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

by Olivia Hawker

  Barley, Clyde said.

  I passed the stem across, and Clyde held it up to the light, turning the dry stalk slowly. Light ran like honey along the filaments between the seeds.

  It’s nice, he said, as if he wanted to set some worry inside me to rest.

  I said, You ain’t looking close enough. You ain’t seen what makes it so special.

  I lifted the dry leaf with one finger, so Clyde could see its underside. There, fixed tightly to the lifeless matter, were a dozen new lives waiting to be born.

  I said, I don’t know what sort of insect put its eggs there, but ain’t it the prettiest thing you ever seen?

  The eggs were tiny, white as pearls, and rather longer than round. I couldn’t help but feel the care and patience of the little mother who had trusted her eggs to the protection of that leaf. She had arranged her children in perfect Vs, nested one inside the other, and had coated them with some miraculous substance that had hardened around them, holding them fast to the leaf while they grew in their pale secrecy, securing their future against wind and rain and marauding birds.

  I ran the tip of my finger gently over the eggs. Though they were impossibly small, I could feel every one.

  Do you think they can sense me touching them? I asked Clyde. Maybe it frightens them. Maybe it gives them nightmares.

  Clyde thrust the barley stem back at me. He brushed his hands together as if he wanted to clean them, as if I had soiled him for good.

  No damn insect eggs can feel you, Beulah, he said. And no damn insect can have a nightmare, either.

  Who are you to say so? You ain’t an insect; you don’t know.

  Insects don’t have minds. Neither do crows. You’re making up stories, and it’s all a lot of foolish talk.

  I looked down at the barley stem and held my peace. It didn’t hurt me, that Clyde said I was foolish, for I knew he was only speaking from fear. What hurt me was this: he had failed to notice the most beautiful thing of all about my barley stem. The eggs lay in exactly the same pattern as the barley seeds. Tight and close, all so perfectly aligned, every seed and every egg holding a new life, a dreaming life—waiting for its season.

  I had thought Clyde could see, same as I saw. But he was still blinded to the truth.

  He said, All this talk of animals with minds and critters having nightmares. My mother would call it blasphemy, if she was to hear it.

  It ain’t blasphemy, I said.

  Clyde shot back at me: Nowhere in the Bible does it say that animals can think or feel.

  Nowhere in the Bible does it say the sky is blue, neither, I said, but you can see it’s so, just by looking up. You don’t need the Bible to tell you.

  Clyde’s body gave a sort of twitch, an impatient jerk, and I thought of a horse when it wants to run away but knows it shouldn’t. He hugged his knees up near his chest and sat and scowled for a minute, frowning down at the little things I’d spread before him as if I’d offered insults instead of beauty.

  I didn’t want Clyde sore with me, so I scooped up all my stones and feathers and the snail shell. I laid them back in the hollow beneath the floor and set the barley stem carefully atop the whole collection, in the stillness and dark where the eggs could go on dreaming till spring came again. Then I replaced the floor board and climbed to my feet, smiling.

  All those lambs have done real well, I said. I was awful worried one or two might die in the storm, but they’re hardy, ain’t they?

  They are, Clyde agreed, but rather sullenly. My father and I bred them for it—to survive the winter.

  I offered my hand and pulled Clyde to his feet. With talk of such ordinary things as sheep and winter, some of his sourness seemed to dissipate. We left my old room and returned to the porch. There was a crisp, smoky scent to the air, a breath of cold coming down from the mountains. It wouldn’t be long before the first snows arrived.

  We stood for a while in amiable quiet. I could hear the ram’s low, guttural calls far out over the pasture, and the answering bleats of his many wives. The sound seemed to relieve the last of Clyde’s strain. With his good mood returning, I thought it best not to mention that snow was on its way.

  Instead, I said, Just one more ewe left to drop her young, and then the fall lambing’s through.

  Clyde turned to me, surprised. There ain’t any more young left to drop, he said.

  There sure is. The ewe with the black legs, but no black on her face.

  I know the one, Clyde said. But she didn’t catch this year. She’s young—she was just born last autumn. It’s nothing strange for ewes to miss their first breeding. It happens all the time.

  She didn’t miss, I said. She’s got a full belly. She’ll be dropping soon. She may be birthing right now, for all I can tell.

  He might justifiably have made some cutting remark, for he had been a shepherd for years longer than I had. But Clyde seemed determined to set his ill feelings aside. He suggested we go down to the pasture and look over the flock, so he could put his hands on the young sheep in question and prove to me, by virtue of his long experience, that I was mistaken. We forgot all notion of willows and fences, and walked across the field to where the flock was grazing along the margin of the recent flood.

  I stood by for a good long spell, while Clyde counted his sheep, then counted again. He walked around the perimeter of the flock, which made the ram grunt and flinch and made the ewes and the new lambs lift their heads in alarm. But no matter how many times Clyde tallied his sheep, he still came up one short.

  The black-legged ewe is the one that’s missing, he finally admitted. She’s nowhere to be seen.

  The ram drew close to me, and I could feel his warm breath across my knuckles. I rested my hand on his dense crown of wool and felt the place where the horn arose from flesh, at the hard, broad edge of the spiral.

  Of course the black-legged ewe is missing, I said to Clyde. She slipped away to be alone. Her time has come for birthing.

  Clyde stared at me in silence. The look he gave me was slow and considering, but there was no doubt left in his eyes.

  At last, he said, Come on back to the farm. There’s a few things I need to fetch. Night is coming on, and we must go out and find that sheep, or the coyotes will find her first.

  CLYDE

  At the edge of the spiral, everything Clyde had once known to be true softened and blurred and shifted. There was no solidity anymore, no sense, no purpose. There was only the strange, disorienting motion of the pasture turning around him, circling him, the sheep’s bodies drifting across his vision from right to left even though he knew the animals stood still.

  Beulah grabbed him by the upper arm. Her grip was surprisingly firm, for a girl so slight. Clyde was always startled by her strength, every time he saw it displayed anew.

  “You look dizzy,” Beulah said.

  Clyde stamped his feet to reassure himself that the world was real. It stopped lurching around him, and the pasture resumed its proper nature, flat and predictable, obedient to the laws of God and the stewardship of man.

  “Spell come over me just now,” he admitted. “But I’m all right.”

  “You ain’t getting the fever again?”

  She sounded as if she already knew the answer, and knowing that she knew made Clyde feel sick and spinning again. But he pushed the sensation away. He hadn’t any time for weakness; one of his flock had gone missing. No good shepherd allowed his ewes to wander off, whether they were ready to lamb or not.

  “I’m fine enough,” Clyde said. “Come on; the sun will set in less than an hour. We got to find that ewe before dark, or likely we’ll find nothing but her bones.”

  When they returned to the sod house, Cora was fixing supper in the kitchen while Miranda, recovered from her ordeal, played with her dolls at the table. The little girl’s cheeks glowed with health and she was restless, as children of her age always are. But since the storm, Cora had insisted that Miranda remain within reach.

  Clyde took his best lantern f
rom the pantry and fitted a new candle inside.

  “Beulah and I must go out to search for a lost sheep, Mrs. Bemis. If we’re lucky, we won’t be gone but half an hour. Will you keep a few bites warm for us in case we’re kept away longer?”

  Cora cast a nervous glance at the lantern. “Do you expect you’ll be out after dark?”

  “I don’t expect it, ma’am, but I aim to be prepared.”

  Clyde retrieved his shotgun from its pegs, high above the kitchen door where the little fellows couldn’t reach. Cora gasped.

  “There’s nothing to fear, Ma,” Beulah said. “Clyde’s only being cautious, ain’t you? Anyway, the worst that’ll come is that Nettie Mae will be sore when she learns we’ve gone off together. Where is Nettie Mae, anyhow?”

  “In the root cellar,” Cora said, “tidying up and packing in more straw where it’s needed.”

  “Good,” Clyde said. “We’ll slip off, Beulah and me, before my mother can take notice. I know she doesn’t like us to be out of her sight, but there’s no helping it now—not with a ewe missing. A fella has to do what a fella has to do, given the circumstances.”

  “Be safe, then,” Cora said. “And don’t stay out late, or I’ll worry.”

  Beulah took her pale-gray shawl from the back of a kitchen chair, kissed the top of Miranda’s head, and followed Clyde out into the rose flush of evening. They held their tongues, stepping quickly till they were beyond the root cellar, from which Clyde could hear the rustle and bump of his mother working in near darkness. He dared say nothing till he and Beulah reached the long shed. Then he moved closer to the girl and murmured, “We ought to check all around the sheep pen and the barn first. Most often, ewes run to someplace familiar when their time comes. So if she is about to lamb, as you say, it’s likely we’ll find her there.”

  But a thorough search of pens and outbuildings produced no sign of the black-legged ewe. Clyde propped the barrel of his shotgun on one shoulder and sighed.

  “The pasture next. We’ll have to walk every inch of it. She could be lying down at the base of some scrub; we’ll never see her unless we’re right on top of her. We ought to spread out, six feet between us, and walk at the same pace, back and forth till we’ve covered the whole field.”

  Scouring the pasture left them empty handed, too, and by the time they reached the farthest corner, where the ground sloped up toward the foothills, purple dusk had settled over the prairie. The ram was already leading his band back toward the farm, and Clyde and Beulah followed, silent and pensive, and shut the flock safely in the fold.

  Clyde turned in a slow circle, taking in the land that was his now, all the acres of his unasked-for dominion. His land; yet it hid secrets from its master. The land had a will of its own. The order and simplicity Clyde wanted—needed—meant nothing to the farm or the prairie. He would have cursed the ewe, but he didn’t wish for Beulah to think less of him.

  The root cellar door stood open by a crack. A candle was burning inside now, ruddy and weak, its small light easing out to touch the flat, dry gray of autumn grasses with tentative warmth.

  “Mother’s still in the cellar,” Clyde whispered. “Come along now, quickly, before she pops out and catches us. She’ll insist on going with me if she learns what we’re up to, and she’ll make you stay behind.”

  They returned to the pasture and took the river trail. Clyde paused at the tangled margin of the hedge, the interwoven mat of sumac and willow, a dense wall through which no grown sheep could venture. He looked back at the sod house. It seemed very small and far, diminished by the vastness of oncoming night. The sky wore a uniformity of featureless cloud from one horizon to another, faintly luminescent, lilac gray. There could be no hope for a moon tonight.

  Someone had lit candles in the house. The two square windows of the first floor—kitchen, sitting room—looked like eyes wide open in the dusk. They stared across the tops of waving grasses, watching Clyde with an unblinking focus.

  Side by side, Clyde and Beulah walked the path. Shoulder-high brush hid the Nowood from view, but Clyde could hear it, a sustained whisper, a sigh that went on and on. He thought the blood in his veins, or in any creature’s veins, would sound the same way if he could make himself quiet enough to hear it. Twilight’s purple sheen vanished from the world and everything reverted to a colorless state, dimmed by the oncoming night, gray fading into gray into deepest black. Clyde took his matchbox from his pocket and made Beulah hold the lantern while he lit the candle within.

  “Keep an eye out for sheep dung on the trail,” he said. “Or hoofprints.”

  “Not a lot of difference between a sheep’s droppings and a deer’s. Nor between their prints.”

  “Keep an eye out all the same. And I never sheared that ewe. If we’re lucky, we might find some of her wool sticking to the brush.”

  Night pulled in around them. The world became a small circle of orange light, shifting and impermanent. Its boundary was the place where reality gave way to every possibility, every dark thing conjured up in dream or imagination. As they pressed along the river trail, the tall grasses hissed and shivered and came, blade by blade, into view. They were all the same ruddy shade, like candle flame, candlelight, a small light that couldn’t hold the teeming darkness back for long. Clyde never heard the coyotes, the wolves, the shambling and hungry bears come down from the mountains. He didn’t see them, nor did he see their signs. But he felt them—out there, waiting just beyond the light, melting ever backward into shadow. He felt worse things, too, creatures he had only known in stories and childhood terrors. The pale, ageless men who drank blood and slept in coffins. The men who could change their shape—wolves, but bigger than a wolf ought to be and clever enough to open doors with their long-thumbed paws. He thought of the tiny white eggs arranged along the secret side of a barley leaf. He remembered Beulah’s finger running down the length of the leaf, and the sky above seemed to press down with all its eternal weight, and ripple and roll behind him. He shuddered.

  Certainty came to Clyde all at once—a rising sensation in his stomach and a burning in the back of his throat, a hot rush of instinct that told him some living creature was just beyond the reach of his lantern, standing on the trail or just beside it. He stopped walking, and Beulah halted beside him.

  “Something ahead,” Clyde whispered. “Might be the ewe.” He hoped it was.

  “It’s not.” She sounded neither doubtful nor concerned.

  “What, then?”

  Beulah took the lantern from his cold hand. She made as if to lead the way, but Clyde caught her by the fringe of her shawl and made her stop.

  “If it’s not the sheep, then what is it? You can’t just walk up on an animal in the darkness.”

  “Don’t you know where we are, Clyde? Of course, I’ve been here a dozen times, but maybe you haven’t. There’s nothing to fear. Nothing here can hurt you, nor even get into your heart unless you allow it.”

  She moved, and Clyde moved with her, still clinging to her shawl like he must have clutched at Nettie Mae’s apron strings once. The packed earth of the trail widened around them, broadening in the ruddy ring of their awareness. They had reached the clearing by the river—the place where Clyde had buried his father.

  He cast his furtive eyes to the edge of the light, to the place where he knew Substance’s grave should be. The flood had scoured the ground almost flat, but a tangle of willow and sage had fetched up against a slight rise—what remained of the burial mound. On that evening when he had ridden after Miranda, Clyde had seen pale stones and bits of wood arranged atop Substance’s grave. He remembered the sight now, blurring past. He remembered that he had assumed Nettie Mae had been the one to visit—that his mother had left the stones as adornments or offerings. But Beulah’s face turned down as they passed the grave. She seemed to peer into the tangle of scrub, searching for the pretty things she had laid out for Substance, looking to determine what the flood had carried away.

  Once they had moved beyo
nd the grave, Clyde released his hold on the shawl. The entrance to the canyon lay somewhere just ahead, not yet illuminated by the feeble light. A dry stick snapped in the darkness to their left, in the hedgerow that separated river from field. Clyde heard the two-beat rhythm of an animal trotting through the brush, a breath of foliage sliding over fur.

  “Coyote,” he whispered.

  She nodded.

  “Any sign of a sheep on the trail?”

  Beulah shook her head.

  “We ought to go back to the farm, probably.”

  “Not just yet. The ewe must be close by.”

  “How do you know? I ain’t seen the least sign of her, and—”

  “Look!”

  Beulah lifted the lantern, and the ring of candlelight shivered and rolled and slid along the path till it caught the sandstone walls of the ravine. There was the flat rock on which Miranda had crouched days before. And at its base, hanging like a banner from the sharp projection of a willow branch, a pale twist of wool.

  “She’s in the canyon,” Beulah said.

  “Let’s hope she hasn’t gone too far up. It’ll be rough going in the dark.”

  A few feet into the ravine, the well-defined path dwindled to a narrow track, the sort used only by the deer and pronghorns and the stone-gray wild sheep who descended from high places to water below. Clyde led the way, scrambling over lips of red rock, turning to offer Beulah his hand, which she rarely took. Whenever he ascended to a new ledge or a flat accumulation of chipped stone, spindled around its margins by the thin stems of saxifrage, Clyde paused and stared around him, desperate for any sign of the missing ewe. They followed the deer track till the river sounded small and weak below, but they found no further sign of the black-legged sheep.

  “We can’t go much farther,” Clyde said. “The canyon is too steep for walking up ahead; we’d have to climb, and that ewe didn’t climb, so unless she grew wings—”

  “Hush.”

  Beulah held perfectly still. Clyde did likewise, so motionless and silent, his breath scarcely cooled his half-parted lips. Then he heard, from the deep shadows just behind and below the ledge on which he was standing, a soft grunt and the scrape of a hoof against dry soil.