The short clouded day was ending. Rather than brightening in the dark, the little fire dimmed further. Dar Oakley, feeling invaded, as though the two beings had thrust something within him that he couldn’t expel, turned his face away from them and shook himself once, again, and again, as his mother had long ago taught him to do. After a time he looked back: the two sat motionless, hands on their knees. He gave them his back again: to show them he could not be possessed. When he looked back a second time, they were going away through the black trees and the mud.
But had he tasted them where they lay, on that field, at that creek bed? He thought he might have; he was thinking, now, that he had.
Husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, they were brought home in their thousands in the baggage cars of northbound trains, in sealed caskets of steel (if such could be afforded) because of the decomposition. Their former enemies going home too in other directions. Those silver tags that Dar Oakley and the Crows saw taken from the necks of some bore engraved addresses that an officer could write to, to tell his loved ones he was dead and when and where he died, but they were uncommon. Others were known because their comrades or officers had carried out their last wishes, to tell their families that they had felt no fear, that they trusted in God, had thought of Mother at the last. Many more were buried in the new cemeteries near the battlefields made specially for them, though not all of the graves were marked or their occupants known, and some were named with names that were not theirs. My great-grandfather lies in one of these.
If they were known for sure to be dead, if a stone could be raised over their remains, then they could live: somewhere elsewhere, in the land of the heart. If they could not be known to be dead, known for sure, they might never die: they could come ever and again in the night to stand before you with their wounds bleeding, or they’d haunt the mind as images of themselves before the war, child with a hoop, a slate, a young man with a poem for a girl-cousin. How could it be borne?
Parents and spouses and kin of those who had not been found, whose words hadn’t been recorded at the last or who had been tumbled nameless in the long ditches side by side with others, in time lost hope of ever laying their soldier in a real place of rest. Some, hearts unhealed, were boarding trains themselves in their black clothes and black-banded hats, traveling in hope and grief to call on certain men and women who had learned the new science of souls, who might reach out from the land of the living to the departed one, hear him say that he was well, repeat his words to listeners: it was all they had.
Anna Kuhn was one of those speakers.
Spring again, the green corn shoots had arisen, and the great band of Crows, strong, loud, corn-fed from birth, crossed from here and there, calling encouragement daywise to darkwise, billwise to otherwise, heard but mostly not seen as they moved by stages to where the farmers had raised those imaginary People of sticks and straw to scare them from the wealth. The land around the white farmhouse was plowed and seeded in this spring as it hadn’t been before; the woman stood and watched, or seemed to watch, the men at work, good, kind men who were not her men. As Dar Oakley passed on this morning over the house, the Dog raised its head, and the boy did too. Once again Dar Oakley left his band and banked downward toward the porch. She sat there in a high-backed chair with a basket by her side, and from it she took pea pods, broke them, let the new peas fall into a bowl in her lap. She never lowered her eyes to the basket or the bowl, and though her head turned toward the Crow when it banked downward and stalled at the farmyard, wings thudding, she seemed to look not at him but at a place above his head.
He took a grip on the porch railing, settled his tail. Made a little noise, one of those small growls or grumbles or chuckles whose meanings are still not all clear to me. She paused in her work, sat with hands slightly raised, unmoving, as though to move would disturb the air or the world and lose her the sound she’d heard. He made it again; she put the bowl on the porch floor with care, and stood. Dar Oakley shook himself again, bent to take off at need, but there was no need. He had known People for centuries, knew which were a threat to him, which not, even if—like her—they approached him with a hunter’s stealth. It took some courage, but he sat perfectly still as her hand came close to his head, and then rested on it, a pressure he could hardly feel. He moved, only to show he knew her hand was on him, and she lifted it and placed it again, on his neck and back.
“A Crow,” she said.
It’s unclear to me when Dar Oakley came to understand Anna Kuhn couldn’t see him or anything else. But he remembers she said that word then, with her hand on him. He didn’t move. Stillness is a strategy: the less alive you seem, the less you’ll be seen. He kept as still as a nestling fallen in the underbrush from the nest, who knows his parents are near and aware. That was his instinct beneath Anna Kuhn’s hand, but there were other reasons too, ones he had no words for then and none now: relief, maybe; adoption; surrender. Those are my glosses. Anna was still too.
His instincts then flung him with a cry into the air, even before he consciously grasped danger: a gun was pointed at him from the window of the house. That small child. Its teeth bared. The gun went off with an odd pop, and a thing small as an acorn flew from it, then stopped, fell, and dangled. Dar Oakley was aloft and gone: his last sight was of the startled mother, chiding the laughing child.
Of course he returned. She came to know his call, stopped when she heard it on the garden path or as she walked the perimeter of the house, following a system of ropes her mother-in-law had put up so she could take the air and not get lost. She wanted him, went searching for him as far as she could go: brought food sometimes, often things of a kind he couldn’t eat. He didn’t want food; he wanted her. He was sick: sick in a way no Crow had ever been, not even Kits; sick within as though parasitic worms inhabited him—he’d once seen a ragged and wasted Crow die of these, the skin splitting and letting out the roiling mass.
He came to sit by her, suffer her touch—he knew now she couldn’t see him except by touch. Touch, and another sense: one that came into him or over him almost unfelt, soft rain in a Hemlock grove. It caused him to yield up to her what he possessed, all that he had seen and done in these late seasons, in some form that wasn’t words, though I can only relate it in words. What she drew from him, hand on his broad back, whispering lips near his face, remained within him even as he was relieved of it; and the words she spoke, though mostly meaningless to him, also entered into him and remained. He remembered the Saint in her jeweled box in the little house of flints in the middle of the Brother’s Abbey: excarnate and in darkness, the Saint had spoken words that both caught and freed him.
In this way she learned what he’d learned. Throat full of blood, cried out for water. Shot me, though I begged them to spare me in Jesus’s name. And of the others, too, all the unburied, exploded, rotted away, eaten by Pigs, Dogs, Crows, Vultures. She hardly stirred, though along the current of her sympathy he felt these things passing from him into her, and (like her words inside him) they would never leave her. It was what she had wanted. She could begin.
There was a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.
Forever, heaven had been distant: the lands beyond death lay at the end of a long astral journey, a shining city, a far shore. Now when everywhere on earth had come closer to everywhere else, trains and steamships and telegraph lines, heaven too had come nearer. Those remote celestial realms, unfigurable, twelve-gated, were now known—through the investigations of Mental Sympathy—to have been near all along, right next to us, overlaying the lands that are not heaven, and just a step away. Those who die happy in the company of their loved ones and in the home they know often can sense no passage at all between earthly and heavenly life, and can believe themselves still among the living: here is the flowered path to the familiar door, here are the remembered ones who went before us, in their habits as they lived; here the table is set, the good odors of sustenance; here the apple tree and the peach tree where once they were, bearing fruit. From there a soul might progress to greater and higher realms, suns and planets beyond number, where the greatest human souls have transformed themselves into angels, powers clothed in light—but if she chooses to remain close to home with mother and father and spouse in that land where we never grow old, there’s no one to deny her.