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

by Olivia Hawker

  “We don’t need money, Ma. We get by all right.”

  Clyde could see the furious flush rising to Cora’s cheeks, the tears of humiliation gathering in her eyes. He laid a hand gently on Beulah’s shoulder. “Leave her be. It can’t be an easy decision to make.” To Cora, he said, “I’ll load up the bags you’ve packed and those quilts you’ve folded up in the sitting room. The little fellas can come across with me and help me unload at the big house. Is that good for you, Mrs. Bemis?”

  “Yes.” The word was brisk and composed, but Clyde didn’t miss the way her hand darted up to wipe below one eye. “Thank you, Clyde. You’re a good neighbor—a good man.”

  Clyde led Beulah into the sitting room. They gathered up the quilts, hugging them against their chests.

  “How are the lambs faring?” Beulah asked.

  “They’re strong. I’ve let the red-faced ewe out of the barn. She’s back with the flock, and the new lambs with her.”

  “Will more ewes drop today, do you suppose?”

  “None look as if they’re ready just yet, but the rest will come any day now.”

  Beulah moved toward the door, making for the float cart tied outside. Clyde found himself suddenly apprehensive. He remained rooted to the spot.

  The girl looked back and saw his hesitation. “What’s the matter, Clyde?”

  “Today I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to cull the flock. Butcher the older lambs and make way for the new.”

  Patient, Beulah nodded.

  “I’m not sure I can do it, Beulah.” Clyde’s voice sank to a whisper, through no will of his own. “I don’t know how.”

  “That’s nonsense. You’ve done it plenty times before.”

  “But not since . . .” Clyde didn’t know how to finish the thought, what excuse he could offer that wouldn’t brand him as weak. He hadn’t killed anything since his father’s death. The mere thought of taking the young sheep’s lives, of cutting their throats and watching the blood spill hot and red onto the soil, filled him with a nauseous tension, a restless stirring of dread. He remembered the stiff arms of Substance Webber flung out from his body in defiance. He remembered the feel of it, his father’s cold, hard chest under his boot, the pressure he’d had to exert to force Substance down into his grave. He couldn’t be the one to dole out death now. He couldn’t take the lambs’ bodies apart and hang the pink things up in the smokehouse as if the work were as ordinary as picking Joe Buck’s hooves or shucking corn. Clyde had no more dispassion for death. He had touched death too intimately for it to remain ordinary and isolated, a thing beyond himself.

  Beulah softened. She seemed to hear the words he had left unsaid. “I’ll be there to help you.”

  “You’ve never butchered animals before. Have you?”

  “More chickens than I can count.”

  “A chicken is different from a sheep.”

  She laughed. “Is that what you think? There ain’t no difference between them, as far as I can tell. Except that one has feathers and the other has wool. One lays eggs and the other births lambs. They’re both alive; that’s what matters. Come to that, the corn and the cabbages are alive, too.”

  She stepped through the door and disappeared. Clyde heard her out on the porch, scolding Charles and Benjamin to stop their fooling and get back to work; there was so much left to do. Clyde still found himself unable to move. He gripped the folded quilts tighter till his arms quivered with the force. If Beulah saw little difference between a cornstalk and a hen, between a hen and a sheep, then did she discern any separation between a sheep and a man? Clyde didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

  God made man different from the animals, he told himself. There is a difference. There must be. Surely Beulah sees that much. Surely she can’t believe otherwise.

  But God was a distant, unfocused being. What had He to do with life on the prairie, with survival out here among a living sea of grass? The sheep, the hens, the cornstalks discarded and rotting behind the barn—all were nearer than God. The earth was nearer still. Clyde could feel it, somewhere down below the floor boards on which he stood, helpless and stunned. The earth pulled at him and held him to this place. And God in His Heaven was far, far away.

  A few hours of daylight still remained by the time Clyde drove the laden float back across the pasture and helped the Bemis family carry their belongings inside. When the last basket had been toted into the house and the little fellows had taken Joe Buck to the barn to unhitch him and rub down his hide, Beulah turned to Clyde, silent with expectation. The task could be delayed no longer. The time had come to cull the flock.

  Clyde and Beulah drove the sheep back to the fold with its hard stone walls. There was no need to speak; they worked together with the same strange understanding, the feeling and knowing that flowed between them as easily, as naturally, as if they shared one heart, one river-branched current of blood. When the sheep were contained, Clyde stood mute at the fence, gripping its upper rail with a hand so cold he might as well have laid his palm against ice. He watched the flock as they circled desperately, bleating and crying. They seemed to know what must follow. And they wanted to live. Didn’t every living thing want the same?

  “I can’t choose,” Clyde finally managed to say. Who was he to decide which lives should end? Who was he to take what the prairie had given? Pressure built in his throat. It stung; it burned. It choked off his words, and he was grateful for that mercy. If he could have said anything more, he would have confessed his emotions: Sorrow at the deaths he must dole out, pain and regret over the shortness of the spring lambs’ lives. Fear of the blood—an instinctive fear, one all people shared when they saw how fast and hot it flowed.

  Men didn’t feel fear, or pain, or sorrow. Men did not regret. Wasn’t that what Clyde’s father had always told him? That was the reality Substance had worked to create: A son who was a man. A son who did not feel those weak and shameful things.

  Beulah climbed up and over the gate. “Then I’ll choose for you.”

  She walked into the center of the fold and stood unmoving, with her back to Clyde. The sheep circled her once, twice. They slowed. Their voices quieted; the dark eyes ceased to roll. Now there was only the sound of their breath, soft as water over stones.

  Beulah lifted her hand as one of the spring lambs passed. She touched its back. The lamb slowed, stopped, and stood close by her side. She touched another, but it kicked up its hooves and ran. It lost itself among the flock, and Beulah made no move to pursue it. She went on that way, waiting, watching, touching one young sheep and then another. Some stilled beneath her hand and remained at her side. Others fled, and she left them to leap and shove, left them to the fast heat of life. Soon seven spring lambs stood docile and ready at Beulah’s back. Clyde shuddered to see it—the ease with which Beulah chose, the lambs’ calm acceptance of their fate. The proceeding was unnatural, or at least, not a thing done before. It seemed to Clyde as if Beulah had silently asked for the spring lambs’ lives, and they had consented to face the knife. She turned and made her way back to the gate. The seven chosen lambs followed quietly in her wake, committed to their terrible purpose.

  For a moment, as he watched the girl and her sheep crossing the pen, Clyde despised the lambs. Why didn’t they fight for their lives? Why didn’t they flee back into the crowd, as their brothers and sisters had done? I would never go so willingly to my death. He thought of the grave by the river, its yawning darkness, the smell of freshly dug soil. He thought of Substance’s arms, outstretched. That’s the right way. The man’s way.

  Resist the end until the end comes, till its jaws gape wide and it takes you, whole and fighting.

  NETTIE MAE

  You can’t do a thing to change it.

  By the time midday gave way to afternoon, Nettie Mae had lost track of how many times she’d repeated those words to herself. Every time she looked up from her spinning, she found more evidence of Cora’s intrusion. A wooden soldier one of the Bemis boys ha
d dropped behind the chairs and forgotten. The frayed end of a snipped thread, discarded by the small girl—scarcely older than a baby—who seemed intent on learning how to embroider, even though her fingers were childish and clumsy. Now one of Cora’s hairs had found its way to Nettie Mae’s skirt. Long, dark brown, curled upon itself like a deceiving serpent, it could only have come from Cora’s head. Nettie Mae’s hair was pin straight and softer in color.

  She took the hair gingerly between thumb and forefinger, pulled it from her knee, and let it fall to the floor. She very nearly crushed it under her heel, too, just for good measure. Nettie Mae had hardly seen the Bemis woman all day, praise God for His mercy. Cora had taken advantage of a break in the rains to lead her brood back to her own home, there to finish all the necessities of invasion.

  Even when she’s gone, she is still here. Nettie Mae scowled down at the floor. The hair had vanished against the dark wood, but she wasn’t fool enough to believe it was no longer there merely because she couldn’t see it. She tempered herself again. You can’t do a thing to change it. Not if you wish your son to survive the winter.

  Now that the little children were established in Nettie Mae’s home, she could admit a grudging acceptance of them. They were well behaved, a fact which startled Nettie Mae, considering the loose morals of their mother. Although they were young, the two little boys and the baby girl seemed earnestly determined to acquit themselves well. They said “please” and “thank you” and “may I.” They took to their few small chores and duties without being told twice. They were children, so a certain amount of fussing was to be expected, but on the whole, they kept quiet and took pains to yield before the mistress of the house. The girl, Miranda, even smiled shyly at Nettie Mae now and then, when she happened to catch the child’s eye, and more than once, Nettie Mae was startled to find herself half smiling in return.

  Pleasant children. It was far too late for their mother to redeem her sins and her soul. Beulah, with her casual disregard for propriety and her unsettling ways with animals, seemed bent on making of herself a sinner equal to her mother in infamy if not in specific offenses. Nettie Mae had little use for either Beulah or Cora, save for the work they did. They were beasts of burden, nothing more—good for nothing other than to ease the weight of responsibility Clyde must carry until the spring thaw came. But perhaps Nettie Mae might hope to redeem the younger Bemis children. If God proved merciful, then she would stand as an influence in their lives, a pattern of righteous womanhood they might look to for a better, more suitable example. A mother’s sins might pass down to her offspring, generation after generation, but perhaps in these tender years, when the mind was still as malleable as freshly dug clay, there was hope that one might break the patterns of iniquity.

  Nettie Mae allowed the last of her wool to wind upon the bobbin, and the wheel slowed and creaked to a stop. She stood, knuckling and arching her back, stifling a groan as she stretched the morning’s stiffness from her muscles. Hunger had left her feeling more on edge than usual; she hadn’t had a bite since breakfast, just after sunrise. She headed for the pantry, where she had hidden a few jars of potted spiced chicken and jackrabbit in a dim corner, behind a large, heavy box of curing salt. It was rare that Nettie Mae’s store of potted meats lasted into the winter. The delicacy would vanish all the sooner if Cora and her brood found the jars. But as she entered the kitchen, Nettie Mae glanced out the window and found Clyde driving his low-slung float across the pasture. The little girl was perched on the seat beside him, while the remainder of the Bemis family trailed the cart on foot.

  No time for more than buttered bread, then, to take the edge off her hunger. Not if she hoped to protect her private stores.

  By the time Nettie Mae finished her hasty meal, the float had pulled into the yard, and the whole crowd of Bemises busied themselves with unloading its contents. Nettie Mae was relieved to see that they had brought only the most urgent necessities—baskets of clothing, extra quilts for cold months to come, preserves and sacks of grain, salt, and sugar from Cora’s pantry. They had even loaded the contents of her root cellar into a few heavy crates; Nettie Mae stood on the front step of her sod-walled fortress and surveyed the onions in their papery red skins, the squashes bearing pale, raised nets on their yellow rinds. The Bemises had evidently dug up what roots still remained in their garden; there was a crate heaped with turnips and another full of parsnips, all still dark with soil.

  “This will never do,” Nettie Mae said. “You’ve dug the parsnips far too early. They’ll be bitter, not sweet.”

  “Oh, I know,” Cora said in that meek, apologetic tone—that show of feminine frailty that always flicked on Nettie Mae’s nerves. “Sweet parsnips would have been much better, but we thought we ought to take advantage of Clyde’s cart today, rather than making him drive over again after the frost arrives.”

  “I don’t like bitter roots.”

  Cora tried a smile, designed to placate. “The children and I will eat these, if you prefer. We won’t complain.”

  Nettie Mae grunted. “Nonsense. There’s twice the work in cooking two separate meals. We shall just have to settle for bitter suppers.”

  Cora came toward Nettie Mae, displaying her most sycophantic mildness. She climbed one step of the short porch. Only one. Nettie Mae halted her with a stare.

  “Let me cook, Mrs. Webber,” Cora said. “You do enough work already.”

  “Isn’t my cooking suitable?”

  Cora was quick to amend her thoughtless commentary. “Of course it’s suitable! Why, it’s better than suitable; your cooking is delicious. We all love it, don’t we, children?”

  Solemn and quiet, the Bemis brood nodded.

  “But I know you’ve been meaning to preserve those apples you’ve stored in the barn,” Cora went on. “With the weather so damp, we oughtn’t to wait much longer. They might begin to rot. If I were cooking and you were preserving—”

  “Then we would both be in the kitchen together.”

  There was no need for Nettie Mae to say more. Cora lowered her eyes. Those smooth, girlishly rounded cheeks colored. Nettie Mae wanted to slap them, left and right, until they turned redder still.

  Ordinarily, Cora held her tongue once she knew she had pushed Nettie Mae too far. But it seemed she had dug up a backbone in her garden that morning, along with those inadequate parsnips.

  “Would it be so terrible,” Cora ventured, “if you and I were to work side by side? There is much I might do for you—many burdens I might ease.”

  It was the wrong thing to say; Cora seemed to understand that at once. She swallowed hard and half turned away, waiting with the air of a cringing dog for Nettie Mae’s reply.

  Nettie Mae obliged with the answer Cora seemed to expect. “My greatest burden of all is you, Mrs. Bemis, as I’m certain you know.”

  Clyde spoke a few quiet words to the boys, and they led the horse and cart off to the barn, while Beulah picked up her sister and carried the child around a corner of the house. Nettie Mae and Cora were left alone on the stoop.

  “I see little you might do to ease my real burden,” Nettie Mae said, “until you’ve departed from my house. I’m not like you; I have no need for useless chatter. I need no ‘company’ while I work. Such notions are better left in the cities where they belong—with the idle, sinful women who fritter away their lives in shameful ease, pretending all the while that they live the lives of honest ladies.”

  With the children and the horse gone, silence pervaded the yard. Nettie Mae could hear the thick, abrupt sound of Cora swallowing.

  She didn’t care whether she hurt Cora. In fact, Nettie Mae rather felt herself righteously entitled to lash out and wound. Wasn’t that satisfaction the least of what she was owed? Cora had made these tremulous overtures of friendship from her first day occupying the Webber house. What offensive presumption—what hubris! That woman was shameless in her pursuit of attention. Cora seemed to believe the world owed her admiration, sympathy, happiness.
Never had Nettie Mae passed the Bemis woman in the upstairs hall or drifted past her while she sat sewing by the hearth but Cora looked up hopefully, undeterred by all Nettie Mae’s countless past rejections. Cora thirsted for idle conversation as a drunkard thirsted for whiskey. She required friendship, fellowship—and the stark bareness of that need disgusted Nettie Mae. The woman had no self-control. She was lust and gluttony and weakness, all pressed into one perfectly formed, rebukingly feminine mold.

  She has lived here just as long as I. Longer, in fact. Eight years for her. Hasn’t she come to understand by now what the prairie is?

  Cora almost seemed to hear Nettie Mae’s thoughts, for at that moment, she turned back to face her. Cora’s eyes remained downcast, though, and Nettie Mae caught the impression that she had trapped the woman who had wronged her, pinioned her between two terrible ramparts. One was the prairie at Cora’s back—its endless expanse of flat emptiness, its lonesome monotony, the sea of nothing upon which no friendly vessel sailed. The other was Nettie Mae herself.

  Why should I be a friend to her—this woman who took from me the only life I knew? Let her go on thirsting for what she craves. She won’t get a drop of society from me.

  There might be nothing Nettie Mae could do to change her own circumstances this season, or the next. But neither would she change Cora’s. The Bemis woman reaped all the isolation, all the cold rejection, she had sown.

  “I regret, Mrs. Webber, that my children and I must be a burden to you. But know that I am grateful for your kindness and generosity in taking us in. Very likely you saved our lives. We are all indebted to you.”

  “Your children are no burden.”

  Nettie Mae startled herself by answering with that confession. Her heart pressed hard against her ribs and felt, quite suddenly and with a warm, strangling force, far too large for her chest. Unbidden, Luther’s face leaped into memory with brutal clarity. Luther had been but two years older than Cora’s Benjamin when the fever had taken him away. He had been a good boy—sweet tempered and mild. It was almost a mercy that God had taken Luther back into His arms before Substance could truly take the boy under his black wing. Luther never would have stood up to Substance’s methods. None of her dead children would have survived their father long. Clyde was the only one who possessed adequate strength.