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

by Olivia Hawker

  Nettie Mae cleared her throat again, shifting from one foot to the other. Then she forced herself to sit on the bricks at Beulah’s side. She kept a healthy distance between herself and the girl, leaning over to assess the attempted quilt patch.

  “The biggest problem I can see,” Nettie Mae said, “is that your stitches are uneven. See here? You started out with proper, short stitches, but as you worked along the patch, they grew longer and looser. That alters the tension of the fabric and creates these puckers. You ought to discipline yourself to make the same stitch length each and every time. Haven’t you ever worked a sampler?”

  “No, ma’am. I never saw much use in a sampler, even for embroidery.”

  “The purpose of a sampler is to learn. To practice.”

  Beulah twisted her mouth, an expression of deep and complicated thought. “How does a body make a sampler, anyway?”

  “You must begin simply and keep the work small. Perhaps you ought to stitch a little blanket for Miranda’s dolls. That would be a proper sampler for a girl of your age.”

  And she thought, If either of my girls had survived to your age, I’d have taught them so well that they’d already be sewing their bridal trousseaux. This is what comes of a feckless, city-bred woman—Cora’s sort.

  Nettie Mae kept her less charitable thoughts to herself. She said, “That fabric you’re using is the other half of your trouble. It’s too thin for good sewing; it won’t hold its shape. Better use it for rags, or to stuff another doll for your sister.” She lifted the scrap basket to her lap and opened the double-hinged lid. “These are bits and pieces I’ve saved from old quilting work. You may use anything you like from this basket.”

  Beulah’s eyes widened. She ran a finger down one row of neatly sorted fabric. “It’s all so pretty. Look, this piece has flowers. And this one has tiny birds! It’s awful generous of you, ma’am.”

  Nettie Mae took a paper folio from the lining of the basket and spread it open on the brick hearth. It revealed dozens of stiff card cutouts, diamonds and perfect squares, yellowed with age, punctured by old needle holes. How long had it been since she’d purchased that card and snipped out the shapes? Wisconsin. The first year of her marriage—or the second?

  “What’s this?” Beulah asked.

  “Piecing paper. I’ll show you how to use it once you’ve learned to sew an even stitch. You cut out your fabric just a bit larger than the paper shape, then fold the edges of the cloth over and baste it to the paper. You do know how to baste, don’t you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then you lay two pieces atop one another, right sides facing, and stitch their edges together. When you’ve finished, you’ll have a lovely quilt block with all its corners perfectly aligned.”

  Laughing, the girl looked up. “Isn’t that cheating?”

  Nettie Mae didn’t want to smile, but a marginal curve fought its way to her lips. “More or less.”

  Nettie Mae helped Beulah sort through the scrap basket and choose a few likely pieces for her sampler. Then she showed her how to thread a needle properly and set the girl to work making fine, even stitches. The boys had, by that time, jumped up and begun to act out the Bible story. They took turns playing the lion, roaring as loudly as they dared in Nettie Mae’s presence.

  The noise gave Nettie Mae enough cover that her bravery was inflamed. If she had thought anyone other than Beulah could have overheard her words, she never would have spoken.

  “What you did for Clyde,” she said softly. Then stopped. Would the girl understand what Nettie Mae meant? Nettie Mae hardly knew herself what she intended to say.

  She swallowed, fighting back a rising current of anxiety. How had Beulah healed the break in Clyde’s spirit? She recalled with vivid, trembling clarity that day when Clyde had tossed, incoherent, in the grip of his fever. And later, Beulah—unconcerned, sweeping out the kitchen as if nothing in the world had ever been wrong, as if there had been no chance Clyde might have died. I’m a sorceress, ain’t I? That’s what the child had said. The impertinent, blasphemous child.

  Maybe that comment had been no impertinence, after all. What else could explain the ease with which Beulah unpicked Substance’s stitches, erasing the shadow of the man from his son’s heart? Perhaps it had been no coincidence that Beulah had done her work over an open grave, with two dead beasts—one of them malformed, twisted like a demon—laid at her feet.

  Nettie Mae’s ears throbbed with the sudden pressure of her pulse. Her throat went tight with a terrible certainty, a conviction that it was blasphemy merely to sit beside the girl, to acknowledge her. Even so, she owed much to Beulah, and more than she could ever hope to repay. It was Beulah—not sixteen years of prayer—who had delivered Clyde from his fate. For the sake of her last living child, Nettie Mae would do anything. She would even suffer a witch to sit quilting by her fire.

  Nettie Mae tried again. “What you did for Clyde, that night . . . with the coyote.”

  Beulah looked up from her stitches, patient and waiting.

  “Thank you. For . . . helping him.”

  The girl shrugged, slicking an end of thread between tongue and front teeth. “I didn’t do much.”

  Nettie Mae paid no heed to the girl’s demurral. “I will admit that at first I thought it blind foolishness to hold a funeral for a coyote.” She wouldn’t mention the abomination, the two-headed freak. “But the affair seems to have comforted Clyde. He’s a different boy now—a different man.”

  “I rather think Clyde’s the same fellow he always has been, ma’am. I hope you don’t think it sauce for me to say so.”

  “No,” Nettie Mae said vaguely, watching snow strike the window pane. “No, he has changed, and for the better. He has settled, I suppose one might say. Something uncertain in him has found its footing. I’m grateful to you, Beulah. Grateful.”

  The girl returned to her stitching. Progress was painfully slow, but she seemed determined to do the job well this time. Her stitches showed white and even against the dark plaid fabric she had chosen.

  “I can’t really tell you,” Nettie Mae said, laughing lightly at the force of her emotions, “exactly what Clyde means to me. He was the first of my children, and he is also the last.”

  Beulah didn’t look up from her work, but the cup of her silence held something warm and companionable, patient and inviting.

  “I’ve had five babies, you know. But the Lord saw fit to take them all—except Clyde.”

  Now Beulah did raise her head. Her eyes had lost their habitual sleepy heaviness. They shone with sympathy, wide and clear sighted. That strange color. Pale yellow brown, more like an animal’s eyes than a proper girl’s.

  “I’m sorry,” Beulah said. “That’s just terrible, Mrs. Webber. It’s an awful sad thing, for a mother to lose even one child.”

  Nettie Mae huffed out one short laugh. She couldn’t help it. Beulah had spoken as if she really knew, as if she had felt that pain herself. It was too absurd. If the girl wasn’t mocking her, then she was dull witted for certain and sure.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken of this,” Nettie Mae said. “It’s no fit story with which to trouble a young girl.”

  “But I ain’t troubled in the least.” She resumed her stitching. “I don’t mind if people tell me this and that—even if they tell me all the things that weigh heaviest on their hearts.”

  Nettie Mae opened her mouth as if to speak again. The words were there on her tongue, eager to spill. Her throat burned with the need to tell this girl everything. Every sorrow, every lost hope. To speak and be heard—to be understood—after years of silence was a temptation bordering on compulsion. Then Nettie Mae remembered the girl in her kitchen earlier that fall, laughing at the word of God. She closed her mouth and laced her fingers together in her lap. What wicked power did this child have, to conjure such dangerous complacency?

  Nettie Mae scolded herself. Don’t be a fool. She is Cora’s daughter, tainted by sin; you know that much already. She m
ay be something far worse, for all you can tell. Don’t be so quick to reveal your weakness to one who may be an enemy.

  An enemy of Nettie Mae. An enemy of God.

  Beulah seemed to understand that Nettie Mae had silenced herself, and not without effort. She smiled lightly, plying her needle. “You needn’t fret, Mrs. Webber. And you needn’t worry about Clyde the way you do—him growing into a man, I mean, and all that comes along with it. Marrying and having children of his own someday. You won’t be left out of the good that’s yet to come.”

  “What do you mean?” Nettie Mae said sharply. She intended to add, I don’t fret over such foolish things. But she couldn’t make herself say those words. The lie wouldn’t come.

  “You will have a family again someday.” Beulah never looked up from her sewing. She spoke as easily as she did to the little children—all the authority and confidence one might claim in reassuring Charles or Miranda that the sun would rise the next morning. “I’ve seen it. I know.”

  Nettie Mae’s words didn’t stick any longer. They burst out so roughly that the boys faltered in their play, casting wary glances toward the hearth. “You’ve seen it? What foolish talk is this?”

  “It’s no foolish talk, ma’am, if you’ll forgive me for arguing. It’s only the truth.”

  “And where have you seen it? How do you know?”

  She feared the answer, recoiled from the possibility with a knot of dread in her middle. Feared the answer and hungered for it. She wanted it to be true. So powerful was her longing for a family that she knew she would believe whatever the girl told her in that moment—accept Beulah’s words like the utterance of a prophet. Panic burned inside her chest, for it was a sin to heed the speech of evildoers. But even as she warned herself away from sin, Nettie Mae succumbed to the stillness that settled like a snowfall in her mind: the peace of acceptance, the quiet of surrender, a welcome blankness muting all fear.

  If it’s a sin to listen to this strange child and wish her words might be true, then I am a sinner, and God in His mercy will forgive me.

  What hope could she otherwise claim? In the bleak and colorless grip of winter, to what guiding staff might she hold? Did she not, after all, believe in redemption? Clyde had been granted a second chance beside that animal’s grave. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask, that grace might afford Nettie Mae an opportunity to right her wrongs, too.

  And if I were given that chance, O God—to start over, to make myself anew, to set aside the bitterness that has poisoned me all these years—I would not be ungrateful.

  She watched Beulah’s hands as the girl sewed. Browned and roughened by her work outdoors, they were nevertheless slender and moved with a latent, naive grace. The skin was yet unmarred by the marks of age—sun spots, scars—and the tendons didn’t rise distinct from bone and flesh as they did on the backs of Nettie Mae’s hands. The image of Clyde’s fingers twined with Beulah’s returned to Nettie Mae. The memory was distinct, sharp: The lantern light stark and golden on their skin. Two hands clasped as if God had made them that way, fitted together, and all around, everywhere, the dark of night. Darkness masking the rest of the world, swallowing the world in all directions. Nothing remained of reality save for Clyde and Beulah, joined.

  No. This girl is not for him. She cannot be.

  Clyde would have a wife someday, when he had truly grown into a man. Nettie Mae knew there was no staving off the inevitable. He would marry when the time was right; it wasn’t right now. But when he did begin courting, it would be with good girls, proper girls from town—not this strange, slow-blinking, sun-browned daughter of a trollop, who might or might not meddle in witchery and other corruptions, for all Nettie Mae could tell.

  Nettie Mae turned her attention to the window again. Snow had gathered along the bottom of the sill, an inch deep, maybe more, and was still climbing up the edges of the panes. A long, dark winter with little hope for peace. She breathed deeply till her nerves were somewhat soothed. Then she swallowed hard, summoning her accustomed bluntness.

  “You mustn’t be alone with Clyde. Ever. I said I’m grateful to you for helping my son as you did, and I am. But make no mistake, Beulah. My rule still stands. I won’t have you ruining Clyde’s future.”

  The girl looked up from her patchwork, but she only smiled with a tolerant air.

  Nettie Mae’s stomach twisted. She could abide Beulah’s uncanny self-possession no longer—not for today, at any rate. She left the girl to her sewing and took herself to the kitchen, even though Cora was skulking there.

  Cora had just begun to mix a cornbread batter for the midday meal. She looked up with a hopeful half smile as Nettie Mae passed the kitchen table. But Nettie Mae never slowed. She took her heavy winter shawl from its hook, wrapped it quickly around her shoulders, and left the house.

  The cold struck her hard as the kitchen door closed behind her. The skin of her cheeks tightened, and her eyes filled with stinging tears. Nettie Mae blinked until the tears had gone. Every breath burned in her throat and rose again in a thick plume, white against a white sky. Through a fog of falling snow, she could make out Clyde’s dark form, bundled in wool, and the hard line of the sheepfold wall, the stones black with moisture. Sheep called now and then, their voices made thick and small by the deadening silence of winter.

  Nettie Mae tucked her hands into the protection of her shawl and watched her son at work. He bent with his spade, his back strong and level, and flung a load of snow toward the great heap he’d already built several feet from the corner of the fold. Then another spadeful, and another. Clyde was tireless, determined, just as a man ought to be. From a distance, and with Clyde half-veiled by snowfall—edges gone blurry, features obscured—Nettie Mae could find no trace of the boy she had cherished and raised. Were it not for the fact that she had watched Clyde take up his shovel that very morning beside the kitchen steps, Nettie Mae might have mistaken the man at the sheepfold for a stranger. Fate and Ernest Bemis had robbed Clyde of his remaining youth. Now he was a man before his time, and all too soon he would yearn for a man’s life. It was no use trying to hold him, nor trying to hold him back. Nettie Mae could see that clearly enough; the truth was plain as the damp stone wall running hard through an indistinct whiteness.

  The kitchen door opened and closed, and even that sound was muffled by the snow, though Nettie Mae was standing only a few paces away. She turned and saw Cora coming gingerly down the steps, and looked away again with a tight scowl.

  Nettie Mae hoped the woman would proceed to the outhouse and leave her in peace, but Cora stopped beside Nettie Mae, albeit with the customary distance between them.

  “My goodness, but it’s a cold day.” The forced pluck in Cora’s voice set Nettie Mae’s teeth on edge. Her witless chirping rang like a bell through the quietude. “And to think, winter has only just begun.”

  “Yes, to think,” Nettie Mae answered dryly.

  “Nettie Mae, I . . .” Cora edged one step closer, timid and shrinking. “I have hoped for a chance to speak to you in confidence, without the children about. I hate to think how they would clamor, if they knew. And Beulah—she would try to convince me to change my mind. Tell me, please, when do you think one might be able to ride to Paintrock? This snowfall hasn’t let up for days, and—”

  “I’m sure I can’t say when the snow will end. Nor can I tell when the next one will come.” Nettie Mae added under her breath, “I’m no witch, to conjure such knowledge.”

  “There have been winter days when Ernest was able to ride to town. Well—he could make it to Paintrock in one day, and return the next, with daylight hours being so short. But not until later in the winter, when enough sleighs had gone by that the snow on the road had been packed down flat.”

  Nettie Mae didn’t answer. She kept her arms folded tightly beneath her shawl, staring into the blowing white, waiting for Cora to tire of this idle chatter and return to her work.

  “Or perhaps you have a sleigh,” Cora said. “We never had one
, though Ernest was saving up to buy one. We’d hoped to have a small sleigh of our own by the time the snow fell this year, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I haven’t got a sleigh.”

  On the rare occasions when some dreadful winter emergency had required a trip to Paintrock, Substance had strapped his lacquered wooden skis to his boots and covered the twenty miles in that fashion. Nettie Mae had no intention of disclosing the skis’ existence; Cora would only send Clyde off on some flippant errand without regard for his safety. And Clyde, eager to prove his manliness and worth, would go at once, without pausing to ask whether the trip was truly necessary. Unless one of the children fell dangerously ill, Nettie Mae would keep her son at home.

  “Then I suppose I must wait until the road is packed down,” Cora said. “The matter can wait, I suppose, but this promises to be such a dreadfully long winter, and I’m . . . well, I’m eager to be off.”

  “Off?” Nettie Mae looked at the woman sharply.

  “Yes. You see, I’ve decided not to stay. Here, I mean.” Cora swept one arm in a wide arc, indicating the snowbound farm and the distant Bemis homestead—the foothills beyond, too, and the ghostly presence of the Bighorns, more felt than seen through a shifting white mist. “I’ve decided I must return to Saint Louis as soon as can be managed.”

  “Have you?” Nettie Mae’s brows lifted in surprise.

  Cora’s departure would resolve the worst of Nettie Mae’s troubles. She would no longer be forced to work alongside the woman who had destroyed her family and her life. And Cora would take Beulah with her—back to the city, far from Clyde’s reach.

  Cautiously, Nettie Mae said, “But it must be a costly endeavor, to travel from here to Saint Louis. How will you manage the expense?”

  “The president’s china. I’ve thought it all out. I’ll sell the china set in Paintrock—surely one of those wealthy ranchers up north would like to buy it for his wife—and I’ll use the money for travel expenses. We can hire a wagon to take us to Carbon, and from Carbon, we can take the train to Saint Louis.”