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

by Olivia Hawker

  The fact that Beulah did not or would not struggle filled Clyde with mistrust equal to his wonder. It wasn’t as if the girl didn’t work. She had labored beside him from the first day, when he had cut the corn behind the Bemis house, and he had come to rely on her strength—surprising, in a small, slight, female body—almost as much as he relied on his own. Beulah was tireless, too. She never complained, never slowed, though her natural pace was never hasty. Amid the uncountable tasks of running a farm, she left time for what seemed to be her real occupation: watching, seeing, knowing. The beauty of the corn seeds, distinct and individual on their papery cob. The way the meadowlarks called and answered across the expanse of the Webber pasture. One bird would call, then pause, and Beulah would point to the other end of the pasture just in time for another lark to answer. As if the birds sang to her well-timed cue.

  The girl knew something about the prairie. Or perhaps the prairie knew her. Beulah saw what none of them could understand—not Clyde or his mother, not Cora, not the rest of her ordinary children. What Beulah saw and what she knew both attracted and repelled him, for he could see and comprehend none of it himself. Now that he found himself alone with his own mind, at leisure to mull over Beulah, Clyde was disturbed by the girl. She wasn’t even there beside him—and yet she was undeniably, forcefully present, coloring his thoughts like a view through tinted glass. Neither the patter of sporadic rain nor the sound of his fillies’ hooves on the muddy road could drive Beulah from his head.

  What would Substance think if he knew? Somehow, if Substance saw—looking down from a Heaven to which he was not entitled—what would he say, knowing his only son was helplessly drawn to that Bemis girl? Clyde entertained a sudden fantasy that Substance did know, and the possibility made him shiver. The memory of that man still stood like a monument everywhere, looming over the two homesteads, vast and dark as the Bighorn Mountains—and Clyde couldn’t help but feel that his father still saw everything. He could all but hear his father berating him for foolishness, for weakness. Substance wearing that cold, unyielding expression, mocking Clyde for setting his sights on such a worthless female thing.

  Clyde talked back to his father’s shade. He’d never dared such a thing while his father still lived, but Substance was dead now and couldn’t retaliate. You wouldn’t think any girl was worth a fella setting his sights on.

  The Substance of Clyde’s imagination had no answer. The shade of memory departed from the wagon—flew off into the grass like the corn seed—and the wagon drove on, and Clyde was alone once more.

  The wagon rolled into Paintrock. Clyde let out a long, slow breath, for the town offered plenty of distractions, and he welcomed the reprieve. He tipped back his head, studying the sky, trying to discern through the racing clouds exactly where the sun stood, how long he could allow himself to linger. It would be good to speak to other folks, to learn what news they had to tell. Maybe he’d find one of his friends, the fellows of his own age, and play a hand of cards or have a cup of sarsaparilla, and there would be neither need nor opportunity to humor the two ghosts who haunted his every thought—his father; the girl. The firewood hadn’t left Clyde entirely destitute. He still had a few dollars in his pocket, which he had earned that summer by breaking two fine young colts to the saddle and selling them to the Paintrock sheriff. He could spare enough coin for a stop at the saloon, for that sarsaparilla—or maybe, now that he was the man of the Webber farm and there was no one to check him, he’d try a bit of ale. Clyde had been meaning to drink his first ale for a long time now. His father had always said he’d skin him alive if he caught him at it before he turned eighteen. But there wasn’t much Substance could do about it now.

  The wagon approached a white church surrounded by a fence of pointed palings and the headstones of the cemetery. Three girls lingered beside the gate, swinging folded parasols and murmuring over a paper box that one of them held. Clyde was gripped by a familiar compulsion, an urgent need to stare at the girls and a paradoxical shame at doing so. He kept his face turned toward the road, but his eye traveled back to the church gate—to the bright dresses and lively sway of their bodies. The girls had fixed their hair, and each was wearing white gloves and holding a paper box. Attending some party, Clyde assumed. One girl lifted the lid of her box; the others peered inside, then looked up grinning. Their eager smiles plucked at something in Clyde’s stomach, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or be sick over the side of his wagon.

  One of the girls noticed Clyde. He looked away quickly, but she called out to him.

  “Well, if it isn’t Clyde Webber. Don’t be a stranger, Clyde. Stop and say hello.”

  Against his better judgment, he drew rein. The bay fillies halted, snorting at the girls’ colorful dresses.

  “Hello,” Clyde offered. He didn’t know what else to say, and couldn’t recall the young ladies’ names, so he tipped his hat and prayed it was enough to satisfy.

  “There’s a baking contest at the church today,” said the one who had called his name. Her hair was chestnut brown. “Why don’t you come in and be a judge?”

  “I . . . I can’t tarry. Got to get back home before dark.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and added, “Firewood.”

  The girls looked at one another. A wordless understanding passed among them.

  “Don’t you remember my name?” said the chestnut girl. “It’ll just about break my heart if you’ve forgotten me.”

  “Oh, I . . .” Clyde swallowed. The reins felt sticky in his hands. “It’s been a long spell since I came to town last.”

  The girl lifted something out of her box—a tart hardly bigger than a silver dollar, bright red at the center. “I’m Elsie Schoen. Land sakes, Clyde; one would think a gentleman would remember the girl he danced with at the spring jubilee.” Elsie stared at Clyde, and he found he couldn’t break her gaze. Her eyes were very large and blue, bluer than chicory flowers, and they seemed to pin him to the wagon seat. She bit into the tart, then licked a crumb from her lip. Clyde’s face burned.

  Giggling, the other two girls fell upon Elsie’s shoulders. That quickness girls had, to whisper and laugh—it had always confounded Clyde. Now, after so long in Beulah’s company, the feminine reaction of giggling struck him as repellent. He had to make his excuses and get away from Elsie and her friends. Somehow he felt sure he would meet some grim peril if he lingered in their company.

  “I’m powerful sorry if I offended, Miss Elsie. You do dance lovely, though. Now I must be off, or I won’t make it home before dark. Good day to you all.”

  He tipped his hat again and clucked to the bays. But another girl shouted after him.

  “Wait, Clyde. You’d best stop in at the post.”

  He turned in the seat; another girl was hurrying along beside his wagon.

  “You don’t recall me either, I guess,” she said, “but I’m the postmaster’s daughter. My pa is about ready to curse your mama’s name.”

  Clyde stopped his horses again. “My mother? Why? What has she done?”

  “Stopped in to see him a few days ago,” the girl said. “He’s had a big shipping crate taking up space in his back room for weeks now. Can’t find a soul to take it down to the Bemis farm. Your ma said she would send Mrs. Bemis up for the crate, but Pa hasn’t seen hide nor hair of anyone from down south at Ten Sleep. You’d better go get that crate, before Pa sets it afire.”

  “I ain’t heard a thing about a shipping crate. Mother never mentioned it.”

  The girl shrugged. She offered up her paper box. “Want a tart? They’re made with raspberry jam. I’m going to beat Elsie’s cherry tarts in the competition. I do every year.”

  Clyde helped himself to a raspberry tart, but he hardly tasted its sweetness, for talk of his mother had raised a new swell of anxiety in his stomach. He guessed by now Nettie Mae had found his note on the kitchen table. He’d left it under the saltcellar, then crept from the house before dawn.

  Dear Mother,

 
I’ve gone to town to buy a load of wood to see Mrs. Bemis through the winter. I know you don’t love her any, but I can’t let a woman and small children suffer and maybe die, even if that woman got my father killed. You can be sore at me when I get home, but my mind is made up. I’ll be home by dark, or maybe a little after.

  Clyde suspected he might be rather sore himself, when he finally returned to the farm. What was his mother thinking, allowing a delivery to languish at the Paintrock post?

  If I can’t find some way to reconcile my mother and Cora Bemis, we’ll all of us have one Hell of a miserable winter.

  CORA

  Root and branch, she had found her family tree. And the confirmation, after so many long and desolate years, was enough to make Cora weep—with gratitude, with shock, with the knowledge she had been vindicated at last. Vindication had come too late to preserve her life in Saint Louis, too late to save her from the prairie, but it was a measure of justice all the same. That small scrap of justice was the most valuable thing she had, and she clung to it like a treasure.

  “Go on and open it, Ma,” Beulah said. “Don’t make us wait!”

  Cora pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. She stared for a moment at the sealed crate—a moment more, just a moment to savor the sight of it, solid and undeniable, those perfect green words painted on the lid. The wood was damp from the long drive, the day’s scattering of rain.

  Clyde had been so good, to haul the heavy crate all that long way, which was to say nothing of the firewood he had provided. That young man’s generosity was enough to make Cora weak with gratitude—and with shame, knowing how her careless ways had changed the course of his young life forever. Every kindness Clyde offered only drove the blade of regret deeper into Cora’s middle, and every kindness made her love the Webber boy all the more.

  Clyde came in from the yard. Evening had settled, but a thin gray light still hung above the prairie, caught between the clouds and the land. The boy had fetched an iron crow from the barn. He offered it to Cora while the children skipped around him, unruly with excitement.

  Cora shook her head. “I don’t think I’m strong enough to pry it open. Will you do it, please?” She still felt shy, inadequate even to speak in the Webber boy’s presence.

  “Yes, ma’am, if you like.”

  Clyde stepped forward, into the ruddy hearth light where he and Beulah had set the heavy crate just a few minutes before. He worked the end of the crowbar beneath the edge of the lid and leaned his weight against it. The lid gave way with a loud squeal, nails sliding through wood. Bits of straw packing lifted into the air as the lid came away. They settled at once to the floor.

  “What is it, Ma?” Beulah approached the crate. The children followed, tearing at the packing; they thought it an excitement equal at least to Christmas Eve.

  Clyde pulled Charles and Benjamin back. “All right now, you two rascals. Let your mother be the first to see. Whatever’s inside this crate was meant for her, after all.”

  Cora came forward, tentative, reluctant, half-afraid that now this would all prove a dream. She would wake suddenly in her cold bedroom, in her half-empty bed, and she would still be herself—only Cora Bemis, a woman of no account, the farm wife who couldn’t even manage her own farm. No place in the city that Cora could claim, and no real place in the wilderness, either. Then Beulah brushed aside a little more straw, revealing a wax-sealed folio. She handed it to Cora. The moment Cora touched the paper—substantial, every grain of it lively beneath her fingertips—she knew it was real. She opened the letter and read.

  Dear Mrs. Bemis,

  It has come to my attention that a great wrong has been done to you and to your late mother by a certain member of the Grant family. This is a fault that must be duly corrected. I hope you will accept this set of fine china as my apology, on behalf of all the Grants, for any suffering you may have endured on account of certain unsavory elements within our family.

  I hope this letter finds you well and thriving.

  With sincerity,

  President Ulysses S. Grant

  Relief scoured Cora, so strong, so sudden, it was more than she could bear. A great hollow place opened between her ribs and filled with rising warmth, as water fills a trench, flooding up from below. She took up her kerchief again, pressed it to her eyes, and wept into it with great, racking sobs. She felt Beulah take the paper from her hand. There was a long pause while the girl read, for distractible as she was, she had never been a strong reader. Then Beulah asked, “What does all this mean, Ma?”

  Cora swallowed her next few sobs and blew her nose as delicately as she could manage. She took a few deep, shuddering breaths to calm herself. Beulah had, by then, passed the letter to the Webber boy. He read it by the light of the hearth, shaking his head slowly in puzzlement.

  “They’ve finally acknowledged me.” Cora’s voice was small and frail, even to her own ears, even in her moment of vindication. “The Grant family. And to have it come from the president himself . . .”

  “You’re family to President Grant?” Clyde said.

  He passed the letter back to Cora; she folded it carefully and ran her thumb over the wax seal. The seal bore the impression of the White House. She had only ever seen a few engravings of the White House in papers back in Saint Louis, but it looked exactly as she remembered, with the pillars and the high-arched dome.

  “I’m President Grant’s niece,” Cora said. “I am.”

  How many times had she insisted as much at the parties, the balls, while the well-bred ladies of Saint Louis laughed behind their hands, and the gentlemen—among whom she had always hoped to find a husband—shook their heads in pity and looked the other way? Now she could say those words, I am his niece, I am, with conviction, not with desperation. Our family, the president had written. Certain unsavory elements within our family. She was one of them. She belonged to the Grants—and to the man who had been the great general, hero of the war. Now he was more than a general, even more than a hero. Grant had become something greater than anyone in Saint Louis had imagined he could be. And he was Cora’s uncle. His family and his glory were also her own.

  The truth had finally been acknowledged. It was enough.

  “I never knew that about you, Ma.” Beulah sifted through the straw and cotton again. She found a sauceboat and held it up to the light. The gloss of its white body, the rounded belly, shone like a beacon in the dimness of the kitchen. A delicate tracery of blue flowers and leaves ran around the lip of the sauceboat, along with an unbroken line of gold. “Would you look at that,” Beulah said.

  “Set it on the table there. You and I can unpack the lot.” Cora wagged a finger at her unruly boys and little Miranda, who was sucking her thumb while she eyed the crate with suspicion. “You little ones keep away. I won’t have you breaking anything with your carelessness.”

  Together, Cora and her daughter delved into the crate, uncovering one gilded treasure after another, stacking the plates and teacups on the kitchen table. How strange they looked together, the elegant china and the rough-hewn table with its pitted surface, its cracked wood stained by blackberries and hen’s blood. Cora told the story while they worked.

  “My mother’s name was Lydia,” she said. “Lydia van Voorhees. She came here from Holland with her father when she was a young girl, and they settled in Saint Louis. My grandfather had been a man of some means back in Holland, and he had always meant to rejoin better society in America. But he fell on difficulty, and was obliged to work so hard that he never found a chance to rise above his lot. But he always held great hope for Lydia’s prospects. She was a pretty girl—that’s what Grandfather always told me. Pretty as a picture, and so sweet tempered, one would think she was an angel come down to earth.”

  “You talk as if you never knew her,” Beulah said.

  “I did not know my mother.”

  It was strange, that Cora’s voice should catch a little now, for she had never dwelt on her mother’s story be
fore with any particular sadness. Lydia’s fate had always seemed the origin of Cora’s own, a blunt fact that couldn’t be altered, and Cora had faced up to it with the same resigned acceptance with which she had faced the other grim events of her life. But now, working beside her own daughter—who was not many years younger than Lydia had been when she’d fallen in love—the tragedy of female frailty struck Cora with its stark injustice.

  She set a gold-rimmed plate atop the others and pressed on. “I never knew her, except through my grandfather’s stories, and he didn’t speak of Lydia often . . . though whenever he did, I could tell how much he loved her. She had been his only child—all he had left after his wife died back in Holland. Grandfather had hoped Lydia would marry well in America and become a woman of status. She would have made a fine wife for any gentleman—sweet, beautiful, and kind. And she was a trusting soul, I’m afraid. Too trusting, really, for her own good.

  “When Lydia was fifteen, Grandfather began sending her to parties and dances. He didn’t have much money by then, but whatever he had, he put into Lydia, buying her the most beautiful dresses and seeing that her hair was always fixed well. He had hoped she would attract the attention of a good suitor, you see—a man who would court her and marry her, and care for her as Grandfather found himself unable to do.

  “One night at a ball, she did meet a man—but not the sort of man Grandfather had wished for. His name was Samuel Grant. He talked sweetly to Lydia, I suppose, and coaxed her into . . .” Cora glanced from Beulah to Clyde and back again, then busied herself brushing flecks of cotton from a teapot. “He coaxed her into iniquity. Lydia thought herself in love. She was young and foolish enough to believe that scoundrel loved her in return, and would do right by her and marry her. I’m sure my grandfather hoped for the same, but all too soon, Samuel fled Saint Louis, leaving my mother to face her shame alone. What more is there to say? I was born soon after, but Lydia died of a fever days after I came into the world.