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

by Olivia Hawker

  If she were courageous, Cora wouldn’t have made a ruin of so many lives.

  Cora twitched away from the window and the sight of Nettie Mae’s home, ready to pace again. But her toe caught the wicker of her sewing basket and she paused. Now there was a task to which she could apply herself on this dismal day. If she must be parted from her neighbor, then she would give Nettie Mae some small gift by which to remember . . . what? Their friendship?

  You presume too much, Cora told herself, in thinking Nettie Mae will wish to remember you at all.

  Yet despite that bitter thought, Cora sank into her rocker and sorted through the basket. She still had a few cards of fine silk thread, which she had bought years ago upon leaving Saint Louis. Cora had intended to save those lovely threads and embroider the finest, laciest delights for Beulah’s trousseau. Crisp white kerchiefs, a ladylike chemise. Time had gotten away from her, though, and now here Beulah was, already stepping into womanhood, already taking notice of young men. All the things I ought to have done but failed to do. The changes I should have noticed. But my eyes were closed.

  Tucked among her quilting scraps, Cora found the linen kerchief she had hemmed and folded carefully, then forgotten for goodness knew how long. She spread it across her knee, trying to smooth away the creases with her hand. Then she stretched the linen on a small wooden hoop and sorted through the silk threads, choosing only the best and brightest.

  Cora rocked gently as she worked, allowing her hands to move as they would, laying in the first stitches of an unplanned motif. As needle slipped into linen and the glistening silk hissed softly through the fabric, Cora wandered through the desolate landscape of her thoughts. Amid fear of the changes that must soon come, she dwelt most often in the cramped stone confines of regret. She would have missed Nettie Mae just as much, Cora realized, even if they hadn’t come to build this tentative friendship. They had shared too much not to feel something for one another. Old hatred notwithstanding, how could two women live as they had—cooperating, surviving together, beating back the terrors of isolation and darkness—without mourning their separation?

  The needle jabbed Cora just beyond the rim of her thimble. She started at the pain, surprised by her carelessness—but then, she had sunk so deeply into her thoughts. She dropped the thimble into her lap and sucked her finger until no more drops of blood welled. Only then, blinking back tears, did she think to study the design she had worked into her linen square. She traced with one finger the shining silk outline of two flowers. Spring beauties, their petals veined in pink, opening atop a single stem.

  CLYDE

  The frogs began to sing as Clyde left the pasture behind and entered the flourishing sanctuary of the river trail. The sun had set moments before, and a long, slow-lingering golden light still stretched across the prairie, hanging among the green bristling fringes of the grass. The evening was mild, still free from the flies and mosquitoes that would all too soon make their vexing appearance and hinder a fellow as he walked. The river smelled richly of leaves and new growth, but though he breathed in the intoxicating scent deeply, it was done by habit alone. Evening’s beauty couldn’t reach Clyde, couldn’t pierce the palisade of his thoughts. A thick, hot anger had walled him in—anger and a sinking desperation that had made him feel entirely powerless.

  His mother had told him over supper, just as she rose to begin the washing up, that Cora Bemis intended to leave for Paintrock. Clyde was to drive them, and Nettie Mae would hear no argument. The matter was settled; the family would soon be gone.

  Beulah would be gone.

  He tried to imagine the journey, tried to prepare himself for what must come. The long road to Paintrock in a crowded, rocking wagon—all the family’s possessions packed in, the children squabbling and fussing. Twenty miles of a slow, agonizing drive, no time alone to bid farewell to the girl he had come to . . . what—to love?

  Maybe. Maybe it was so. He might love Beulah, Clyde supposed, and if he did, it was all the more tragic that he would have no time to bid her a proper farewell. It seemed likely he might never see her again.

  Clyde had tried to argue with his mother. “What about next winter? How will we run the farm on our own?”

  “The decision has been made,” Nettie Mae told him. “There’s no point protesting, Clyde. The Bemises are moving away, and that is that.”

  What cruel twist of fate was this, he wondered—to take away the girl on whom he had come to depend? His trusted partner about the farm, his only companion. The girl he had come to admire so very much, too.

  Clyde wouldn’t allow himself to think beyond admiration, to acknowledge that small, persistent thrill of warmth inside his chest. What use to think on it now?

  Twenty miles off—might as well be twenty thousand miles.

  Clyde would be lucky if he caught sight of Beulah once a month, on his routine trips to Paintrock to fetch the post or buy sugar and coffee at the general store. He tried to picture Beulah outside that very store, giggling at the window with new friends, dressed in the stylish mode of a town girl. He tried to imagine her entering the baking contest at the church, lifting a little raspberry tart in a delicate, pale hand and saying, One would think a gentleman would remember the girl he danced with at the spring jubilee.

  The image didn’t fit. The very thought of Beulah as a town girl was so absurd, Clyde might have laughed aloud, if he hadn’t been too angry for laughter. He could more easily picture a pronghorn or a hawk in a fancy dress than Beulah—batting her eyes, simpering and perfumed and curled. No life suited the girl but this one, here at the edge of the wilderness, the boundary of the world. Beulah was part of this land, just as the land was part of her—intrinsic, inseparable. How would she survive in Paintrock?

  And how could Clyde ever hope to get by without Beulah? The dull promise of lonely days yawned before him—an endless monotony of work unrelieved by the girl’s conversation, her strange and beautiful observations, the simple comfort of her silent presence.

  I don’t want this life without her. The realization came to Clyde with a thump in his chest, an impact, a dull pain. He knew it was a true thought. But what was he to do? Abandon the farm—his animals? Abandon his mother? He couldn’t possibly. Neither he nor Nettie Mae had any other means of living. Cora had come from a big city, Clyde knew; she understood how to get along in a place like Paintrock. Clyde and his mother would be lost there, obliged to throw themselves on the mercy of the church. Such weakness would break his mother’s spirit. I don’t much like the thought of it myself.

  As the dense undergrowth of the river trail wrapped around him, some of Clyde’s anger eased. Serenity had become a balm—once Beulah had shown him how to find it. He made his way to the bank and stood at the chattering, murmuring edge of the Nowood, watching the bats come down from their roosts. They flitted over the water, dark and agile, turning on the wing. The remnants of the day faded, replaced by the gentle blue half light that sweeps in just before dusk and lingers but a few rare minutes. Above the river, bands of thin cloud arched across the sky. The clouds glowed with an echo of sunset, pink and luminous, and the choir of frogs sang loudly up in the damp, green canyon. The sounds quieted Clyde’s racing thoughts—the chanting of frogs, the Nowood’s endless flow, even the minute cries of the bats, only the nearest of which he could hear. But the river didn’t carry off his pain.

  When the pink light had faded from the clouds, he left the bank and returned to the trail, and soon came upon the grave. Not his father’s grave, but the one he and Beulah had made together. Spring runoff or animals had disturbed it since Clyde’s last visit many weeks before. He looked around in dismay. Something had unearthed the coyote’s bones, scattering them across the flat red sand. It made his heart pound, to see the creature again—this time stark and white and permanently cold. Most of what the coyote had once been was gone now, forever. The animal had come up out of the earth as if to accuse its killer.

  Here on the farm, the bones seemed to say, onl
y you hold yourself to account. You are your father’s son. This is a lonely place, and you will become what loneliness made of Substance—the hardness, the hate. That’s the way of the world, the way of parents and children.

  I ain’t a child any longer, Clyde said to the coyote’s spirit, to his father’s, to his own. I’m no longer a boy. I will make my own world and build my own future.

  But even as he answered, Clyde suspected he had no real power to alter the path of his fate.

  He gathered all the bones he could find, dropping the smallest into his pockets as he picked his way among brush and stone. Then he laid the bones out on the sand. They lay mute but sharp against the gray, dusky ground. Clyde set the ribs and pelvis and leg bones where he thought they ought to go, but he couldn’t reassemble the coyote’s body. Too many parts had washed away or had been carried off by scavengers. Still he worked, jaw clenched, determined. Scapula and long, graceful leg bones, the small white vertebrae like fragments of a broken crock.

  Clyde would have laid out the two-headed lamb, too, but he found no trace, not a single bone. The miraculous creature had vanished from the world—so thoroughly gone Clyde wondered whether it had truly existed, or whether he and Beulah had dreamed it up together.

  It can’t have disappeared entirely. There must be some remains, something left for me to see.

  He picked his way back down to the stony riverbed and searched among the rocks, but still he found nothing.

  As Clyde returned to the grave site, however, something round and dark caught his eye, just below his feet. He halted just in time to avoid treading on the thing and took a hesitant step backward. He bent to examine the object, squinting against the oncoming night. It was the coyote’s skull, and the circle of darkness that had snared Clyde’s attention was an eye socket, staring back at him from among the rocks.

  Clyde had to pull hard to lift the skull, for sand had accumulated around the bare bone. Dust had gathered in the seams of the bone, blushing what had once been white to canyon red. He turned the skull over in his hands. Sand and fragments of leaves ran out of the hollow braincase, pattering as they fell back to earth.

  He looked down at the skull where it rested in his hands. The teeth, still sharp; the one broken flat, just as he remembered. The void where the eyes should have been, the dark hollows that still seemed to see and know. He shrank from the memory of the animal’s death, yet he knew he had no right to absolve himself of that pain, the pain he had caused—so Clyde shut his eyes and remembered. He watched the scene play out on the ruthless stage of memory. He felt again the sickening rage, felt it rise and crest to overcome him. He felt satisfaction at his own brute force. And underneath the satisfaction, fear—of being weak, being alone. The need to prove, as his father had proved, that he was a man, merciless, undisputed.

  When the vision had passed, Clyde stood for a moment, trembling, alone with the bats and the river. The frogs had fallen silent, stilled for a moment by the passage of some unknown creature. Clyde left the bank and carried the skull back to the other bones—the scatter of white, the body diminished. But he couldn’t bring himself to set the skull in its proper place. Instead, he sent out one final apology to the coyote’s spirit, then returned to the trail, delving deeper into the rank, dusky heart of the cottonwoods.

  The sight of his father’s grave never failed to strike Clyde with a jolt of dread or satisfaction. He never could name the emotion. He had visited only rarely since his father’s death, yet the grave was ever present, a thing Clyde always felt—the absence of his father, the absence in himself, a void once occupied by Substance. The void that remained in Clyde longed to fill itself with the same dark water, the force that had filled his father. He could feel its hunger, its ravenous nature—an emptiness that couldn’t be sated.

  Thaw had scattered many of the artifacts Beulah had brought to the grave. Clyde didn’t spare the time to hunt for those small, bright things, as he had searched for the coyote’s bones. Instead, he carried the skull to the head of his father’s grave. He set it atop what remained of the mound, the almost imperceptible rise—all that was left to mark the place where the man had fallen. Clyde pressed the skull down till its long teeth sank into red soil.

  I ain’t what you tried to make me, Clyde said to his father’s shade. He didn’t know whether Substance heard, whether Substance tried to listen. I won’t be you. I’ll make myself into a different man, a better husband and father—good and useful and kind.

  For he would be those things; Clyde knew it. Husband and father. The time was coming, the change of his seasons. Whatever his mother might wish, however she may long to delay the inevitable, Clyde felt his future open before him like the certainty of dawn or the coming of the autumn lambs. The pattern of his life was set now. The threads had woven themselves around him, bright and intricate in the nimble fingers of time.

  I’ve chosen, Clyde told Substance and Nettie Mae. It’s my choice to make, for this ain’t your world anymore. The world has passed to me—and to Beulah. We’ll make of it what we choose.

  “Clyde?”

  He turned, flushing with surprise. Beulah was moving down the trail at her usual pace, the unhurried amble, the drift of a dream. Where she went, the evening didn’t seem as dark, as if she pushed back the coming night with her simple, natural radiance. She was carrying flowers in both hands. She had gathered them in exuberance, Clyde could see—a tangle of color even twilight couldn’t dull. All the blossoms that filled the springtime pasture, plucked without regard for order or symmetry. Spring beauties and buttercups, yellow bells, even the leggy, dark stems of saxifrage with their dull, dry stars for flowers. She must have picked them while she walked through the dusk, taking every stem that slanted or trembled across her path. Pink yarrow blushed in the half darkness; bindweed and buttercups trailed over her wrists. Angelica from the Bemis garden held up a spray of flat umbels, its tight buds yet to open. She had even collected the humblest flowers, those that were little more than weeds—pale spikes of henbit, circlets of fleabane, orange poppies, the tiny warm flames of geranium. They burst from her hands as if they still grew, as if she were the force that gave them life.

  Beulah tucked her bouquet beside the coyote’s skull. When she straightened, Clyde could see tears standing in her eyes. “Ma says we’re to go to Paintrock after all.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to go, but I guess there ain’t much I can do to convince her we should stay. I tried already. I tried to show her what a good place this is, how lively it is. But she won’t have it any other way.”

  “It is a good place,” Clyde said. “I always knew that, but I never saw it so clearly . . . before you and I grew close.”

  Beulah looked down at the grave. One of the tears broke and ran down her cheek. Clyde had never seen her weeping before, except on the night of the coyote.

  “It won’t be the same,” he said, “living here without you.”

  “You’ll still have the land. I hope that’s some comfort. Our land and everything in it.” Beulah sighed and turned to gaze north, though she couldn’t see a thing from where she stood—nothing but the undergrowth. “You’ll have the land, but up in Paintrock, I’ll have . . . who knows what?”

  “Paintrock ain’t so terrible.” Even as he spoke, Clyde grieved, for he knew what it would cost Beulah to be separated from the land that was herself.

  “I don’t want to go, Clyde. I don’t want to part with this place. Or with you.”

  He took her hand. He could feel the faint stickiness of sap from the flowers. She smelled of yarrow, pungent, green, and sharp. They said nothing more, for it had become their custom to feel rather than speak—to sense the mood and direction of the other, to trust as the creatures of the prairie trusted to their instincts. Wordless, hand in hand, they mourned.

  The clouds had moved on. Dusk muted the earth, but in the purple sky the first few stars glittered, distant and pale. A few late birds called from the cottonwoods,
high in their murmuring roost. Clyde whistled—a sage thrasher’s call. The river sighed between its banks; the wind moved lazily, stirring the leaves. Then, from the mouth of the canyon, a thrasher responded, high and shrill.

  Beulah looked up into Clyde’s face. The tears had dried on her cheeks. “I’ll marry you someday.”

  Clyde laughed—a choking, bitter sound, for what chance had they now of marrying? “I never asked you.”

  “You will someday,” Beulah said. “So I’m telling you now: my answer is yes.”

  12

  A LONG WAY DOWN

  Nettie Mae and my ma worked faster than I’d ever believed possible. They chose the date when they would send Clyde north to Paintrock, driving the wagon laden with all the possessions my ma wished to keep, and everything she hoped she might be able to sell. The wagon would carry us, too—the Bemises in exile, casting ourselves to the wind, praying we would land safely and take root in friendly soil. I had only three days left on my beloved land.

  Ma made good use of her time. She busied herself with sorting and packing, and kept the children occupied with tasks that excited them—pounding nails into the corners of wooden crates, gathering their toys and favorite belongings. Ma worked with an energy and focus I hadn’t seen in her since the winter, when she had toiled for redemption under Nettie Mae’s eye.

  I went on tending to the animals and crops, for though a great, heavy sadness had settled in my heart at the prospect of leaving this land—my land—still I couldn’t believe it would truly come to pass. A world in which I was separated from the prairie was not a world I recognized. I didn’t always see change coming before it struck, before it washed over those less observant like the sudden wall of a flash flood. But this shift in my fate seemed too big, too important, for me to have missed. So I tended the living things that were under my care and watched the passing of the days, sunrise and sunset, each afternoon warming with the golden approach of summer.