by IGMS
Fall started early, and the crow found me one clear day in the middle of August when it should have been warmer than it was. There were about half dozen crows sitting on the antenna of a house a few down from mine. They were having some kind of debate, rough and loud enough that their voices would have woken me had I not already been up and walking to school. I usually biked the several blocks to campus, but one tire was flat and I hadn't had a chance to repair it.
They broke off when I approached. When I passed, one spiraled away and perched in a low branch farther down the sidewalk. I fished out the peanut butter sandwich I'd packed for lunch, tore off a piece, and tossed it. The crow caught it deftly in its beak.
That was more or less how Hamilton adopted me. I did not know then that Mab had sent him, though I would like to think that on a cool August afternoon like that he would have found me anyway. I'm sure he gave me a name, but I never learned it. I couldn't decide whether to call him Hamilton or Lagrange, but he struck me as a crow more Irish than French.
The first day he followed me all the way to campus, watching me pass on the sidewalk and then flying to a tree where I would pass again. By the time we reached the gates, he had gone through half my sandwich. He didn't come any farther, just perched on a lamppost and watched me walk down the brick pathway into campus. I know he couldn't have waited there all day, but when I walked home in the evening he was sitting at the same lamppost.
It only took a few days of that before he was riding my shoulder and I was packing an extra sandwich for him. I was never sure he'd come back, but he always did.
I had always wanted a pet crow. You don't see many people walking around with a tame one on their shoulder. (Hamilton certainly wasn't tame, but he pretended.) We had only been together for a few weeks before he started talking.
There are many crows, and they all talk. They call Mab's name, and in the stormy evenings they bring her news of the far and the wide world. I've asked them about Hamilton, but they say they don't know him. Perhaps they've disowned him for the word spoken on my behalf.
I need to say something about Carla here, too. Mab has not answered all my questions about her; about the things she was able to do. She says only this: "I grow old, and all stories have a beginning."
Make of it what you will.
I don't think Mab sent her. That might have been the only part of this story left to chance.
This was a college town, and there was something that everyone joked about, but they were sort of serious too: you came to school here -- or at least, lots of us did -- hoping to leave married. In lots of ways it was that type of college: small, denominational, traditional. It was a bit embarrassing sometimes how hopefully parents would scan the crowds at orientation.
Carla wasn't one of the girls from campus. She worked at a gas station several blocks from school, along the route I walked or rode my bike each day. I think she had taken classes on campus for a semester or two, but she hadn't stayed.
She worked the night shift. I first became aware of her when I went in one evening to ask about the air machine. I was on my way home, and one of the tires on my bike was again low. She had to come out and show me the button.
I say the gas station was on my way to and from school, but it was actually along one of many potential routes. After that evening, I went that way every time. I started trying to think of reasons to stop. I bought candy bars. I wished I had a car to get gas. Finally I stopped buying anything and would just go in to see her. When I stayed late on campus there was usually no one else at the station, so I'd sit at the counter and we'd talk.
I eventually found out that she was engaged to a guy named Dan. He never came around though, and for some reason the engagement seemed irrelevant.
One evening I stayed until she got off work, which was close to midnight. I volunteered to walk her home. She didn't live far from the station so she didn't drive to work. She said fine, but she first needed to stop by the library. I assumed she needed to drop a book off in the after-hours return.
When we got there she reached into the satchel she carried and pulled out a wrench. There were two metal lions flanking the library's doors, some rather pathetic echo of the lions at certain, more famous, public libraries. The lions stood with their paws fixed by huge bolts to cement pedestals. It was to these that Carla applied the wrench, her small arms straining.
"What are you doing?" The library entrance was not in any way secluded. We were standing in front of a well-lit parking lot beside the main street downtown. Cars passed every few moments.
She didn't say anything, just glanced at me with one raised eyebrow as if to ask why I wasn't helping.
I should say something about Carla here, something more than I have. I should say it, even though Mab waits with lifted arms beneath the tossing trees.
She was lovely. You do stupid things when you think you're in love with someone, even if she says she'll be marrying a man you've never met. She had dark hair that fell across her eyes as she strained over the bolt, and she had blue eyes.
I watched like an idiot until the first bolt holding the lion's front paw was out. When it was clear she wasn't stopping, I took the wrench from her and went to work on the second.
In a few moments they were all out and no one had stopped us to ask what we were doing. I stepped back and looked at the lion, wondering what she'd do now.
"The other one," she whispered, pointing at the paws of the second lion. I shrugged heavily and turned to it as Carla started whispering to the first. She had taken its head in her hands while I was working on its back paw.
The second lion was nearly unscrewed when something brushed my leg and I felt more than heard a low rumble. I nearly dropped the wrench and looked behind me.
The first lion was still the color of dull metal.
It rubbed its head up against my leg and kind of purred.
Carla wasn't saying anything now. She was watching my progress on the second lion like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
When I just stood there, staring, she got this bemused expression and took the wrench and loosed the last bolt herself. Then she went to its head and started whispering again. I couldn't tell when exactly it happened, but the lion stretched itself, flexed the paws where they had been bolted to the cement, and bounded down from the pedestal.
The two lions looked at us for an instant, and then slipped off into the darkness.
That was the first crack, but I had forgotten about it before the crow started speaking. I think I made myself forget, though it had not been hard. Sometimes things happen that don't have any connection to the rest of your life, and that's not how the human mind works. Your mind works by making connections. When it can't make one -- when a fact can't be grafted into the network of experience that makes up our mind or memory -- sometimes it just gets dropped.
That's what I did. Carla never said anything about it. I walked her home that night like nothing out of the ordinary happened, though she did hold my hand. When I passed the library after that, I did not glance at the empty pedestals. The newspaper ran a story about the theft. No one had seen anything.
It didn't make sense, so I ignored it.
The crow was more difficult to ignore.
When he started talking, the first word he said was "Dresden."
I was walking home from campus, and he had taken his customary spot on my shoulder. We would walk like this, and sometimes kids from the elementary school who were getting off the bus along my route would want to stop and try to pet him and ask me how I caught him. I would explain that he didn't like to be petted and that I hadn't caught him. He would eye them patiently and sometime give the kids an obligatory caw, which always thrilled.
The day Hamilton started talking, one of the kids, who must have been about seven or eight, walked alongside us for a block chattering about things he had read in a book on crows and ravens. He asked me if mine talked.
I told him it did not.
"Ravens a
re real smart," he said, oblivious to the fact that Hamilton was not a raven. "You're supposed to be able to teach them how to talk. Say something, Hammy. Say, pretty bird."
"Dresden," Hamilton said.
The boy clapped and smiled.
A few blocks later, having left the kids behind, Hamilton said it again.
When the kids weren't following us home from school a bunch of other crows might, and Hamilton would keep up a running conversation with them from my shoulder. But those were crow-noises. They weren't words like "Dresden."
Plus, each time he said it, it was clearer.
The third time, I finally bit.
"Okay. What about Dresden?"
He cocked his head at me but didn't say anything else. When we stopped at the station to see Carla I tried to show off his new trick, but he wouldn't perform.
The next morning he was more talkative. I had begun keeping the screen off the window in the living room so he could come and go freely. I don't know where he went at night, but in the mornings I would fix myself some oatmeal and set some raisins out on the table for him, and within a few minutes he'd fly in and hop onto the back of a chair.
"The Russians," he said, proudly, as if he'd been practicing. "Dresden."
I pointed out that Dresden was in Germany.
He talked like a crow: harsh and loud, heavy on the r's and the vowels, having trouble with his s's and n's.
I was not sure why I took it as such a matter of course that my adopted crow would first of all begin to speak, and second of all try to explain something to me about Dresden. It seemed like there were only a few options: ignore it, imagine I was going crazy, or take it in stride. The first had worked with the lions, but Hamilton was louder and wouldn't leave me alone. The second really served no purpose.
"Dresden," he said again, bobbing his head in what I took to be agreement. "The Russians."
"The Germans," I insisted. "Eat your raisins."
He muttered something I could not understand and hopped down to the table.
But it got me thinking. I knew enough to know that the Russians had cause to be in a lot of German cities at the end of the Second World War. I did not know enough geography though to know whether Dresden was in the east or the west, and I didn't know enough history to know why it was important.
He finished his raisins and muttered the word I couldn't understand, louder this time. He kept repeating it as I gathered my things and headed out the door. I didn't bike anymore now that I had a crow riding my shoulder each morning.
"You've got to practice more," I told him. "I can't understand what you're saying."
When we passed the kids coming home from school the next day, the same kid as before wanted to know if Hamilton could talk yet.
"Pretty bird," the crow said, and then, when the kid's jaw dropped, "Leave me alone."
He wouldn't stop chattering about Dresden. "Carla, Carla," he croaked as we walked up to the gas station. Again though, once we were there he would not show off. I asked Carla about Dresden.
"Like, have I been there?" She shook her head.
"Neither have I. But do you know anything about it?"
"Not really." She paused. "They had a museum exhibit a while back that was supposed to be a bunch of art and stuff from there. Dan and I went. I guess Dresden was the art capital of Germany or something before the war. They called it the Paris of Germany."
Hamilton croaked.
"What happened with the Russians?"
She shrugged.
The Russians were coming from the east, and the people of Dresden didn't want their art and sculpture -- what remained after the firebombing -- carried off or destroyed. Carla was right, and the city had been called "the Paris of Germany" for good reason. Its museums were packed with pieces assembled over hundreds of years.
When the Russians arrived, the museums that still stood were empty. The Russians clomped through the marble halls in boots that had marched across frozen steppes, but only echoes greeted them. The walls were bare of paintings; the pedestals held no sculptures. The museums' contents had disappeared.
I never bothered to look any of this up. Hamilton explained it bit by bit over the next couple weeks. His vocabulary seemed to grow daily, though his pronunciation often had a hard time keeping up.
"Empty museums," I said. "Got it."
"No, no. Taken away. Hidden."
"The museums were hidden?"
We were walking in the park. It was closer to September now, and I wondered if Hamilton would need to migrate soon. I was unsure if crows stuck around during the winter.
"Art! Art hidden!"
"Who hid it?"
"Everyone," he clucked, slightly softer, though carrying on a conversation with the bird always entailed him shrieking at some point. "Peasants, farmers, old ladies, houses, attics, cellars. Hidden." He cocked his head one way and then the other, a gesture I had learned was roughly equivalent to a human spreading his arms. "Empty museum."
Hamilton was explaining it all to me, but I still did not understand.
"She's letting me talk now," Hamilton said from the lamppost. I was sitting on the porch with a book. "Really talk."
"You've certainly gotten better," I said, trying to arch an eyebrow. "Who is?"
"Queen Mab."
"The fairy queen?"
The bird bobbed his head.
"Look," I began, "it's enough that I have a talking crow and --"
"We have to find her museum," he croaked, cutting me off. "Like in Dresden. But there, the people brought it back themselves. Not here. It's been too long."
Carla was inside, washing the dishes after dinner. It was the first time I had invited her to my place, and I had been surprised when she had not refused. I cooked pasta, and after we ate she made me go outside while she cleaned up. I had a server for creamer that was shaped like a tiny cow, and I could hear its ceramic hooves clinking against the sill of the window in the kitchen as she worked.
Suddenly everything seemed to click into place.
"Carla is the fairy queen," I said. "I fell in love with Queen Mab."
The crow cocked his head and looked at me like I was an idiot.
"Mab won't come. Or at least, you better hope she won't. She tends to put undue pressure on reality when she shows up. She needs you though, to start putting the museum back together."
"What museum?"
He spread his wings. "The one that used to be here."
A few minutes later Carla pushed the door open with her hip, bringing two mugs of coffee. Hamilton eyed her from the lamppost, and she smiled at him.
"Who were you talking to? I thought I heard voices."
I didn't like lying. "A neighbor."
"Oh." She took the other rocker on the porch and sipped from her mug. "Your cow creamer thing is gone," she said. "I'll get you another one."
"Shaped like a cow?"
She shrugged. "If you want."
Maybe things were not moving fast enough. Maybe I was dense, or I thought the talking crow was some kind of game or gimmick.
In any case, Mab did end up coming herself.
She didn't look like I expected. In plays and paintings she wore a dark gown with gems and leaves in her hair. In the rain, standing in the grass in the backyard, she looked far less human. One breast was painted black and the other silver. She had twigs in her hair.
I could not remember why I had stepped out into the backyard in the rain.
"Once upon a time," she was saying. She spoke as though resuming a discussion we had been having before something interrupted us. "There were two brothers who fell in love with Death. They saw her for the first time at the side of their father, who called them to his bed as he died. When their mother reached down to close his eyes, the two brothers saw Death standing there behind her in a black gown, and they loved her, for she was lovely."
Mab stooped, holding her hand a few inches above the ash sprout I had let grow up beyond the grass. She stood like that
for a while, the rain tracing the arch of her back, but nothing seemed to happen to the tree.
"The first son became a soldier, though whether he would have anyway I could not tell you. He would see Death on the fields, flashing through the battle, towering over the carnage, harsh and serene. Sometimes she would be there at his side, her face set. The soldier loved her, though as close as he came she always held her distance. He would whisper to her over the rattling breath of the dying, lift his bloodied hands to her silent form, but she said nothing."
I did not know if, watching her naked form move across the lawn, I should feel something. I would say she was like a dancer, but she did not move quite like any human. And then I would say like a sculpture, but she had not been birthed from any human mind.
I was fearful more than anything.
Mab stopped suddenly and looked at me. "You will find my things?"
The change in tone and topic was so abrupt that I just stared. The crow shifted uneasily on the top of the clothesline pole.
"Your things?"
"My things and my people." She tilted her head like a child. "My museum. They all went away, but I think they can come back now. You will find them for me?"
"If I can. I don't know where to look."
"They will probably find you, mostly." She started ticking off names on her fingers. "There is the Red Hand, Christopher 57, all of the gripe water, Thirteen Shades and his lovers, and Janie Wringer."
"That's all?"
She shrugged and held up her hand, five fingers outstretched. "All on this hand."
"Why me?"
She shook her head, coming closer, moving like a snag of cloth caught in a breeze. The closer she got the harder she was to see, until she was whispering right in my face. I smelled dirt and dry leaves on her lips. "Then you would understand too much," she was saying. "Then you would know the whole story."