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

by Olivia Hawker

  Clyde had killed animals before. Of course. How else could you survive? But every life he had taken before, he had taken in its season. You do not cut the cornstalk while the tassel is still damp and white. The two-headed lamb must live a short life, Beulah had been right about that, but it seemed a terrible injustice to deprive it of whatever time remained in this small and vivid season.

  Worse, the more Clyde had handled the creature—trying to make it stand, stand and nurse—the greater grew his affection for the strange, ugly thing. He would never enjoy a bond with this animal like he had with Joe Buck. It was impossible—with any sheep, perhaps, for the nature of sheep was different from the nature of horses or dogs or people. But he admired the lamb’s persistence, the singularity of its goal. The creature was weak, but it never gave up. It wanted to live. And Clyde had gone into the darkness to save its life. He was the lamb’s savior; he couldn’t also be its executioner—not without trying to provide what was due, what the very fact of its birth had promised.

  As the morning wore on, however, and the lamb remained unfed, Clyde came to understand that hope was futile. He had almost felt relieved when Beulah returned to the barn, back from her private sojourn. She could always see a situation clearly for what it was, without any sentimental foolishness clouding her judgment. Beulah would know what was best; she would tell Clyde, This is what you must do, and next this, and you mustn’t worry over whether it’s right or wrong. She never fretted over such things herself. She seemed to make every decision with the calm composure, the ready confidence, of a person who stood beyond the reach of fear. Perhaps, Clyde thought, the girl had never really learned what fear was. After all, Beulah hadn’t been raised under the thumb—under the fist—of Substance Webber. Perhaps without the need to question what a raging father might think of her every choice and thought, without the need to wonder what such a father might do if she made a mistake, the seed of fear had never taken root inside her.

  Beulah raised her eyes from the two-headed lamb. She smiled at Clyde, and though the smile warmed him, it was also a throb of agony. There was something sad in Beulah’s expression. She had resigned herself to the inevitable.

  “I think he liked it,” the girl said, “seeing.”

  “I hope so.”

  Clyde’s cheeks burned with shame. His father would mock him, if he could hear such talk. Sheep don’t like or dislike. They only live—act—do what their bodies instruct. They cannot think, cannot feel.

  “Now,” Beulah said, “we ought to bring him back to his mother.”

  The black-legged ewe bleated and moved toward them when they returned to the stillness of the barn. Clyde stepped over the stall gate and tucked the lamb into the straw, rested his hand on its flank, and felt the gentle breaths coming and going. The ewe nuzzled her offspring, then settled in the straw close by.

  “It doesn’t seem to be suffering,” Clyde said. “Only falling asleep.” Deeper and deeper into sleep.

  “This is best,” Beulah agreed. “Let it go when the time comes, right here, next to its mother.”

  This is best. To drift into a comfortable dream. Not to end in a sudden burst of noise and passion and blood, the way Substance had ended—the way he’d ended all things.

  Beulah extended a hand and Clyde went to her, climbing back over the gate, brushing straw from his trousers. He shook out his coat and put it on. It smelled faintly warm, faintly sweet, like the precious thing it had enfolded. Beulah put her arm around Clyde’s shoulders and led him away from the stall and outside, into the wind and the persistent smoky purple of low-hanging cloud.

  “Work to be done,” Clyde said shortly.

  “Yep.” After a pause, Beulah added, “I’ll go back to the old house and bring more wood for the fences.”

  Clyde nodded but couldn’t look at Beulah, couldn’t speak. After a moment, the girl slipped away, and Clyde busied himself in the long shed, cleaning and sorting his tools just for the mercy of distraction.

  As he worked in the dim half light, his vision blurred now and then, and he was obliged to blink away a sudden rush of tears or blot them on the edge of his sleeve. It was the cold that did it—stung his sleep-deprived eyes till they watered. Just the cold. Snow was coming, sure enough. He could smell it plainly: the unmistakable sharpness of ice, the mellow, woodsmoke aroma of cold rolling down from the granite heights. The first snow of autumn—early, as all things were this year. The first snowfall wouldn’t last more than a day or two, Clyde felt sure; the ground hadn’t yet begun to freeze. But this was the promise of a long winter ahead.

  He coiled a length of wire and set it aside, then added a heavy tin rattling with nails. He and Beulah would need those things for their fences. With a harsh winter well on its way, they’d have little time to fortify their pens and gates, making fast against the six-foot drifts that would accumulate beside every structure for miles around.

  He found his sturdiest mallet and added it to the growing collection of fence-mending supplies. Then he had to stop and blink again till the mist dissipated from his sight.

  Why did it pain him so, the lamb’s coming death? The loss of an animal to disease, to deformity, was no great shock to a farming man. But he had touched the ewe, up there in the canyon. He had put his hands upon the black-legged ewe and she had allowed it without fear, almost as if she had understood that Clyde had come to help her. He had felt, for one startling flash of a moment—a lightning strike, a candle flaring in the darkness—just what the ewe had felt, her fear and pain, her desperate hope. In that moment, he had found the animal to be as living and feeling as he was. And now, knowing the black-legged ewe for what she was, Clyde couldn’t help but imagine her grief, too. She had hoped, as all mothers hope, for a healthy babe. Something twisted had come in its place, but the two-headed lamb was still hers—her child. And it could not live. It would die, leaving the ewe empty again, bereft of the purpose she had carried all the months of her pregnancy.

  And the strange, frightening wonder of the lamb itself. Was it truly one animal with two heads, or had twin lambs grown so closely together that their flesh had merged? Clyde heard again the long hum, the chorus of life singing in its ceaseless harmony. The voice and the purpose of every creature—every tree by the river, every blade of grass and twist of sage, every person who walked the land—expanded beyond the borders of flesh and self. He let his arms hang limp at his sides; he allowed the tears to come, to fall as they would. He loved the monster, the miracle that lay dying in the barn. He knew he shouldn’t, but he could mute his aching heart as easily as he could lift his hand to the sky and halt winter’s advance.

  The first snowflakes fell just after noon. Large and wet, fat with the marginal warmth of fall’s remainder, they drifted down like feathers spilled from a ripped-open tick. The sky subsided from violet to flat gray. Clyde’s flock gathered at the edge of the pasture, massing together, made nervous by the change. He heard a new tension in their guttural calls. They wanted to linger near the safety of the fold. Through a haze of snowfall, he could see Beulah approaching from the Bemis house, carrying a fat bundle of staves across her shoulders.

  Clyde leaned against a corner of the long shed, hands deep in the flannel-lined pockets of his coat, and watched Beulah make her way across the open field. At a distance, she seemed less of a girl. Her skinniness and her coltish lack of grace were transformed by the field or by the snowfall or by the persistent ache in Clyde’s chest to the lean, upright, capable strength of a woman. Her dark dress and the gathered staves, black with damp, showed starkly among a blurred, featureless gray of snowfall. For a moment, Clyde wished he could erase the edges of himself as easily as the lamb had done—the two lambs with one body—and learn all the secrets Beulah knew, the clear-eyed sight, the placid acceptance in the place where fear should have been.

  The horses whinnied, high and sharp, a cry of panic. Clyde turned toward the paddock in time to see a low brown shadow bolt away from the fence into the brush. Joe Buck le
d the small herd in a gallop around the pen; cold air misted with the horses’ harsh breaths, the indignant huffs of animals offended.

  Clyde ran toward the paddock, shouting and waving his hat, but the coyote had already vanished. Cursing under his breath, he hurried instead to meet Beulah.

  “Well, here’s the snow, right on time,” the girl said cheerily.

  “Animals are restless.” Clyde took the staves from her shoulders, slung them across his own. “I spotted a coyote near the horses.”

  Beulah rolled her neck to work the stiffness from her muscles. “It didn’t harm the horses any, did it?”

  “No.” Coyotes were too small to inflict any real damage on the larger stock. “But if it’s coming in so close, it’ll be after the sheep next. It could take down the new lambs, for certain. Maybe some of the older sheep, too.”

  “Let’s get the flock into their pen, then,” Beulah said. “We can feed them on hay till tomorrow.”

  The sheep went eagerly to the fold. It was the work of a few minutes to guide the flock through the gate and settle them in with a few armfuls of hay. Clyde and Beulah tended to the cattle and horses next. By the time they’d finished settling all the stock in their pens, the snow had accumulated ankle deep, but the snowfall had ceased, leaving the world huddled and still, drawn in upon itself. The cloudbank hung so low Clyde thought he might reach up and touch it. The afternoon was stifled by cloud, gray and subdued as dusk.

  “Hungry?” Beulah asked.

  Clyde nodded.

  “I ain’t had a bite since breakfast. Let’s get inside and see whether my ma can scare us up something to eat.”

  Cora provided bread with apple preserves and cut each of them a good thick slice of smoked ham, which Clyde and Beulah ate cold. Clyde hadn’t realized how famished he was. Not only the day’s work but also the day’s grief had drained him of strength and will. He sat at the kitchen table, chin propped on a fist, chewing slowly and staring through the bubbled glass window at a world gone white and silent. The fresh coat of snow had rounded and softened the yard, rippling over clumps of grass and weeds. The land looked like nothing so much as the fleece of a newborn lamb—and thinking of the one that lay dozing and fading in the shelter of the barn, Clyde’s throat tightened all over again. He had to rub his eyes in a show of weariness to make an excuse for the tears.

  Benjamin and Charles came into the kitchen to petition their mother for an extra slice of bread.

  “Look,” Charles said, pointing toward the window. “Is that a wolf?”

  Benjamin rushed to the glass and pressed his nose against it. “Where? I can’t see anything.”

  “Over by the sheepfold.”

  “There it is!”

  Clyde lurched up from the table. His thighs bumped the edge so hard the table rocked; Beulah grabbed her cup of water to keep it from overturning.

  “Show me,” Clyde said to the boys.

  He spotted the coyote at once, sly and low, dodging around a corner of the fold. “Damn,” he muttered, and the little fellows looked up at him, wide eyed with shock or admiration.

  “It can’t get into the pen,” Beulah said. She remained at the table, picking at the crust of her bread. “The boards on the gate are too close together, and I guess the walls are too high and smooth for it to climb.”

  “I don’t like it lurking around.”

  “It can’t harm anyone or anything. Not with the sheep off the pasture.”

  Clyde reached above the kitchen door and took down his rifle, and the boys gasped with delight.

  “Clyde, don’t,” Beulah said.

  “I won’t have that damned coyote harassing my stock.”

  From the drain board where she worked, Cora emitted a soft and hesitant “Oh . . .” She didn’t dare scold Clyde for his language, but he knew she had no liking for rough words, especially not where her children could hear.

  He shrugged uncomfortably in Cora’s direction—an apology of sorts—and stepped outside. The boys tried to follow.

  “No, you little fellas stay in here where it’s warm.”

  “We want to see you shoot the wolf!”

  “It ain’t a wolf,” Beulah said, “it’s a coyote, and it’s of no harm to anybody.”

  Clyde rounded on her, furious that she couldn’t see what danger the predator posed. She, of all people, who usually saw clear as day, even with her eyes shut.

  “Shush, Beulah,” Clyde said—nearly shouted. “Can’t you shush?”

  He closed the door firmly behind him.

  Clyde moved out into the snow. It crunched with every step, and he would have cursed the sound if cursing wouldn’t have rendered him all the more conspicuous. The sheep had caught the coyote’s scent, even if they couldn’t see the beast that circled their pen, menacing them from beyond the stone walls. Clyde could hear the restless rhythm of his flock, the thin, high bleating of the ewes and the basso grunts of the ram. The horses, too, were pacing nervously in their paddock. Even the milk cows crowded along their fence, heads raised, ears flicking toward the coyote.

  Clyde couldn’t see the creature from where he was standing. It had slunk to the opposite side of the fold, but the flock’s sounds of distress went on unabated. Clyde slipped behind the outhouse and crouched low amid a leafless tangle of lilac branches. From there, he could just make out the gate of the sheepfold and the pen’s farthest corner. He raised his rifle and sighted toward the corner, waiting for the coyote to show itself beyond the stone wall. But the animal was too clever for him; Clyde’s legs began to cramp and at last he abandoned his cover, circling wide around the fold, eyes on the pen, hungry for any sign of the hunter.

  The cattle shied away as Clyde neared their enclosure, made anxious by the rage that burned around him like a brushfire. The heavy rumble of their hooves gave him the sound cover he needed, and he quickened his pace, jogging in a wide arc toward the far side of the fold.

  There, at last, he spotted the coyote. Brown and lean, it was half-crouched beside the stone wall, looking up as if judging the distance to the top. It thought to leap up and over, Clyde saw—and it was big enough that it might make the jump. He raised the rifle to his shoulder, but the coyote bolted at the sudden movement. The animal flew back into the cover of sage and snow just as Clyde’s gun kicked hard. The roar of the shot stifled all sound—but with cold horror, Clyde watched a gout of wet, dark earth and a geyser of snow erupt from the mounded roof of the root cellar.

  He lowered his gun, numb with shock at his own foolhardiness. A moment later, the kitchen door flew open and Nettie Mae stormed out into the yard. Clyde’s ears rang and hummed from the shot, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes. He could see his mother’s mouth working on a furious tirade. Little by little, the whine in his ears diminished and he could make out her scolding.

  “. . . never seen such a careless stunt in all my life! You could have killed someone! Get over here at once, you fool of a boy!”

  Clyde’s feet dragged, but he went to face his mother.

  “What in the Lord’s name did you mean by that?” Nettie Mae said. “Shooting toward the house? What if your aim had been worse? You could have shot right through a window. You could have done for anybody inside.”

  Her face was all hard angles, tight with anger and fear. Clyde hung back, reluctant to come too close to Nettie Mae; she looked as if she might twist an ear.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  “I should say you are sorry. Give me that gun.”

  “Mother—”

  “You heard me.”

  “I’m not a child anymore; I’m the man of the house.”

  “Then you can damned well act like it!”

  Clyde hesitated. He could see shadows on the other side of the kitchen window, the little fellows pressed close to the pane. Watching. Clyde didn’t wish to set a poor example for the boys. He handed the rifle over to Nettie Mae.

  She tucked it under her arm, brisk and scornful, then headed back toward th
e kitchen door. But a few paces away, Nettie Mae stopped and whirled again to face her son. Her small, hard eyes raked him from head to foot, and Clyde felt himself wither under the authority of her stare.

  “I have always hoped,” she said quietly, “always prayed, Clyde, that you would turn out better.”

  “Better?” He could manage scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Than your father. He was hot headed. Vengeful. You know that well; you aren’t a little child anymore. You understand who your father was . . . what he was. I had hoped you would be different, but this—this reckless, dangerous behavior . . .”

  She said nothing more, but pinned Clyde with a stare. He clenched his fists inside his trouser pockets where Nettie Mae couldn’t see, willing himself not to writhe with the discomfort of guilt. Finally, Nettie Mae strode back to the house, taking the rifle with her.

  Clyde lingered in the yard, too ashamed of his own foolishness to go back inside. Anger at his mother sat heavy and sour in his stomach. Nettie Mae had humiliated him—treating him like a child there in front of everyone, everyone who made up Clyde’s world. Worst of all, he couldn’t help but feel his mother had been right to scold him. He had acted rashly, and for no good reason.

  If I don’t protect those who depend on me, what good am I to anyone? One wide shot, and he could have killed his mother. Or the little fellows, or Cora or Miranda. He could have killed Beulah.

  He drifted back to the long shed and leaned against an outer wall, hat pulled low over his eyes. The gunshot had sent the sheep into a panic, but they were settling now. Clyde could hear the ram calling to his ewes, leading them back to the hay. The ram’s low, gruff voice put Clyde in mind of his mother—Nettie Mae unmanning him with a stare, stripping him in an instant of all the esteem that had been his since Substance’s death.