Edna takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.
"This is your doing, Jack," she says. "Lord, but I'm grateful."
"I'm not stealing your girl's thunder," I tell her. "She's earned this on her own."
"You know what I mean."
I suppose I do. But Nettie was hungry to learn. All I did was point her in a direction or two.
There's a party at the Bean farm later that day, a regular hooley with wild crow boys coming down out of the wooded hills and everybody having themselves a fine old time. At one point Maida and Zia are doing a two-step along the peak of the barn and when Jolene tries to join in, the three of them fall off on the far side of the roof, out of sight. Everybody laughs except for Edna, who lets out a sharp gasp.
"Don't you worry about those girls," Crazy Crow reassures her. "They never get into something so deep that they can't pull themselves out."
"But the roof's so high …"
Her voice trails off when the girls come round the side of the barn, poking at each other and giggling.
When it starts on getting dark, Bear and Nettie put together a huge bonfire in the middle of the farmyard and we all pull up chairs and stumps to sit around it, except for Maida, Zia and the wild crow boys, who start up to dancing again with Jolene, going round and round the fire, feet stomping in time to some strange tune Alberta's pulling from a fiddle, who knows where she got it, fiddle and tune both.
A long time later, Edna's gone in to bed and there's stories being told around the coals of the fire, songs being sung. Nettie comes walking up to where I'm sitting on the porch of the farmhouse. I'm looking off across the field of wildflowers that sides the house, thinking of what seems like a long ago time when this fox child was just a skinny little thing running wild. Now she's a young lady. Still has the hills in her, the accent and the turn of phrase that make the big-city folk laugh, but she's gained something else from these wild woodlands and fields that can't be born into a body or taught: the grace of learning how to listen, and learning how to speak. I see the studies she does of weeds and flowers and such, I read the essays she writes, and I know these hills have found themselves a voice in her.
I think I'm proudest of her for that. These days she tells me stories, like I still tell them to her, and she's not shy about it anymore. We're meeting on common ground, like equals, the way I always wanted it to be but she never felt she was up to before.
"Hey, Jack," she says as she comes up and sits beside me on the bench. "You okay?"
I nod. "I'm just admiring the starlight on that field of flowers."
"You're missing the stories."
I glance at the bonfire. Crazy Crow's telling one of his, that long rambling account of the year he and Raven wintered in Africa and found Cody teaching people how to make fire.
"I've heard them all before," I say.
She smiles and gives me a light poke in the ribs with her elbow. "Wasn't it you who told me that you can never hear a story too many times?"
"That's true. A good story's like a good song. It doesn't age."
She doesn't say anything, just listens like I taught her to listen to the wild, and like the wild, I find myself filling up the quiet that lies between us with words. What I'm thinking is: Sometimes the love you have for someone can spur you on to great and wonderful things, takes all that potential you've got resting inside you and lets it blossom and grow. But sometimes a love can hold you back. Nettie, she's had both with me, and now it's time for her to get on with her life and stop wishing for what's never going to be.
Corbae and human, even a human with fox blood running strong in her, can't ever pair up for too long. It doesn't work because how do you reconcile a life that stretches back to when the medicine lands woke up out of the long ago to make this world and a life that's as brief in comparison as a candle flickering in the wind? It's why Ray doesn't stick around, it's why the crow girls wear their hearts on their sleeves and will share them from time to time, but they don't ever give them away.
And it's not like I haven't tried before. But it hurts too much and I'm too old to carry that pain again. Except this hurts, too. Maybe more. Who am I kidding? This calls up an ache that goes bone deep and settles in the marrow. But it's got to be done. She needs a chance at a real life with her own kind.
So that's what I'm thinking, but what I say is, "You've got a lot of good friends here. See you don't forget them when you're living in that big city."
She always had insight as a child. Now she's a young woman and that insight's only grown sharper. She gives me a look and I know she can see straight through me. I'm like an open book to her.
She knows I'm not telling her to remember anything; I'm saying good-bye.
"I will always love you, Jack," she says.
Maida warned me of this years ago. Zia, too. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear.
I'm carrying a big hurt when I leave the farm next morning, early, before daylight, jackdaw wings earning me south, over Newford, over the lake, all the way down to Mexico. But distance doesn't ease the pain. Nor do the years.
And one day I just have to see her again.
4.
Late summer, 1971
I hear about how Nettie is doing from the crow girls, from Jolene and Crazy Crow and all, never tire of it, not the smallest details that come my way. And I collect the stories that spring up like trod-on grass where she's walked.
It's not just the hills around Hazard that gossip about her now. She's on a world stage—maybe not in a big way, like someone making the New York Times bestseller list, which she doesn't, but her books are being read in a lot of places that never heard of the Kickaha Hills or those hollows and high lonesome ridges around Hazard until she wrote about them. So people talk. People write about her.
I have the books. The catalogues for a couple of her art shows. But it's not enough. One day I know I have to see her. I don't plan on entering her life again, I just want to look at her one more time.
'Course nothing works out the way you expect when it comes to Nettie Bean. Must be the fox blood in her.
Edna took ill, the winter of '49, and never did live to see Nettie graduate from college. Didn't see her graduate and didn't see how she moved back to the farm and settled in like she'd never been off studying for all those years. Nettie just had enough of cities, missed her woods and her hills too much to put the farm up for sale when her mammy died.
Her returning would have broken Edna's heart. Edna wouldn't have seen Nettie's happiness, only how she was trapping herself the same way her mammy had in her time.
But the farm was no trap for Nettie. By the time she moved back home, she'd been having essays and articles published in naturalist journals, was selling her paintings, even had a book sold and coming out in the fall. She wasn't rich, but she could cover her living expenses and the land taxes. And maybe she wasn't making a lot of friends in the towns roundabout, fighting for closure of the mines and to stop the clear-cutting and all, but she was still happier than Edna had ever been on that land.
Because Edna hadn't been close to it the way her daughter was. They were neither of them farmers, though they grew their own greens and such, kept chickens for the eggs, a cow for milk. Edna had rented out her hayfields, done washing and mending, whatever she could to make ends meet. That farm was like a big ball and chain holding her down. For Nettie it was a piece of freedom.
She was old by hill standards—almost twenty-four—when she finally married Randall Miller in '53, and the marriage lasted long enough to produce one child the next year, a daughter. She was baptized Lilah, after Randall's paternal grandmother, and was a dark-haired, sullen girl as different from the wild fox child Nettie had been as honey is from vinegar. Lilah took an immediate dislike to her mother, wouldn't suckle, couldn't even abide Nettie holding her. I can't explain it. Nettie might have carried her for nine months, but it was like Lilah was someone else's child. If she had any of the blood in her, no one could smell it, which, if you
know anything about genetics, makes no sense either.
The marriage didn't last much beyond Lilah's first year, though from all accounts, it was never any great shakes in the first place. Nettie kept her name, kept at her work, and plain ignored any attempt on Randall's part to give up either just to fit the picture he had in his head of what a wife was supposed to be. It took a couple of years before he finally gave up trying to fit that round peg she was into the square hole he imagined for her.
He didn't divorce her at first. What he wanted was that land, the Millers having lost all their own through mismanagement and plain bad luck over the years. So instead of having the marriage annulled, he tried to have Nettie institutionalized for incompetence, claiming she was a danger to herself and those around her. Like father, like daughter, I suppose, since Lilah took to that idea in her own time like a duck does to water.
Nettie didn't have many friends 'round there by that time—not human ones. There wasn't a whole lot of understanding or support for her fights with the mining companies and the loggers. Truth was, even before she got into all of that, folks thought she was a little too strange, even by hill standards. So Randall might have had his way, except Alberta got wind of what was happening and she went and had a talk with Chloë, who sent this lawyer to the county seat, where the competency hearing was being held. To hear Alberta tell the story, it took maybe all of five minutes for that lawyer to straighten things out. He handled the divorce, too, when Randall filed the papers a few weeks later.
I would have been there for her myself, stood by her through that hard time, but by the time word got to me, it was all over. Nettie kept her name and the family farm; Randall kept the daughter and moved back into Hazard where the two of them lived up above the work bays of his garage in that small apartment he'd had before he got married. Maybe no one can explain why Lilah took that sudden dislike to her mother pretty much from the moment she was born, but it's not hard to see why she never gave it up. Randall harbored a grudge against Nettie till the day he died, and it stands to reason that his daughter never heard a kind word in relation to her mother.
Lilah eventually married Stephen Madan, a real estate agent who made himself a tidy bundle when he parceled and sold off his own family farm before his father was cold in the grave. Of course she poisoned him against Nettie, too, but with a man like that, it wouldn't have taken much.
Lilah was a puzzle to me, but in some ways Randall puzzled me more. I never could figure how a man who'd loved Nettie as much as I know he once did could bring so much hurt into her life.
But then sometimes I wonder if, in my own way, I was no better than him.
I love those piney wood hills around Hazard any time of the year, but I think I love summer the best. It's late in the season when I fly up, the August fields awash with milkweed, goldenrod and great purple sweeps of joe-pye weed. I ride a warm updraft, circle the hollow where I first met a wild fox girl. When I'm sure there's no one nearby, I glide down out of the blue to the old piece of granite that's still resting in a field of tall grass and wildflowers and settle down on its rough stone surface.
It's not changed much. The forest has crept a little closer, the trees are taller. Still old growth. Crickets cheep like high-pitched squeaky wheels and the air's full of bees, humming and buzzing from one purple blossom to the next. This time of year the creek's almost dry, but I can still trace the route it takes down the hollow, following a thin trickle of water that gleams like a silver ribbon in the bright sun.
It's a drowsy kind of a day and I've had me a long flight. I nod off after a while and the next thing I know it's late afternoon and I'm looking up at a red-haired woman with eyes so blue you'd think they'd swallowed a piece of the sky above us.
"Well, look what the crows dug up," she says.
She's standing there, hands on her hips, smiling. Not a wild fox child anymore, but the fox is still there, and I don't doubt she's only part-tamed. She'd be forty-two, but looks ten years younger, and whatever I told myself when I flew up here today, I can't pretend that the real reason wasn't to see her.
"How're you doing, Nettie?" I say.
"I've been better." She sits down and talks like it hasn't been twenty-five years since we last saw each other. "I slept funny last night and woke with a crick in my neck."
She's still carrying that old leather satchel of hers—it's a wonder it's still all of a piece. Reaching in, she takes out some oatmeal cookies wrapped up in a piece of checked cotton cloth.
"Care for some field food?" she asks.
"Thanks."
The cookies are good and go well with the tea we share out of the canteen she's carrying on her belt. It's sweetened with honey from her own hives, she tells me.
"You're doing well for yourself," I say after a while. "I hear about you all the time—read your books."
"I don't hear about you at all."
I shrug. "Yeah, well, I don't do much of anything. Collect my stories, tell 'em when and where I can. They've still got my picture in the dictionary, right there beside the word 'footloose.' "
"I could've sworn it was beside 'feckless,' " she says, but she smiles—same crooked smile her mother had.
I figure I deserve that. I never got the words out the last time. I told myself I didn't need to, that she'd understand, maybe not right away, but at some point, only the truth was, I just didn't have the courage. I won't let that happen again.
"I can understand your being mad," I begin, but she cuts me off.
"I'm not mad, Jack. I was never really mad. I just missed you. You took yourself out of my life—for my own good, I'm sure is what you were thinking—but you never asked me if that's what I wanted. You never stopped to think how I'd feel."
"I thought I knew how you felt."
"That I was head over heels, crazy in love with you from the first time we met?"
"Something like that. But it wasn't right. You were just a child."
"And later? When I grew up?"
"I could see too much hurt coming out of it," I say.
She gives me a steady look. "And whose feelings were you sparing? Mine or your own?"
"Some of both," I admit.
"You figured it'd be like the way it worked out with Ray and my mother," she says.
"How'd you know about that?"
She shrugs. "I think Jolene told me."
"So maybe now you understand."
"I don't understand at all," she says. "What's wrong with taking what good you can when it comes? Might as well. Life's short enough. Sooner or later, we all die anyway, so why not take our happinesses where we can?"
"My people don't die," I say. "Not unless somebody kills us, and even then I'm not so sure. I think some of us—like the crow girls and Raven—are going to be here right until that last day when they finally close the curtains and start sweeping down the stage."
She just looks at me.
"What did you think we were?" I ask.
"I don't know. Some kind of spirits, I guess. I never thought about it all that much."
"Most of us have been here since the first days," I tell her. "But the corbae, we were here before there even was a 'here.' "
"How … ?" she starts to say, but then she just shakes her head.
She looks out across the field and I can almost see her thinking, working out what it all means. I lie back on the grass and look up into the blue so like her eyes. I hear a couple of crows argue in the distance and I wonder if the crow girls are visiting or if it's just those cousins of theirs squabbling. Closer at hand, the crickets are still cheeping. They put me in mind of a piece Nettie wrote about them for some magazine or other. I remember all the little pen and ink illustrations she did to accompany it and I can't help but smile. She was drawing crickets from the first time she took pencil to hand.
"What's it like?" she finally asks. "This living forever."
I shrug. "Everybody takes to it a little different. The crow girls, they live each day like they just got h
ere, like it's still the long ago. Zen time. Every day is now and forever. Some of the rooks and jays, they get deep into expressing themselves, take their music and their art and keep walking it deeper and deeper into the place that everything comes from—you know, trying to walk it all the way back to those dreaming places that sleep under the forever trees."
Nettie nods, remembering that story, I guess.
"Others, they like to wander—like Crazy Crow. And then you've got Raven. He's carried the weight of history for so long that he's just stepped out of time. Nothing touches him there. No responsibilities, no worries."
"And how about you, Jack?" she asks. "How do you handle it?"
I sit back up to look at her, resting my weight on my elbows. "I tell the stories. First I told them to remember them because a long time ago, I got like Raven and stepped out of time, didn't know my history, didn't care anymore. Forgot everything. Just wandered around and let things happen to me. That could still be me, except I ran into the crow girls one day and … well, I've told you how it is. You see them, and things change for you. You start looking for meaning again. Start wanting to make a difference."
I've never talked about this to anyone before. I guess I should have started a long time ago—started with that wild fox child Nettie once was, so that she'd understand.
"And now," I say, lying back on the grass. "Now I tell the stories so that maybe we don't have to keep making the same mistakes over and over again."
It's like old times, biding here by our rock in this hollow, passing the time with pieces of quiet and conversation, the sun starting to slide behind the trees.
Someplace to Be Flying Page 21
