Someplace to Be Flying (28 page)

I would have been there for her myself, stood by her through that hard time, by the time word got to me, it was all over. Nettie kept her name and the family farm; Randall kept the daughter and moved back into Hazard where the two of them lived up above the work bays of his garage in that small apartment he’d had before he got married. Maybe no one can explain why Lilah took that sudden dislike to her mother, pretty much from the moment she was born, but it’s not hard to see why she never gave it up. Randall harbored a grudge against Nettie till the day he died and it stands to reason that his daughter never heard a kind word in relation to her mother.

Lilah eventually married Stephen Madan, a real estate agent who made himself a tidy bundle when he parceled and sold off his own family farm before his father was cold in the grave. Of course she poisoned him against Nettie, too, but with a man like that, it wouldn’t have taken much.

Lilah was a puzzle to me, but in some ways, Randall puzzled me more. I never could figure how a man who’d loved Nettie as much as I know he once did could bring so much hurt into her life.

But then sometimes I wonder if, in my own way, I was no better than him.

I love those piney wood hills around Hazard any time of the year, but I think I love summer the best. It’s late in the season when I fly up, the August fields awash with milkweed, goldenrod, and great purple sweeps of joe-pye weed. I ride a warm updraft, circle the hollow where I first met a wild fox girl. When I’m sure there’s no one nearby, I glide down out of the blue to the old piece of granite that’s still resting in a field of tall grass and wildflowers and settle down on its rough stone surface.

It’s not changed much. The forest has crept a little closer, the trees are taller. Still old growth. Crickets cheep like high-pitched squeaky wheels and the air’s full of bees, humming and buzzing from one purple blossom to the next. This time of year, the creek’s almost dry but I can still trace the route it takes down the hollow, following a thin trickle of water that gleams like a silver ribbon in the bright sun.

It’s a drowsy kind of a day and I’ve had me a long flight. I nod off after awhile and the next thing I know it’s late afternoon and I’m looking up at a red-haired woman with eyes so blue you’d think they’d swallowed a piece of? the sky above us.

“Well, look what the crows dug up,” she says.

She’s standing there, hands on her hips, smiling. Not a wild fox child anymore, but the fox is still there, and I don’t doubt she’s only part-tamed. She’d be forty-two, but looks ten years younger, and whatever I told myself? when I flew up here today, I can’t pretend that the real reason wasn’t to see her.

“How’re you doing, Nettie?” I say.

“I’ve been better.” She sits down and talks like it hasn’t been twenty-five years since we last saw each other. “I slept funny last night and woke with a crick in my neck.”

She’s still carrying that old leather satchel of hers—it’s a wonder it’s still all of a piece. Reaching in, she takes out some oatmeal cookies wrapped up in a piece of checked cotton cloth.

“Care for some field food?” she asks. “Thanks.”

The cookies are good and go well with the tea we share out of the canteen she’s earning on her belt. It’s sweetened with honey from her own hives, she tells me.

“You’re doing well for yourself,” I say after awhile. “I hear about you all the time—read your books.”

“I don’t hear about you at all.”

I shrug. “Yeah, well, I don’t do much of anything. Collect my stories, tell ‘em when and where I can. They’ve still got my picture in the dictionary, right there beside the word ‘footloose.’ “

“I could’ve sworn it was beside ‘feckless,’ ” she says, but she smiles—same crooked smile her mother had.

I figure I deserve that. I never got the words out the last time. I told myself I didn’t need to, that she’d understand, maybe not right away, but at some point, only the truth was, I just didn’t have the courage. I won’t let that happen again.

“I can understand your being mad,” I begin, but she cuts me off. “I’m not mad, Jack. I was never really mad. I just missed you. You took yourself out of my life—for my own good, I’m sure is what you were thinking—but you never asked me if that’s what I wanted. You never stopped to think how I’d feel.”

“I thought I knew how you felt.”

“That I was head over heels, crazy in love with you from the first time we met?”

“Something like that. But it wasn’t right. You were just a child.” “And later? When I grew up?”

“I could see too much hurt coming out of it,” I say.

She gives me a steady look. “And whose feelings were you sparing? Mine or your own?”

“Some of both,” I admit.

“You figured it’d be like the way it worked out with Ray and my mother,” she says.

“How’d you know about that?” She shrugs. “I think Jolene told me.” “So maybe now you understand.”

“I don’t understand at all,” she says. “What’s wrong with taking what good you can when it comes? Might as well. Life’s short enough. Sooner or later, we all die anyway, so why not take our happinesses where we can?”

“My people don’t die,” I say. “Not unless somebody kills us and even then I’m not so sure. I think some of us—like the crow girls and Raven—are going to be here right until that last day when they finally close the curtains and start sweeping down the stage.”

She just looks at me.

“What did you think we were?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Some kind of spirits, I guess. I never thought about it all that much.”

“Most of us have been here since the first days,” I tell her. “But the corbæ, we were here before there even was a ‘here.’ “

“How … ?” she starts to say, but then she just shakes her head.

She looks out across the field and I can almost see her thinking, working out what it all means. I lie back on the grass and look up into the blue so like her eyes. I hear a couple of crows argue in the distance and I wonder if the crow girls are visiting, or if it’s just those cousins of theirs squabbling. Closer at hand, the crickets are still cheeping. They put me in mind of a piece Nettie wrote about them for some magazine or other. I remember all the little pen and ink illustrations she did to accompany it and I can’t help but smile. She was drawing crickets from the first time she took pencil to hand.

“What’s it like?” she finally asks. “This living forever.”

I shrug. “Everybody takes to it a little different. The crow girls, they live each day like they just got here, like it’s still the long ago. Zen time. Every day is now and forever. Some of the rooks and jays, they get deep into expressing themselves, take their music and their art and keep walking it deeper and deeper into the place that everything comes from—you know, trying to walk it all the way back to those dreaming places that sleep under the forever trees.”

Nettie nods, remembering that story, I guess.

“Others, they like to wander—like Crazy Crow. And then you’ve got Raven. He’s carried the weight of history for so long that he’s just stepped out of time. Nothing touches him there. No responsibilities, no worries.”

“And how about you, Jack?” she asks. “How do you handle it?”

I sit back up to look at her, resting my weight on my elbows. “I tell the stories. First I told them to remember them because a long time ago, I got like Raven and stepped out of time, didn’t know my history, didn’t care anymore. Forgot everything. Just wandered around and let things happen to me. That could still be me, except I ran into the crow girls one day and … well, I’ve told you how it is. You see them, and things change for you. You start looking for meaning again. Start wanting to make a difference.”

I’ve never talked about this to anyone before. I guess I should have started a long time ago—started with that wild fox child Nettie once was so that she’d understand.

“And now,” I say, lying back on the grass. “Now I tell the stories so that maybe we don’t have to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”

It’s like old times, biding here by our rock in this hollow, passing the time with pieces of quiet and conversation, the sun starting to slide behind the trees.

We don’t talk for a time, just watch the shadows grow, wait to see what the twilight brings.

“Come back to the house with me,” Nettie says after awhilc. “Let me make you some dinner.”

I know I should leave, follow the road away from her again, but I can’t. I’ve had this taste of her company now, and after all these years, it’s too little.

“Sure,” I find myself saying.

She tucks her arm in mine and we go ambling back through the woods following a familiar route that takes us out above the wildflower field that sides the old yellow farmhouse the Beans have lived in for a half-dozen generations.

I don’t want to pretend it was all her doing, that I had no hand in what happened that night. I’m just as guilty as she is for how we end up together in that big four-poster bed of hers on the second floor, except she doesn’t feel guilty and that’s the problem.

“I’m not a child anymore,” she says. “You think I don’t know that was the issuer Of course I was too young for you back then. But I’m a grown woman now.”

I shake my head. “That’s only partly it.”

She sits up against the headboard, a sheet covering her breasts.

“Goddamn it, Jack,” she says. “I’m a woman, you’re a man, and we love each other, so what’s the problem?”

I realize then that she still doesn’t get it. Everything we talked about in the hollow this afternoon, and later, sitting together in front of the fire downstairs, sipping coffees laced with whiskey … none of it ever really sank in. Corbæ is just a word to her. She’s seen us in more than one skin, the crow girls, Jolene, Crazy Crow, and all. She knows we live in the woods and wild, that we’re older than she can ever begin to imagine. But none of it’s registered where it counts—in her heart, where belief doesn’t just happen, but settles down into the bones and can’t be denied.

“I’m not a man,” I tell her. “I’m a corbæ. A jackdaw.”

“You’re a jackass.”

“Maybe so, because this should never have happened.”

She always had a temper and I can see it smoldering now, a storm cloud on the horizon of those blue-sky eyes.

“Are you telling me you don’t love me?” she asks.

“Not even close.”

“So you’re telling me you didn’t enjoy yourself?”

“That’s not the point.”

“So what is the point?” she asks, her voice gone dangerously soft.

“The point is, I do love you, but I can’t stay—it’s not in my nature any more than it was in yours to give up your art and the hills for Randall Miller.”

“I didn’t hear anyone asking for some lifetime commitment here, pack.”

I won’t get pulled into that.

“So my being here in your bed makes me no better than Ray,” I say. “Here for a few hours, then gone again by morning. You deserve better than that, just as your mammy deserved better than what he gave her.”

“I don’t think my mammy ever regretted that night. I know I sure don’t because otherwise I wouldn’t ever have been born.”

“I’m not explaining this right.”

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.” She shakes her head. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for what we had here tonight, lack, for what I thought this was the start of, and now you’re making me wonder what the hell was wrong with me for doing that.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I say. “It’s not right. Bad enough you’ve got the fox blood in you, making you restless in human company. But then you’ve had this yearning for something that’s never going to happen between you and me and that’s not only making you restless, it’s pushing you right out of any hope you could have for a normal life.”

“I’ve told you before,” she says with a hardness in her voice. “Don’t you go deciding what’s best for me. I can make my own decisions on that count.”

“And if you’re making a mistake?”

“Then it’s my mistake to make.”

I sigh. “I can’t stand back in good conscience and let you do that,” I say. “I love you too much.”

“I don’t think you ever loved me at all.”

I look at her, see she believes it, like she won’t believe what I am, like she won’t believe the fox blood in her or that there’s such a thing as corbæ in this world with her.

“I think you better go,” she says.

I want to make things right, but I don’t even know where to begin. And she’s not about to give me the time to work it out.

“Just get out of here,” she tells me. “I ever see you creeping around here again and I’ll take the shotgun to you.”

Those blue eyes of hers are brimming with tears, but she’s keeping them in check. The mad she’s got for me is that much stronger.

“I mean it, Jack.”

Maybe it’s better this way, I find myself thinking as I get up from the bed. Maybe it’s better that she sends me away, that she hates me instead of loves me. Maybe she’ll be able to get on with her life.

But I’ve got feelings, too. I’ve heard some say that that’s all we are, pure feelings. I’m sad, but I’m hurting, too. No one likes being misunderstood. So I do a stupid thing. For the first time in all those years we’ve known each other, I shift skin in front of her. One moment she’s got what she thinks is a man standing naked at the side of her bed, and the next she’s got herself a black-winged jackdaw. I make one circle of the room, then I fly right out the window, tearing through the screen like it was tissue paper, and the night swallows me.

But not before I see the look on her face. Not before I see that she finally understands what I’ve been trying to tell her. In that one moment, she believes—not with her head, but right down into the marrow of her bones.

I leave her crying, crying with the same hurt that’s burning in my own chest, but I leave her scared, too. Leave her staring at the window where this
thing
she’s taken to her bed turns out to be everything it said it was. Leave her with her world changed forever.

I leave her with something else, too, but it’ll take a few months before ? starts to showing and nine months all told to come to term, but I don’t know that then. I don’t hear about that till a long time later.