by John Crowley
Of course he returned. She came to know his call, stopped when she heard it on the garden path or as she walked the perimeter of the house, following a system of ropes her mother-in-law had put up so she could take the air and not get lost. She wanted him, went searching for him as far as she could go: brought food sometimes, often things of a kind he couldn’t eat. He didn’t want food; he wanted her. He was sick: sick in a way no Crow had ever been, not even Kits; sick within as though parasitic worms inhabited him—he’d once seen a ragged and wasted Crow die of these, the skin splitting and letting out the roiling mass.
He came to sit by her, suffer her touch—he knew now she couldn’t see him except by touch. Touch, and another sense: one that came into him or over him almost unfelt, soft rain in a Hemlock grove. It caused him to yield up to her what he possessed, all that he had seen and done in these late seasons, in some form that wasn’t words, though I can only relate it in words. What she drew from him, hand on his broad back, whispering lips near his face, remained within him even as he was relieved of it; and the words she spoke, though mostly meaningless to him, also entered into him and remained. He remembered the Saint in her jeweled box in the little house of flints in the middle of the Brother’s Abbey: excarnate and in darkness, the Saint had spoken words that both caught and freed him.
In this way she learned what he’d learned. Throat full of blood, cried out for water. Shot me, though I begged them to spare me in Jesus’s name. And of the others, too, all the unburied, exploded, rotted away, eaten by Pigs, Dogs, Crows, Vultures. She hardly stirred, though along the current of her sympathy he felt these things passing from him into her, and (like her words inside him) they would never leave her. It was what she had wanted. She could begin.
There was a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.
Forever, heaven had been distant: the lands beyond death lay at the end of a long astral journey, a shining city, a far shore. Now when everywhere on earth had come closer to everywhere else, trains and steamships and telegraph lines, heaven too had come nearer. Those remote celestial realms, unfigurable, twelve-gated, were now known—through the investigations of Mental Sympathy—to have been near all along, right next to us, overlaying the lands that are not heaven, and just a step away. Those who die happy in the company of their loved ones and in the home they know often can sense no passage at all between earthly and heavenly life, and can believe themselves still among the living: here is the flowered path to the familiar door, here are the remembered ones who went before us, in their habits as they lived; here the table is set, the good odors of sustenance; here the apple tree and the peach tree where once they were, bearing fruit. From there a soul might progress to greater and higher realms, suns and planets beyond number, where the greatest human souls have transformed themselves into angels, powers clothed in light—but if she chooses to remain close to home with mother and father and spouse in that land where we never grow old, there’s no one to deny her.
That was before the War. Before the War, progress on earth had seemed to model progress in heaven. This earthly Republic had grown not just richer but wiser; the principles of peace and loving-kindness would surely expand, following the railroad and the westward wagons. Unlike the Crows of Dar Oakley’s old demesne, the People who participated in the great sympathy knew what the Future was: It was land they were bound for, this land’s true reality, inside them now, outside them as well in times to come.
For all its justice, all its nobility, its necessity—as the President insisted—the War seemed to quench that progress, stifle sympathy in horror, bring back Death’s old dominion. If the true Republic that the fellowship of sympathy had envisioned could begin to advance again, those who had the talents and the will would have to steel themselves to suffering such as they could not before have imagined. Only by entering into the suffering of others with all their being could they free those whose dreadful deaths trapped them in the grief and horror in which they had died. That was what Anna Kuhn must have gained through Dar Oakley: a suffering like that of the mother of Jesus, like Jesus’s own in the dark of the Garden. If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. After that suffering came new power, caustic as lye to use; yet to use it was all that she and her sisters and brothers in spiritual science wanted to do for as long as it had to be done: to reach these souls, entangled in their deaths, and free them. For they are inhabiting felicity; they are standing in its environs; they just don’t know it:
Just beyond where the shadows are falling
Is a bright, summer land, ever fair
Surely the powers on the other side would be at the same work. Surely there would be great hospitals and sanitariums there, airy, clean, and temporary, like the ones built by the Sanitary Commission vastly multiplied. There salvation, incomplete at death, would be continued.
And the work of salvation there as here was a work of knowledge.
It didn’t matter that a loved one’s physical frame, the abandoned support of the soul, lay somewhere unknown, didn’t matter that his bones had no rest: that was what Anna Kuhn would tell the heart-shattered mothers in black bombazine who sat opposite her at the trembling parlor table. The soul had left all that behind, didn’t rest or want to rest. In the vastness of heaven the dead began a life busier than their lives on earth, and part of their business was reaching and guiding those still in the body. Every communication strengthened the bond between the living and the dead; it was a work with the same gravity, the same promise, the same wild successes and failures as the laying of the Atlantic cable, and just like that cable it canceled a gulf simply by crossing it. A bond that joined all places and persons in an immediacy that was not different from the instantaneous motion of electricity: an Alternating Current running through the whole extent of Spirit, which was likely infinite.
That’s how it felt, I think. That’s how it must have felt to them.
In the celestial system, however, sender and receiver weren’t so easily and surely joined as in the telegraph system. The chords of sympathy weren’t as certain; a call to that realm might reach many, or none—though the ones who responded to a call, who stepped forth, so to speak, from the murmur of voices indistinctly heard, almost always proved to be if not the one called at least one who knew that one or who agreed to seek for him: the child or brother of the one whose hands Anna Kuhn held.
A precious bit of a conversation I’ve found transcribed in a spiritualist pamphlet my mother preserved, taken down by I don’t know who, sometime in the late 1860s:
MRS. KUHN: Is there someone near? We welcome you. There is someone. There are voices.
VISITOR: Mrs. Kuhn, who speaks to you? Is it—
MRS. KUHN: Hush, I hear. Is it you, D—? Your mother is here.
VISITOR: Oh, oh, my child.
MRS. KUHN (possessed, a different voice): Mother? Is she here? Munny?
VISITOR: D—! His name for me. Oh darling.
MRS. KUHN (possessed): Munny, I am afraid. I cannot see.
VISITOR: Oh my lovey. (Weeps.)
MRS. KUHN: You need not be afraid. Where are you? Can you tell us where you are?
A pause.
MRS. KUHN (possessed): Cold. They are all dead, I know. There is a crow. Something presses me—yet I do not feel it. I feel nothing. I do not know where I may be.
VISITOR: Where is my boy? Ask him to tell me.
MRS. KUHN: Wait, have patience. (Listens.) D—, your Mother is here. There is love here. Yes. Soon you will have comfort.
VISITOR: Tell me what you hear, I beg you.
MRS. KUHN: Gone. I hear—Speak!—No, now silence.—No, don’t weep, he will return, I am sure. Come—
The transcript ends there.
There’s a poorly reproduced photograph, Anna in a straight-backed chair, hands folded in front of her. Her dress is, surely, black. She wears an odd pair of oval black glasses that I don’t think she wore in daily life—Dar
Oakley would have noticed them. Her hair—it looks dark here, though it was always described as light—is sharply parted and tied back.
A Crow. I admit that I was startled to read that, and my eyes filled suddenly: the evidence of my friend there. It’s true, I thought; which of course isn’t proven by that. But if it is so?
One other thing: among the spirits who are reported in this cheap little pamphlet (half of it is missing) to have spoken with Anna more than once are an Indian chief and a monk. They both spoke to her in English—but maybe English is the language of heaven. Were a monk and an Indian reached, or did they reach Anna, because of the current that ran through Dar Oakley? Well, I don’t want to make much of this; it appears that a lot of mediums heard from Indians and conversed with them at length. And with George Washington, too, and Ben Franklin.
Enough.
What Anna Kuhn enjoined on Dar Oakley—what anyway he felt compelled to do for her sake—was to go as far as he could to find as many as he could who had died so hard: who were still at war, still untranslated. He was to sit with and listen to each one, because every story, every disaster, every death was different, and had to be experienced freshly if the medium—the coming word for those who stood at the juncture of currents, who both transmitted and received—were to help them make their way, take that single step toward the light.
For this, Dar Oakley became what no Crow had ever been: a night bird. The ones it was his remit to find could be seen in the day—he’d seen them in their numbers coming North, most often at dawn or evening, in fog or mist, as he had seen Anna’s husband and his brother. But they were more numerous at night, brighter against the dark world.
He’d always believed he couldn’t fly at night, and he didn’t know even now that he could, didn’t know if this dark was night itself or some other place that came after day. He’d slip away from the flock as it headed for the evening roosts, fly to a high Pine he knew of that had a long view; there he watched the sun set and the further world arise. He learned about moonrise and moonset; saw the white stars and found that they turned through the night, some going down darkwise below the black land and others arising daywise, as though they flocked. He thought of Kits: the world is round, and if you go far enough, you return to where you started; did these lights do that, all in a night? Sometimes he’d fly, exalted and afraid. From a height he’d see the People, concentrated in some places, scattered thinly in others; roads and inhabited places were marked by the greater numbers of them there, a dull sparkle of drifting souls, like the lines of fires set across the land by One Ear’s People that he’d once looked down on.
There were so many. Not all were soldiers: no, he knew they weren’t, he could in time separate the blue-clad foot-dragging limb-shattered ones from all the others he perceived, whose sorrows glowed around them too: the ones murdered at home, the diseased, the ones frozen alone in their cabins or burned in fires, killed at birth by mothers who then killed themselves or were hanged. Men killed in knife fights or caught in iron machinery or shot by their friends, some of them once soldiers. However close he came to them, however long he sat by them, he wouldn’t learn the stories or fates themselves; he heard the vague murmur the souls made, felt their rage or regret, but he was only a conduit or collector of them. Don’t kill me, Sam, don’t kill me now and send me down to Hell with the sin of what we’ve done all on me. Anna Kuhn then drew the stories out of him, her blind eyes weeping, her fingers like the dipper that draws up clear water from the black rain barrel. He couldn’t tell the stories, but still they were his; in the day as he fed and flew with the others and as he sat the Pine in the night, they were with him.
Pity. He felt it in his breast and in his hooded eyes when at dawn he roosted to sleep in hiding. He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.
If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out. He saw the earth and the night as People did, and it wasn’t a different place from their day-world. It was all one now, Ymr was, and he was in it.
The Crows had taken notice of Dar Oakley’s visits to the white farmhouse, that he seemed unafraid of the People or animals there. It was something to gossip about, as anything out of the ordinary was.
“So what do you get from that?” the Crow called Ke Rainshower asked him. Late summer, and a dozen Crows were laid out on a sunward bank, wings spread out, eyes half-closed.
“Oh, nothing special.”
“Uh-huh. Well.” She was a lean and suspicious bird. She didn’t suggest that Dar Oakley was hiding something, but it wasn’t like a Crow to do something for nothing.
“Let us know if you need some help,” she said. “Distract the Dog. Get the Ducks away from their wee ducklings.”
“Sure.”
“All for one,” Ke Rainshower said, not as sleepy as she seemed. “Right?”
Watch out, watch out, the lookouts on high called. Gun, gun. Wearily, reluctantly, the sun-drugged Crows roused, looking the way that the cries pointed. The hunter was there, creeping to a clump of tall grass, likely thinking he couldn’t be seen; the Crows could certainly see him, see the color of his hat, the color of his eyes, for that matter. It was the boy from the farmhouse, who’d shot at Dar Oakley from the window, and then later from behind a shed.
“It’s not a gun,” he said.
“It sure is,” Ke Rainshower said.
“Well, it is a gun, but it can’t hurt you.”
“Oh yes?”
“Watch,” Dar Oakley said. He pulled his sun-softened parts together and got aloft. He flew low and slow over the place where the boy hid, and the boy swung wildly with the gun to keep him in his sights. Then the sorry little sound. Dar Oakley turned back to where the Crows had taken to the trees.
Too little caution is rarely better than too much. Sometime afterward the Crows spied the same boy making his way toward them, squirming on his belly, the gun cradled on his arms. They came closer, ready now to be amused, calling to the others, Come, come. The boy raised and aimed the gun, and it went off with a true bang. The ball shattered leaves and twigs passing amid the Crows.
“Not a gun, huh,” Ke Rainshower said to Dar Oakley, not without some harshness. “Can’t hurt you, huh.”
What could he do? He becked, shrugged, held his tongue.
They watched that boy closely from then on. He always came alone, toward evening; he never quit till the light failed. His first kill—a fledgling he got by luck and the little Crow’s inexperience—came the next spring. The fledgling’s parents cursed and shouted but didn’t dare come close; the other Crows joined in. They saw the boy kick the dead bird with a cool ferocity until it was hardly a Crow at all.
The young man’s name was Paul. He hated Crows; he’d later become famous for it. He hated his mother’s blindness; he hated his father for being dead. But more than anything he hated Mental Sympathy.
When he was old enough, it would become his duty to drive to the station in the trap, collect his mother’s Visitors (as they were always called), and bring them to the house. He also was the one who received from the visitors the coins and envelopes of dollars—differing amounts, whatever they chose, no one in the house spoke of it to them—which they didn’t care to press on Anna. Sometimes a father or a mother would take Paul’s hand or try to reach him through his eyes, but he’d just return to the trap and the waiting nag, and climb aboard. Along the road to town he’d see Crows sitting a branch above the road, or cruising not far off. He’d snap the reins, turning
his head to look up and around, old enough now to know that if the Crow his mother favored—the Crow with the white cheek—wanted to track him from far away, he’d never see it. And of course Dar Oakley did track him, unseen himself; likely the boy Paul didn’t know that a Crow sees four times farther and three times sharper than one of us can. But he gave far less thought to the young man than the young man gave to him.
The great commonwealth of the dead, which had for a time grown so close to the living as to be identical to it, had begun to seem farther off now. Perhaps the elder spirits had by now finished the work of leading the lost war dead into felicity, work that Anna Kuhn had labored at too; perhaps to some extent they’d lost their interest in the living, had turned to face the other way, toward the nested spheres of the higher realms and the infinity beyond. I don’t know. Dar Oakley stayed at his work, kept his watches in the night, but like the great flights of Passenger Pigeons that he and the Crows had watched in awe and then over time had seen grow fewer and fewer, the flocks of the wandering dead grew less.
At the same time there began a great movement to account for, locate, disinter, and honorably rebury as many of the fallen as could be, and it continued for years. Families were able at last to lay wreaths over beloved bones; those who had long laid wreaths over the wrong bones were led to the different ones, made to learn a new story. Still, more than half the dead, North and South, were never accounted for; the ploughs turning battlefields back into fields would bring up their brown skulls and corroded brass buttons for decades after. Among the ones who remained unfound were Anna Kuhn’s two menfolk. She had seen them through the Great Change, as it came to be called, but never did learn from them or from the Crow where their bodies lay; surely—she tried to be glad of it—they themselves didn’t care at all.