Soul of a Crow (37 page)

My eyes had been made unfamiliar, enlarged and outlined with the thick black smudge of a kohl stick, my lips redder than warm blood, cheeks decorated with perfectly-round spots of fuchsia rouge. My hair hung loose and my breasts were lifted outrageously high by the pinching of a black satin corset, my waist likewise cinched and ludicrously diminutive, as if I was nothing more than a caricature of a prostitute, drawn in ink by the mocking hand of an Eastern cartoonist peddling pulp novels. Twin straps of black dangled down my thighs, but there were no stockings attached to these garters, and I was in fact naked from navel downward, with no additional garments to cover my lower regions.

Before I could react bodily to the heated shame at this recognition, rough hands clutched my waist from behind, thrusting me to my knees upon the dirt of the road. The mirror was positioned directly in front of me now, the evening sky appearing in its smooth glass surface at a cockeyed angle, stars flaring into view and then away. The man behind me was faceless and savage, brutally penetrating my flesh—and try as I may, I could not look away from the vicious scene. My body twisted and writhed to escape his assault; I heard the raw screams issued, but another part of me, my spirit perhaps, remained oddly still and silent, observing from a brief distance.

A woman whispered in my ear, and somehow I could hear her words despite my cries and desperate pleas, the animal grunting of my attacker.

They used your body, Lorie, but not you.

You must understand this difference.

They used you, but they cannot destroy you, do you understand
?

The stars twirled and pitched in the reflected surface of the mirror, as a child's rotating toy, distorting my awareness. I was both within and without my physical form. The woman whispering so urgently to me possessed eyes of a very vivid blue.

Do you understand
?

I understand
, I whispered at last.

You must go on.

You must, no matter what, Lorie.

You must.

A horror beyond even the violence of the rape seeped coldly into me. I did not comprehend just exactly what she meant, but I knew suddenly that I could not agree. I would not agree.

No
, I said.
No. Leave me.
Leave me!

The crow glided into view, large and gorgeously black, supple and lissome as a catamount, a predator that had never known a day's hunger. It landed elegantly atop the golden gilt of the mirror's frame, and suddenly there was nothing besides it—and me. The landscape receded and faded to gray featurelessness, but in the mirror, red light suddenly leaped and grew, monstrous and demonic, consuming everything in its path.

I ran to the water pump in the side yard at Ginny's, where I had once spent the days of my monthly bleeding hanging laundry, and cranked fiercely upon the handle, filling a heavy bucket, stumbling over the ash-covered ground in my haste to douse the fire. I threw the water upon the flames with all of my strength, but the liquid struck nothing more than the flat surface of the mirror, scattering in droplets, utterly ineffective.

The fire burned higher.

- 26 -

I was not
simply seeking to reassure Lorie when I said that there were plenty worse places I had slept, as a soldier. Many a night during the War had I spent the long hours of darkness entrenched in dampness, or outright mud, hollow with fear and loss, hunger and fatigue, wrapped in nothing more than my army-issued coat; after time, that had grown threadbare and pitiful. We were lucky to come across occasional Companies with whom we could trade—though it was anyone's guess which was the better trade, that for food, or warmer garments. By War's end, I felt less human than an old dog, flea-bitten and ragged, chiseled away to bones, each rib prominent. A skinny bag of innards held together by little more than the dream of returning to Cumberland County, and the family I believed there, waiting for me.

And yet tonight, lying here on the lumpy, unwashed cot upon which many another prisoner had rested his sorry self, I truly felt as though no place could be worse; now that I had found Lorie, nothing hurt as desperately as our physical separation. A part of what kept me sane during my time as a soldier had been my dream of finding her—the woman meant for me, and to whom I would equally belong, a belief to which I clung with stubborn determination since one early morning in the summer of my twelfth year, when I returned to the haunted cave in the Bledsoe holler to retrieve my lost boot. Upon arriving at the mouth of the cave in the silvering light of dawn, I found my boot, which the night previous had been wedged between two rocks, now unstuck and waiting patiently as a pup for its master.

This had been strange enough, sending a chill along my young spine—I was not nearly as brave as I pretended to be, in front of Boyd and our brothers—but I had reached for it gamely enough, the thoughts of fey creatures from Mama's stories in the forefront of my mind. As my fingers closed around the familiar old leather, a voice deep within the cave had told me two words.
The angel
, I heard. And from that moment forth there had arisen in my soul the need to find her, my angel, the woman meant for me.

Boyd and Ethan laughed themselves sick when I informed them of this truth, later that same morning.

“You's crazy as a jaybird,” Boyd had said. “Ain't no voices in caves, 'less you's hearing things that other folks ain't.”

“I'll tell you who's an angel, is that Helen Sue Gottlender,” had been my brother's contribution, once his laughter died away. He continued, with an air of reverence, “You think her legs are as fair an' freckled as her arms? I aim to find out.”

And Ethan had, by his and her sixteenth summer.

I turned to my other side, alone after the two men in the adjacent cell had been released earlier in the evening. There was no moon this night, and the jailhouse was dark as a tomb, but my thoughts were elsewhere, far away back home, and I allowed the memories of my old life momentary sway in my thoughts, a faint amusement tugging at me as I remembered my brother and his never-ending accounts; he had inherited Mama's gift for storytelling.

As eldest, I felt it should have been me earning the right to tell such tales of girls and the softness of their limbs, and yet Ethan had been the bold one in those days, always knowing just the right words to draw forth giggles and blushes in the local girls. I had been jealous and Jeremiah simply in awe, as he was far too painfully shy to be within a country mile of any girl not related to us, unless forced, as he was at school. The three of us shared a room, Eth and Jere a bed, and many a night had we crowded near Ethan as he related his exploits in hushed, excited whispers.

“I tell you, her daddy would skin me alive,” I heard Ethan say, and if I closed my eyes I could plainly see his face in the moon-spill entering into our bedroom that long ago summer night. He insisted, “I tell you, we was kissing, an' she weren't wearing a thing beneath all them layers of skirts, an' her legs sorta opened up, an' she sorta
lifted
up, as if she
wanted
me to keep going.” He paused purposely at this critical juncture in the story, grinning impishly. Ethan dearly relished being able to hold our rapt attention.

Jere, effectively bated, whispered breathlessly, “Then what?”

I had scoffed, restacking both hands beneath my head and directing my gaze at the wooden beams of the ceiling. I muttered irritably, “She did
not
.”

Undaunted, Ethan said, “Shows how much you know, Sawyer. She did. An' then, sweet Jesus, I felt
right between
her legs. It was so soft, an' wet…an' she made a sweet little sound that I swear I want to hear every night for the rest of my livin' life…”

Jere interrupted to dutifully inform, “Reverend Wheeler would say it's a sin, Eth.”

Ethan snorted a laugh and replied confidently, “It ain't no sin,
deartháir beag
. Nothing so precious could be sinful. If it is, curse me straight to the devil!”

Now, many years after the fact, I held close my brothers in my mind—Ethan and Jeremiah, the three of us inseparable, right to the horrific end. As I had so many times since returning from War, I thought,
Forgive me for not taking better care of you. I know we were grown men when we left home, but I was eldest. I intended to keep you safe, mo dheartháireacha daor, and I did not. Forgive me.

Boyd had known Ethan and Jere nearly as well as I, and loved them as I had loved Beau and Grafton Carter as my own kin. Malcolm was too little to share the same depth of memories, only seven years when we left the holler in November of 1862. Of course, our plan was to drive out the Yankee invaders and return home victorious, no later than the eve of the New Year. The worst kind of foolishness, and blind pride, and it had killed everyone but Boyd and me, and little Malcolm. I understood I could hardly assign myself blame for the fevers that had taken a third of Suttonville the final winter of the War, a population weakened considerably by loss and starvation, a toll exacted upon those we were fighting for, left behind with little word, and even less food.

Rumors reached our ears after returning home, that Bainbridge Carter had been killed by a bullet to the gut, rather than illness. Tales of the crimes of retreating Federal troops were often grossly exaggerated, but I had seen with my own eyes of what desperate men were capable, on both sides of the fight; in any event, Boyd had not heeded these rumors, but I knew they troubled him still. The vision of his father defending their home to the last—making a stand against enemy soldiers and being cut down for his efforts—was at once valiant and terrible. Bainbridge and Clairee had been buried by the time we returned, near the headstones erected for their lost sons in the family's plot near their home; my own folks were likewise already beneath the ground, our homes burned out and looted. Our paths forever and indisputably altered.

And yet, as I had told Lorie that night at the Rawleys', had we not been to War, had they survived, I would likely never have ventured from Cumberland County, and home, and I would not have found her—and that price was the only one too great to pay. I had survived the loss of everything I once held dear, but I would not survive the loss of this woman, my wife.

And then I prayed, sending my thoughts upwards into the night.

Let us live out our natural lives together
.
Please, let Lorie live to be an old woman, with me at her side. Let us watch one another age, our hair gone gray and our faces lined. Please. It cannot be unfathomable to ask of this.

I would not consider all of the unheeded prayers of my past, the abject begging in the midst of one filthy, bloody battlefield after another. The whisperings I had made as I lay in the Suttonville cemetery that terrible summer of 'sixty-five, when I had wished for nothing but my own death, if for no other reason than to end the ceaseless torture of a functioning memory.

Please. Do not let me die in a hangman's noose. Not now. Not when I have so much to live for. If I must die, I will feign bravery, for Lorie's sake, but please do not let it come to that, oh sweet Jesus, please.

It was surely beyond midnight. I was restless with dormant energy, exhausted but unable to sleep, the threat of Zeb and Yancy never far from my mind. I had been rabid with fury at the news of Zeb firing on our wagon, our tent, during the hours of last night, possessed anew with the need to kill both men with my bare hands. What sadistic satisfaction I would find in wrapping my fingers about their throats and crushing away their worthless lives. Zeb, who had taken it upon himself during the ride back into Iowa City to tell me just what vile things he had done and would do to Lorie, when given the slightest opportunity. Zeb's halting voice and odd manner of speech reminded me of a man I had known in the War, who had been kicked brutally in the head by a horse, but had survived.

Zeb, who was surely hiding somewhere near, coward-like, awaiting his next chance to strike.

Yancy, by contrast, remained quiet and aloof on the ride north, and related to me none of what he told Lorie when she was his prisoner. I might have been a complete stranger to him for as little as he spoke, the wound on my temple leaking blood; at least I had been granted the assurance that Lorie was safe with Boyd. And Whistler remained with me. My horse, whose gait was near as familiar to me as my own, who had survived the duration of the War. My horse, who I would not allow to be stolen that dreadful night in April of 'sixty-five. In the saving of my horse, I had taken the life of a Federal—one of too many to count, at that point in my life—but the very act of marching home in the wake of formal surrender, defeated and hollowed-out, should have suggested that the killing was over.

I am not attempting to manufacture excuses, I am not,
I thought, uncertain exactly to whom I directed these words; perhaps nothing more than my own conscience.
He fired upon my face, and I would have been dead these past years, killed right there in that clearing if not for a misfire. I would have let him ride free, but he engaged further—he drew the saber first.

Yancy's brother chose his own death
.

I did not intend to kill him, not until he attacked and I had no choice
.

Did the hereafter take such things into account? I thought of Reverend Wheeler, the clergyman of my youth, whose sermons I had only ever listened to with half an ear, always on the lookout to catch my brothers' gazes and exchange some joke. Boyd, Beau, and Grafton were likewise always near, and privy to our irreverent conduct, more than willing to contribute; many a strappings had we earned after misbehavior during Sunday service. The reverend was a fairly tolerant man, at least in my memory, with docile brown eyes that Ethan once commented reminded him of a milking cow.

Would you have told me I could be forgiven?
I wondered of the reverend, who, were he still living, would undoubtedly find it difficult to envision the boy he once knew should I appear before him now, changed as I was, both inwardly and outwardly. Young Sawyer Davis, eldest son of a kind-natured liveryman, would never have dreamed of the ferocity that would one day be enacted in battle, and endured; even in boyish speculation, and visions of imagined heroism, I had never considered there might come a time when I would be forced to kill another man.

But I am not sorry for killing Yancy's brother. I am only sorry for the terrible things that have come of it, since
.

My thoughts continued, heedless of my need for at least an hour's sleep.

I am not sorry, nor do I believe it is wrong to kill a man who intends you harm, who would as soon kill you. I would do so again. I would do so to save the life of those I love, without a moment's hesitation.

I would help Lorie come to understand this; I refused to allow her to be plagued by the guilt of taking Jack's life, of being forced to bear witness to his violent death. That she had been under such circumstances again, defending herself against assault beyond imagining, was unbearable to me—as though life continually mocked my attempts to protect those I loved, and even as I lay there in flat-black darkness, I swore I felt the shadow of the crow.

You could not save Ethan, or Jeremiah.

Lorie could have been killed.

Even now she is unsafe and you are able to do exactly nothing
.

“No,” I whispered, struggling beyond these thoughts, instead picturing Lorie as I had envisioned her earlier in the night. When our thoughts had intertwined in the way I had come to cherish and depend upon, the connection that bound her heart with mine, stronger than all else previously known to me. I closed my eyes and reached for her, and then, in the deeper dimness behind my eyelids, I suddenly beheld the red and unmistakable menace of growing flames.

I sat up in a rush.

The window glass was not quite enough to muffle the faint sounds of passage just outside the jailhouse—had I been asleep, had it been raining, I would not have heard it at all. Instinct drove me to crouch into the corner of the cell, seeking refuge, throwing my awareness outward; there was no reason for a soul to be here at this hour, and it was not Boyd, or Tilson, carefully turning a key in the lock.

Yancy?

Would he dare to act on his own?

He would not.

He would send Zeb to act for him
.

My thoughts raced, as a hog fleeing a butcher.

You have no defenses.

You are unarmed, a perfect target
.

The door opened just enough to emit a hulking figure, an enormous, smudged outline darker even than the blackness of the small room. He entered and closed the door, just as quietly. My heart was shredding itself to bits with beating, blood flowing hot and fast, preparing me to fight. I had no weapon. I hadn't even the chain of the irons, which I might have used to choke him, and it would be a battle for my life. I understood clearly that one of us would die this night, and it would not be me.