Crows rarely fly far without stopping now and then to rest, but Dar Oakley quite soon felt strangely weak—he came down to sit on the long, bare branch of a dying Oak. Day was as full as day would become. He thought again of the dull-feathered Crow he had seen on the body of that People child: a sick Crow, probably dying. He settled his disordered plumage, once, twice, three times, blinked, and realized with a certain satisfaction that he wasn’t feeling so well himself.
I can compute at a guess how many miles it was Dar Oakley had to fly to reach my house and yard, but not how many days or weeks it took him. I don’t know if he flew straight (“as the Crow flies,” in the old phrase that’s no more true than a thousand others) or if he wandered daywise, then darkwise, looking for something he couldn’t name or picture, while the illness tried and failed to kill him. When he got here, he wasn’t the Crow he had been, but nor was he any other Crow. However he had gone, wherever he had thought to go, he had arrived at a place not far from the shores of the lake where Kits had found a death at last.
Whiskey in the morning today. Pain is worsening.
From the porch where I stood at dawn with my glass, I could see out on the lawn the spectral Deer, Whitetails, who looked up from their browsing to stand for a moment immobile, looking at me with their great brown doll’s eyes. Then—instead of dodging fastidiously away—they returned to their breakfast. I counted seven, young and mature. I say “lawn,” but it’s not my lawn, not kept by me; it’s their doing. They’ve eaten down everything that can grow, including the leaves of saplings, which then die away. Now it’s like a nobleman’s ride out there, large trees and cropped green grass in the checkered shade, and that’s all. No more than Crows in the city do they have predators to keep their numbers down—so long as they shun the trafficked roads around. They’ve made the woods their own, modified them to suit themselves, as once the Indian clans did, and the white People after them.
After a time my staring bothered them, and they bounded off, not very seriously, in that lovely slow-motion way of theirs. The birds were loud. Robins, which I used to see in ones and twos listening for worms, now seem to come in flocks.
Dar Oakley’s gone often in these spring days, I don’t know where; perhaps despite all his vows and forswearing he’s mated again, and feeding young. Or maybe he’s grown tired of our long colloquy—which won’t be much longer now. I look up now and then to see if he’s winging this way. Sometimes I wonder if he might have gone for good. I feel sure it’s not so, yet for a moment I can foresee an abandonment I think I could not survive.
“Survive” is a foolish word to use. Not the word I may use, no, not at all.
When I was a teenager, I announced to my mother that I no longer believed in the real existence of the spirits that she, like Anna Kuhn, claimed to listen to. Nor in the spirits those spirits spoke to, nor the world where they congregated. I had no good reason to give for why I didn’t believe; I just didn’t. When I tried to think about that placeless place, it seemed to be eternally dark, the ones there forever alone—as though I were trying to imagine nothing. And she said to me that it was commonly known (her spirit informants had spoken to her of it) that those who in physical life do not believe—or refuse to believe—in the realm of souls will find themselves after death in precisely the dark emptiness that was all they could conceive when alive. They’ll subsist there alone and unseeing amid the busy throngs of the dead in their bright habitations.
Son, my mother said, you refuse to believe because you’re afraid of the dark; but your refusal is itself the darkness you fear.
I am afraid: not afraid of death, but of darkness and solitude, and I always have been: as afraid as any Crow. It’s why I have asked Dar Oakley to guide me at the last to that place, for which I now have at least his tales for evidence. I don’t mind so much really if that realm is pleasant or unpleasant, but let it be not empty. Let it be where the sheaves are gathered in: Anna Kuhn said it was. I’m not such a great sinner that I need to fear it, and I don’t; I won’t. Just let it not be alone, in the dark.
Well, it will be what it is.
I wonder, though: will I see Debra on the other side, the place the dead are? Will she be embarrassed that I have found her there, will I say I told you so? How fatuous it seems. Forgive me, my love, if I resign before the work’s done that I promised to do for you; it would never have been done, no matter how long I kept at it.
I’m too old for scheming and concealment now, and rather than trying to keep it from her, last week I told Barbara straight out about my plan. She wasn’t shocked—I could tell she wasn’t, though she sat down heavily and stared at me for a long time without speaking. The next day she told me that she wanted to go with me. She wants to join me there, on that high place I mean to go to, take that step—and it will be a step, one step—with me. And she’ll bring the child as well, she says. The nameless child. She says it’s her duty to return the child to the ancestors (or, on some days, to God) who can remake him in a better form, and send him back to some mother better than herself.
I have no grounds on which to tell her otherwise. Should I have dissuaded her, argued for life, sent her away, found help for her somewhere? Convinced her to remain? I can’t even convince myself.
I wonder if Dar Oakley will recognize the spot I have selected. I may have misunderstood the geography of his travels in this land—he certainly ended up far darkwise from here in his latter lives—but long ago he was hereabouts, and knew the lake whose common name I’ve been told translates as “beautiful,” though when I asked Barbara if she knew this word in the language of her ancestors, she shook her head in sadness. Not sad because she didn’t know, I don’t think: all that Barbara says and does these days seems infused with sadness.
It’s not far from my house. There’s a state park entrance that leads to the standard facilities of such places, a parking lot, toilets, a booth where maps are posted—all of it now neglected, the parking lot broken and weedy, the plastic covers of the maps so yellowed and fogged the maps can’t be read. It doesn’t matter; I know where I am when I am there, and where the trails (still discernible) will take me. The steepest will wind up to the top of an ancient row of clay cliffs that stand above the margins of the lake. These are glacial drumlins, rock piles turned out by the moving ice mountain that made the lake bed. Millennia of windblown loess have built high cliffs over these, and the same wind has carved them into weird shapes, some like cathedral spires or ruined castles or stupas, hardened now into piles as unerodible as granite. On the sloping landward side they are forested, but on the lake or windward side they are as sheer as walls, and nearly bare. The trail I’ll take us on ends at that windward edge, quite high up. A fine view. There was once a guardrail or fence, but no more.
Not long ago—perhaps it was winter this year, or autumn last year—Dar Oakley tried to convince me that the expedition I’ve decided on is a bad idea. It’s hard to describe how this touched me, whatever his reasons might be. We were in the kitchen, sharing a lunch of boiled eggs and dog food (for him; Dar Oakley loves the hard pebbly kind, and it’s cheap).
“This place,” he said to me, “this place after death you think you’ll go to. Let me tell you. It doesn’t exist.”
“It does, though,” I answered him. “You of all persons know it.”
“I don’t know a thing,” he said.