried, I thought—or maybe he was frightened of what might rise up to take his father’s place. Clyde couldn’t see that Substance had already grown again. There was nothing to fear in the sprouting. Seeds don’t always breed true; sometimes they bring up a better crop than the one that came before.

  When the work was done, and Clyde departed with my ma’s usual offering of buttered bread, I took my leave of the farm and walked out to the river alone. The rains had been light that day, but a heaviness of indigo clung to the edges of an overcast sky, and I knew the night would be loud with storm and the next day too cold and wet for walking. I intended to get my peace while I still could. I followed the old trail through waist-high grass. Every sort of plant had responded to the rain with a passionate effort, and the way had become a thicket—long, bladed leaves reaching out to obscure the path—for no one had walked there since the night my pa left. No one but me, and I didn’t go to the riverbank often.

  When I got there, I could sense the fullness of the river, the water running high and fast among the huge old cottonwoods. They were talking among themselves, the trees—their newly turned leaves whispering together, speaking of the water soaking cold and good down among their intertwined roots.

  Substance was there, too, restless yet tethered to his place, like the cottonwoods.

  I took what I had brought for him out of my apron pocket. It was a great splinter of half-rotted wood, long as my hand, broken from the board Clyde had pulled free of the cow-pen fence. I laid it carefully on Substance’s grave, among the other things I had given him: feathers weighed down by flat river stones; a chip of agate I’d found in the creek, white swirled with red; an old horseshoe; the skull of a crow, picked clean by other crows, its beak still dark pigmented and smooth as night. Short grass and the thin, wiry vines of bindweed had begun to cover the grave, but I could still discern the rise where his body lay, and of course my gifts to Substance marked the spot.

  I had never really known Substance in life, but I knew him now, in death . . . and a more stubborn man the world had never seen. No one who died stayed put together afterward quite so long as Substance—no one I’d ever encountered, anyway. But there he was, a presence hanging over his own grave, aware, knowing, furious in the face of his fate. The hens I killed for our soup pot fell apart the moment their wings stopped flapping—those quick, curious, darting little spirits bursting like sparks from a campfire, dispersing out into the world. My ma had cherished a pet cat some years ago, and when it had died suddenly, I sat beside its body and felt the cat’s awareness linger for half an hour or more. The cat had been amazed by its sudden weightlessness, pleasantly drawn to all the silver strands of light that reached for it, thirsty for its spirit, the threads of all the lives that continued on: me and my family and the hens in the yard and the cattle in their pen, the squash vines and carrots in the garden, the insects trilling on the prairie—the prairie itself. Sheep seemed to consent to their dissolution even before their bodies had died, and most plants, too, as if the great unraveling was a sacredness for which they had always lived. But Substance Webber refused to do what other spirits did. He would not be dissolved. He would permit no other life to touch him, to take him, to use him. He didn’t yet know that we can’t remain whole forever, but he would learn the truth soon enough. No one escapes the great unraveling; no thread
is unspooled and escapes the weaver’s hand. I knew the roots of the newly sprouted grasses surrounded Substance’s body. The bindweed thrived on his rich flesh. A few yards away, the cottonwoods were already reaching toward him, delving through the soil with ancient hands. Before much longer, the earth would take every last bit of Substance Webber, whether he consented to be taken or not.

  But he wasn’t gone yet.

  Hello, Substance, I said, standing over the feathers and the crow skull.

  He greeted me, but not with words. Substance spoke with feelings—images. Quick impressions I felt like thumps inside my chest.

  Clyde is an awful good boy, I told him. And then I felt foolish for calling him a boy. I said, Clyde is a good man.

  Substance felt the roots wreathing his body, what was left of it below the soil. I felt those filaments surrounding me, too, pale and cold, never still, growing and growing, thirsty as Indian summer. He seemed to say, I’m a man, and I should be living still.

  No, I said. That’s not the way of things. None of us lives forever. We don’t get to choose when our time comes.

  I always chose, Substance said. Not with words—with a tightening in my throat, a clenching of my fists, a welter of rage rising in my stomach.

  I told him—as I always told him—You ought to let go now. Feel how light you are. You can fly, if you want to. You can go up and join the birds. You can be a bird. You can be anything you like, and all things you like at once. All you have to do is let go of yourself. Allow yourself to fall apart.

  Substance wouldn’t do it. He brooded, refusing to tell me any more. He lay beneath the soil, or lingered somewhere just above it, hard and resentful of death as he had been of life.

  What I didn’t tell Substance was this: You’ve renewed already, so there’s no use staying as you are. Your son has taken your place. It’s he who will carry on without you. Without your anger, without your hate. There is a future, Substance—but though it isn’t yours, you can be glad for those who will shape it.