Anna Kuhn. Child or grandchild of German immigrants. There are certainly written records of her, and if I had the capacity, I could travel to the archives where they are kept, I could find the letters she wrote or dictated, and the little books of her poems that were put out by her friends and devotees. All that’s beyond me now, and the resources that not long ago could be reached from anywhere—they’re largely in chaos, or locked, or fouled in one way or another. They’d be inaccessible anyway to me here. What I do know about Anna Kuhn is what my mother told me, and some pages about her in those of my mother’s books I still have; and the witness of the Crow. Mother wouldn’t have been surprised that by such means the woman reached me. She was by you, Mother would have said, all along.
In adolescence Anna was known locally as a somnambule: a sleepwalker. There were many famous somnambules in the years before the Civil War, suddenly appearing across the Republic, exhibiting strange powers. Maybe they’ve been common in all ages, but at that time they seemed to herald something new, or to embody it: an opening to an unseen world. They’d get up and walk dark lanes in their shifts (they were almost all women, as I understand it) or set tables in the night and make meals for no visitor, as though other senses awakened within them when they slept, by which they could see what was concealed in the day, hear what made no sound, feel the sympathetic vibrations that physical nerves could not. Others didn’t ambulate, kept to their beds, lay unmoving nightlong with eyes closed while in a voice unlike their usual one they would sermonize to listeners, answer questions, tell of God’s love and the world beyond death, and yet have no memory in the morning of what they had said.
Anna Kuhn didn’t speak asleep, didn’t preach, hardly spoke, apparently; in the dark she could see into mirrors, and read her Bible, but when she later recounted the days when she had walked asleep, she mostly remembered being spoken to. Her eyesight was never good; she trusted hearing more than sight. She said she had always sought for the way ahead by ear, and by ear she understood the place that the way led her to. Of those Mansions and Gardens I only hear, I do not see them, but in Hearing I do see, tho’ whether I may trust what I see I do not know—I think the Reality must exceed all that my mind can picture. The harder she tried to see, the less clear the way and the place became.
She became entirely blind in the years after the War. She told her correspondents that she despaired then—as much for her fatherless son as for herself—but that in time she felt an inward sense open that was more perceptive than her physical eyes had ever been:
Before Dark fell I fear’d the dark
And shunned the Shadowed way—
But now—awake—I know a Night
Much brighter than the Day.
She came to wide notice through accounts published by the minister of her church, who was interested in questions of mental sympathy and the condition of the dead. He took down what she told him about her brother and her husband, that she knew just how they had suffered, how they could not free themselves of the burden of their dreadful deaths. They are like living people who have taken terrible wounds: they can think of nothing else, all their energies devoted to healing and the sufferance of pain. I believe (she said) that in time—though truly there is no time, nor space, there where they now are—their eyes and hearts will be opened, and they will know their true condition. They were heroes of a great crusade, and there is nothing to prevent their entry into joy. A blessed doctrine, the Reverend concluded.
Among other remarkable signs of her sympathetic powers, he reported that if Anna touched either one of the two ambrotypes she often carried with her, she was able to identify instantly which man it pictured, though the frames and the cases were identical. He’d known the men: had given them their lessons as boys, had prayed with them the morning they went to join their regiments, the day the pictures had been made. Her touch upon their pictured faces, the Reverend wrote, was as gentle as the touch of a mother’s hand upon the eyes of a sleeping child. He couldn’t know—Anna Kuhn herself hardly knew it then—that without a Crow who came near her, a Crow overburdened with stories that he didn’t want, she wouldn’t have been able to know the true deaths and afterlives of the two men shut in their cases of wood and plush.
Late winter, a day of dense fog, the naked trees black and dripping, black earth pied with white. Perched aloft, Dar Oakley looked here and there for a way to go more promising than any other, and saw none. No Crow called from any direction. He seemed, for this moment, to be the only Crow in existence. Shifting his feet on the branch, he turned his head and caught sight of a crimson smudge in a stand of young trees by the small river.
A fire. Who would make and keep a fire there? He watched for a time, and the little fire neither grew nor sank away. Dar Oakley felt his wings open; he closed and settled them; they opened again, as though they knew where he should go even if he didn’t. What, was this any business of his? It wasn’t.
He lifted off the branch and beat toward the grove.
The two of them sat as they had sat before, looking into their imagined fire—Dar Oakley was sure he could fly right through it without harm; it gave off no heat, heat was not what it was for. They took no notice of the Crow; they seemed to be speaking in turns, but their eyes never met. From a high branch Dar Oakley fell to a lower one and to a stump.
He couldn’t understand their speech; it wasn’t a language he knew then, it wasn’t One Ear’s or the Saints’. Yet as they spoke, the matter seemed to enter into him, so that he saw what they spoke of. It was as though he had seen enough on the battlefields to see without hearing.
Caught under a gun carriage when it rolled over. Horse ran away with it in the retreat. Caught up in the reins, trampling me, my legs caught under the gun. The others ran past, didn’t stop, on the run, left me there to die, others too.
It might have gone something like that—Dar Oakley can only give me hints; the ghost at the fire spoke low, motionless, as though he had said all this many times, as though the saying of it was all he was.
Cried out as long as I could for help, for water, blood in my throat, Rebs passing over chasing us, them; stepped on my face, one gave me the bayonet, see him still, the teeth in his mouth, old man, broken hat, I see it.
As he spoke these things, Dar Oakley saw the wounds he named appear on him, eye driven from his head by the boot, his breast opening to bleed. The wounds vanished as soon as they appeared.
Then he ceased to speak, if he had ever spoken. Dar Oakley’s mind cleared. Then the other began.
Sent away from my brother-in-law, been promised we would serve together, cruel officer, made to go on patrol leading a squadron of niggers, me but a corporal, never saw or spoke to such before, sent out to look for dead and bury them. Caught by Rebs; they hanged the weeping niggers as I watched, cut at their private parts with their great Reb knives, blood running down, shot me then, though I begged them in Jesus’s name to spare me, threw me headlong in a muddy stream. There I still lie.