by Layne Maheu
Then he flew to the highest point of the fallen Giant.
And from his horn came a sound I’d never heard him make before. I was stunned that he’d ever paid enough attention in his life to make it. My father sang the Mother of Many’s song in a high, raspy falsetto, with perfect pitches and eerie sadness, though he got the order of the names wrong and sang names I’d never heard before. Perhaps his memory was better than or at least different from Our Many’s. Rest her feathers somewhere on the ground of the underworld. Already flies were beginning to wheel in the air above her thinning, stiffened wings.
My father called out, “Fly Home,” to my mother. Or he called her name and “Fly Home” afterward.
Soon other crows flew to our woods, crows that I’d never heard call before, and they perched and waited in trees just beyond view. When my mother’s song, sung by my father, hit a certain chord, a bird in the near trees would chime back again, again, flying nearer, hooded and proud-shouldered, extending her feathers, keeping her distance.
“Too Blue!” called my father.
And “Too Blue!” called the woods.
“Guided by Voices!”
“Blood of Mary!”
“Why Be Me?”
The woods answered back.
And these were the elder siblings of songs long gone, old birds, most likely older than my father, with a great ongoing curve to their beaks that they could barely keep trimmed and long, gnarly talons with many superfluous angles, curving blades, out-grown points. And these elder siblings lit in the distant, respectful wood. Such was the scope of Our Mother of Many’s song.
Lone Crow hung with his hooked posture nearby and made his pitiful mockeries that made no sense until he was idly chased away by Plum Black, who landed then beside me and preened me. Her eyes were cloudy with that awful weather that had afflicted Our Mother of Many.
Now and then a sojourner crow called out, “Many, of Many,” from the trees.
Then a crow called out its alarm. A few birds scattered, but all took note. The idle, excited squabble of foreigners ceased, and the silence of the woods announced a single rustling coming up the hill.
On a pathway rarely traveled by humans, Keeyaw appeared, moaning to himself, eyes downcast, in a fight against the reins of his mule. His animal, stupid enough to allow himself to be the beast of another, could not bear to look at the fallen tree. But there it was, and the mule knew it, and knew what he’d soon be forced to do. Keeyaw came upon the fallen Giant and tied the unhappy beast to it. Looking over the trunk’s size and girth, he pulled at his long, sad, lion-like beard and made sounds of strange moaning rapture.
Meanwhile, the gathering of foreign crows dispersed in a beguiling way, escaping through and around the branches of the forest without making a noise, and none of them passing before the vision of the man who probably wouldn’t have noticed them anyway.
“Keeyaw,” one hissed. “The pale beast, friend of the pale bird.”
Keeyaw took out a jawbone sickle and began to strike away at the branches that had once been the shoulders of my world. From different perches, my father called out. Not angry, not grieving, he was more than that, or less. His wits had flown completely away. “Fly here,” he called. “. . . here . . .” then “. . . there . . .” It unnerved me when he landed beside me. I found myself crying out as he did, the woe grinding away, making a bruise of my heart where the hot blood spilled out. Plum Black flew near and told me to follow. We flew off to a safe distance, where she arranged the feathers searing my face and told me to be brave, that soon I would have to find my own way. Her eyes clouded over again with that same faraway weather. How could she not be one from Our Many’s song? Plum Black snipped delicately around my eyes. She said soon everything would be different. Then she flew off to one of her caches in a crook of the fallen tree. Keeyaw stopped chopping and looked at her with something akin to wonder but continued his hacking away as she flew back to me with a scrap of gut gone dry and hard to swallow. The grainy offal was like grief stuck in my throat.
When Keeyaw had enough branches stacked and tied together, he reined the mule to the bundle. At first the mule feigned ignorance, grazing on a lump of grass. But Keeyaw hit him with a switch from our tree, and slowly, off they trudged, beast pushing beast, my old home in a tangle of sticks, snags, and horns, dragged across the face of the underworld.
· · ·
Keeyaw returned with four mules and three sons. The sons were all lank and groveling, following along the dirty embankments of the underworld. But unlike Keeyaw, their manes were wildly dark. Keeyaw barked and instructed them as if they were his to yell at, like his mule. And like his mule, his sons seemed resentful and unwilling to the point that they were all dulled by their submission, asleep and dreaming of elsewhere. They even moved like sullen beasts, necks heavy in their yokes and traces and no means to rebel. All except the youngest, the beastchild, who ignored the rest and ran back and forth in the Field of the Dead, waving a fan of cedar leaf over his head.
Looking over the fallen Giant, the sons joined their father in uttering strange moans of ecstasy. The dead tree pleased them greatly, and they took to truncating the rest of the branches without noticing our mangled Mother of Many or the nest below. That was when the God Crow appeared in a nearby tree again without notice from anyone, man or bird, except me. Eyeing Keeyaw, It blinked Its bone-colored eyelids and held Its majestic horn half-open and kept it that way, tilting Its head sideways as if about to form a question.
One of Keeyaw’s sons spoke, the one named Ham, whose voice rose and fell in such wild syllables that I could almost understand him even when the God Crow was nowhere near.
Ham said, “I believe this is a sign.”
“Of course. They’re all signs,” said the oldest son, picking up the nest and tossing it onto a pile of hacked limbs.
“This is no sign,” said the youngest, who picked up Our Mother of Many by the claws and carried her upside down to Keeyaw’s mule, where he threw her into the knapsack. “It is soup.”
“No. Listen—” said Ham. He looked about the woods, troubled and spooked, as if trying to remember something, as if he knew the wind’s meanings. He said, “We are being watched.”
“Watched?”
“Yes. By those black birds back in the trees.”
“Put your eyes to good use,” said Keeyaw, who held up a jawbone sickle for his son. “And your back, too. It is because we have destroyed their nest that they’re watching. If there is a sign, Japeth is right. It is everywhere. The God of Adam does not need to work through birds. He is a righteous God, and a straightforward one, too.”
“Is that why He asks you to build a boat so far from water?”
“Oh, Lord!” Keeyaw shook his jawbone to the sky. “What good is a man if his own sons doubt him?”
And he struck the tree near the God Crow, Who flew off with a burst and a great clapping of wings.
“The tree, the tree,” It said, unruffled and remote, in Its vast, steady whooshing. “Follow her there.”
. . . and he knew that beyond reality Was the other passion of mythology, That myths were sensual as tears or dreams,
—RICHARD EBERHART, “KAIRE”
3. Funeral
Strange crows flew in and out of our songscape without a worry, and my father let them. Once the sons of Keeyaw put Our Many into their mule sack and dragged her away, my father stopped flying altogether. His sunken body seemed like nothing more than the curved, hollow instrument of his wailing.
“Come fly!” he called.
“Fly somewhere.”
Seeming to act on a single pair of eyes, all the vagrant crows flew off again at dusk, secretly, to their own secret places. I would fly through the traditional pathways and stick my claws out in the dark, only to remember that our tree was no longer there. Home was nothing more than a trail of leaves and debris and sticks too small for Keeyaw’s purposes. Through the clearing I could see out to the ends of our aerie, where the mangl
ed stumps of other fallen Giants had gathered in the fields of the dead below the moon.
The nighttime whippoorwill’s comic repetitions seemed somehow louder, as if the absence of the tree only amplified the night. Stars that were once the warm glow of a fabric behind our tree’s limbs and needles were now as bright to me as the naked knowing of eyes. But whose eyes? Without the urgent, seeing quality of an iris, yet with a calm otherliness about them, as if they could commune slowly back and forth across the silvery dark. They trailed across the sky, and as they approached the morning, they disappeared. It was hard to sleep with all the dreams that kept landing beside me. I thought they were the elder siblings, none of whom were as beautiful to me as Plum Black, who had been lured away by the foul croakings of Lone Crow. The visitors that circled in the sky turned out to be vultures, but vultures with black, crow-sized bodies. One of them landed beside me with its naked, burnt-red face, and the vulture said, “While you are alive, I will love you.”
“And when I am dead?” I asked. “What of then?”
“Then I will become you.” And the face, scorched hideously from years and years of soaring far above the earth’s shadows, living directly near the sun, gave me crow kisses upon my forehead and brow and took a sharp nip at my neck with that one long, curved tooth of her beak and drew blood. Then we flew off together, and it was Plum Black, now a vulture, and she spoke: “Come with me to the Tree of the Dead; at the Tree, we will find her.”
“Many . . . of Many . . .” I awoke to the sound of a crow moving like a herald across the sky.
At first came the respectful. But now the curious, and worse, and they lurked in every tree. They gurgled back and forth in their foul gibberish. Why weren’t we off following Keeyaw to the Tree of the Dead? Hadn’t my father or the others heard the call? The loose murder of younger birds, perhaps a year or two older than Night Time, eyed me in a sidelong manner.
That’s him, their silence seemed to say.
An arrogant crow would land on the perch my father had just abandoned. Two or three belligerents would land in my father’s view. But only one at a time would challenge him there at the ends of the aerie. The grief floating across his brow wasn’t ready for the savage assault on his home. My father seemed foggy-eyed and off balance, but he flew ready to die. You could hear it in his cries. Somewhere flew my father’s growling attack, and the young bird cowered away, and my father kept at it, screeching between the trees.
Calls and black feathers flew at the strike of beak against wing, midair. But it was too great a force for the broad birds of youth, who weren’t ready to die. All morning my father stood off the challenges to his aerie with a raucous, bubbling squawk. Out, his feathers would go, out, with each blustery call, ready to give any newcomer chase.
My father cawed and bobbed and shot like a ragged bolt at whatever straggler was left, but not everyone he harassed was a crow. Far above the trees, a red-tailed hawk kettled, wings out, unmoving except for his windy tilting side to side, adjusting his flight to the slightest degree over the thermals. Our father met him so far above us it seemed like a slow drift. “Fly Home!” And the red-tail lazily flapped away with my father in excited pursuit. “Fly Home!” He dove like a mad thing at squirrels. He chased jays, starlings, even sparrows, little birds.
Seeing me, my father usually called out, “Come follow.” But now he just glared and struck the branch below him with his horn.
“I Am!” I cried out.
“Quiet,” called Squall.
“Pale bird!” said our father. “Will you burden this new nest, too?”
But my father avoided me and tore after Squall, who flew away into the woods, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
Night Time flew by me, too, squawking.
“Shut up.”
Then he flew away before our father could return.
“I Am!” I cried. “I Am!”
But my father seemed too spooked to chase me. Plum Black escaped by circling the various trees of our songscape, trying to land back on a tree no longer there. Finally she grew weary of landing on nothing only to get hollered at and harassed and pecked. So she hurried beyond the boundaries of the sky, to places I’d never flown before. I had no other choice; I followed. The last I saw of my father, he was humped over and grotesque, perched on the uppermost tree of our home, hollering threats at us as we fled.
When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.
—WALLACE STEVENS, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
4. Vanquished
Plum Black was a speedy flier.
My wings ached, and I fell behind.
Out here Night Time dove in front of her now that our father no longer badgered us with his sudden lunacy. I wondered if it was too late for her to become a Pure Flier. Perhaps she loved the fallen nest too much. Without a break in her flight, she dodged Night Time and left him behind as if he were a mere afterthought of a speeding wind. Meanwhile, I felt as if my own wings were clipped. Unable to keep pace with the siblings who disappeared behind a row of trees, I grew frantic in a fight with the air.
All at once the trees fell out from underneath me. Below was nothing but a great, gray expanse of water, and bits of the sun and sky leapt up out of it, and I didn’t know that such a thing existed, though I’d heard of one before. With no place anywhere to land, my bowels gave way. All was the same, just one watery wave after wave across the great body of water. Plum Black worked steadily far ahead, almost to the far shore.
I called after her.
Instead of actually seeing her, I saw a silvery, mirror-like flashing far off in the sky. Night Time looked clumsy, cawing in her trail.
“I Am!”
“Hurry!” she called, her voice diminished by the span of the lake and the swiftness of her flight, which made her wings work faster.
Far above the cloudbanks, a thick hawk soared, and there was no tree cover until we reached the far shore.
In the woods across the water, I imagined we drew closer to our sweet Mother of Many and the Most Merciful Tree, but I lost track of where I was and called out again and again, searching strange trees far and wide, flying circles I could never hope to repeat. Here beyond the lake, even my Plum Black had forsaken me, and despite her warning, I called her until I felt utterly exposed. Without a single reply, I kept flying—to where, who knew?—above the shores of unnamed trees and grasses and valleys without end.
From far off, I heard the calls of Plum Black and Night Time, but their calls disappeared in the impossible woods. There was the land of small trees and boulders, and the landslip that had sunk below the green, lurid waters. All that poked its head out of the filthy bog were trees and tufts of greenish grass. I called out the Song of Our Trees. But neither Plum Black nor Night Time answered. Mostly I flew through woods that seemed no different from any other woods, though I knew I was far from home and that was gone, too.
I flew to a clearing where a river fell off the edge of the earth and figured this was as good a place as any to die. The river made a strange, loud, lovely song as it spilled over the edge. So I found a tree and sang the song of my family the way my Mother of Many had sung it before the great tree had fallen on her head. That was the proper way to go, bringing your songscape with you. I had the odd sensation that our song was singing back to me, but it was just my own dying madness and the strange chasms of underwater music falling over the cliff and onto the rocks below. Then it grew hard to sing, being so hungry, which was how I figured I’d die. I was only a crow, but I did know how to poke around in the decaying leaves for potato bugs and grubs and the like. So I flew down and began turning over leaves, quieting my death song long enough to catch those wiggly nudgers and grubbers by surprise. They tasted so good now that I caught my own catch, so bloody and succulent, exploding in my mouth, not all soaked and deflated in somebody else’s throat pouch, halfway dissolved in some other hot esophagus.
Then I had the sun and the
stars knocked out of my head, and I was pinned onto the deadened leaves. I looked up and saw a goshawk above me with his wings spread out wide, guarding me from any other hungry bird that might want to take a bite of me before his sharp hook was finished plucking me right down to the nub of my heart. I was nothing more than a severed head and two wings held together by a wishbone. I called out at the hawk that angered me.
“Who are you? Is the Great Mother of Many in you? What of the Tree of the Dead? Can you take me there? Or must I fly to where the beastman took her myself?”
But that magnificent arrowhead of terror no longer saw me as anything other than that day’s morsel to pluck, pinned below him, begging for the quick law of the woods. More than a crow, less than a crow, the hunter of birds became nothing but the sharp-boned instrument that would deliver me to the death I’d sung for. It lacked any of those special powers that might allow it to become me and glorify me as the being it had consumed. But what the hawk knew, it did know, there in the herky-jerky doom of its ever-open eyes.
Before the hawk could finish scanning all around itself, a whirl of black beating wings fell over us. The hawk flew off in a confused screech. It was Night Time. Plum Black was with him, too, and they cried, “Get!”
“What? Are you going to lie there until he comes back!?”
We flew off to a tree covered by denser trees, and Plum Black preened the drops of blood off my neck.
“I thought you were already nothing but song,” she said, “after I heard you sing the Parting from This Earth. Then I saw the hawk. Look.” And she pulled some loose hawk down from the corners of my beak. “You must have bitten him once or twice.”
“Yes,” I said. “I bite hawks.”
“I thought I was hearing our great Mother of Many’s ghost,” said Night Time, himself the luminary of mimicry. His eyes blazed bright like polished coals from the fight with the hawk and the stirrings of our song.