One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

by Olivia Hawker

The watching made me realize why I had felt no surprise at Clyde’s coming. The corn patch was his natural place, for he was tall among tall stalks and browned by the sun as the plants were browned. The cornstalks called to him. They beckoned him to the harvest because he was their kin, grown to maturity, on the point of harvest himself.

The seasons don’t cease to change because we haven’t the time to plant or tend or harvest, because grief like a hailstorm comes up sudden and frightens us with its noise. Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.

There was but one land, one reality, and everything that moved beneath the boundless sky shared itself with its neighbors.

Had she no instinct for fear? It was unnatural, the way she simply looked at the world—observed it and accepted it, without reacting to its ceaseless affronts, its endless dangers.

Like the river and its bank, we flowed as one. I guess that’s the privilege of the young. Age roots a person, grounds a body to its habits.

whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.

It’s your own will you ought to follow, not God’s.

he could mute his aching heart as easily as he could lift his hand to the sky and halt winter’s advance.

time had flown on its heartless and rapid wings.

Clyde had always seen his farm as a necessity, the center of an unadorned life that sustained him and his mother but gave little more than what he put into it. The land had always been, in Clyde’s reckoning, a simple machine—functional, but lacking in elegance or beauty. Never before had it struck him as something lovely; but now, with the pattern of life imprinted in his mind, woven into awareness, he saw not the spiritless machine but the intricacy of its workings. Sun and soil and leaf and root, animal and stone, bone, human strength, human weakness, all moved together, worked together, dictating one great pattern of dependence. Each creature and plant, every person, fitted into its place. The perfection of the weave sped his pulse; his ears roared with awe. He was pressed down into the mystery that held them all, pressed like a track in river mud. And like red mud, like the richness of damp soil, the substance into which Clyde was pushed flowed and fitted around him, held him precisely in his place, sited him in the great and intricate order.

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.

Let joy run out of me. Let it soak the barren ground of this house—my home—and let something new and bright grow up from the field of my past bitterness.