The drive up the hill had taken far longer than Cora had expected. The horse was reluctant and ill tempered—possibly Cora hadn’t fitted its harness correctly, for she had never done the job before—and every foot she ascended above the prairie felt hard won, gained only by her insistent command, lashing the horse’s rump with the ends of its reins. She paused on the ridge, surveying the gray forest below. The pines seemed thin from her vantage—slender enough to fell with a hard shove. But there were so many trees. Even with the better part of the valley obscured, still the wall of pines made Cora shudder. How far into the foothills did the forest extend? Shadows clung beneath the pine boughs, menacing and cold. The bleak woodland might stretch on into eternity for all Cora could tell. And God alone knew what beasts were watching from the shifting fringes of the fog, wily and hungering, patient as only predators can be.
The horse snorted, impatient to be off—to finish its work, to be free of Cora’s poorly fitted harness. The sound rang loud and hollow along the ridgeline. Cora winced, then shifted her boot against the wagon’s footboard—carefully, so as not to draw the attention of mountain lions or the great bears with heads like boulders, whatever gape-jawed things waited among the trees.
Her heel found what it sought: the solid weight of her husband’s rifle, stowed beneath the seat, precisely where she had placed it that morning. Cora had almost left the gun behind, for she couldn’t stand to touch it, could hardly force herself to look at the thing, the instrument of Substance’s death—as much a cause of this present misery as Cora herself. But there were animals in the foothills. The bears were busy fattening themselves on huckleberries; this was the time of year when they were most belligerent, except when the sows emerged from hibernation with new cubs on their heels. Cora knew if she came face-to-face with a bear, the rifle would be her one slim hope for survival.
The horse stamped its hoof. Cora watched the border of the pines, searching patches of red-stemmed dogwood and the spent flower spikes of fireweed, keen for any sign of movement. But nothing stirred. Cora pushed her fear deep down into her chest until it was nothing more than a ripple of nausea. Then she flicked the reins and guided the horse to the downward slope of the trail.
Cora stopped the wagon at the edge of the forest. She remained for a moment in the driver’s seat, staring up at the flat gray clouds. The ridge from which she had just descended was partially lost to view already; the mist was moving on a slow current, dropping tendrils toward the earth, suffusing the valley with the scent of wet stone. The day’s light seemed to come from every direction at once, filtered through banks of cloud. Cora couldn’t begin to guess where the sun stood in the sky, and she had lost all sense of time on the difficult ascent.
I had best get to work, she told herself stoutly. For all I can tell, night may already be on its way.
She climbed down from the seat and paced a cautious circle around horse and wagon. The trees had seemed slender from the ridge, little more than saplings. Now, standing among the pines, Cora noted their girth, their staunchly upright power.
You thought you could push a tree over, you fool.
Cora located the slimmest pine in her vicinity and retrieved the ax from the wagon bed. It was heavy; the weight dragged at her arm and slowed her, so she moved like a woman imprisoned by a dream, lagging and perplexed. She took the haft in both hands and swung the blade back over her shoulder, then hacked at the chosen tree.
The ax blow bounced from the trunk. A few chips of bark flew off into the fireweed, exposing a slash of pale wood, but the cut was small. Cora allowed the ax head to drop to the earth. She trembled, listening to the echo of that single strike reverberate from the valley walls. She glanced toward the wagon—the gun, just out of sight. How many blows would it take to fell a single pine? And then she must cut the trunk into smaller pieces.
God help me, I’ll never do it. The bears and mountain lions will find me before I can drop a single tree.
Cora’s chest quivered. She ignored her mounting despair and lifted the ax again, but the heavy blade dropped back into the loam almost immediately. Cora leaned on the haft, shuddering and gasping as she tried in vain to ward away her sobs. But the weeping came, heedless of her will. She had thought her life hard and mean all the years before, ever since she and Ernest left Saint Louis behind and settled on the prairie. But now—now, Mother of Mercy—she would learn the meaning of hardship. Winter stalked closer with each passing day. Cora could smell the cold coming; she could feel the chill, the bite against her cheeks as the mist moved through the valley. Winters past had frightened her, every year, for the snow piled up against the house, higher than the window panes, and made of her home a prison cell—a tomb. It was Ernest who had kept Cora in good spirits through the long winters. Ernest, laying in a store of wood and smoked meat to last the season. Ernest patting Cora’s hand, reassuring her that the snow wouldn’t last forever, and when the thaw came, the prairie would burst with color—the flowers of spring opening to welcome the warmth.
The house would become a tomb indeed this year. Cora had no strength to protect her children, to provide as their father had done.
You did this. To yourself, to your children. It’s your doing, all yours, and now God will see to it that you suffer for your sins.
The thought stabbed deep into Cora’s breast, bringing a sharp pain and a curious satisfaction—a sickening confirmation, as when one overturns some small dead creature’s body to find white maggots writhing among the fur.
Cora would have made any sacrifice, except to lose one of her children, if only Ernest would return before winter set in. Not only for his strength, his easy capability, but for his company. The comfort of his presence. He had been the very paragon of a man from their earliest days together—gentle, patient, without the least tendency toward violence. Ernest seldom even shouted; he had no temper to speak of, being all good humor and kindly tolerance.
Cora had been fortunate in that respect, for she hadn’t even known Ernest when she had agreed to marry him. She had accepted a farm boy’s proposal on a girlish impulse—the sort of thoughtless flight that would have landed an unluckier woman in a lifetime of entrapment and misery. A lovestruck stranger, dropping to his knee to ask for Cora’s hand. He could have been anyone, any foul-tempered, hard-eyed brute, but God had proved merciful back then, when Cora was still young, and the Lord had given her a worthy husband. Not a rich man, as Cora’s grandfather had wanted, but a good man, a respectable man, and Cora had known herself blessed.
And she had wasted that blessing—tossed it on the rubbish heap—for nothing.
Something crackled in the brush, a swift movement, passing too near for Cora’s liking. She ceased crying on the instant; before she realized she had moved, Cora found herself beside the wagon, heaving the ax up into the bed. It clattered as it fell, and Cora seized the rifle from beneath the seat. She held it out before her, extended like some crippled limb, and turned in a stiff half circle, staring hard into the forest. She could see nothing—whatever animal had crept nearby was gone now, or was frozen in place, watching. All the world seemed to stare at her: a thousand unseen, unblinking eyes, peering with dispassionate interest from the formless shadows between the pines.
Cora’s hand trembled on the rifle stock. She had as little experience with guns as she did with axes or harnesses. The rifle was heavier than she’d expected, too; the weight weakened her arms and made the muscles of her back clench until they ached. Perhaps it was the burden of guilt she felt more than the burden of steel and wood. She couldn’t help but imagine herself in Ernest’s place—the last person to hold this gun, the last one to fire it. Cora could see herself, sprawled on the riverbank with Substance over her; she could feel the sudden rush of anger, of pain at the betrayal. The vision lasted only a heartbeat, then she saw nothing but the pines. Yet a shameful heat lingered on her cheeks, and a foul taste rose to the back of her throat.
Impossible that Ernest should have fired that rifle at
another man, even considering the circumstance. Neither violence nor rage had lived before in Ernest’s heart. Hate was as foreign to his character as strength was to Cora’s. If she hadn’t heard the rifle blast herself—if she hadn’t seen, from the corner of her eye, a dark river running from Substance’s flesh—she never could have believed it. Not of Ernest, her gentle, worthy husband.
Perhaps that was why she’d felt herself drawn to Substance Webber. That man had exuded power, even brutality, breathing out his strength like some formidable poison. A more disparate pair of men could scarcely be imagined. After fourteen years married to Ernest—coddled by his essential goodness, wanting for nothing—perhaps Cora’s heart had yearned for a change.
Or perhaps Cora had found in Substance all the strength and certainty she herself had never possessed. Substance was all power, all swift and unerring decision. Against the ceaseless danger, the routine terrors of life in a vast, unfeeling wilderness, Substance had proved to be an even greater bulwark than Ernest had been.
And yet it had been Ernest who had seized the ultimate staff of power. Ernest who had killed.
I never really knew him, Cora realized. All these years, my husband remained a stranger to me, for I had thought him too gentle and Christian to do murder.
Then another thought struck her—nearly felled her with its blow. Ernest killed because of me. I pushed him to it. It’s my fault that he committed the unforgivable sin. I have damned the man I love.
Cora reeled on her feet. She lowered the gun, heedless of the thousand eyes, but the forest had gone silent. The chill crept in around her thoughts—the flat, gray expanse of guilt and self-loathing. The valley still smelled of winter, of rain yet to come, of the tombal dark of the year. There was work yet to be done; Cora would accomplish nothing by pointing that instrument of violence into the underbrush. She returned the rifle to the wagon and set about her business once more.
There was no sense in trying to cut down a tree; Cora could see that now. She hadn’t enough strength to wield the ax, nor had she time to split the trunk before nightfall. Instead, she moved through the underbrush, gathering whatever fallen limbs she could find. She hauled branches from forest to trail, then hacked at the branches with the heavy ax, tossing manageable pieces into the wagon bed. She worked steadily until her wool dress was soaked with sweat and the muscles in her arms felt useless—insubstantial—quivering like the jelly aspics that had been so stylish at parties back in Saint Louis. Her dampened clothing raised a shiver whenever she slowed or paused, so Cora kept on doggedly, wading into the underbrush with only a prayer to defend her against the beasts of the forest, dragging heavy limbs up the slope until her hands were blistered and raw.
The light had begun to dim. Then droplets of rain splashed on her face and shoulders, and pattered among the trees. Cora leaned against a wagon wheel, panting, and scrubbed the sweat from her brow with the cuff of her sleeve. She must return to the farm now, for if she were caught out in darkness and rain, she might lose the trail—and she hadn’t anything more substantial than a shawl to protect herself from the weather. She flexed her hands, wincing at the sting of her blisters. Then she turned to survey the wagon bed, to take in the results of a hard day’s labor.
Cora froze in disbelief. She had toiled for hours, yet the bed was far from full. Indeed, she had collected no more than a few sticks—or so it seemed now—scarcely more than an armful. How could she have worked so hard for so little gain? The shock of failure rooted her to the spot; the rain pelted down, falling harder by the moment, soaking her hair and running in rivulets down her scalp, under her collar, down her stiff, cold back.
God help me. My children will freeze for certain. Unless . . .
Cora saw the only path left to her, the one way she might hope to bring her children safely through the dark and cold of the year. She must go to Nettie Mae—as she had gone once already. She must abase herself before the woman she had wronged, must plead for help, for charity.
The mere thought soured her gut and set a terrible pressure of anxiety beating inside her head. But she would do it. Cora would do whatever was necessary, make of herself a spectacle, a shameful fool. Without wood—without charity—her family wouldn’t last the winter.
CLYDE
Gray against gray. All colors in the world had settled, one into another. There was nothing left to distinguish between dreaming and waking. The fever was deep and dry as a summer ravine, and Clyde moved warily through its passages, one hand on the high stone wall of conscious thought, even as his weary feet slipped in the sand and all that was once true and solid around him—everything he had known to be real—shifted and flowed like dust through his fingers.
His mother’s presence was constant, and sometimes Nettie Mae’s nearness comforted Clyde. Sometimes she only made him feel weaker, for now and then he could hear her weeping, the sudden catch in her breath, the shuddering inhalation, the pause and the silence when she refused to breathe out again till she could do it without wailing. He wanted to speak to his mother—offer her comfort in turn. But this sudden illness had drained all the strength from his body and deprived him of his will. He could do nothing but lie in his bed, eyes closed, clinging to a small awareness of the world while he slipped easily, fluidly, in and out of consciousness.
The border between dream and reality was nothing now, transparent, dark with shadows. There were fish in the river. In the springtime and in autumn, he would stand ankle deep in the shallows and look down into the water. On the river’s surface, and seeming to hang just below it in a hand’s depth of water, the cottonwoods made a pattern of green so deep it was almost black. The edges of treetops showed ragged, frayed as torn paper, haloed and shot through by a white or yellow sky. And among the dark reflections, trout glided against the current. They came near to Clyde’s bare skin if he held still enough, and if he was still, his feet sank down into silt softer than velvet. Under the silt—through it—the water flowed more sluggishly, and it was warm from the sun. In the fast-moving currents just above, cold as the mountain snows from which the river ran, the trout drew so near he could feel their tails stirring the water. A slow and gentle shift, a subtlety, the heightened nerves of his cold-shocked skin aware of the nearness of the fish before his eyes could pick out their spotted backs against a green-and-amber dappling of stone. That was the way he moved between the mundane world, the world of his farm and the Bemis homestead, and the world of his dreams—or if not dreams, then spirits. His mind, his awareness, his heart beating steadily, all moved as the trout moved through a cold shadow realm. Slow, side to side, slipping from the cover of deep-green reflection into the shallows and back again, never still long enough to be sure of where he was.
The pure, demanding whiteness of morning light glowed through his eyelids. He turned his face away, then lay exhausted by the movement. His mother was gone. He couldn’t feel her presence anymore—not in his bedroom, not in the house. Outside, he could hear his sheep bleating. They were still shut up in the fold. Someone must let them out, but who? The fall ewes would begin lambing soon, but the timing was bad. Early as the ewes were, the rains had come earlier still. It might be that no lamb would survive, unless Clyde could reach every ewe before her labor began. He would bed them down in the barn with deep straw to keep their young ones warm and dry.
It doesn’t matter, Substance said. Clyde could hear his father’s voice very near, ringing just over his right shoulder, though Clyde was lying flat in his bed. No one could truly be standing there behind him, menacing him.
If any lambs die in the rain, then they were too weak to survive. God’s will.
They’re helpless things, Clyde protested. Shouldn’t we give them a chance to survive, if it’s in our power to do it?
Substance seemed to laugh—the short, cruel chuckle that had always made Clyde’s backbone feel as if it had been set on fire. Once, the day after he and Substance had burned a pile of brush, Clyde had walked past the charred circle and found t
endrils of smoke rising from the earth. He had dug into the soil with the heel of his boot and exposed a tree root, gnarled in its long, secretive, ancient course. It had carried the heat of the fire underground, where it still burned, unseen. Now the root was a long, twisted core of ember, white ash cracked by thin lines of glowing red. That was how Substance’s laugh had always made Clyde feel.
Substance said, If you care so much about pampering sheep, then you’re weaker than a woman, and no son of mine.
The anger and hurt those words roused gave Clyde just enough strength to open his eyes. He was looking at the wall of his bedroom, whitewashed, blurred, and there were footsteps receding, somebody walking away from him. Out the door, down the hall, descending the stairs. He followed the sound and discerned that the tread was light, the stride short. Not his mother, then. He knew the rhythm of those feet after so many days working at Beulah’s side. Where had his mother gone? Nettie Mae had sat beside him for hours—for days, as far as Clyde could tell. A familiar stillness, her long habit of watchful waiting. Clyde shut his eyes again; the whiteness of his room pained him. He recalled Nettie Mae’s hand resting on his brow, brushing back his hair. Then she had walked away—out of the bedroom, out of their home.
You’re weaker than a woman, and no son of mine.
I’m the only son you have, Clyde said to his father’s memory.
Substance made no answer. He was gone now, if he had ever really been there. Gone, but the terrible heat remained, throbbing down Clyde’s back. He could all but see it, the whiteness of his bones, each small bit of spine spaced as evenly as the seasons. And the black lines between, and the embers glowing within, threads of red against the darkness.
There was one way to be a man—only one. Any other way a man had of being was wrong, all wrong. Substance had taught Clyde that much. You do not pamper sheep; a man does not coddle his flock. You let God take what He wishes to take, and you shut your ears to the crying of the ewes when they stand over the lifeless bodies of their lambs. They are animals, nothing more. They do not think, do not feel. To go tender for the sheep, to balk at taking a rooster’s head, to feel pity for the deer you fell with a single shot from your rifle—these things are weak. To be weak is to be womanish. To be like a woman is to be unlike a man.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 10