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

by Olivia Hawker

  Beulah turned and chuckled at the sight. She crossed the yard and helped Miranda negotiate the steps. The two girls walked hand in hand, slowly, accommodating Miranda’s stilted pace—the best she could manage in the midst of her thick wool wrappings.

  The girls moved toward the outhouse, but Nettie Mae hurried to intercept them. “I told your mother Miranda wasn’t to come outside for any reason. Not until I said it was safe.”

  “You said she wasn’t to go out unless she was bundled up. As you can see, my ma did a fine job with the bundling.”

  “She oughtn’t to be outside at all. It’s far too chilly.”

  “The rain has stopped,” Beulah said languidly. “There’s no danger. And I’ll go with her to the outhouse, to see that she wraps up properly when she’s finished. You needn’t fret, Mrs. Webber. The danger has passed.”

  Nettie Mae was on the point of scolding Beulah again. But Miranda held up her free hand suddenly, revealing the doll Nettie Mae had spent the night sewing.

  “Thank you for my dolly, Mrs. Webber. She’s real pretty. You was awful kind to make her for me. I think you’re a real nice lady.”

  “Oh.” Surprise caught Nettie Mae by the throat—and a welling of reluctant sweetness, somewhere deep inside her chest. “I . . . I’m glad you like your doll, Miranda dear. Have you thought of a name for her?”

  “No, not yet. What name do you like?”

  Nettie Mae examined the rag doll in the child’s small hand. The night had passed in a featureless blur of fear; she hardly recalled cutting the fabric or stitching the pieces together. Now the strange little poppet struck her with its uncanny resemblance to the daughter she had lost: the dark hair in two woolen braids, the large blue eyes, the rosy cheeks framing a small and hesitant smile. Nettie Mae had even dotted a few freckles onto the cloth where the doll’s nose ought to be. It looked as much like Alta as any rag dolly could.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you ought to call her,” Nettie Mae said rather faintly. She dared not speak her dead child’s name. “You’ll think of something. Now run along to the outhouse, but be quick, my dear. You really shouldn’t be out in this chill.”

  When the girls had gone, anger supplanted Nettie Mae’s fear, and she was glad of it. Anger had ever been her fortress. Miranda did what was needed quickly, and soon enough the child was headed back toward the house. Beulah helped her up the steps again, but when her sister was safely inside, Beulah returned to the sheepfold and lingered near Nettie Mae, sipping her coffee, watching the world over the rim of the cup with that slow, persistent gaze.

  “You had better go inside, too,” Nettie Mae said, “or go where you please, but don’t you haunt me. I’ve no use for you hanging about and chattering ever on. You never speak a lick of sense, anyhow. Leave me in peace, girl.”

  Beulah shrugged in a rather congenial manner. She began drifting away, angling toward the barn but never moving in haste. Heading toward some idleness, no doubt—not toward any honest work.

  “And another thing,” Nettie Mae called.

  Beulah stopped, turned, cradling the cup in her hands, waiting for Nettie Mae to say whatever she would.

  “You keep well away from Clyde, too. Do you hear me? Oh, the two of you must work at certain chores together, I know, for they can’t be accomplished by one person alone.” Not without risking Clyde’s health. “But you are never to be alone with my son where I cannot see you. Never.”

  Beulah tilted her head, an expression of mild curiosity. “Why?”

  “Like mother, like daughter.” Nettie Mae forced each word out, grinding the words under the heel of her anger. “That’s why. Am I understood?”

  “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  Beulah drifted toward the barn again, and Nettie Mae was left alone with her shivering weariness, with the subtle curve of the earth, long and slow beneath her feet.

  8

  AT THE EDGE OF THE SPIRAL

  I knew we weren’t likely to see another storm as powerful as the one that had almost claimed Miranda’s life—not till winter arrived. But the autumn winds blew as fiercely as they had in all the years before. With the harvest in, Clyde and I found ourselves with more time for leisure. Which was not to say either of us was exactly idle. Our fences could always stand a bit of fortification, so a few days after the thunderstorm, when we reckoned the river and Tensleep Creek had returned to their accustomed courses, we began making our daily treks to the canyon to cut willows. We took all the straightest saplings we could find, assured that plenty more would sprout from the sandy gorge when springtime came again, but with my family’s livestock added to Clyde’s—the cattle, the hogs, even our flock of fowl—there didn’t seem to be enough willow to go around.

  We’ve fences back at our homestead we might take apart, I told Clyde.

  We were trudging side by side through the pasture, each with one last bundle of saplings on our backs. The grass had begun to right itself after the floodwaters had flattened stems and blades to the ground, but there were still drifts of red silt piled up around the roots of the sagebrush.

  Clyde said, We might go over to your place, then, and see what we can find.

  Your ma won’t like it one bit.

  Clyde looked at me with a crooked smile. He had lost his hat in the river, so he said, and he hadn’t yet dug a replacement out of the trunks of his pa’s old things, which he kept in the long shed. I wasn’t used to seeing Clyde without a hat. His hair was so thick the wind couldn’t even stir it.

  He said, Have you been talking to my mother? I’m surprised she’ll speak a word to you.

  She don’t speak one single word to me unless it’s to scold me, I said. But I don’t mind. I know she’s only so hard and cold because she’s afraid.

  Afraid! Clyde said.

  That word burst out of him sharp and loud, like the shot of a rifle. A covey of grouse broke from the pasture ahead, startled by his voice. As they lifted into the air, the birds’ wings sounded like a fall of rocks rattling down the walls of a canyon.

  Clyde said, My mother ain’t scared of anything. She never has been in all her life. She’s the bravest woman I ever knew.

  I ain’t said a thing about bravery, I told him. Your ma’s as brave as a lion. You’ll never hear me argue otherwise. But she is awful scared, too, Clyde. Can’t you tell when you’re around her? Don’t you hear it in her voice?

  What has Mother to be scared of?

  I didn’t answer Clyde. I thought I knew what Nettie Mae feared, but I couldn’t be perfectly sure. Oh, she was frightened of death, as most people were. And as was true of most folks, religion gave Nettie Mae less reassurance on that subject the tighter she clung to its tenets, the deeper she delved into Scripture seeking knowledge of the great unknowable. But something else troubled Nettie Mae—the threat of a more immediate loss. I was at the center of it, somehow. Clyde and me, both at the point of Nettie Mae’s short, dark spiral. Maybe she feared I would take Clyde away, leaving her stranded and lonesome as my own ma was lonesome, weak before the winds and the scouring floods of the prairie. That might have been true, for I was sure there was nothing a strong, self-reliant woman of Nettie Mae’s sort could fear worse than weakness.

  After a spell, I said, Your ma told me I ain’t to be alone with you, even while doing our chores. She said we ain’t to venture out of her line of sight.

  Clyde laughed. We been going to the ravine for willow branches for days now.

  I know, said I, but your ma’s awful busy helping with Miranda, and pressing cider, too. I guess she’s been too distracted to look out the window. When she finally does, and sees that we’ve gone off together, she’ll be powerful sore.

  You don’t sound too worried, Clyde said.

  Can’t think why I should be. What’s the worst she can do—strap me?

  She wouldn’t strap you, Clyde said. At least, I don’t think she would. It was always my father who doled out the punishments, never my mother. But she might take to str
apping just for your sake. She really don’t like you much, I guess.

  I wonder why she’s taken such a bad shine to me, I said, and smiled to myself, for I knew exactly why. A spirit of mischief had entered into me. I wanted to see whether Clyde would come up with the reason himself, and if he did, whether it would make him stammer and flush.

  But Clyde had nothing more to say on the subject of Nettie Mae, except to mutter, I’m the man of the house now, anyway, and man enough to make up my own mind about where I go and what I do. She can’t go around scolding and ruling me forever.

  We stacked our willow bundles in the barn and headed across the fields to the empty gray farmhouse, and neither Clyde nor I bothered to look back at the Webber place to learn whether Nettie Mae was watching. But by the time we reached my old home, a pleasant air of idleness had replaced our former spirit of industrious duty. Of course there was work to be done. When was there not? But we had no cause for urgency, with the crops safely stored and the animals housed and fed.

  We sat for a spell on the porch steps, resting after the effort of scrambling through ankle-deep mud. The yard where I had played as a small child lay so still that every breezy shiver of grass stems seemed exaggerated. Too strong, too vibrant, each small movement as bold as if the world itself were quaking. It gave me a curious yet not unpleasant sense of living beyond time, existing just outside time’s fragile and moveable borders. The steps on which we sat were mute with disuse. The house at our back—my home, the one I had known and loved best—seemed to hold in a great, painful chestful of memory, a breath it refused to exhale. Across the yard, abandoned to wind and scrub, and far over the pasture where Clyde’s sheep grazed, the Webber house was bustling with life. Somewhere between my old home and my new lay the boundary of time. We had crossed it, and life at the sod house went on without us. Where Clyde and I sat, the hours hung suspended in the low autumn light.

  When we had rested our tired legs, I got up and opened the door. The hinges squealed, which only made the silence within all the heavier. Clyde followed me, and for a long time we stood beside the cold hearth on my ma’s rug of braided rags, feeling the present emptiness and the past joys and sorrows, all the simple acts of life those walls had contained. The crate with the president’s china stood in the center of the kitchen. No one had bothered to nail the lid closed, and it set upon the crate just slightly askew, so a crack of dark shadow showed around its edge.

  That made me remember the treasures I’d hidden all the months and years before.

  Come along, I said to Clyde. I want to show you something.

  I led him down the short passage to a small room, the one I had shared with Miranda. My bedstead was there, stripped of its sheets, with spiderwebs strung between the posts. The webs caught all the light that spilled in through one narrow window; they shone like silver threads and seemed to illuminate the whole space, casting back the gloom of disuse and welcoming Clyde and me to the heart of silence.

  I got down on my knees and reached under the bed. Miranda’s trundle used to be there, but Ma and I had moved it to the Webber place, so now I found it easier than it ever had been before to pry up the loose floor board and delve down into the cool black hollow below. I found my treasures by feel and brought them up, one at a time, for Clyde to examine.

  As I set my things out one by one along the planks of the floor, I could feel Clyde’s confusion. The stones and feathers and bits of wood I laid at his feet were ordinary things, I knew. I heard the words he didn’t think it proper to say: Why would you show me such things, and why treat them as if they’re jewels or gold? There’s nothing worth saving here. But I went on pulling my treasures from the earth, and after a spell, he sat with his legs folded beneath him and looked at my collection in silence.

  When I had taken the last rock from beneath the floor, I sat likewise with my back against the bed, watching Clyde over the spread of bright and beautiful things that lay between us. I picked up a crow’s feather, blue black, and offered it to him. But when he reached for it, I rolled the quill between my thumb and finger, so the feather tilted in the light. Blue and violet and a deep, leafy green flashed across its surface, glorifying what had been mere blackness a moment before.

  Clyde’s hand paused in the air. He held still, and I rolled the feather again. His smile was slow, hesitant.

  I like crows, I said. I know most folks curse them, for they’ll pluck the seeds you plant right out of the soil and eat them all, if they can. And sometimes they’ll eat chicks, if they can get at them while they’re small. But crows are real bright, too. They have minds of their own.

  Clyde looked up from the feather. The half smile had returned to his face—cautious, not quite sure whether his amusement was proper.

  He said, Crows don’t have minds. No animal does.

  I said, You sure about that? I reckon that buckskin horse of yours has a real sharp mind, and a kindly way about him, too. Ain’t you noticed?

  Clyde was silent for a spell, watching the feather turn in my fingers. The colors shifted and danced. Then he said, real quiet and thoughtful, Joe Buck came back for me when I pulled Miranda from the river. We were washed far downstream. Joe was real scared by the flood and the rain, but he followed me instead of lighting out for home. He could have run off, if he wanted to. If he hadn’t come and found me, I might not have made it back to the farm. And Miranda surely wouldn’t have lived.

  I said, I seen crows pick up sticks and snap all the little sharp snags off so the sticks are perfectly smooth and straight. Then they poke their sticks down into an anthill or a termite stump and pull up their supper. You ever seen another bird do such a thing?

  No, ma’am, Clyde said with a little laugh. Never in my life. Birds ain’t exactly the smartest of creatures, I guess.

  Well, there you have it, I said. Crows ain’t got no inclination to starve just ’cause somebody decided a proper bird ought to be dull and helpless. They’ve decided on their own what they’ll be. Minds of their own, just like I told you. I can’t help but admire them an awful lot, for the sake of that brightness—even if their brightness goes hard on a farmer when planting time comes.

  I passed the feather to Clyde and allowed him to spin it for himself. He watched the colors shift from deepest purple to the blue of a summer sky reflected in water—dark and complete, the richest shade a blue could ever be. He would never again look at a crow and see only black. I felt certain of that.

  I showed him the stones next, each in turn. One was shaped like an egg, and the light flowed soft and blurred around its curves, luminous, exactly in the manner of a real eggshell. Another was red, but it wasn’t the same red of the limestone canyon or the ruts of the road that stretched clear to Paintrock. This was a shining poppy red, and where a flake of stone had broken away, it left an arching, pleated scar. I showed him another rock I’d found by the river. It was white flecked with black, smoothed by an endless flow of water. Pinpoint dots of some sparkling material shimmered when I rolled it in my palm. I showed him the tiny dimples in the surface, almost too fine to be seen.

  You see, I said. Those dimples are the places where this stone has lost little bits of itself. Parts of it have fallen away. But they became something else, as soon as they left the stone. You know what they became, don’t you?

  Sand? Clyde said uncertainly.

  Sand and riverbank. And mud and soil. And the soil falls apart, too, little by little, and what does it become?

  Clyde stared at me, his brows pinched, and I understood that something I’d said had troubled him, though I couldn’t think what it might be.

  I answered my own question: The soil becomes all the plants that grow up out of it.

  Clyde said, Soil only holds plants, like a bed for sleeping in. It doesn’t become anything.

  Well, I guess it does, I said. Haven’t you ever sucked on a grass stem long enough to taste the dirt in it?

  No, he said, laughing. How would I know what dirt tastes like, anyhow?
>
  I didn’t answer, for I thought it awful sad that Clyde had never thought to put a little earth in his mouth and learn the taste of his own land.

  Look at this, I said.

  I passed him a snail shell. It wasn’t much bigger than the glass marbles my brothers played with, but it was ten times prettier.

  I found it on the riverbank, I said. Isn’t it the loveliest thing you ever seen?

  Clyde shook his head, a small gesture, vague and unsettled. He said, It’s just a snail shell.

  But look at the colors.

  Brown, he said.

  You don’t look very close. Maybe you need spectacles. Hold it up to the light. Really look, now, and tell me what you see.

  Clyde held the snail shell up toward the window. He turned it slowly in his hand. Cast in the easy afternoon light, in the mirror light of the spiderwebs, the shell seemed to glow from within. What had seemed brown at first careless glance revealed its layers of color. Oranges and reds, subdued like a shaded lantern, but no less warm for all that. Hues of gold and caramel lay one beside the other in delicate ridges, each ridge finer than a hair. One dark line and one pale, both lines carrying a hint of subtle green, wrapped from the shell’s edge toward the fat bump on its side, the point where all line and color merged into one, at the terminus of the spiral. Clyde traced the dark line with his finger, around and around till it joined the pale line and the line gave way to uniform brownness.

  I smiled. He saw the beauty in it now.

  I said, Have a look here.

  With the greatest care, I picked up a short stem of grass crowned by a dry, pale-golden seed head. I had snapped off the stem some months before, as spring had given way to summer, and I had taken care to keep one long, flat leaf attached to the stem. The whole arrangement had been green when I’d picked it and added it to my cache of pretty things. The green had long since faded, but I didn’t mind. I hadn’t taken it for its color.