Clyde and Beulah scrambled back down the ledge together and pushed their way through a screen of scrubby willows. The black-legged ewe lay on her side against the canyon wall; when the light fell upon her, she scrabbled with her forelegs and let out a pitiful moan. Then she subsided, her flanks rising and falling with her rapid, hopeless breath.
“By God,” Clyde murmured. “We found her. But she’s weak; something bad happened. Attacked?”
“Of course not. She hasn’t yet recovered from the birth; that’s all.”
Beulah moved closer to the ewe—slowly, one step and pause, then another deliberate step. The girl’s presence, and perhaps the light, seemed to have a calming effect. The ewe settled, raising no protest as Beulah sank down on her heels and stroked the curve of the animal’s forehead.
“There’s blood on her hind end,” Beulah said.
“Do you see any lambs?”
“No, but there’s something dark here beside her. Dark and not moving.” Still half-crouched, Beulah worked her slow way around the ewe’s body. She bent her neck to peer down into the weeds. “It’s the afterbirth.”
“But no lambs. We got here too late, then; coyotes took the young.”
Beulah straightened and seemed about to speak. But her eye fell on a flat, pale thing, motionless among the stunted clumps of willow.
“Clyde, look!”
She sounded breathless, and her face had darkened with a rising rush of feeling—of wonder. He moved carefully toward Beulah and the willows, though he still felt that roll of caution overhead, the weight of dark and unseen things watching him, touching him.
At Beulah’s feet, bedded on a few dry curls of fallen leaves, lay a newborn lamb. Its body was thin, sodden, matted with blood and birth, pressed to the earth by its own weakness. It had rolled or crawled away from its mother, and the cord, shiny and wet as a bloated worm, snaked away from its belly through wiry grass. The lamb was small and motionless, but perfect in form from shoulders to tail. When Clyde looked at its neck, though—and what the neck carried—fear and revulsion rose so suddenly in his throat that he gagged. He barely kept himself from heaving into the weeds.
The lamb’s face was cloven, deeply as a hoof. On either side of the monstrous divide, two perfectly formed muzzles worked feebly, the pink nostrils distending, the twin mouths opening in silent entreaty. Each side of the head bore a normal eye, and each eye blinked in the lantern light, first one, then the other. It was the third eye that struck cold horror into Clyde’s chest. Dark and glittering in the seam of flesh, in the place where the two halves merged into one, the third eye stared at Clyde, far too small and unblinking, with an air of sickening patience.
“God have mercy.” He backed away.
“I never seen the like.” Beulah was rapturous, already in love.
“It’s a monster.”
Clyde turned his shotgun toward the creature, but Beulah pushed the muzzle aside.
“Don’t you dare shoot that lamb, Clyde Webber. You’re blessed by a miracle, something no one has seen before, and all you can think to do is kill it?”
“It won’t live, Beulah. It can’t! It’d be kinder to put it out of its misery.”
“It ain’t in any misery—not yet. The little thing only came into this world moments ago. Let it have its life, even if its life will be a short one.”
“I . . . I can’t take that thing back to the farm, and—”
“Then I’ll take it. You see to the mother.”
Clyde propped his shotgun against the willows. Gratefully, he turned away from the two-headed lamb. The ewe’s eye rolled when she saw that Clyde had shifted his attention to her. She struggled again, bracing her forelegs against the stone, fighting to rise. But her hind end was weak, and she cried out in helpless pain, then fell heavily back to the ground.
I never was good at catching them.
Clyde remembered Substance grabbing for the wool, pulling at the animals without regard for their suffering. He remembered how the ewes had fought and twisted and screamed in their guttural panic when he, Clyde, had held them for shearing. The first shearing he’d done on his own, and hard work it had been. He had left the fold feeling sick and angry over the hurt he had caused, the nicked hides, the blood, the betrayal of animals who had trusted him, who had once thought him gentle and safe.
I can’t go to her now, this ewe. She’ll try to run. I’ll never hold her. She’ll fly into a panic and plunge right over the ledge and break her legs or her neck. I can’t touch her. I can’t.
From the black floor of the ravine there came a high-pitched yelp. Then another, answering from the river trail.
“Coyotes,” Clyde said to Beulah. “We got to hurry, if we hope to get either one of them out of this place.”
“Can the ewe walk?”
“I don’t know.”
Beulah had set the lantern on a flat-topped stone while she tended to the monster. By the twitching, fickle light of the shaded candle, Clyde strained to assess the ewe’s condition. Blood had darkened her hindquarters, but it might only have been the blood of birth. He moved toward her again, and the ewe bleated, scrabbling toward the ledge.
“Damn.” Clyde sank onto his heels. There was little time to lose; the coyotes were already slinking up the game trail, jaws gaping with hunger. Clyde might frighten them away with a blast from his gun, but then his shell would be spent. How would he and Beulah fare, going back through the darkness with a ewe—crippled and reeking of blood—and the terrible thing she had birthed? It was a long trek back to the farm. They might attract something far worse than coyotes—wolves, or a bear, or the pale drinkers of blood, or the thing that watched from the darkness at the edge of his father’s grave.
He closed his eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, and fought to slow the wild flutter of his heart.
Improbably, for no reason he could discern, he thought of the snail shell Beulah had placed in his hand in the stillness and silver light of the abandoned bedroom. He remembered the feel of it, the smoothness, the dark line and the pale line curving around and around, merging into one. He had traced that path with his finger. He had seen more colors than brown—had seen that brown was, in the right light and carefully observed, golden and green and crimson layered one atop the other.
Clyde opened his eyes. He watched the ewe’s face, the redness of pain at the corner of her eye, the tight smile of fear.
“You’re hurting,” Clyde said to the animal, softly. “I’m sorry you hurt, little mother. But I’ll help you, if you’ll lie still.”
He crept toward the ewe. She moaned, but she didn’t thrash or try to run.
“You know me,” Clyde murmured. “You see me every day. I let you in and out of the pen.” Closer. The ewe trembled and held still. “That’s it; that’s it, good girl. You know me now, don’t you? I’ve come to help you. I’m your shepherd. That’s what a shepherd does, isn’t it? Cares for his sheep.”
He moved again, but too close this time. The ewe tried to leap up in a sudden panic. She fell back, crying piteously, a high and agonized sound.
“Easy, easy. Of course you know me. We live on the same land. The pasture. It’s yours, and mine, and we both know it, we both share it. Don’t we? Don’t we, little mother?”
The ewe turned her head. She stared at Clyde, a sharp, direct look that seemed to strike him hard, a blow to the forehead or to the center of his chest; he couldn’t tell where the blow had fallen. But on the instant, a streak of pain ran from his groin up into his back, his belly. It was hot—scalding—and though he knew he wasn’t bleeding, still he smelled the iron of his own blood and feared that it would all flow out of him, onto the rocks where little could grow, where it would all be wasted.
Clyde sucked in a deep, cold breath, a spasm of shock and wonder. The air tasted of the canyon, damp and red, the mineral closeness of the sandstone walls tingling on his tongue. He could taste a sweetness of grass, too, and the grass was familiar and good.
You se
e, he told the ewe silently. We do know each other. And here I am to help you. There’s nothing to fear. Nothing to fear. We are of the same place—the pasture, the land.
Clyde crouched over the black-legged ewe now; she permitted his nearness, sagged back against the stone wall, and allowed him to run his hands down her heaving flanks. The wool of her back end was saturated with blood. He touched the birthing place and felt the ewe flinch, felt the disunion of warm flesh.
“She’s torn,” Clyde said to Beulah. “Little wonder, after birthing that thing. I don’t think she can walk. I’ll have to carry her.”
Clyde spoke his quiet comforts to the ewe as he guided her to her feet, then crouched low to pull her up to his shoulders. She was young and small, weighing less than most of his flock; he could feel her disorientation, the swimming fear, as he straightened and bore her high above solid ground. With his left hand, he held the ewe’s forelegs. With his right, he took the shotgun and snugged it under his arm, muzzle pointed out. Then he slipped the muzzle through the lantern’s handle and lifted the light, too.
Beulah had wrapped the monstrous newborn in her shawl. The two joined heads were all that could be seen of the creature; Beulah cradled that sickening bundle against her chest, beaming down with soft-eyed tenderness as if it were her own child she held.
Clyde turned away from the sight. He shuddered in disgust. “Are you ready?”
“Yes. You got the light, so you lead the way. I’ll follow.”
As they picked their slow way down the game trail, the brush around them rattled and snapped—coyotes fleeing the light, retreating to the emptiness of the plain. Clyde’s shoulders and right arm had already begun to ache by the time he found the river path, but he held the gun more tightly against his side and didn’t pause to relieve his cramping muscles. The sooner he and Beulah were back at the farm, the better off they’d all be. He must convince the girl somehow that the two-headed lamb ought rightly to be killed. The thing would never grow, never thrive. God alone knew if it could even suckle. It might very well starve to death, unless it was spared.
Yet even as he mused over the lamb’s inevitable fate, Clyde’s senses sharpened. The river came to him as sound and smell. Brightness of water, crisp and compelling, making his mouth wet with the newness and power of the scent. He could smell, so it seemed, every leaf that hung over the bank and exhaled greenly in the air above the water—breathed out a green scent so that he could breathe it in. Murmur, rush, a chorus of voices, the voices of stones rolling and chattering, the countless cracks and pops of mineral breaking from mineral, of specks of sand departing from granite and leaving minute dimples behind. The sound of the river building its bank, endlessly renewing.
He had never felt the river so powerfully before. He had never known a world like this. It was as if he had multiplied himself, as if there were no longer one Clyde, but many. As if he had two minds, or more, with which to sense and think and feel.
The realization came to Clyde that he was experiencing whatever the two-headed lamb heard and smelled, just as he had felt its mother’s pain for one brief moment, up in the ravine. That knowledge stunned him, and wiped all thought from his mind. He didn’t wish to feel any sympathy with that deformed beast. The monster lamb was a thing that never should have been, a freak of nature, a revelation of God in His most creative and cruelest capacity. He refused to accept the lamb’s awareness, refused to feel. This was not a thing Clyde could allow, this oneness with the weak—the feeblest, most inutile of all living things. Yet despite his resolve, tears came to Clyde’s eyes. They blurred the circle of lantern light, obscuring the ground below him, where he placed one foot ahead of the other, step and step and step through the singing night all the way back to the order and safety of his home.
He looked back only once, just after they passed Substance’s grave. In a halo of light, Beulah stood out against the darkness with vivid and fearful clarity. Her eyes were downcast, watching the two faces of the miracle she carried, heavy lidded with a kind of holy acceptance. And the lamb’s four nostrils moved to catch the river air, breathing deeply of life while life still remained.
NETTIE MAE
At the edge of the spiral of her thoughts, her fears, Nettie Mae held herself aloof and still, hardened against the agony of unknowing. She was used to the pain, after all—or should have been, with so many years gone by. That rasp of doubt, the sting of injustice, had never left her heart since the first burial, the first child she had lost, the tiny grave among the roots of a willow tree somewhere in Wisconsin—the long flat nothingness of brown Wisconsin. She would never find that tree again, not if she searched for a hundred years. And now the bones of her baby—the boy who had lived not quite two days and was gone before she could give him a name—were laced about with willow roots, pushed apart and down into the long flat neverness below the earth.
Four children lost. Four children dead. And Clyde will be just as lost to me forever, if that witch of a girl ensnares him.
Nettie Mae hadn’t spoken a word through supper—not that she was much given to idle chatter, especially during the solemnity of meals. She had hardly eaten a bite either; she had stared at Clyde’s empty chair, his bowl unfilled in its customary place. And she had refused to look at Beulah’s seat, also empty. The girl’s absence was as stark as an accusation. She had defied Nettie Mae’s command—her one command, her most emphatic wish. Beulah had spat on Nettie Mae’s control, trampled her authority, and drawn Clyde off into the darkness of sin.
Sensing Nettie Mae’s mood, Cora had kept the rest of her children silent at the table and had hurried them upstairs to bed as soon as they had eaten their fill.
Coming down the stairs, Cora had meekly offered to wash the dishes. At least she was timid, humbled now by the enormity of her sins—now that a man was dead. That was more than could be said for her daughter. Who must perish before Beulah saw the error of her ways and repented of her scandalous behavior? The mooning, the lazing, the chasing after Clyde when there was work to be done and better, holier things for a young man to think of than the convenient nearness of some city-bred hussy.
“I will wash,” Nettie Mae had said shortly, and Cora had fled to her room.
When the washing was finished, Nettie Mae bundled herself in a long shawl and paced the rear yard, from kitchen steps to outhouse, from sheepfold to garden gate to root cellar, listening for any sound, any cries in the night, any sly note of Beulah’s laughter that might tell her where the girl had gone to ground with Nettie Mae’s son in tow. And after too long a spell—what might have been hours, with no moon or stars visible to gauge the passage of time—she spotted the glimmer of a lantern far across the dense black expanse of night. The lantern winked and dimmed as it passed behind the cottonwood trees. So they had gone to the riverside.
As you knew they would. As you knew they must, Nettie Mae told herself bitterly. Like mother, like daughter.
Nettie Mae had expected Clyde and Beulah to come directly back to the house, and she intended to confront them in the yard. As she watched the orb of light draw slowly nearer, she pictured the clash with no small amount of righteous satisfaction. Herself, looming up out of the darkness to challenge the sinners with their own foul deeds, cold and unforgiving as Judgment. But the lantern diverted, swinging wide of the usual route from pasture to house. In a few moments, the light vanished into the barn, and there it remained for far too long. No doubt Beulah, emboldened by the success of her deception and spurred on by the filthy glee of fornication, had pulled Clyde into the loft for another tumble in the hay.
Time crept by unmeasured. The darkness persisted. A few crickets still lived, defiant against the autumn cold, and note after faltering note, their desultory chirps from the denuded garden replaced Nettie Mae’s anger with a helpless, trembling submission. The deed was over. Her son was ruined; he had tasted of sin and now he would thirst for it like a wretch in the desert lusting after any foul puddle he might find. That had ever been the
manner of sin, since Eve first tasted of Eden’s fruit.
By the time the lantern reappeared and came bobbing and swinging toward the house, Nettie Mae’s wrath had abandoned her. What was the use of raging when the damage was already done? She felt withered and papery—dry—a husk stripped away from its kernel. She shivered, and told herself it was because of the cold.
By the time Clyde and Beulah passed the outhouse, Nettie Mae could see them, two silhouettes black within the private sphere of their light. They did not hold hands, nor did the foolish girl cling to his arm as girls think it charming to do. But neither was there distance between them—not exactly. They moved with natural ease in one another’s presence. Something intimate had passed between them; Nettie Mae was sure of it. And now their voices came to her across the yard. Neither spoke loudly enough that Nettie Mae could discern their words—there was something low and cryptic about their speech, something furtive—but the tone carried a distinct note of familiarity, and it soured Nettie Mae’s gut.
She stepped forward, invading the circle of their light. Clyde and Beulah both started, and the lantern swung violently in Clyde’s hand. He cursed under his breath, stilling the lantern with his other hand.
“Mother! You frightened us. We—”
“I don’t want to hear it. It’s not a fit thing to speak of, in any case. I know. I know what you’ve been up to this night, both of you. You ought to be ashamed.”
“Mother—”
“Hold your tongue, Clyde Webber.” She rounded on Beulah. “What did I tell you? What did I say?”
The girl stared back at Nettie Mae unfazed. Despite the cold, Beulah held her shawl slung over one arm. The color rode high in her cheeks, and there was a glint of something in her eye—something Nettie Mae couldn’t countenance, something unholy. Glee. Or bliss. An eerie, self-contained rapture.
“Well?” Nettie Mae snapped. “Answer me, girl.”
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 27