Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  “The rest?”

  “Of the earth’s creatures.”

  “Animals? For food? We will help you. Noah, do not turn your back on your own kind. We must go in now. The water rises daily. It follows our path. You have no choice. Look at our numbers. We’re going in.”

  “Oh?” Noah seemed relieved. “Very well, then.”

  And the herd of his kind started in an orderly procession up to his home, where they hoped to outwit the rising floodwaters. The man called Noah sat down in the field and watched them in speculation. He muttered to himself. “It will take them a forever going that way.” He picked up the reed cage and watched the butterfly batter the delicate dust off its wings against the wickets. Once all of his kind were gone, Noah cried out, “God of Adam! How am I ever to do this thing?”

  Then the God Crow flew near. Or maybe It had been there all along. In a tree just above Noah, the God Crow watched unannounced and left Noah to speak unknowingly to the air.

  “So far, I have just the she and he of the honeybee, the locust, and some other creeping-crawling kind. But of what kind I can’t say, nor can I tell for sure if they are the she and he, since to me they are all alike. And tell me this, before the ark is swamped and we all perish. Is not the thinking of the people more than the silence of a grub, or a whole snorting, bellowing forest of baboonery?”

  To that the God Crow flapped magnificently, puffing Its proud feathers, when from a clearing came a giraffe raising and lowering its great, broad neck as it neared. Noah stood, readying himself before the great spotted beast could trample him. But the giraffe stopped just short of Noah and also stood, as tall as a tree, knock-kneed, flicking its ears and looking down. Then the God Crow Itself flew down on top of the giraffe’s head, between the fuzzy horns, and spoke.

  “Noah, today your goodly grandfather, Methuselah, has died, mentor to you in the useful sciences of horticulture, metallurgy, apothecary, alchemy, astrology, religion, healing, animal husbandry, truths of heaven and earth, moralistic tales, and the art of growing trees. At the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine years, he has died. It is the time of grace and mourning.”

  “Of course it is,” said Noah. “Must you kill everyone?”

  “Enough. Worry not about the gathering of the earth’s creatures. Go now and sit beside the door of your ark and observe each creature as it comes to you. Waste no time, Noah. I know you won’t.”

  And the majestic God Crow receded, riding the crown of the giraffe, whose neck and haunches surged smoothly with each loping stride back into the woods.

  The one known as Noah went forth as the God Crow had bidden him. And the Old Bone and I flew as if the Mighty Bird had instructed us as well.

  All throughout the forest, strange sights passed before our eyes. Mist from the pounding flood grew as thick as rain, and gray shadows like ghosts ran through it. Two humped shadows big and buffalo-like swept through a clearing, then disappeared back into the thickening gloom. It was hard to make out the shapes. For a time, I even lost track of the Old Bone. But we called to each other. I thought I saw him, but it was a pair of strange birds I’d never seen before, resting from the heavy air and waiting on the branches. With strange amazement, Noah noticed them, too, all the many creatures, especially the larger ones, scared, lumpish shapes that moved with a weary patience.

  Noah knew the forest pathways much better than his fellow creatures and took a shortcut. I followed above him. Back at his home, Noah sat on a stump below the ramp to the ark as he had been instructed, and waited.

  Then a small herd of massive, hulking beasts hoofed their way through the mist of his rookery. These were the horses, their manes flattened wet against their necks and their arched necks steaming as their hoofs came down.

  “Oh, my,” said Noah, “a piebald, two draft horses, an Arabian for speed—”

  His eyes twinkled, and he wiggled his fingers. He made a mugging face at his mule. “You see that?”

  And then seven—because they were considered clean—seven clean, fine horses clumped up the gang ramp and rang through the decks, and they knew just where to go, into the stalls where Noah’s family had thrown down fresh hay. And so it went. Seven each of the clean kind, and two of those unclean, found their way past Noah into the cages and stalls and compartments awaiting them. At first the chosen beasts would wait at the outskirts of Noah’s rookery. Then they would creep before the ark as if they were shy, or in the wrong place.

  But when the Old Bone and I cast our eyes downhill, the approaching of the beasts had turned into a long procession of animal life, great and small, with no end to all the wide heads, tall horns, houses of fleece, time-heavy tails. You couldn’t imagine so many forms of fur, feather, or scale. Most of the creatures arrived in pairs, but some in sevens, while others arrived sopped-skinny and alone, as if the storm and the chaotic migration had singled them out. A furry, ferretish creature—but with webbed feet—climbed somehow down from a tree and watched the procession for a while before rushing in under the plodding of the hooves and disappearing into the ark. An anxious doe splashed in the puddles alongside the throng and then bounded up the ramp. Needing no paths, the birds swarmed in from all directions, like bursts of wind. Flurries of the mixed flock descended, then nothing, then a few scattered birds, and then a whirlwind all over again. They fought against the gales to enter the ark.

  “Aren’t you going in?” asked the Old Bone.

  “Me?” I thought of the hot ovens that burned deep in the hold, and the disemboweled corpses, and the piles of feather. “No. I’ll take my chances out here.”

  “I thought you liked it inside Keeyaw’s nest.”

  Then the dark angel of doom himself, the raven, came down. Instead of flying straight in, the raven sat in a tree beyond the ark, as large as the God Crow Itself, where he could observe all the comings and goings. He flapped and bobbed as he called out to the one they called Noah, “Who? Who? Who are you?”

  Noah gave no answer but only lifted his eyebrows in scrutiny.

  “Very well, I know who you are, anyway,” said the raven.

  And instead of entering, the raven shot his sharp glances all around.

  He lifted his throat and from his great horn came sounds faint and familiar to me, made even stranger because the raven couldn’t possibly have known what he was saying. There were calls deep from his gut, where hungry brother My Other still lived. Somehow my sibling was able to pipe his little song through the raven’s throat. He sang songs from his time as My Other, and even from his season down in the yolk. “I Am! Pale bird! Fear not,” he called. “I will always watch over you.” He called out to the bubbles and the last creatures of creation, still flailing in the headwaters, or climbing higher into the trees. When the raven turned his eyes my way, there he was, My Other, in the raven’s stare, except he was all raven now. He bid me to beware and laughed at the same time and then entered the ark.

  “Fear not.”

  Owing to a heavy swell right on shore, the Vessel struck and was lost: the Loss of this Ship had been foretold. . . In the Spring of the Year, a Flight of Crows were fighting in the Air, and making a dreadful noise. One of them was killed by the rest, and fell upon the Deck of this Ship; the whole Swarm immediately descended, and entirely devoured the vanquished Bird, leaving no other Vestiges than the Feathers behind.

  —THOMAS DAVISON, Rural Sports

  7. The Unclean

  The passage of time from day to night blurred in the sky, until there was neither. In the limbo of God’s wrath, the last animals on earth plodded the paths uphill, one behind the other, slouched heavily at the neck, unable to hide their faces from the onslaught. Between the lowering of the sky and the rising of the waters, the inhabitable plain shrank to a thin nimbus lit from below as if the powerful sea drifts, held at bay by the land walls of the valley, could throw out their own light by their movement. The vast whirlpools of gray-green light moved as the flood moved, surfacing like the afterthought of some infinitely large in
difference. In its slow path, hillsides gave way, sprawling forests disappeared, uprooted trees twirled in the rips. The clouds were dark from the flood headwaters having turned whole hillsides to pumice and sending it up into the air. The droplets spun in confused circles without falling, so that the cattle and sheep could not figure which way to hide their heads. The gray, wet air hung like smoke and left its film on everything.

  It was in this earthen smoke that the herds of humans arrived as if sleepwalking, feeling their way uphill, their garments wet and plastered like their hair to their white, sickly skin. Again one from the herd stood before Noah, who still sat beside the door to his ark, as he had been instructed.

  She was a righteous woman, carrying a large child in her arms, and two girls walked behind her, shivering.

  “You must—” the woman gasped. “No, you must,” she said again. “Not all of us have God to tell us what to do.” Water flew from her face with the blow of each word. “Many of us were swallowed on the way here. Parts of the path collapsed under our feet. The water rushed up behind us.”

  Noah hung his head. He said, “The ark is so full. I have not enough food and space for those already inside.”

  “Who? Who is inside?”

  Noah did not speak.

  The crowd began yelling threats about the beasts on board, and how the ark had filled with vermin when Noah wasn’t looking, and how they’d fix that.

  But the one they call Noah spoke. “You are too many for me to fight back, even if I wanted. But also, you are too many for the ark. It will not survive your numbers.”

  And the full herd of humans moved—slowly at first, then with much shoving and incidents of flying fists, and individuals flung down, and many trodden underfoot. There was a great panic to reach the ramp before the others. Seeing the throng, Noah turned his face to the sky.

  “You see how it is?” he asked. “The ark will be swamped.”

  Pushed by the advancing waters, many of the earth’s last beasts had gathered on the outskirts of Noah’s rookery, including the largest of God’s creation. As if on command, these hippos and buffaloes stepped between the ark and the mob of hysterical beastmen. The great brown bear, destined to be ravaged by the flood and sucked into the bubbles, stood before the entrance of salvation and roared. An enormous tiger leapt up into the throng, affixed his teeth into the skull of a human, and dragged the fresh corpse into the thicket. Wolves and lions tore the fleeing humans to pieces, and dispersed the rest. Elk, boar, and bull ran through the crowd, goring men and women and hurling them aside, and the human herds broke out into a mass scurrying. Soon the field before Noah’s ark became empty again, except for a low, guttural, rumbling underground, which was the flood drawing near.

  Then the awful creatures came to the ark—leeches, ticks, naked mole rats, monsters, creatures of the dark that live only by moonlight or deep under the earth, and it pained them to be out in the darkened afternoon—shrews and water rats and creatures too loathsome for Adam ever to see, let alone name, virus, pestilence, plague, the unseen and evil to everything but their own kind. These, it seemed, were not led here by the wings of the God Crow but came of their own accord, in unregulated numbers far exceeding the rest.

  “Lord!” Noah’s voice rose in anguish. “Lord! How are we to survive? We are so few! And now these cancers of creation wish to enter back into the world.”

  But no sign came from the Crow. No act.

  And when Noah stooped to keep one such creature from entering, they all scattered. Like drops of mercury, they shot up the ramp and deep into the recesses of the ark, where they lurked unseen and expectant, outside the cages, beyond Noah’s law.

  The Fifth Day

  On the same day with the fishes, the birds were created, for these two kinds of animals are closely related to each other. Fish are fashioned out of water, and birds out of marshy ground saturated with water . . . mammals were formed out of solid earth.

  —WILLIS BARNSTONE, HAGGADAH (JEWISH LEGEND), The Other Bible

  8. The Door

  The field below the ark pooled with muddy wallow seeping up from underground. Soon Noah’s rookery was inundated. A river without banks ran through the wash, and what should have been rapid whitewater was the same gray-brown churn, roaring until the waves grew constant. The frothing headwaters lapped against the dunnage below the ark and spilled around the trees. Still Noah stood outside, waiting for God’s will to change, and the waters to abate.

  All at once the ark lurched. One end of it bucked the hillside as the land below caved and gave way. With the animal mass inside and the water forces pushing from without, the untested hull threatened to burst. The blackened timbers, stacked in place for more than a lifetime, creaked and complained. From outside, Noah turned all about himself and did nothing, except for more of his watching and wading through the roiling slack water for a sign. He listened, mouth open, to the siren’s long lament above the ending of the world. Wringing-wet animals and humans cried out and took refuge in the trees as the earth sank from sight. But most of the animals floated by, their gray, wet heads above the flood, dog-paddling as best they could as they were carried off. On one branch, a large, ferocious cat snarled, sopped to the bone like a water rat, unable to move or let any other creature near. On another tree, a man handed a small child up to a higher branch where the mother waited. There the woman sat, cradling the child’s head as if it were an egg.

  Noah looked at the last vestige of the world’s beauty, being swept from sight. He looked at the tangled mess of his ark, unshorn branches reaching out from house and hull, hardly finished, black, shriveled leaves held in place by pitch.

  “How can you choose this over the wonders of your own handiwork?” he asked of the air. Meanwhile, the floodwaters rushed at his knees, then his waist. In the tide he looked like nothing more than a thin, bent tree; his robes and mane hung like streamers of moss, flailing in the storm.

  From inside the ark, a beastwoman cried out, “Noah. Come inside! You’ll be swept off!”

  Finally he waded back toward the ramp, but fell and was carried a small ways off.

  “No. It’s time to die,” he said, half-swimming. He was calmed by his motion in the water and studied an eddy from his hand. “For me, it’s time. Now, you—you are just. You save the world. Our children are on the ark. That’s enough.”

  “Fine!” she yelled, and disappeared within.

  From the ark’s ramp came a chair, flying into the drink. It was a huge chair hewn from heavy wood, and it floated down current, toward Noah.

  “Woman! What are you doing? That is my chair.”

  “I thought you might need it,” came the answer from within.

  Noah tried to drag it back through the onslaught, but made no progress and let the chair go. He neared the vessel almost in a swim now, when a riptide threw him back into the ark. As if by an invisible hand, the ramp to the door swung closed and tumbled Noah deep within the darkness of his own handiwork.

  Then the door to the ark was latched shut behind him.

  The God Crow—I could barely make out Its silhouette in the grayishgreen light that seemed to rise up from the sloshing waves—flew down and perched Itself above the bolted door, where It preened and stretched out Its feathers. Below the Great Bird, the chaos once quelled by Its Mightiness and the light once parted from the darkness all rolled into one glistening gloom and reclaimed itself.

  The passage from day to night, or the difference between the two, was obliterated, and the sky gave no answer. Not even lightning could break through the thickening sky. And the banks of stinging, salty fog grew into an ether neither water nor air but hovering between the two.

  “What now?” I asked.

  Before the wind had calmed, it pinned the Old Bone up against a tree trunk, so that he could stand propped up on his one good foot.

  “I had a pretty good life,” he said. “Now I will sing my song, and go. And I will sing for you, too; for what I sing, you sing. We sing from th
e same songscape.”

  And he sang of all the Mothers of Many who filled the woods with song, and who helped him trick an egret or two out of catfish, and of the young jack crows who taunted the beastman’s dog away from his beastman’s food, good crows, too, every one of them, wherever they flew to. “But it doesn’t matter now, does it? And what about my very own sibling, your sweet Mother of Many, dragged under by her own nest? She must have seen it coming, though, because she asked me to watch over you—”

  “She what?”

  The Old Bone stopped singing.

  The flooding below us grew constant, after the saltwater wash had claimed all of the land, and had nowhere to go but up. The Old Bone and I waited in the trees. All the creatures waited there for days it seemed as the huge riptides rolled by, and you could see the pattern the drizzle made on the flood’s surface. Occasionally an animal swam by through the canals between the treetops, a set of antlers, or a small, dark head above a pumping body. The filling up of the world with water would take a while. And all the creatures I saw, clinging to the treetops or floating by on a raft of debris, had a calm, shocked patience, as though this whole miserable affair would all go away soon, if they could only wait long enough.

  I asked the Old Bone about his song again. “My mother came to you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, well. Not really. She just called my name.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Old Bone!’”

  “I mean what did she say when she saw you?”

  “She said we Misfortunes should stick together.”

  “Where are your white feathers?”

  “Keeyaw got to them when he chopped off my tail. I had one or two back there, at one time.”

  “Our Mother of Many,” I whispered slowly, amazed once again at the reach of her song.

  “Who can say where she is now?” sang the Old Bone, a little impatient to continue his song. “Not like old Hookbill the Haunted, stuck by the feathers to Keeyaw’s nest, and her soul singing somewhere inside that mutt of man’s. What wonders she will see in the next world. Hear me now, the song of Old Bone the Tailless, as I sing my tailless song, short and simple, like my one good foot. And I sing for I Am, too, a pretty good bird in his own right. I know. I’ve seen it, with my one good eye. Why, I tried to show him the ark of Keeyaw, but when the time came, he wouldn’t go in. Good for him. May he hear this song, so he can sing on and on about our most beautiful aerie, our songscape, amen.”