Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  Yes, it was the one: the one who on that day had followed her mother out over the field, calling the begging call, more afraid to be left behind alone than to be under open sky. She seemed unhurt, healed.

  One of those on the porch rolled tobacco into a white paper and put it in his mouth. Dar Oakley saw Moss’s daughter take notice of that; she stuck her head in that man’s direction, alert and waiting. When he took a match from a shirt pocket, her attention grew intense. So did Dar Oakley’s attention on her. The match—that little secret fire that People now kept about them—was struck on the porch pillar, sizzled and flamed orange, then yellow, and he touched it to the tobacco and shook it out. Dr. Hergesheimer’s eyes were on the Crow, a smile of deviltry in his black beard, and a couple of others also seemed to think that something amusing was up—and the little Crow, unable to bear it longer, dove to the man and with a neat, swift gesture that reminded Dar Oakley of her mother, snatched the burning, smoking thing from his mouth and flew to her perch with it. Everyone except the stunned one who’d lost his smoke exploded in glee.

  The Crow, transfixed by her prize, turned it this way and that. Her tail spread and bent daywise; her wings lifted and cupped; her eyes were nearly closed, the haws slid over them. She applied the burning thing she held to the insides of her wings, this side, that side, bending her head deeply within. She was trembling with excitement. When the cigarette fell apart and the ember dropped to the porch floor, she followed it, hovering over it as though protecting it, putting her bill into the smoke.

  Only when it was all out and cold did she return to her perch.

  Dar Oakley now knew a thing about this Crow, and it was a thing he thought might be useful to him. The daughter of Digs Moss for Snails was a lover of fire, an addict of smoke: one of that widespread Crow confraternity that can’t resist the summons of fire, and don’t try to. She sat unmoving now, as though after great exertion, her bill open slightly and her body settling toward the perch. Dar Oakley felt an eye turned to where he hid in the Cottonwood—Dr. Hergesheimer’s; he’d felt it probing for him before he knew whose it was—and he slipped away.

  Dar Oakley can’t explain to me why Crows who love fire do so, or what the experience of it is for them, but he says some always have, that it’s a part of Crow life, at least for those who have the need. They seek it out, they step right up to it, handle embers in their hard bills, let the smoke into their feathers and up their nostrils. I didn’t believe it, had never seen or heard of such a thing, but since then I’ve had an old hunter and then a logger hereabouts tell me, Oh yes, Crows are drawn to fire; you can see a Crow hover over the chimney of a stove, or stand at a campfire that’s abandoned but not quite out—they’ll lift their wings, pick up burning stuff and dance around with it, spookiest thing you’ll ever see—but they do say Crows are devils, now don’t they?

  When he was first in the world, Dar Oakley says, Crows didn’t encounter smoke that much. Fires set by lightning were rare; so were People. A Crow could live her whole life and never see fire. When the lives of Crows and People had become intertwined, and People owned fire and produced it in many forms, devotion to it had spread. Old Crows who loved smoke inducted young Crows in the practice, but the response to the smoke and sparks wasn’t taught or learned; it came from the soul. (He didn’t say exactly that, but I have no other way to state it.)

  Is he, Dar Oakley, one of them? Any Crow might like the smoke, he says, but only some will do anything at all to get it. And playing with fire the way Moss’s daughter did is strange to him; all other beasts, he says, are afraid of fire. He doesn’t say that he is. Moths gather at flames, and burn; People stare into their fires, hypnotized. Are Crows ever burned, burned badly? That old hunter who says he knows all about Crows told me that once he saw a forest fire started in a nest, a big nest of sticks: had some loving Crow mother brought home a burning brand for her young ones? Dar Oakley in my house gazes at the orange airs that dance over the embers in the stove, and I see him tremble faintly, his feet move in shuddery steps, his wings tempted to rise.

  Why do they do it? What is the fascination? It seems to me that fire is the only thing in Crow life that has a meaning for them beyond the thing that it is: but I can’t say, and they can’t say, what that meaning is.

  In summer Dr. Hergesheimer chained Moss’s daughter to her perch. She learned that she couldn’t fly off when the leather cuff was on her ankle, after trying several times, being caught by the chain as she rose and then hanging helplessly, flapping upside down, until the laughing Doctor lifted and righted her. So there she’d spend the noonday hours while he slept away the heat in the curtained house.

  That was when Dar Oakley came to talk to her from within the Cottonwood. Hello, hello, she said when he first spoke to her, but that was what she said all the time, and it wouldn’t rouse the Doctor. Sometimes he’d dare to bring a treat for her to eat—a strawberry, a Grasshopper, the fat leg of a Frog—though always careful to remove all traces of it from the porch before he flew away.

  “Good?”

  “Good, good!”

  “Good.”

  He tried to get her to remember who he was, but was never sure she did. He talked to her of her mother, how good and beautiful she’d been, and how her daughter reminded him of her. He told her of her brother and her sisters, one who had mated in the spring and was raising young of her own.

  “You should see them,” he said. “They remember you.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Except for the love of fire, the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails knew nothing about being a Crow: what Dar Oakley sometimes felt he had forgotten, she had never learned. She’d never been part of a flock, hadn’t courted or been courted; hadn’t mobbed an Owl with a gang of wild young ones, discussed a dead animal with hungry elders, learned to play Drop the Stick. She still spoke in the whiny voice of a fledgling, though she was grown now, and she never would learn grown-up speech. Dar Oakley supposed she was stupid.

  What she did talk about was Dr. Hergesheimer, whom she called One—the Crow designation for a high-status Crow whose gender isn’t known. One gave me a squirrel to eat, which One had shot, she’d say. One took me into the field and let me fly and see Crows, and I came back to One.

  “You know that he—One—kills the Crows that come when you call. Don’t you?”

  “I just say hello,” she answered. “Hello, hello.”

  “Your mother and your father were two that he killed.”

  “Oh.”

  There being nothing more to say about that, Dar Oakley spoke of the one thing that he thought would catch her attention. He told her about the great fires that One Ear’s people long ago had set, how far they reached, how the smoke rose up above the treetops to meet the clouds. He told her about the thick smoke of shrieking trains that rose up full of sparks, how the cinders they threw off started grass fires in dry seasons, how the Crows would gather at the long blackened edge in the still-warm white ashes, lifting their wings and possessing the smoke in great draughts.

  She listened, one attentive eye on him, but he couldn’t tell if she could really imagine fires such as he told her of or could only respond to fire that she encountered.

  Or fire that she started herself.

  Concealed once in leaves and evening, he watched as Dr. Hergesheimer toyed with his Crow, taking her kisses and tickling her throat. After enough of this, she probed with her bill gently in his ear and in his collar as he smiled patiently, and then in a pocket high on his waistcoat. She pulled out a match, a wooden match that she seemed to know had been put there, and Dr. Hergesheimer did nothing to stop her flying with it to the broad rail of the porch; there she carefully laid the match and put her foot on it. She pecked at it, at the red head of it, striking with care and persistence until—Dar Oakley was taken by surprise, wouldn’t have thought it possible—it burst hissing into flame.

  She’d certainly known it would. Cautiously but deliberately she picked it up by the stick’s e
nd; her stance altered into the fire-lover’s, contorted tail and wings lifted, into which she pressed or shook the flickering match, her eyes half-closed but focused till it was out. Dr. Hergesheimer could be heard laughing, uh uh uh.

  Hunters tend to admire the prey they favor: to hold the prey in esteem is to increase the hunters’ self-esteem. Crow hunters all knew that Crows were smart, “wily,” capable of feats of insight that those who didn’t know them as the hunters did would have dismissed as impossible. They could remember faces of People who’d threatened them, and keep the memory for years. They could imitate Dogs, Cats, People. They could start fires.

  Yes, Crows were smart, they all agreed: but the hunters were smarter. There were plenty of Crows who’d dispute that; but just as many, even proud as they were, who wouldn’t.

  One respect in which People could never be outdone, not by Crows or by any other living thing, was in the laying of plans. All through his multitude of encounters with People, this was what astonished Dar Oakley most: how People could see forward to the days after this day, and perceive as though they beheld them the consequences of doing the thing they were now doing, if after they had done it they then did another thing that depended on the first thing. Dar Oakley couldn’t do any of that. But up in the Cottonwood that summer evening he felt scenes or pictures come and go as if they were before his eyes, though they were not before his eyes. Not pictures of what would be, but of what the would be was going to be made from: the match that Moss’s daughter lit. The smoke of a long prairie fire. The innocent calling of Hello, hello. Theft and precious things. The cigar of Dr. Hergesheimer. Spring; and courting; and mating. The dense autumn flocks more vast than any ever before, their cries rising to the sky, so multitudinous that no single voice could be distinguished in the sound.

  Each day produces in all its fullness the day that follows it. He didn’t know how, but he knew that much. And if the right things are done or the wrong things left undone, what comes to be won’t be what was to have been. It won’t be the future that this day now contains; it will be another thing. He didn’t yet know what the right things and the wrong things were to do and to avoid, but he knew that it was he, and Moss’s daughter, and Dr. Hergesheimer, who would do them, and bring that altered future forth; and after that, nothing.

  The days went on, and among the things they produced was a new People engine for Dr. Hergesheimer, and after that a new dwelling.

  The engine was a four-wheeled wagonlike device that moved without a Horse or an Ox or even a Goat like the little wagon that the boy Paul had had long ago. It moved itself, as though it were a beast; it made a continuous growl like a beast’s, and a steady rhythmic clatter like hooves on a road, and its hot breath came out the rear. But Dar Oakley knew it wasn’t a beast. The Crows had seen, in the last harvesttime, a huge yellow machine that also moved by itself, creeping over the land, smoke pouring from a chimney on it; with slow force it came into the cornfields as the People cheered, and in the course of a day it ate all the corn, chewing and chewing and roaring and roaring. Then it rested. Then it went away, and the People (who had watched the whole thing) went in to pick up what it had left, which was a lot, and there was some for Crows, too, when the People had gone. This wagon of Dr. Hergesheimer’s was the same: a thing that moved by itself because of fire.

  The new dwelling wasn’t new; it was the Hergesheimer house, a three-story house on a bare rise painted a dark purplish color, with details picked out in another color, the fashion when it was made. A large gray barn beyond, and outbuildings and yards. From it and to it more People came than merely the Doctor’s hunting companions; two were women, one apparently a mate. (I suppose Dr. Hergesheimer had inherited it on his stepfather’s death and felt he could then marry.) Anna Kuhn’s small house was shuttered and unattended to. On the porch of the new dwelling Moss’s daughter sat a new perch, or in cold weather could be glimpsed behind the large bay window. Dar Oakley watched Dr. Hergesheimer pile his new machine with his guns and supplies and set Moss’s daughter in it, in a cage of wood and wire, and drive away; Dar Oakley followed, but the machine went far and fast and he didn’t dare go close enough to see where they went. He knew what they went to do.

  Another new thing was that when the moved-by-itself car returned days later, it brought back not only Moss’s daughter but the Crows that Dr. Hergesheimer had bagged: Dar Oakley could guess that the grain sacks in the carrier at the car’s rear held them. Black feathers were blown back in the car’s wake as it went up over humps in the road, raising dust. Once returned, and after Moss’s daughter had been lifted out and secured, Dr. Hergesheimer brought his sacks of Crows into the back of the house and shut the door.

  Before, the hunters had simply left Crow corpses to rot away, or be eaten by scavengers. If there was a bounty on them, they’d tie the dead ones together by the feet and sling them over their shoulders or toss them in their wagons. Not now. Now the hunters—some known by sight to Dar Oakley, some strange—brought their kills, one or two or more Crows, to the back door of the big house, and went away counting money.

  Dr. Hergesheimer had gone from hating Crows to wanting them.

  But if that was so, why were the corpses then brought out in tubs from the back of the house, not by the Doctor but by others, and dumped in a pit at a distance, where they were sprinkled with something from a red can and set afire? Black smoke of burning black birds. Dar Oakley thought of the land under the Abbey on the island that he had entered with the Brother, the burning pits where the unlucky souls of People were thrust, blackened and distorted, at once dead and not. That was in Ymr, where such things could be. These Crows were dead, dead as dead. Nevertheless he was appalled: the dead Crows, moved by the force of flames rising, seemed to try to escape. He wouldn’t watch—no Crow could—and went away.

  Soon he came back again.

  This is the patience of vengeance: when he wasn’t eating or sleeping, Dar Oakley was watching the Hergesheimer place and noting what went on there. It was boring but compelling. As winter deepened he saw Moss’s daughter set out on her perch less often; it was harder here than at Anna Kuhn’s house to get near to her without being seen, and it wasn’t the time yet or the place for the Doctor to see him. Snow fell thinly and the wind carried it over the flat farmlands and piled it in drifts and heaps; it blew from the peaked roofs of the purplish house like plumes of smoke. Crows ceased to be brought or burned at the house, but one warming day a wagon drew up to the back side of the house, and the driver and Dr. Hergesheimer in his shirtsleeves brought out wooden crates and loaded them into the wagon, crates filled with bottles packed in straw. One box cracked as it was being put on the wagon, and a few bottles fell out; Dr. Hergesheimer in a fury shouted at the wagoner. Money changed hands. The wagon departed, and Dr. Hergesheimer, breathing cold clouds, went inside.

  When he thought it was safe, Dar Oakley let himself down and examined the remains of the bottles. The black stuff they had contained stained the snow; Dar Oakley tasted it. It was the bitterest thing he had ever touched to his tongue. Yet something in the taste was known to him, something that tasted of the burning of the Crow bodies. It was the same thing, whatever thing that was.

  A noise in the house caused him to rise away.

  Dr. Hergesheimer’s Genuine Pot-A-Wottamie Crow-Gall Digestive Bitters and Blood Strengthener. That was what must have been in the bottles. How do I know this? Because an advertisement for it appears in the pages of the Farmers’ Cyclopedia of 1915, which I acquired along with other books of no value when the local library gave up at last and cleaned its shelves and basements. There are ads for a lot of things in this fat, cheaply printed thing: Browning shotguns, chicken-wire fencing, dynamite for stump removal, seed, steam harvesters to hire. And medicines, which was what Dr. Hergesheimer’s tonic was advertised as being. Besides the stylized Crow on the label, there is the profile of an Indian with black feathers in his hair, facing a black-bearded man in a high collar and cravat. A tiny faucet has bee
n let into the Crow’s middle, from which a black drop descends. The Crow’s face is distorted into a strange patient ecstasy, with blinkered eyes: a face the Doctor had certainly seen many times. A bottle cost a dollar; you could get a dozen for ten dollars. It differs—I think this can be said—from nearly all other patent medicines of its time in containing at least in part what it claimed to contain: bile from the gallbladders of Crows.

  Spring: courting, mating. Mates seeking out mates in the dispersing flocks, thinking of building. All Crows are capable of things in that season that they are not in other times, heroic things, surprising things. Dar Oakley knew that well enough. He also knew that the changes he felt occurring in himself were happening now for the first time to the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails—or would happen if a male was there. And knowing that, and feeling as he felt, he perceived what he could or would do next. It was unlikely, hardly possible, but it was as though he could see himself doing it, see out of his eyes today what he would see tomorrow; as though what might be done had been done already.

  She was still shut up in the house in this season. Crow bodies were warming now within, but cold rain still fell and froze. Springs had been warmer in the land of his birth.

  He could see her, when he dared to come close enough, behind the large window on the darkwise side of the house; when he perched on the ledge of the window and rapped on the glass, her head turned his way, and she lifted her wings as though to go to him, but then remembered she couldn’t: the leather shackle that tied her to the perch was on her leg. Still he performed for her, his body moving in what for Crows is the equivalent of making faces. On each day thereafter he brought a gift and laid it on the window ledge. She studied the gifts, though she couldn’t have them, pointing her face toward this one or that one: a brass bullet casing, a fragment of glass, a bent nail, a tarnished silver thimble. He’d lift one or another of them, change their arrangement. Yours, his stance would say.