Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  “What?” said the boy, who seemed embarrassed now by his attempt to ridicule the crow corpse.

  He tried prying the old bird body from the bulwarks, only to have the tips of her bones come loose while the feathers stayed. Frustrated, he mashed all of her back into the pitch.

  “I thought things might have gone faster,” he said.

  “That was thinking?” said Noah. The old man squinted round at the shrubs, and the treetops, and the clouds, then the prow of his nest, where the dead crow was stuck for good. “At least someone was thinking.”

  · · ·

  In a copse of trees, without a noise, appeared the God Crow. It was the God Crow to me anyway. But each of us saw something different, each according to his or her own story. The Old Bone saw what looked like one of Noah’s own kind, also old, wearing a long white beard. This God rode in on a donkey and had a rooster on his arm. Plum Black said she’d noticed a break in the weather that distilled the smoke until it disappeared. Noah climbed down from his scaffolding and talked to a tree. At first I thought Noah was just muttering to himself. But as he spoke, a tiger appeared from the underbrush and sat in a bank of tall grass, swishing his tail just beyond Noah’s sight. Another tiger neared, and the two of them disappeared as if of one mind back into the thicket. A camel raised its head above the hedge and studied the human family busy at work. An owl landed, as did its mate. Strange birds never before seen flew in quick circles through the waning smoke, and a hyena laughed its lonely, hideous laugh somewhere far away. At one point my father thought he’d seen the Bird: God appeared to him, in size about halfway between a human and a crow. It had the body of a crow, crusty-winged and crow-blue, but the face of the beastman, dull, naked, and slow-moving like the human, drawn to either what was entirely obvious or entirely obscure. Then again the waves of heat and smoke altered in the air, dulling my father’s sight.

  But I saw neither the Half-Bird nor the creatures. For me, the God Crow watched in much the same way Our Mother of Many did. You felt the presence of the mother, but also felt she wasn’t watching. Then, just when you forgot she was there, she would reproduce the long, low hum you were humming, matching you note for note, and the feathers on the back of your neck would stand. All my attention fell upon It when It landed on a log next to one of Noah’s many fires. The old man walked over and sat down beside It, and the two spoke.

  “It’s been far too long,” said Noah. “I build in darkness.”

  The God Crow pecked at the bark of Its perch, ruffling and unruffling Its feathers.

  “Okay, okay,” said Noah. “What do you want?”

  “Let’s have tea,” said God.

  They did.

  Noah put the tea down in front of the God Crow, Who was busy watching a fly wheel through the air, but for only a second. Then the Bird began preening Its feathers.

  Finally, It spoke.

  “Noah, do you believe in me?”

  “I build the ark.”

  “Still, you doubt me?”

  “Must all drown?”

  “Yes,” said the God Crow. “The fallen ones, the giant corrupters, everyone.”

  “Even beasts? Even children?”

  “Stop,” said the Lord. “Already, I mourn. My creation has always saddened me. But soon, even more.”

  “Oh, Great God of Adam, for fifty-two years now I build your ark in the hope of delaying your vengeance. But also with hopes that humankind might rid itself of at least some of its evils.”

  “Fifty-two years?”

  “Well, it takes time,” said Noah. “To find the right trees, invent the right tools.”

  “It took you fifty-two years just to get started.”

  “The trees had to grow.”

  “And what did you do until then?”

  “Oh—” Noah picked at a wild strand from his beard gone stiff and black with bitumen. “Same thing I’d been doing the last four hundred years.”

  “Did you think I was not?” asked the God Crow. “Not serious, or not truthful?”

  “I thought it was . . . well, I thought you were . . . testing.”

  “Testing whom?”

  “All of earth’s flesh,” said Noah, trying to get the answer right. “So that the violence might calm down a bit, and purity come to dwell again in human hearts. It could happen.”

  “It seems you’ve been delaying the ark much longer than you say.”

  “Yes, perhaps it has been too long in the making, yet—”

  “You doubt me.”

  “Forgive me. How can the world be destroyed with water when it is so dry?”

  “Would it help if I shot my great lightning bolt across the sky?”

  “I need more time,” said the beastman called Noah. “People need more time. What am I saying? I don’t believe you can do it.”

  “Three days hence, I will shoot my bolt. That will be the onset.”

  “I will need more time,” said Noah, “to build another ark, so that the fearful might repent upon seeing the floodwaters and find haven in your most merciful boat.”

  “What you’ve done here is enough.”

  “But even that’s not finished. If you drown them now, then I’ll go with them.”

  Then the one known as Noah looked with anguish at his three strong sons at rest at the far end of the ark. They laughed and joked with one another, unable to wash the pitch from their arms and robes as their mother brought them their supper.

  As if moving in a weary slumber, Noah began chopping.

  “Leave me now, please,” he said to the God Crow. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

  And he swung down with his implement into the pulp of a fallen Giant.

  crow’s feet: Any of the wrinkles at the outer corner of the eye, common in many adults.

  —THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

  5. The Garment

  I followed after the God Crow, who flew beyond the rookery, but lost sight of the Endless All-Knowing in the thick of the woods. Below, on the beastman’s path, I saw a man with a walking stick. He was heading back toward Noah’s inferno. Old Hookbill, who lived in the dog’s eye now, lumbered over with the clumsy gait of a dog to greet the traveler. She barked up into the trees at me, and I followed them back to Noah’s nest. Perhaps this was the god the Old Bone had spoken of, because this one had a long white beard like Noah’s and walked slowly and deliberately like him, using the walking stick. But then, this god had no donkey and no rooster on his shoulders. His face bore crying whiskers; his crying whiskers hung in billowy clouds.

  Upon seeing the traveler, Noah once again dropped his brush of pitch and stood before the stranger. The two smiled long at each other and did not speak. They stood face to face and placed their hands one upon the other’s shoulders until the words came from their beards.

  “Uriel, my friend, how is paradise?”

  “As lonely as always. But use your own eyes. You could see Eden from here, if it weren’t for all the smoke.”

  “Shall we have tea?”

  They sat down on the same log that Noah had sat upon with the God Crow. The traveler squinted uneasily at the cloud drifts of smoke above Noah’s home.

  Instead of tea, Noah came back from the ark with one of his animal-skin bottles.

  “Here, friend,” he said and sat again on the log.

  The traveler held the large bladder-like body up over his shoulder and the red liquid poured from the open neck.

  Soon the talk of the two humans became strange gibberish to me again as Hookbill the Mongrel scraped her toes across the dirt and walked up to the feet of Noah’s sons. There she begged for scraps from their plates that they readily threw down to her. Old Hookbill seemed happy to be an inhabitant of the dog’s eyes, one blue and the other brown, so the ancient sorcerer could inhabit only one eye at a time, and keep not only her identity but a crow’s one-eyed stare. She could perform feats of the will without the dog ever knowing. Such were the powers of Old Hookbill—th
e intermediary between beast and crow. What did the sons talk about? Back and forth, over and over, babble, chitchat—until the one known as Ham threw his plate down in a fit.

  “Why don’t we just plaster all of God’s creatures up there?” he said.

  “Relax. Father and his guest are beginning to take note. Besides, up there, this bird will be our benefactor.”

  “Blaspheme your own home,” said Ham.

  “Oh-ho, always so serious,” said another, as Ham stood in a fit and stomped into the ark. Hookbill the Dog Now followed.

  Throughout the nest, all up and down its long passages, the dog barked. But it was the Hookbill Within who showed me the secret accesses into the vessel. These openings were often up high, where the logs of the hull and the main deck met. Some were large enough for the dog’s entire head to fit through, where Hookbill would look out at me with one happy, surprised eye. Other openings were so small that only one paw fit through, and Hook-bill would do this for me, scratching the wood with her nails to get my attention and getting pitch all the way up to her dewclaw. In this way, I learned all the entrances into the ark that the beastman never used or even knew about. The holes were too large for the pitch to plug up. Now I could enter and leave their nest whenever I wished in even further secrecy.

  But hunger returned to the hound as it brought Hookbill back to the log, where Noah and the traveler sat. Once again, I could understand the discussion between them. As he spoke, Noah worked his strange, spider-like clutches through the Hookbill’s dusty old mange.

  The stranger coughed from the thick fumes in the air, and spoke.

  “And to think you were the source of such laughter, Noah. Seeing your fantastic ship now, they’d really have a howl.”

  “Would they, Uriel? Have I turned my back on everyone? Have I turned my back on you?”

  “It’s the will of God. Why?” The stranger shrugged. “Who can say? Still, you won’t believe me. Look. Three magnificent sons. You have much to be happy about.”

  Noah walked into his ark and returned with an eel. He removed one of the cauldrons of black stewing tar and held the eel up on a stick above the flames. Where had Noah possibly gotten this tender morsel? It had been months—since the drought began—since we’d seen a creature of water. The extremes of the fish, the eyes, the mouth, the fins, all began to curl back in a skeletal shrivel.

  The Old Bone and I watched from our perch.

  The Hookbill walked near, attentive, already begging.

  “This offering,” said the one known as Noah, “is not for my God. It goes out to your daughter. How old is she now?”

  “She grows so fast,” said the man through his weepy tendrils. “Eleven years now.”

  “Then I will dance at her wedding.”

  The two nodded their heads, and sipped from the severed neck of the hide, then held their heads in silence.

  “Noah,” said the traveler, “every day now, a mysterious rumbling sounds from the ground. A rumbling that grows closer, each hour, it seems. Each night now I hear it rumble up through the ground, to my bed, and my pillow. It sounds up from beneath my sleeping wife. The side of my head grows weary with it. In the lowlands, twice a day now, the raging tidewaters flood the land, unearthing the dead from their graves and sending them awash. The sky rips open. It howls. Rivers run backward.”

  “Uriel, go to your home. Return quickly with your family. We have all that you will need here. Hurry.”

  The traveler spoke. “The people with boats,” he said, “they have already fled. And the people of the lowlands, who know of your great ship, already they make progress on the journey here. Noah, safeguard yourself.”

  “But you. You can find refuge inside with us.”

  “No. I am only a messenger. I’ve been sent to give you my message, and that is all.”

  “All?”

  “One last thing.”

  “What?” Noah placed his eel on a stick against the log, the fleshy flanks blackened and the fishy juices gone. “You haven’t been listening to me,” he said. “You can be saved.”

  The traveler reached into his knapsack and pulled out the garment of a very small, newborn beastchild.

  “See that it is worn again, Noah.” The traveler rose to his feet. “You have my blessing. Now I must go. I haven’t much time.”

  And the traveler walked away through the clearing, moving much like the smoke that clouded the air. Noah held the small garment up before him. He could open all of the material across his fingertips. With just one knobbed, paddle-like hand, he spread it out, and he studied every inch and stitch of the child’s dress.

  The eel was too tasty to me and the Old Bone and to Hookbill the Dog Now, too, who left most of it for us. Afterward, I flew into one of my new openings to the ark to have my fill there as well.

  And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

  —GENESIS, 8:6

  6. Butterfly Net

  Dead of night.

  Almost day.

  The noise came from far off, like the echo of a whole forest of falling trees. All else was silence. No songbird sang the joy of the day to come, no beast slumped the forest floor, and no crow sang, Come follow. But the thunder was constant and low and traveled beneath the ground. The earth trembled with it, even the uppermost leaves, and above the hills, the sky exploded from within. Thunderheads flashed in the ominous dark, then receded back to darkness as the lesser bolts continued to twist and disappear. The lightning was like a school of trapped fish that flashed and wrangled against the walls of the mushroom cloud that spread out above the lake that had no other shore. The apparition of the world’s end was a horrific monster, spreading its monstrous wings out in a magnitude that would be too fearful to look upon if it weren’t also awesome and spellbinding above the reddening horizon.

  “I’ve got to see what that’s all about,” I said.

  “You don’t know?” asked the Old Bone from the next tree over.

  “That’s why I want to see it.”

  “Lightning,” said the Old One, flapping after me. “If a bolt doesn’t get you, the thunder will. It gives little crows like you a heart attack.”

  Many a crow met its end that way, even if the lightning struck nowhere near.

  We flew down to the lake that had no far shore, and now it had no near shore either. What once was swampland was now a dirty sargasso tide that spread out in all directions, and at the horizon, the sky was the same earthy gray-brown color where the tops of the hills dissolved into the cloud cover. The floodwater, flat and dull, broke out into large effluvial rips that frothed and roiled full of the flotsam of the land, and dead fish, and animals. The top halves of all the trees of the forest rocked in the underwater currents and eddies spilling up around them. Small mammals clung to the branches of the surrounded trees and stared with round saucer eyes at the water assailing them from below.

  “The beastman,” said the Old Bone in a whisper as we flew. “The beast.” Though to me it was the God Crow who had perpetrated such a madness as to make the rivers run backward. We flew on in the direction of the city of humans. In the river’s ravine, the tides buoyed up the waves of corpses. Pale bodies spun and bobbed, more fishes, rows of them, fowl, animals caught unaware. A stag sloshed against the rocky embankment, cut hugely from the violence and pushed by a flotsam of uprooted trees, rotten vegetation, insects, fungus, spores, seeds, pollen, all mixed with algae and the brackish swill of lake weed water. From the air, even a crow could smell the stench. The Old Bone and I flew on.

  A thick mist, made sharp by saltwater, hung before us and grew into a violent, rainy fog. It made the flying hard, and I wanted to leave it right away, but I wasn’t sure if we could, or which way to fly. At the human roost, surrounded by water, the inhabitants broke apart their homes on the village earth mounds. They used the larger trunks
and beams to build makeshift rafts and tentatively pushed themselves off into the flowing streets and the slurry beyond the city walls. Some sent themselves directly into the onslaught, where their rafts broke apart or spun out of control and disappeared into the abyss. Others pushed themselves off as best they could to shores where the flood had not yet reached and were still swept off by unseen forces. On the hillsides, small herds of them moved toward Noah’s nest. They moved there from all directions, heading uphill.

  “A Great Offering,” said the Old Bone. “A Jubilation, perhaps.”

  And though I was already engorged and groggy from the stewed carrion at the rim of the flood, we followed the herds of beastmen out of an uncontrollable excitement from the thought that a strange Jubilation might take place. We flew from tree to tree as they slogged along at their cumbersome pace, and there was less reason than normal for us to sneak above the poor-hearing creatures. The opening of the sluiceway from the mountain filled the sky with a rumbling, and the beastmen wailed one to the other, or to the woods, or to no one.

  The humans trudged uphill above the clouds and into the sunlight. The first waves of them found Noah in a field far from his rookery, holding a small net and watching a pair of smart butterfly wings bandied in the breeze above the meadow. One from the herd quieted the others, and he alone approached. As he walked through the field, he waved his arms to get Noah’s attention. But Noah kept his perplexed stare on his little net.

  Without looking up, he spoke: “You scared him away.”

  “Him?”

  “The butterfly, orange with black markings along the wings. The he of that kind. I already have a she-butterfly of that color. I thought I’d caught a he, but I injured him with the net, and he did not survive my attack.”

  “Noah, we repent. We heed your God’s warnings.”

  “Of course, now—”

  “We must board your boat.”

  “No. First the small. First the very, very small, so I can place them in all of the out-of-the way places. That way I’ll have room for the rest.”