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

by Olivia Hawker

  “You may go to her. I think the worst is over now. Or so I pray. Carry her upstairs, Beulah, and tuck her into bed. She may only get out of bed to use the chamber pot until I say otherwise, and even then, she must be wrapped up and kept warm. It’s most important that she should take no chill. I’ll start a good broth and bring her supper up soon. It won’t take long to boil, with the fire blazing.”

  Beulah did as she was bidden, cradling her sister with all tenderness and dropping kisses on the little white brow. When the girls had gone, Nettie Mae stayed on the one remaining quilt. She stared vacantly into the fire.

  Clyde pushed himself up from the chair, stifling a groan, for his legs and the muscles along his ribs stiffened in protest. He offered a hand and Nettie Mae took it, still watching the flames leap and bow before the gusts of wind that whistled down the chimney. Clyde pulled his mother to her feet.

  “Will Miranda truly be well?”

  “God alone can say. I might have some idea, if I could hear her breathing, but . . .” Nettie Mae closed her eyes. “How do you feel?”

  “Tuckered out. I think I might sleep for a week, even with the rain pounding away. But I don’t believe I’m feverish again.”

  Nettie Mae pressed her hand to Clyde’s forehead. Her palm was cool, her fingers untrembling, yet still Clyde could sense her fear.

  “You aren’t feverish,” she confirmed. “Not yet, anyhow. Thank the Lord for that.”

  “I saw to it that the little fellas dried off, just as you told them. They ought to be well, too.”

  “It’s not the fever I’m afraid of, when it comes to Miranda. It’s . . . it’s . . .” Nettie Mae seemed unable to force the words out. Her voice had gone thick and she turned her face away, so Clyde couldn’t see her weakness. Finally, she said, slow and deliberate, in defiance of her own terror, “Drowning.”

  “She can’t drown now,” Clyde said. “I pulled her out of the river. You’re worn out, Mother; you aren’t making sense.”

  The accustomed sternness returned as if it had never gone. “I know exactly what I speak of. You remember your sister Alta.”

  “Of course I remember Alta.”

  In the urgency of the storm and the fear of finding Miranda gone, Clyde hadn’t thought of his dead sister at all. But now the memories came crowding back, forceful and hard, towering and cold as the Bighorns. He remembered his father pulling Alta from the creek. The small body dripping and limp. He remembered his mother sitting beside Alta’s bed for days—never weeping, never speaking, never ceasing to work. Nettie Mae’s hands hadn’t stopped moving all those countless hours while the family had waited and prayed for Alta’s recovery. But Alta hadn’t recovered. Her breathing had only grown harsher, wetter, more strained and agonized with every weary, too-long moment.

  “Alta died of fever,” Clyde said softly.

  “No. She drowned; I know it. She was on dry land for two days after falling into the creek, but still she drowned. Nothing will convince me otherwise; nothing ever has convinced me, through all these years. The water stayed in her chest. I know it, Clyde; I listened to her every breath. God help me, the sound of it has never left my memory. I’ve had no peace from that day to this.”

  “Mother . . .”

  Clyde held out his arms, and Nettie Mae wilted into them. He held her tightly, swaying gently from side to side, unsure what else he could do to bring his mother comfort.

  Nettie Mae mumbled against the wool of Clyde’s union suit. “I tried to get the water out of her. I tried.”

  She wasn’t speaking of Alta now. It was little Miranda she was thinking of—only Miranda, the child who needed her most this day, this hour.

  “I know you tried, Mother. You did what you could.”

  Nettie Mae moaned, a wordless utterance of pain. Never in his life had Clyde heard that stoic woman make such a harrowing sound. Not even when Substance died—never. Never. The realization that Nettie Mae could be so affected, that she was not the bulwark Clyde had always thought her to be, struck him with visceral, instinctive fear. Not even the storm had frightened him so badly, not even the lightning. He clutched her more tightly still—not to succor her, now, but for his own sake. He was a little boy again, clinging to his mother in terror, trying to wring from her inexhaustible body all the strength and fortitude he lacked.

  “Oh,” she said, “did I do enough? Was it enough to save her life?” There was no mistaking the high, bent warp of Nettie Mae’s voice. She was crying. Weeping against his chest.

  “God have mercy.” Nettie Mae still huddled in Clyde’s arms. She spoke her prayer against his body, and Clyde felt too weak, too inadequate, to bear it. “God, spare that child’s life. Do not take another precious baby from me, Lord. I cannot bear it, if You do. Save her, God, I beg You.”

  NETTIE MAE

  When she heard the thunder, Nettie Mae knew something inside of her had broken, or would soon break. Not the way a stick breaks, or a bone, snapping into pieces that may be thrown in opposite directions, a permanent and emphatic separation. Rather, the break was a pot or a jug dropped to the floor. A heavy vessel, full, full to overflowing. Too heavy to be borne any longer, and it slips from weary arms, and when it cracks open, everything it had contained rushes out at once and drains away. That was the sound of the thunder: the shaking arms giving out, the weight plunging down, the bursting forth of everything Nettie Mae had held inside for too many years.

  But when she heard the first distant notes of the lark, Nettie Mae knew the long night of the storm had passed. Morning would soon arrive. The rain had ceased hours ago, giving way to a still, windless night. The floodwaters had come no nearer than the far end of the pasture. The light of a full moon had broken intermittently through the clouds as they dispersed, and Nettie Mae had watched, from the height of her bedroom window, a long, slow gold-snake ripple of moonlight on water, out there in the grass where the sheep ought to graze, and the dark reflection of the cottonwoods had been like ink spilled or bleeding from one page to another. But the larks were rising now. The flood could come no nearer. The storm had expended its fury in the high granite spires of the Bighorns, and the sky moved in gentle peace.

  Nettie Mae cast aside her lap blanket and tucked needle and thread into her sewing basket. She rose from the settee in the sitting room, where she had passed the night in a sleepless vigil, and padded to the kitchen. A heap of embers glowed on the hearth. Clyde had pulled his cot close to the fire, where he slept the determined, committed sleep of one who has tested and found the limits of human endurance.

  She paused beside her son’s bed. His chest rose and fell steadily beneath the apple-leaf quilt. She had stitched that quilt all the months she had carried Clyde inside her—her first child, her dearest hope—and had laid him upon the quilt as a baby, when he had been as round and fat and formless as all babies are. How strange to see him now, to truly see him, as if for the first time. He had become a man. When had it happened? There was no more boy about him. The defined set of his jaw, the thinness of his face, the shadow of coarse hair darkening his lip and chin. Even his expression—and even in sleep—was that of a grown man, thoughtful and concerned, a tilt of tension between the brows. Nettie Mae could see where the lines would form someday, the furrows above the bridge of his nose and the bird’s feet at the corners of his eyes. They weren’t there yet, but already she knew their placement. They wouldn’t fall where Substance’s lines had fallen. There was little of her husband in her son; Clyde’s features were Nettie Mae’s, and those of her father—what she could remember of him. She was grateful for that. Somehow it would seem unjust if God were to fashion Clyde too closely after Substance’s pattern.

  Clyde’s chest had remained clear throughout the night, thank God, and the fever that had burdened him weeks ago showed no signs of returning. The knowledge that Clyde had come through this terrible night unharmed made Nettie Mae weak with gratitude. Her bones ached with longing for sleep. She thought of the settee, the lap blanket, an
d she wanted to curl up there in the light chill of the sitting room, in its blue-dawn silence, and finally rest. But she couldn’t rest yet. She needed to know—needed to truly believe—that Miranda would survive, too.

  Nettie Mae tucked the rag doll she had made that night under her arm. She stepped around Clyde’s cot and ladled up a bit more of her shank-bone broth from the kettle above the coals. She carried the bowl upstairs. Every step was an effort, and her head grew lighter as she climbed, for her whole body was pleading for its rest. She paused beside the half-open door that had once been Clyde’s. Cora’s boys were sleeping peacefully, wrapped in one another’s arms, their soft faces brushed and silvered by the first trace of morning light.

  Nettie Mae crept to the other door, the crowded room shared by Cora and her two daughters. It wasn’t the first time she had looked in on Miranda since putting her to bed. In fact, Nettie Mae had lost count of her trips up the stairs to watch the girl sleeping, to listen to her breath. As dawn came, the scene was much as it had been for hours. Cora was still asleep on her bed, sitting up against the headboard with her neck bent at a stiff, uneasy angle. Cora’s left hand rested on Miranda’s body, and the girl slept well at her mother’s side. Beulah had sprawled across the trundle bed, half-covered by a dark blanket, with most of her bare, graceless legs exposed.

  Nettie Mae edged closer to the bed. She could just isolate the sound of Miranda’s breathing above the light snores of her sister. There was no rattle, no wet catch in the girl’s throat, even lying on her back. That hadn’t been the way with Alta.

  She will live, Nettie Mae realized. God has answered my prayer. Miranda will survive.

  Nettie Mae wouldn’t wake the child from that healing sleep for the sake of more broth. Miranda had already taken enough broth throughout the night; any time she wakened and murmured in the darkness, Nettie Mae had come to her side and encouraged her to drink, even as Cora slept on. Instead, Nettie Mae drank down the bowl herself. It was salty and thick with fat, and had gone almost cold, but it braced her up at once. Her stomach ached for more, and Nettie Mae realized with dull surprise that she had eaten nothing since the previous noon. She had been too absorbed in caring for Miranda, too committed to doing what must be done.

  For a moment, as Nettie Mae watched the three sleepers, she considered fetching a small cushion and propping it under Cora’s head, folding it between her neck and shoulder. Cora would be stiff and in pain when she woke, without a cushion to support her. Instead, Nettie Mae slipped the new rag doll under the covers—carefully, so as not to wake Miranda—and tucked it in the girl’s arms.

  She eased herself back down the stairs and left the bowl standing on the drain board. Then she wrapped her thickest shawl around her shoulders and slipped quietly from the house.

  The scent of morning rose up from every footstep: the clean smell of dew evaporating, of rain soaking into the earth. There was a richness and greenness to the scent—a clamor of gratitude from the scrublands, the rounded, peeled-wood smell of roots that have drunk their fill and leaves that hang fat and open on the stem, the heat of summer forgotten. Larks gamboled in a pearl-soft sky. It may as well have been spring, for all they sang, for all they madly dove and circled overhead.

  Perhaps, Nettie Mae thought, perhaps I am so weary that their singing only sounds louder to me than it ought.

  She found herself at the sheepfold and leaned her forearms on its stone edge. The flock looked up at her, subdued by the long, stormy night and the weight of their rain-soaked wool. Nettie Mae searched among the sheep for sight of the new lambs. Now and then as she’d tended Miranda, she had wondered whether the lambs could survive the violent downpour. But there they were, clustered with their mothers at the center of the flock. Every one was on its feet, every one suckling and butting the ewes’ bags with their curly foreheads.

  The sight should have gladdened Nettie Mae. She knew it ought to have lifted her heart. Instead, worn thin by her long night of fear and prayer, she felt herself harden again. The shock of almost losing Miranda had broken the vessel of her rage, and much of her hate had drained away. But she could repair the cracks. Time and life would give her sorrows enough to refill the vessel. That was the way of life. That was the way of time.

  You answered my prayer for Miranda, God, she silently told the Creator. But not for my own children. Didn’t I pray just as sincerely over Alta? And Luther? Didn’t I pray over Anna, whom You took from me when she was only three months old, and my baby boy, who lived two days? You didn’t even leave him in my arms long enough for me to give him a name. You spared Cora’s daughter. You even spared the lambs. Why will You never spare me?

  Cora. The mere thought of the woman was so choking, so bitter, that Nettie Mae spat into the mud. Cora had never lost anything of significance. Even her husband was still alive, protected in the confines of his cell. Fortune and God both seemed to smile endlessly on that helpless, vapid creature, while Nettie Mae had endured one sorrow after another, every day that she could recall, back to her earliest memory.

  What have I done, God, to make you hate me so? Haven’t I followed Your word? Yet You succor those who sin and punish the obedient.

  The ram lifted his head and Nettie Mae met the animal’s eye. They stood for a time and gazed at one another, the ram chewing his cud, Nettie Mae motionless even though her sleeves had soaked up the rainwater from the stones and now chafed around her wrists.

  Her gaze drifted to the ram’s horn—the smooth, confident arc of its curvature, the perfect proportion of the spiral. Dark against the creature’s wool, the horn captured all of Nettie Mae’s attention, and wrung out as she was by the tense, sleepless night, she couldn’t force herself to look away. Between one beat of her heart and the next, she felt herself standing upon the horn, felt it grow to an unfathomable size, to the size of the world and all that lay beyond it. The ground beneath her was the dark spiral. The prairie was the arc of the curve. And in that brief moment, that flicker of awareness—bright and rapid as thought—she saw that all living things also stood upon the spiral, as she stood now, and moved along the curve as life directed them. At the point of the ram’s horn was death, and all things flowed toward it. But the edge of the spiral, where horn sprouted from animal, forever remade itself—always new. From blood and air, from breath and bone, the horn generated and curled. The spiral grew wider every season, but death was always at its center.

  Nettie Mae gasped. She lurched backward from the wall and lost sight of the ram. The earth was solid and flat beneath her feet, and away to the east, beyond the shoulder of the Bighorns, the sun had begun to rise. She could see it, forcefully red, its upper edge flattened and truncated by a dense shelf of cloud, the same storm that had wreaked such terror the night before now small and distant across the plain.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Webber.”

  Nettie Mae started and spun to face Beulah. The girl had bundled up in her shawl and was carrying a steaming cup in both hands. She sipped from it as she came toward Nettie Mae, over the trampled grass of the yard, through the hens scratching and feasting on the new abundance of rain-fattened grubs.

  “Coffee,” Beulah said when she reached Nettie Mae’s side. “I never liked it much when I was younger, but I find I’ve got a real taste for it now. Still, I don’t drink it often, for my ma says it’s better not to rely on drinks for your giddy-up-and-go. But last night wasn’t especially restful, was it? I guessed I could use a little help with waking up this morning.”

  Nettie Mae didn’t reply. She only narrowed her eyes at the girl. She had never seen a child of thirteen drinking coffee as if she had a right to it. It struck her as unnatural, and she thought, Add that affront to all the rest of this odd creature’s habits.

  “I had thought to make a cup for you,” Beulah went on, “but I figured you need sleep right now, not pep. You didn’t sleep a wink last night, did you?”

  “No,” Nettie Mae said reluctantly. “How did you know, anyhow?”

  �
�It isn’t your way to sleep when there’s fretting to be done.”

  “A near drowning is nothing to be flippant about, girl. Not in any case, but particularly not when one’s own small sister is fighting for her life.”

  “But Miranda isn’t fighting for her life now. She’s quite well. You saw how she looked this morning. You heard her breathing.”

  Nettie Mae pulled her shawl tighter against this tingling new chill. Beulah had lain soundly asleep when Nettie Mae had looked in on Miranda. How had the girl known she had been in the room at all, let alone that she had listened to Miranda’s breath and found it steady?

  She stepped back, distancing herself from Beulah’s calm, smiling presence. She couldn’t abide the girl, not now, weary and frayed as she was. Beulah’s very health and pluck were as insults to Nettie Mae, a stinging slap across the face. Alta would be close to the girl’s age now, if she had lived. If God had answered Nettie Mae’s prayers and spared that child—her child.

  But my daughter would never have been so unnatural. Eerie and wise, sipping coffee in the satiated, slow-moving dawn, with those unseasonable larks tumbling overhead.

  “You ought to go inside and get some sleep,” Beulah said. “Miranda will be fine—just fine. You did a powerful lot to save her, and we’re all so grateful, but you must look after yourself, too, Mrs.—”

  “Be quiet,” Nettie Mae said. “It isn’t your place to tell me what I ought or ought not do. Children should be seen, not heard.”

  Nettie Mae held her tongue for a moment, testing Beulah’s obedience, waiting to learn whether the girl had understood the lesson. Beulah said nothing more, but Nettie Mae disliked her smile now more than ever before. It was too slow, too broad. It lingered in a manner that suggested mockery.

  The kitchen door opened again. A fat bundle tottered out on stiff little legs—Miranda, wrapped up thickly in coats and shawls, so swaddled she could hardly move. The girl stood on the stoop, looking down at the steps in dismay. Then she called out plaintively, “Beulie.”