“Beulah, I’m sorry. I—”
She silenced him with a touch—took his nearest wrist in one hand, then reached across his body and took the other. She raised his hands from his lap, moving them toward the coyote.
Clyde resisted.
“Yes,” Beulah said. “You must.”
He heard the command in her words, but even if she hadn’t compelled him, still Clyde would have obeyed. For he heard something more than command: knowing. You must. You must. He believed her. If there was any escape from himself—any hope to evade the shadow of his father—it lay in this girl’s understanding. Clyde surrendered, and Beulah guided his hands to the lifeless animal before him.
Sick with shame and self-loathing, Clyde made himself do what Beulah had done. He rested his fingers on the coyote’s muzzle. The lips had slackened in death; they moved freely over the jaw, and he could feel the teeth like pebbles in the riverbed—pebbles when you went wading, smooth beneath your feet, firm among flowing silt. He traced the bridge of the animal’s nose, around the eye, open, for the coyote had seen its death coming. The ears were stiff and strong like a horse’s ears, the ruff at the coyote’s neck soft beneath his palms. When he reached the animal’s ribs, Clyde paused. The stillness rebuked him. This body should have stirred with breath. Breath and life were the coyote’s by right, but Clyde had stolen them both away. He had cut the stalk before its season. He hung his head and wept as Beulah had done, racked by the impact of a sorrow he could never control.
“More,” Beulah said.
Clyde didn’t open his eyes; he couldn’t bear the sight of what he had done. But his hands moved again at Beulah’s command, touching the legs that had run their last, the back that would no longer bend in flight, the tail that had thrashed in final defiance against the evil Clyde had wrought.
When he had finished, Clyde sat back on his heels, shuddering for his breath.
Gently, Beulah said, “Why did you do this?”
“The lamb.” Clyde choked, coughed, and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat. “I went to the barn, but the lamb was gone. I saw the coyote’s tracks in the snow.”
“Oh, Clyde,” Beulah whispered. “The lamb died all on its own. Its time had come. I heard the ewe crying after supper, and I went to the barn. I found our lamb there in the stall, where we had left it.”
Clyde nodded.
“I took the lamb,” Beulah said. “I wrapped it in some jute I found in the barn. Then I went back to the house to find you, but by then you were already on your horse.”
“Beulah.” He hated the way her name came tearing from his throat. He sounded like a child lost in the forest, crying for its mother. But when she wrapped her arms around him, Clyde knew at least that Beulah didn’t hate him. “What should we do now?” Clyde’s face was pressed against her shoulder. Beulah smelled of the lavender and cedar Nettie Mae sprinkled in the blanket chests. And more, too. Sage and rain, and warm red earth, like the coyote’s hide.
“We should bury them,” Beulah decided. “Both.”
She climbed to her feet, and after a moment, Clyde did the same. Tentatively, he looked toward the house. His mother had vanished; so had Joe Buck. But Cora remained, an arm around each of her sons.
“Your ma caught your horse and took him back to the paddock,” Beulah said. “I guess she’ll unsaddle him and turn him loose.”
“Where ought we to make the graves?”
“By the creek, I think. Easier to dig where it’s sandy, and the ground will freeze last near moving water.”
Beulah lifted the coyote as if it weighed no more than the lamb. Its head and tail sagged from her arms, yearning toward the earth. “You go and get the lamb. Meet me at the river trail.”
Clyde couldn’t stand the sight of the trench in the snow, the long track attesting to his own unreasoning violence. He went the other way around the house, stumbling through the darkness. He passed the paddock—the horses had gathered against the cold, one mass of living shadow—and heard Joe Buck whicker from the midst of the herd. A moment later, the shed door opened, and a sudden flare of lantern light made Clyde throw up an arm to shield his eyes.
“Clyde. Where are you going?” It was his mother’s voice.
Blinking, he lowered his arm. “To the river. Beulah and I will bury the coyote. And . . . and a lamb that died, too.”
“Bury them? Why? Better to drag them out to the brush and let the varmints take them.”
Clyde lowered his eyes, wondering what excuse he could give. Finally, he said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
He waited for his mother’s castigation. She moved toward him, and the ring of her light glided across the snow till it surrounded Clyde, too. Nettie Mae said nothing. She only laid a hand on Clyde’s cheek. When he looked into her eyes, he found them brimming with tears.
“I’ve feared for you,” Nettie Mae said softly. “All these years. You don’t know how I’ve feared.”
Before he could ask what she meant, Nettie Mae turned away, and in her usual brusque manner said, “You’ll need a light, if the job is to be done tonight.”
“I’ll go back to the house with you. Then I can take your lantern.”
“No. I’ll hold the lantern and come along with you. That way, you and Beulah can see what you’re about.”
Clyde stood for a moment, numb with surprise. Nettie Mae offered him a smile. It made her seem shy, almost girlish.
“I—I must go to the barn first,” Clyde said, “and fetch something Beulah left there.”
“Very well, then. Off we go.”
As they crossed the farm, there was nothing to be heard but the steady tread of their feet through the snow and the restlessness of the wind. Neither spoke. Clyde sensed in his mother a peculiar release, an easing of some habitual strain, and a vision returned to him—the lariat slipping over the coyote’s ears. The knot buried deep in warm fur, loosening under his hand.
In the barn, Clyde found the still, small bundle on the shelf where Beulah had laid it. Coarse jute cloth shrouded the lamb’s body. He didn’t unwrap the covering, for fear of what his mother might think. He scooped it against his chest and turned at once to go. The body inside had stiffened; it seemed heavier than the lamb had been in life. He took his spade from its hook and led Nettie Mae toward the river trail.
Beulah was waiting for them beside a stand of leafless brush. The coyote still hung in her arms, just as it had before, limp and piteous in defeat. She nodded to Nettie Mae, who returned the silent acknowledgment. Then Beulah stepped out onto the trail and led the way to the place where the creek met the river.
Beulah didn’t go as far as Substance’s grave, and Clyde was grateful for that mercy. The girl stopped at a flat expanse of undisturbed snow, nodding once to Clyde. He laid the lamb’s body at the foot of a nearby sapling and bent to his work. No one uttered a word as wet earth came up and mounded dark upon the snow. Nettie Mae held the lantern high, watching with somber poise. When Clyde had dug the first grave—more than a foot deep, long enough to hold the slain coyote—Beulah stepped to the edge of the pit and lowered the body into the earth.
She looked up at Clyde, unspeaking, and he came to her side and helped her arrange the slack limbs and straighten the coyote’s head. The animal looked as if it lay in peaceful sleep.
Clyde stood and took up his spade once more. But Beulah stopped him. “Wait. Bring the lamb, too.”
“In the same grave?”
“Yes.”
Clyde hesitated, casting an anxious glance at his mother. But Nettie Mae seemed cognizant of nothing except Beulah. She was watching the girl’s face with an expression somewhere between fascination and fear.
Clyde lifted the wrapped bundle and bore it to the graveside. He peered at his mother once more—then, swallowing his worry, he unwound the cloth from the animal’s body. Nettie Mae gasped when the two-headed creature emerged from its shroud into the light of her lantern. Beulah gave no sign that she had heard. The girl
tucked the lamb between the coyote’s forelegs. The two creatures lay chest to chest. Both heads of the lamb—that brief-burning miracle—nestled below the coyote’s jaw.
“Is there anything you want to say before we cover them?” Beulah asked softly.
Clyde stared down into the grave. It struck him that this humble processional, this ceremony, amounted to far more respect than Substance had been given on the occasion of his burial. He reached down into the pit, felt cold air lace through his fingers. He stroked the coyote’s pelt one last time.
“Forgive me, please,” Clyde whispered, “for I never will forgive myself.”
When he withdrew his hand from the grave, Beulah took it in her own. And where the warmth of her skin met his, there was no barrier between them, no notion of self to keep them apart. One sound, one song, one breath he exhaled and Beulah breathed in.
NETTIE MAE
Nettie Mae would have given all the world to prevent her son from becoming like his father, if only the world had been hers to give. Not one coin would she have kept for herself, not one speck. Diamonds, gold, the great power of influence, even love meant nothing to Nettie Mae when set against her son. Her last remaining child. But she had never held the world and had no riches to spare. Prayer and hope were the only paltry treasures at her disposal—small and fragile things, levers inadequate to shift a man’s fate.
By the first of November, winter had come in earnest: true winter, white and silent with snowfalls spanning days at a stretch. Drifts piled against the house, reaching to the windowsills; wind heaped the snow halfway to the eaves of the barn. The stone walls of the sheepfold turned to white hillocks, which Clyde dug away every morning, wary of the countless wild things that still menaced his flock. The livestock moved in despondent lines along stinking, mud-dark avenues beaten through the snow by weary hooves. Every day, Clyde turned the animals out to their pastures, but it was hard work browsing through heavy snow, and the stock never ventured far from the barn’s weak blue shadow. Hay was their only real sustenance now, bland as the porridge and dried beans upon which the residents of the sod house would depend before spring came again.
Nettie Mae worked at her spinning wheel, squinting through the day’s white glare toward the fold where Clyde was pounding sharp stakes into the earth. He had cut the stakes from scrap wood recovered from the Bemis farm and had whittled their ends to wicked points. The stakes angled outward from the stone wall, a deterrent against the wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions who would inevitably come prowling around the farm once the real hardship of midwinter set in.
When Clyde had first begun the work some two days before, the sight of that bristling palisade had filled Nettie Mae with disquiet. Since the death of the coyote, she didn’t like to think of Clyde and predators together, her only remaining child facing the hungry, sharp-fanged beasts of an unfeeling world. Her son—the first babe she had cradled at her breast—a predator himself, potent with rage, capable of swift and merciless brutality.
From the moment she had seen him in pursuit of the coyote, Nettie Mae had known that sixteen years of prayer and pleading had been in vain. Clyde had become, between one moment and the next, exactly what his father had been. Vengeful. Unconstrained. A man not governed by sense or will, but by the darkest passions of a veiled heart.
As she had stood transfixed on the stoop, watching her son kill that creature—slowly, cruelly, without the quick mercy of a clean shot—Nettie Mae had thought, Perhaps no boy can grow to manhood in Substance’s shadow without becoming Substance himself. Without the infection of violence and hate, without the love of power. Fear had gripped her so tightly that night that Nettie Mae had felt herself paralyzed, scarcely strong enough to draw a breath. She had known in that instant—known—that Clyde was beyond all hope, even beyond the reach of prayer. He would become the very thing Nettie Mae had sworn her beloved child never could be.
That night, the night of the first snow, Nettie Mae had faced her darkest hour. But the girl had changed it all. Beulah had taken Clyde in her arms and remade him—Nettie Mae could find no other word for the transformation she had witnessed. Remade. Shaped into a new, more hopeful form by Beulah’s strange and miraculous hands.
A gust of wind picked up, strewing ice crystals against the window. They crackled and chimed, the sound almost swallowed by the chatter of Cora’s children. The boys had sprawled belly down on a blanket in front of the sitting-room fire, taking turns reading aloud from Nettie Mae’s Bible. Word by staggered word, syllable by syllable, they read out the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, a halting tale impeded by mispronunciations and storms of laughter.
Miranda occupied herself on the sofa with her two rag dolls—the one she had always had and the new one Nettie Mae had sewn for her. She watched the girl surreptitiously over the edge of her spinning wheel. Nettie Mae still feared for the girl, though the incident of the flood lay weeks in the past. She found herself checking on little Miranda ten times a day or more, searching her face for the flush of fever, finding any excuse to draw near and listen to the sound of her breath.
Miranda looked up from her dolls and met Nettie Mae’s eye—the girl seemed to know whenever Nettie Mae cast the briefest glance in her direction. Miranda grinned and raised the rag dolls to her face as if to hide behind them, as if to start a game of peep-bo. Nettie Mae couldn’t help but smile in response. A treacherous warmth flooded her heart whenever she found herself in Miranda’s presence or whenever she thought about the child, which was far too often for her liking. There was no sense in developing a fondness for the girl, nor for Benjamin, nor Charles. None of Cora’s brood could replace the precious babies Nettie Mae had lost. Yet she couldn’t save herself from that fatal foolishness, a growing affection for the Bemis offspring. That was the nature of children, Nettie Mae supposed—they instilled a rising hope in even the hardest of hearts. Children were a persistent reminder that life went ever onward, that a future lay ahead, for them if not for you. Perhaps Nettie Mae needed that remembrance now, when everything else had been taken from her.
She let the wheel slow and released the soft white roving to hang unspun. Then she covered her eyes with her hands and opened them like shutters, peeking across the room at Miranda. The girl laughed—a high, pure music. Contented, she returned to her dolls.
Miranda only likes me because I gave her that poppet, Nettie Mae thought, taking up her spinning again. But what did the reason matter? At least someone in the sod house felt warmly toward Nettie Mae.
Cora was still at work in the kitchen. Nettie Mae could hear her at the drain board, washing out the crocks that had contained the last of the potted meat. How quickly such luxuries vanished in the winter, and all the faster with three small children to feed—to placate during the long hours of confinement.
Cora and Nettie Mae maintained their custom of avoiding one another as far as they were able, with the exception of breakfast and supper. But all the same, Nettie Mae felt Cora’s presence like a burr in her stocking. Every step along the kitchen floor, every clink of a spoon against pottery, sent a jolt of resentment along Nettie Mae’s nerves. She had long been accustomed to tranquility in her house—more or less, when Substance had been in a fair mood—and winter had always been, for Nettie Mae, a time of rest and recreation, a time to spin and make, to watch the snow fall while the soft click of her knitting needles accompanied her inmost thoughts. This year, the house felt hectic and close. Winter would last far too long.
Beulah was perched on the brick hearth, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire, struggling to piece a quilt patch out of a few torn scraps of old fabric. Nettie Mae allowed the spinning wheel to stop once more. She watched the girl fold her scraps this way and that, pinching corners, pressing the needle longwise between her lips as she frowned in concentration. Beulah hadn’t sewn much before; that was plain, just by watching her clumsy technique. But the fabric was part of the problem. It looked far too worn, almost threadbare, and had the faded appearance
of old shirting. She had torn up some of her father’s disused clothes, Nettie Mae realized, and was trying to make something useful of the scraps.
Nettie Mae hesitated, wondering whether it was really safe to speak with the girl. She never could stand in that child’s presence without a subtle thrill of trepidation. She hadn’t forgotten how Beulah had laughed that day in the kitchen, with Clyde scarcely free from the grip of fever—that day when Nettie Mae had told Beulah the meaning of necromancy. But for all her strange ways, the girl had never done Nettie Mae any harm. In fact, she had mended the sudden break in Clyde—God alone knew how—and restored the precious hope Nettie Mae had thought dashed for good.
Nettie Mae tucked her fleece against the wheel’s mother-of-all and rose from the spinning stool. She stepped over the boys’ legs and climbed the stairs to her room, where she found her little basket of neatly folded cloth scraps, all arranged by color. Then she returned to the sitting room and stood a few feet away from the frowning girl.
Nettie Mae cleared her throat; Beulah looked up and took the needle from between her lips.
“I couldn’t help but notice,” Nettie Mae said, “that you seem to be struggling with your work.”
Beulah smiled. Lazy eyed and slow, as ever. “My ma has tried to teach me how to sew, but I guess I got no talent for it.”
“Nonsense. Sewing doesn’t require talent, only practice and concentration.”
“I do well enough with embroidery when I’m pushed to it,” Beulah said, “but stitching into cloth isn’t the same as stitching two pieces of cloth together. You’re an awful good hand with a needle and thread, ma’am. Miranda loves her new dolly. I’d be grateful if you’d teach me what you know.”
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 32
