One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

by Olivia Hawker

I ain’t fool enough to think I’m wise, exactly, but I have learned one scrap of wisdom, at least: whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.

Death comes when it comes. You can’t do a thing to change it, once the great and final decision has been made.

Clyde had no more dispassion for death. He had touched death too intimately for it to remain ordinary and isolated, a thing beyond himself.

I would never go so willingly to my death. He thought of the grave by the river, its yawning darkness, the smell of freshly dug soil. He thought of Substance’s arms, outstretched. That’s the right way. The man’s way. Resist the end until the end comes, till its jaws gape wide and it takes you, whole and fighting.

A mother’s sins might pass down to her offspring, generation after generation, but perhaps in these tender years, when the mind was still as malleable as freshly dug clay, there was hope that one might break the patterns of iniquity.

Beulah was a creature set apart from fear.

Hard as Nettie Mae was, tightly as she had bound herself to hatred, without her level head and steel command, my sister would never have survived.

One sob after another tore at his chest, but Clyde refused to wail. That wasn’t the sort of thing a proper man would do, he knew that much; and even here, in the blankness and solitude of the prairie, he was determined to be the right sort of man.

A boy becoming a man

The realization that Nettie Mae could be so affected, that she was not the bulwark Clyde had always thought her to be, struck him with visceral, instinctive fear. Not even the storm had frightened him so badly, not even the lightning.

The horrific realization that a mother is not undefeated.

That was the sound of the thunder: the shaking arms giving out, the weight plunging down, the bursting forth of everything Nettie Mae had held inside for too many years.

In a halo of light, Beulah stood out against the darkness with vivid and fearful clarity. Her eyes were downcast, watching the two faces of the miracle she carried, heavy lidded with a kind of holy acceptance. And the lamb’s four nostrils moved to catch the river air, breathing deeply of life while life still remained.

Weariness dragged her always toward sleep, and in sleep she found a refuge of dreams. Dreams always tasted sweeter than this life of toil and isolation, even when the dreams were bitter.

She had hoped, as all mothers hope, for a healthy babe. Something twisted had come in its place, but the two-headed lamb was still hers—her child. And it could not live. It would die, leaving the ewe empty again, bereft of the purpose she had carried all the months of her pregnancy.

Same as Nettie Mae

It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.

Suffering as part of maturing.

One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.

I’ve no child of my own any longer. I’ve a son—and one who has grown to manhood, thank God for that mercy. But no child left for me to hold.

A mother’s sorrow.

Nothing seems just but that you should go on living here. We have had our time as enemies. That season has passed. Now let us live in a new day. Let us come together as sisters.

we roved up the slope of the foothills. From that vantage we looked down on the thing we had made together: one great expanse of thriving beauty with no boundary to cleave it.

Cora may have proved a friend of sorts, but she was still a woman shadowed by shame, a woman whose morals were loose enough to mire her in sin. Her daughter was cut from the same cloth. Wasn’t it always the case, that children followed in the footsteps of their parents? What came before would always come again.

So hard to change one’s train of thoughts & judgement , after living a lifetime of narrow-mindedness

I don’t want this life without her.

only you hold yourself to account. You are your father’s son. This is a lonely place, and you will become what loneliness made of Substance—the hardness, the hate. That’s the way of the world, the way of parents and children.

He wanted to look down on the whole of us—see the unity we had made before his mother’s whim tore it all asunder.

The tracks of our routines—our daily lives—were beaten deep into the earth. We had made a permanent mark upon the land, but if a stranger were to look down from where we rode, he would never have known where one farm ended and the other began. The months we had lived since Substance’s death had consumed all our boundaries. We had made of our two worlds one shared and thriving reality.

A tree may fall, but if even one root remains in the soil, it will live.

God is said to be great, the worm told me, so great you cannot see Him. But God is small, with hands like threads, and they reach for you everywhere you go. The hands touch everything—even you, even me. What falls never falls; what grows has grown a thousand times, and will live a thousand times more. Wherever hand touches hand, the Oneness comes to stay. Once God has made a thing whole, it cannot be broken again.