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

by Olivia Hawker

  And then she tried to imagine what it might look like, the two-headed lamb. She forced herself to confront the thought, the idea, to strip away all its terror and power until only the simple fact of it remained: animal flesh, blood and bone, a thing that could be killed. But she saw, in her flinching vision, two sinewy necks that curved like serpents, two mouths fanged like the jaws of a wolf. Horns curling from the two vile heads, sharp and inescapable as Judgment.

  Cora gasped, then breathed deeply again, stifling a sob of terror. The lamb would live on for as long as God saw fit to visit His curse upon the farm. Cora couldn’t end its life. She had never killed a sheep—had killed nothing larger than a bird, and whenever she did it, the act always left her sick with remorse, trembling from the blood and commotion.

  If I am not strong enough to destroy a cursed thing, nor even to ease the suffering of a doomed and deformed creature, how can I be strong enough to take my children away from this place?

  Beyond the vast, cold nothingness of the prairie, there was a place of refuge. But Saint Louis was so far away that Cora couldn’t see its beacon. Night hung too heavily around her. The days were growing shorter, the lightless hours longer. And the Judgment of God, His terrible omen, was out there, waiting, in the dark.

  9

  ALL OF THE WORLD

  The flood hadn’t done for Substance Webber’s bones. I could still feel him, rancorous and intact, lingering somewhere just above or below the earth. The waters had flattened the burial mound and scattered all the nice things I’d brought to appease his spirit, and the big river stones I’d placed with care around the perimeter of Substance’s grave had been pushed out of place, rolled far long the red-sand shore. But Substance remained just where Clyde had planted him.

  Hullo, Mr. Webber, I said as I lifted the nearest stone and dropped it back into position.

  It was the morning after the miracle, the first and last day our two-headed lamb would ever see. I felt eager to get back to the barn and watch over the creature, and come to know it while I still could. But the night before, while Clyde and I were searching the river trail, I had seen the disarray of Substance’s resting place. My conscience wouldn’t leave me in peace till I’d tidied up his grave.

  I said to Substance, I see you’re still here, despite the storm’s best efforts.

  Substance bore me no more affection than he’d borne anybody else. He made no answer, and I went on working, toting the biggest stones I could find from the riverside to the frank, red flatness where he lay.

  When the grave was properly marked again, I sat down for a spell to catch my breath. I could feel Substance all around me. He had spread some, in the time since his death—expanded, loosened the rigid strictures of himself. He no longer cleaved to a narrow column of strength, the shape he reckoned was the proper shape for a man. Instead, he flowed and reached through the air and soil, and pushed himself out and drew himself in like the flank of some great creature breathing. But he was still himself. There was no mistaking Substance, if ever you found yourself in his presence—living or dead.

  I sat for a few minutes in silence till my heart slowed. Then I said, Mr. Webber, why are you still here, anyhow? This is no kind of existence, drifting up above this single patch of ground like a rain cloud. Or are you under the ground with your bones? I can’t rightly tell.

  He didn’t answer, but that was out of spite. I knew he’d heard me. Substance was often hungry for my talk, as I was the only person who ever came to visit.

  I said, I know you’re there and I can tell when you hear me. I can feel it. You ain’t never been good at hiding your thoughts. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Mr. Webber, for I know it was always important to you, to keep everything hidden but your anger and your strength.

  After I said that, Substance made no more pretense of hiding. Like a whiplash, his anger licked out at me; it stung right in the center of my chest. And though I never heard any words when Substance spoke, I felt his meaning, true and clear, as was the usual way between us.

  Get away, you rotten girl. I’ve got no use for you.

  I said, Seems you’ve got a powerful lot of use for me.

  I never minded saucing at a spirit, for I knew no spirit could harm me.

  I said, I’m the only one who comes to tend your grave, after all, and you are so hell bent on hanging around here, when you know—I’ve told you a hundred times—that you don’t have to stay.

  I asked him, Why are you so dreadful sore at me, anyway? Why don’t you tell me and have it all out?

  Substance answered in the only way he could. I saw Clyde in my mind’s eye—or, I ought to say, I felt Clyde. Though I knew he was back at the barn, tending to the black-legged ewe and her glorious lamb, I caught the sense of him as clearly as if he’d been seated there beside me. The quiet, thoughtful nature; the earnest longing to do good; and the ever-present fear that he never would know what good really meant, that he wouldn’t recognize right when he saw it and never could tell it from wrong—those things belonged to Clyde as much as did his tall, strong body or the voice that got a little deeper every day, or the hair so thick even the wind couldn’t move it. It startled me, to realize Substance had understood Clyde’s nature all along, almost from the cradle. I hadn’t thought a man like Substance capable of seeing way down deep into any person’s spirit. But he saw Clyde, all right. He just didn’t heed what he found in his son.

  You’re making Clyde too soft, Substance told me—the welling disgust in my stomach, my mouth bending into a frown. I felt an urge to push Clyde hard, just to get him away from me; and maybe I would have pushed him then, if he’d been near me in truth.

  Substance said, You’re making my son soft when he ought to be strong.

  Mr. Webber, I told him, I haven’t made your son anything. He has made himself.

  I made him, Substance insisted. He is mine. I set him on the path to manhood but you—you diverted him. Why won’t you leave me this one small peace, you miserable girl? Why won’t you let me rest knowing that my son is a man?

  I stood up and brushed sand from the back of my skirt. I said, Clyde is a man, and a damn fine one at that. I’m sorry you ain’t got sense enough to see it.

  A great, hard pulse of anger came up from below the earth. There was a time, in the days just after his death, when Substance would have tried to make himself whole again. He would have pulled and pulled at the world, would have sucked at the liveliness that flows through all things—not only the things that live, the birds and deer who left their tracks in the hard red river-damp sand, but the things that never lived, too: the stone walls of the canyon, the direction of the water’s flow, a sudden brush of wind. He would have pulled and taken, and he might have shaped just enough of himself to stand there before me, towering in his rage. But Substance had begun to accept the fact of his death, a little and a little. A pinch more acceptance every day. He was reconciled to his condition, and so he remained as he was, spread but whole, mute before my merciless honesty.

  I said, You don’t have to stay this way, Mr. Webber. There don’t seem much point to staying, far as I can see. What good does it do you, being a shade? You could be anything else you pleased. You could be everything. All you need to do is spread yourself a little farther. Loosen yourself a little more.

  Still, Substance kept his peace. He subsided back into the earth. There he remained, coiled and secretive, a rattlesnake sleeping off the winter.

  I turned toward the trail, but something small and white and sharp caught my attention. It hung in the sage a few feet away from the grave. I stepped closer, bending low to the earth, and there was the old crow’s skull that had once decorated the burial mound. The floodwaters had swept it away, of course, but a twig of sagebrush had pierced the great round socket of its eye. The skull hung at an angle, its dark bill pointing toward the river.

  I plucked the crow’s skull out of the sage and returned to Substance’s resting place.

  Clyde is a good
man, I told him.

  I pressed the skull down into flat red sand. Then I left before Substance could answer.

  The barn was all gray shadow inside and the hush of animals breathing. Clyde never looked up when I came in through the southern door. He remained crouched beside the low gate of the farthest stall, huddled as if in the grip of some vast and slow-moving, inevitable misery. When I reached him and stood looking down at the black-legged ewe and her lamb, Clyde spoke to me quietly.

  It’s weak. I can’t get it to suckle. I don’t think it has eaten all night through.

  The lamb lay folded peacefully in the deep straw, each face looking in a different direction, the two good eyes blinking in a slow, resigned way, and the third eye—the shared eye—staring out between the two halves of its understanding with a bright, piercing curiosity. The ewe had pressed herself against the wall. She didn’t tremble; her flanks did not stir with rapid, fearful breaths. The ewe was calm, but she knew what I knew. There was no point in trying.

  Clyde said, The ewe won’t stand still for suckling. I tried to convince her, but she walks away. Doesn’t kick out or try to run—only walks. I might try another ewe. The fall lambers are still in milk.

  If the little thing’s own mother won’t stand still for it, I said, the others surely won’t. Is she still bleeding?

  No, Clyde said. She’s healed up, far as I can tell—or she will heal.

  That’s good, then. You ought to send her back to the flock.

  He shook his head, slowly, never taking his eyes off the lamb. He said, Not while her baby’s still living.

  The two dark eyes blinked; the two heads nodded on a single neck. The lamb was dry now and soft, the crimp of its hide begging to be touched. But it moved almost not at all. It only stared and nodded, accepting what was to come.

  It won’t be long now, I said to Clyde, gently.

  He kept his silence for a long time, watching the creature where it lay. Then he said, It don’t seem right, that I can’t make it live.

  Just last night you were all for shooting it.

  I know, he said. Maybe I still ought to shoot it. Now, for sure—now that it’s getting weaker. Now that I know it won’t drink, or can’t drink.

  I said, What made you change your mind?

  Clyde didn’t answer, except to shrug. There was a studied placidity to his face, a fixed hardness, a deadweight mask he had to struggle to hold. I could discern nothing else by looking at him. I wished in that moment that I could speak to Clyde as I spoke to his father—as Substance talked to me—with the simple ease of understanding, each thought and emotion passing from one to the other because there was no barrier anymore, no flesh to stop it.

  He said again, It don’t seem right.

  And then: All it knows of the world—all it ever can know—is the inside of this barn. That’s an awful small world, I guess. Small and dark with walls all around you.

  I said, It ain’t dark outside. The sun is shining. It’s a lovely day.

  But my mother—

  I went to the east-side door, opened it, and let in the sweet rain-scented air and the silver autumn light. I could see Nettie Mae far across the yard, her thin strong arm working the handle of the pump. Faintly, I could hear the whine and clack of the mechanism, its metallic rhythm, a small, cupped-hand splash of water in the pail. But the sounds came across the open ground laggardly, and Nettie Mae in her black dress and black shawl seemed to move and work beyond the borders of our reality, the world I shared with Clyde. Presently, she stopped pumping and hefted the water pail, and she set off back toward the house. The last few echoes of the pump handle sounded in the stillness. Then the farm was silent again.

  When Nettie Mae had gone, I said, Your mother’s inside the house.

  Clyde remained where he was, hugging his knees, looking up at me with a lost, hopeless expression. The light from outside, from the threshold where I stood, fell upon him as if it meant to, as if it had sought him out. Clyde in the band of silver was as vivid as new-dyed cloth. Folded up that way, uncertain, waiting for me to make whatever choice must be made, he put me in mind of an egg just beginning to hatch, with the chick inside afraid of the crack in its shell, too stunned to shrink away from the light that had pierced a familiar darkness.

  It’s cold out, I said. Proper cold. There’s snow on the way; maybe soon. Wrap up the lamb in your coat.

  Clyde rose from the straw-covered ground with the slowness of aching joints. How long had he been crouching there, I wondered, watching the newborn? He removed his coat, then took from the gatepost the hat he’d found in his father’s chest. The hat settled easily on his brow. Then he stepped over the stall gate, moving carefully, murmuring to the ewe as he went. He bent low, and I heard the straw rustling. When he straightened, both heads of the lamb peered out from the bundle of Clyde’s coat, and the bundle was cradled in his arms.

  We left the shadows of the barn together. Outside, the air was crisp and biting, promising snow. When I breathed in, I could feel the cold tingling on my tongue and along the roof of my mouth. A clump of vetch weed, limp and dry, had lain all morning in the barn’s shadow, untouched by the cloud-muted sun. Stems and brown leaves wore a pale picotee of frost.

  Clyde whispered, What should I do now?

  You know what to do, I told him. You don’t need to ask me.

  He walked a few feet with the lamb, out into the pasture where its family grazed in the distance. It would never run among those grasses, never skip and play as its siblings played. Clyde stopped where the grass grew knee high. He stood with his back to me, and I could see his warm breath rising in regular plumes. For a long time, he only stood with his neck craned back so he could look up at the mountains, their ancient sides steep and hard, bluing and graying into layers of cloud. The flock called at the sight of their shepherd, low bleats rolling across the winter-ready ground. Clyde turned in a circle. He moved slowly—slowly, giving the lamb all the time he could, every precious second to see what lay beyond the walls of the barn, what beauty could be found in daylight. As Clyde turned, as he carried the lamb around to face the endless sweep of the prairie, the two heads lifted from within the bundle, and all three eyes opened wide in wonder. The lamb saw all of the world.

  CLYDE

  All the world. That was what he showed the two-headed creature, the soft, almost weightless thing that lay so trusting in his arms. It was, at the very least, everything Clyde knew of the world. The long spread of land that had belonged to his father and now belonged to him. He had learned the boundaries as a child and learned them so well that he felt them now by instinct; no need for fences along the perimeter of his farm. The flock, alive and ripe with the promise of life yet to come—the ewes who always bore twins, those who lambed in the spring and those who lambed in autumn. After they had gone, their daughters would go on bearing. And there stood the sod-brick house, gray and austere. Within its furtive walls dwelt every person who gave his life purpose, all those who needed him. Without his mother, Cora, and the children, his days would have no shape nor his labor meaning.

  Beyond the borders of the land that was his lay the wilderness that was its own. The upthrust stone, the shoulders of the Bighorns, reddish gray where they stood near to the homestead and blue where they stood far—bluer, dissipating veils of blue lost against an indistinct horizon. The pale gold of autumn grass like the rough hide of an animal, wind-riffled down the mountain’s flank. The low trough where the river ran, a score mark in wet clay—dark, shadow-and-green, redolent of moving water, of soil that never went dry. And the infinite sweep of the prairie, yellow shaded with folds of violet until, a hundred miles away or more, the whole plain was swallowed by color and consumed, taken up by the lower edge of a sagging purple sky.

  Slowly, slowly, Clyde turned in place, presenting everything to the creature he held. First sight, last sight, the only and sweetest sight of the world and all that lived upon it.

  The lamb was so light it almost wasn’t there. T
hin, more bones than flesh in Clyde’s arms; he could feel the shape of its bladed scapula and the knobs of its joints even through the swaddling coat. But it was warm. And he could feel its breath, the steady rise and fall of its pliant ribs. It shifted, turning its neck so both faces could see, and the baby fleece of one head brushed against Clyde’s cheek. Soft. Just like any lamb born on the farm. Just like, and nothing like. Nothing seen before.

  When he had completed the circle, Clyde found himself facing Beulah. She stood wrapped in her gray shawl, unconcerned by the blood that still darkened its fabric and fringe. Wind—the never-ceasing prairie wind—lifted her hair and toyed with it and tangled it, but she made no move to tie it back. It spread around her shoulders. The sparrow color reminded him of the bird that had flown into the long shed that summer when he had been busy within, repairing the handle of his scythe. Startled by the sudden confinement, the bird had flapped high among the dark rafters, but when it passed across the open door, time seemed to pause in its course. For a fraction of a second, Clyde had seen its wings spread against the glare of sunlight, and the moment suspended and wrote itself into his memory. Every feather limned in gold, every feather distinct, the dark veins of each shaft incised into light. The wings were like two human hands thrown up in terror. When the bird lighted in a corner, its breast a rapid pulse, the small head darting to stare, Clyde had eased his hat down carefully over the soft brown body and trapped the bird inside. He had set it free in the sunlight, but he couldn’t remember what it looked like flying away.

  Beulah’s quiet eyes, those eyes that saw everything, were fixed now on the lamb. Clyde heard the words she didn’t say. He knew the words were true.

  It won’t live much longer. The time is coming soon.

  He should have shot the lamb the night before. That was true, too; he ought to have done the proper thing, the manly thing. Clyde couldn’t tell, couldn’t imagine, why he hadn’t gone through with it. But the night before, after he and Beulah had bedded down the ewe and her offspring in the stall, he had lain awake on his cot listening to the hearth fire. At first, every snap of cinder and spark had been distinct, but as sleep settled into him, the crackling fire had blurred and blended to a low and steady music. It was one sound, one song, as the wind across the prairie was one endless breath, a body that never stopped sighing. It put Clyde in mind of the dream—the fever dream, and the certainty of oneness that had come to him then—all separate and distinct sounds merging into one endless hum.