They were unlike One Ear’s West-wandering dead in one way: One Ear’s had grown more numerous the farther they moved, as Death moved before them and made more, who rose from where they lay to join them. These ones, though, grew steadily fewer. Why? Dar Oakley began to perceive how by ones and twos and threes they’d leave the crowd, turn away daywise or darkwise toward the People towns and farms that appeared now and then. And at length he understood. These fighters had lived in those places, had left them to go to fight in Battles, and now were heading home, as the Crows, too, were heading home.
By the time he began to recognize the billwise country again, there seemed to be only a few around or below him. He wondered if some had just grown tired of journeying, as some among One Ear’s People had, and stopped for good in the woods or hills. It was hard to track them, in any case; they were as much not there as there, shadows that nothing cast. Finally he sensed only two remaining: they seemed related, though he couldn’t say why. Without really choosing to, he began to keep close to them—following them as they’d followed him. They’d come and go as though lost, then be near him again and walking purposefully. Dar Oakley knew that following them he’d drifted far from the way to his old demesne, but he didn’t mind. Spring was a hard time for a single Crow like himself to be among friends and kin: maybe just as well to wander, learn something new.
There: the two of them, sitting motionless together in a clearing, a small fire between them. Of course there was no fire, only the thought of one. Or perhaps a memory: two People at a fire. His memory, or theirs?
Apple trees were white with blossom, fields turned brown by the plow, when the two in plain day came to a stream beneath trailing willows. Across the stream on higher ground was a small plot set apart by a low fence and a gate. A few upright stones marked the People remains laid beneath. The two seemed to strive to cross the stream and reach that place, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t go any farther. Dar Oakley knew this, but they didn’t know it.
Crows—those that chose to take notice of such things—knew by then something about graves and graveyards; they knew that the long boxes put into holes dug deep in the earth contained each a People body, child or old one, the size of the box would tell you, though you saw nothing of that body and never would. The two blue-clad fighters longed for that dwelling-place. He knew they longed, but not why; he knew that even those who were buried in these places set aside for them couldn’t remain there, though some People believed they could and did. Fox Cap long ago had brought home the bones of her People from where they were scattered, and placed them in the cairns that had been made for them; but she had told Dar Oakley that those dead were by then in another Realm the living couldn’t reach. (She had reached it, though, and he too with her.) The only happy dead, she said, are those who know where their bones are laid: only they are free to go and never return.
Beyond the fenced and separated space, the bare ground rose farther to a white farmhouse with two chimneys. The land around it hadn’t been turned or planted; there seemed no one there, except that in the yard a lean gray Horse harnessed to a little carriage with a black hood cropped the grass. As Dar Oakley watched, two People came out of the house, females, one in white, and young, Dar Oakley thought, her hair light; the other gray-haired, in black. The young one stepped from the porch—though the one in black tried to hold her back—and walked with a kind of dreamy certainty toward the little graveyard. Dar Oakley felt the two fighters strain toward her but make no advance.
So there they are, the three of them, motionless, with the graveyard and the stream between them, the Crow watching.
The two men are the woman’s brother and husband, and she has suspected, even known, that they are dead, but has received no news of that or of their whereabouts; their bodies will never be brought home and placed here beside her parents and her first child. In the woman’s apron pocket are photographs of the two men: perhaps it’s these as much as her person they are drawn to. The pictures are kept on the mantel most of the time, but now and then she must have them with her. The other woman in black is the husband’s mother.
I know these things about her, which Dar Oakley didn’t then know; and I know more than that. I know that in that year she stood by her window for hours, facing toward the little home cemetery; that with a crow-quill pen she would write down what she felt there:
There is within the Earth a Door
That opens to the Sky—
And there Integument and Self
Part Company—for aye.
She knows that we leave the husk of the body behind at death, and go on without it to our next habitation; that somewhere Death has drawn out the essence of her husband and her brother, just as the essence of them was drawn out by the camera artist and fixed on the glass, where it will never change; that wherever, on whatever field they lie, no more harm can be done them.
She knows all that and yet nothing can console her finally that she cannot touch their dead faces, brush the hair of their heads, bathe their limbs, and wrap them in clean linen to be put in that ground where she herself will one day go, only to depart again. If she can’t lay them to rest in earth, bid them farewell at that door, then she can’t lay them to rest in herself. It’s as though she carries a dead child in her womb that can never be born. And now in the spring of the year she feels them, their selves, souls, persons, returned to here where they ought to lie, from where they might have been able at last to detach from the earth and the world and go on. They want her help, and she can’t help them.
After a time neither long nor short the two men were gone, despite all their longing, as though even so little existence as they had was hard to maintain. And she knew, and Dar Oakley knew, that she looked at nothing.
Of the many human persons in Dar Oakley’s stories, she is the one who for certain lived and died in a place and time in our history. I know her name, though Dar Oakley never learned it. My mother said the name to me. She used to hear it spoken, as others also did, by the living and by the dead.
Dar Oakley never returned to the freehold he had held in that land he’d called the Future, or to that flock he brought there. The Crows of this new country he’d come into, after a time of wariness and even some hostility, came to hold him in some esteem; they could laugh at his brags, but—Dar Oakley notes—nearly all of them bore that old invention of his, a name of their own, whether taken from a parent or a parent’s parent from long ago, or given just yesterday for some deed or some accident: Ran Foxglove, Ke Rainshower, Fats, Muleskin, Gra Brokenfoot. They called Dar Oakley Whitecheek, for the tale he told about his dealings with the Snowy Owl, which of course they didn’t believe. But it wasn’t because of Na Cherry and his failure in the Ymr of Ka that he hadn’t returned to the old place. It was because he was held here now in the Ymr of Ymr: by the People’s dead he had seen in these lands to which he’d wandered, and now could not stop seeing.
Autumn, and Dar Oakley and the other Biggers—Ke Rainshower, Muleskin, and the rest—led a large band going at evening darkwise toward their roosts, passing over the barns and yellow fields, following the clear line of a small river through the valley. They’d pass over the white farmhouse to which the two dead fighters had come, whose family dead were buried in the fenced space. Crows took no interest in it, could hardly be said to perceive it. But to Dar Oakley’s sight it seemed to brighten, to be larger than others; to glow, at dawn or evening, against the dark earth around, as though a setting or a rising sun struck it but not the land it stood on: of the world but not in it. He saw her, too, on the porch: in white, her light hair disordered, dark shawl over her shoulders; the child beside her angry and beseeching—why? He left the gang and let himself down toward her, called, hardly knowing he did so. She loosened the hands of the boy tugging at her skirts and came to stand at the railing of the porch, putting her hands on it and pointing her face outward and upward but not looking, not at Crows or at anything: he felt sure of that. And yet he felt her seeking.