The Crow stayed by her. In time her ashen hair turned all white. She stopped aiding the grieving, no longer felt she knew how; the art or science she practiced seemed to have fallen into the hands of tricksters and confidence men, fakers of ghost photographs, bell-ringers, maskers. She and her mother-in-law had an army pension to live on, and money Anna’s son sent home. Though she had almost ceased speaking with the dead, she spoke often to herself; sometimes she made the soft mewling sound that Dar Oakley knew was called singing:
Come near angel band
Come and around me stand
At other times she spoke names, of People or of things she wanted and couldn’t feel or touch. Dar Oakley learned in that way a lot of her speech: with her son grown and gone, he was admitted to the kitchen (though not elsewhere in the house), and he could locate for her this and that by chuckling or by tapping on whatever it was. Out on the path she would stop and say the names of flowers, which apparently (Dar Oakley was surprised to learn it) she recognized by their odors. She retained to some degree from the days of her somnambulations the ability to see in darkness, to see what her eyes could not. On late-summer evenings she might stand by the fields when the wind was in the long grasses, lit white by the descending sun, and sometimes there she would say, And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. And he standing on her shoulder, feathers ruffled by the standing wind that brought the sound and the smell of it to her, would think Why does she say that? Why do People say such things? Graves are under grass, yes, but not here; and grass is not hair to be cut. The grass of graves isn’t uncut; the People see to that. But on one evening, a far mutter of thunder and the low sunlight passing through the high grass with the wind so that it seemed a being that moved, Dar Oakley was altered inside, and he saw what Anna Kuhn meant by saying what she said. Not that it made sense, it didn’t, but he knew what would make her say it. For centuries he’d heard People say such things, and fought them away as an annoyance, an irritation, and now, just like that, he knew. The beautiful uncut hair of graves. Ever after he’d say it, not aloud, when the lives of People and their dead were again mysteries to him that he could not solve: and the gold-green wind and Anna’s sadness and his would be in the words that he alone would hear himself say.
I am unable to find a death date for Anna Kuhn, which is curious, though of course in a way it’s fitting. It was winter, near the end of the century. Whatever day it was, Dar Oakley was aware of it, of her death. He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen the drapes drawn in the farmhouse windows in the day, the black wagon and the long box; would not have distinguished the church bell tolling for a death from its ringing for Sunday service. But he knew of it. The two of them had been woven together so long that a tug on one would be felt by the other: death would not have broken those threads.
He’d long given up his night watches by then, but found himself that winter evening again on the old Pine as the sun went down. He wasn’t surprised to see her in the twilight, walking barefoot over the snow-covered earth; perhaps the white shift she seemed to wear was the one she’d worn when she walked asleep as a child. She seemed to walk a path that went just above the ground, but her steps were steady. He left the Pine to follow her; he says it was like following Fox Cap when she was a Saint in white, leading the Brother: how she seemed to see yet didn’t look, to know but not notice. After an indistinct time she came to higher ground, where there stood something, a structure that Dar Oakley says he couldn’t exactly see or grasp, toward which she went without hesitation, as though it were her own and she was returning to it from an errand or a journey. And that’s all he can say. Soon—he can’t say how long—all of it was over, like a fire gone out.
I think—and if Dar Oakley and I are connected in any way as he and Anna Kuhn were connected, I can be sure of it—that what Anna went to, and through, was a door. When he told me about that night, I could clearly see it: a tall double door in a casement, of plain wood simply carpentered. Perhaps ajar. Anyway it opens at her touch: the lightest of touches. The night beyond is bright. I hope this is so. I hope (though what use, what value, has my hope?) that among those awaiting her were two young men dressed in bright blue, their sleeves slashed in yellow. They reach toward her, and she toward them. They are whole.
CHAPTER FOUR
Years before Anna Kuhn’s death, the small farm and house passed out of her hands. The blind woman and her unwell mother-in-law found it difficult to manage the boy Paul, Anna’s son, as he went through adolescence; in the language of the time he was willful, unregenerate—bitter and destructive, impossible to control. A local rich man, a mill owner and big farmer, a childless widower, offered to adopt Paul, give him an education, set him straight, if the two women would sign over their few acres to him; they’d retain a lifetime interest in the place. Paul’s mother agreed. I don’t know if she felt pain in doing so, or relief, or both. The rich man was named Hergesheimer; he changed Paul’s surname to his, and sent him East to study. It can be imagined that he was a reckless and intractable student, but I don’t know. After going through medical training (not all that arduous then), he went off into the world for several years, returning to the farm the day after his mother was buried in the family plot beside her first child and Paul’s grandparents. He may have already adopted by then the long black duster he later commonly wore, and the curious black wideawake hat, the front brim longer than the back and pinned up at the sides to form a point. He may have been wearing these things when he got off the train, when he stood at the porch of the house in the dust in his dusty boots, with his gun cases and his satchels of elk-skin.
Dar Oakley—even before he determined that this big black-bearded fellow was the same person as the boy who shot at Crows—knew he was seeing an enemy, and made himself scarce. The house was no longer his.
Dr. Hergesheimer seems never to have practiced much; perhaps his inheritance sustained him, or his later business interests. At that time he considered himself over and above any other pursuits or occupations a sportsman. He favored what were called the blood sports, and first among them all, Crow shooting, at which he was expert even then, and which he promoted whenever he could. His private reasons for this singular pursuit or obsession were of no account; Crows being the most destructive of agricultural pests—everybody knew that—the shooters of Crows did well to shoot them, and could take delight in it freely at the same time. It was both pleasure and duty, Dr. Hergesheimer’d contend, less sport in fact than crusade.
In the years—centuries—since Dar Oakley had first come storm-driven to this continent, it had grown to resemble in some ways the lands where Dar Oakley had begun life, across the sea. There was no stone tower, no Dux and his cohort, no Abbey of stones piled on stones; but by now the Oak and Beech forests that had covered the valleys and broad lands in One Ear’s time had been mostly leveled, just as the old-world forests where Dar Oakley had been born had been leveled long before. The wide land had greened over as though it had always been treeless, open, arable. Scattered houses acquired company, villages were made. It became the sort of land that’s suited to Crows: wide, long views, with groves here and there for hiding and nesting in and flocking to in winter; still-forested hills where the remains of others’ prey could be found, at least till the Wolves and big cats went farther away. People middens where the braver Crows could get the endless People waste. Stock to follow, chicks and eggs, the yards unfenced where the Foxes and Fisher-cats too got wealth. At evening the light of the sun went out and lamps instead came on in window after window.