Ka

CHAPTER THREE

A gray day in the winter lands, smell of rain. Crows walking a stubbled field, finding little enough: rotted grains, Bumblebee’s nest, a dead Mouse. But glad anyway to be where snow and ice don’t reach.

One lifts her head. “Thunder?”

“Not now,” Dar Oakley says. “Wrong season.” But now he can hear it too: a long rolling rumble, rising and falling, over daywise from them. Unlike thunder, it doesn’t cease and start again; it’s continuous.

“Weird,” says the Crow, whose name (Dar Oakley thinks) is Toebone.

They return to foraging, each lifting his head now and then to listen, and to smell the air.

“Smoke,” says Toebone.

It is. Not the smell of wood-fire, though; they know that smell.

“Look,” says another Crow. Overhead a crowd of Blackbirds, flying in a confused mass daywise to darkwise, as though tossed by storm winds, though there are none.

“Let’s go see,” Dar Oakley says. “It’s beyond that ridge, I bet. Whatever it is.”

“You go see,” Toebone says, and the others agree. “Come back and tell us.”

As always.

The earth’s obscure beneath Dar Oakley as he flies, mist, low light. He’s high enough that he can look down on the road that passes through the lowlands. Along the road a mass is moving that soon proves to be People, lots of them, all going one way, all taking their steps together, so many that as he descends he can hear the striking of their boots on the road. The sound Toebone heard grows consistently louder as he approaches it, which thunder wouldn’t do, and the smell of smoke carried on the damp breeze is stronger too, and familiar now.

Winging and gliding, Dar Oakley reaches a winter-leafless tree well ahead of those People, and from there watches them pass by below him. Around them, leading, following, on either side, are others on Horses. Then more Horses and Mules pulling carts, whipped along. All of them moving as fast as so many can.

How can this be told about? He’d tell the other Crows: Think of all the wagons and all the Horses and the People riding on them on all the days you’ve ever seen them, and put them all together on one and the same day, all walking daywise. But of course they wouldn’t be able to think of any such thing as that; he can hardly think it himself even with all of them passing beneath him where he sits. Each of them carries on his shoulder what is unmistakably a gun. The bitter smell in the air is gun smoke.

Crows are afraid of very little, though they are wary of a lot of things. One thing that does frighten them, that they can never get used to, is a sudden, sharp, loud noise. Not long before, a new species of People engine had appeared in Dar Oakley’s lands: a string of great carts pulled at headlong speed without Horses or Oxen on special roads that nothing else uses—alarming at first to Crows for its long, piercing cries and the dense smoke it produced, a People fire on the move. But its noise begins faint and far away and only grows loud as it comes closer, like thunder. Harmless. They stayed away from it for a long time though, just in case.

They know about guns, too, by now: they’ve had guns fired at them, and now and then a Crow will be killed by one. Not often; Crows learn young to distinguish a man carrying a gun from a man carrying a shovel or an ax, and just how far to stay away from a gun to be safe. Still, the nearby bang of one can make Crows take to the air even in the midst of a conversation—they just can’t help it. A whiff of gun smoke can also be good, though: it can mean that nearby something’s been killed.

Dar Oakley knows where this road runs, and sees a faster way to get to where it’ll come out beyond the far ridge. That’s where a cloud of yellow fog he can see now has settled: but it’s not a cloud, and it’s rising. The noise has resolved itself into individual thumps and bangs. The smell is huge.

Along the crest of the low ridge is a row of trees where Dar Oakley alights to look down on what is taking place in the meadows and brown fields beyond.

A crowd of People larger than any he’s ever seen, far larger than the line of them he’d watched moving all together on the road. They are facing another group just as large not far off. Lines of wagonlike things, each bearing what looks like a fire-blackened log; they belch smoke like a gun, but much more, and then a huge gun-noise reaches Dar Oakley. At first he thinks it’s simply the noise that knocks down the ones moving toward the wagon-thing, but no: the black log is a hollow gun, from which a ball as big as a People head is flung. The wagon and gun leap in a spasm to eject it.

The line of People he first saw is now reaching the field; they have banners and drums, the ones riding Horses are waving weapons and urging the rest into a run, and then a black ball is thrown into their midst too and immediately more than one of the People falls, and also one of the shouting ones on a Horse, Horse screaming, People blown into parts.

There’s no describing this. Not even he could make Crows see this by his tale-telling. He’ll have to return and say, Follow me.

“What is it?” they cry. “What? Why?” The Crows that Dar Oakley has brought to the ridgeline row of trees can see how many People and Horses have fallen down, can see the balls fly into the lines of advancing People and strike down several at once. Some balls fall short or long and drive into earth, or they land and bounce high—Crows fly up in alarm as they see that—and still do damage to People too crowded together to avoid them. The Crows look this way and that, fly off and return, baffled by the questions that only People can answer, if even they can: Why can’t they, with all their awful noise, just drive the others away? Why do they kill what they can’t eat, or won’t eat? What are they doing, Dar Oakley?

Dar Oakley just then experiences a new memory, a thing not remembered since it first happened: sitting in an Oak in a thunderstorm with a rain-wet Raven, who gave him a word for an inexplicable People thing that he, Dar Oakley, had seen. It’s a Battle, the Raven said.

“It’s a Battle,” Dar Oakley says.

They stay in trees far from it, examining with Crow-sight the details. They are Crows of peaceable times; they’ve seen fights but not murders among People, and down there are more People dead than they have ever seen in any one place alive.

The short winter day is ending. Before the light is gone, it seems that one of the two masses of People is drawing away from the other. A roar like the roar of a train begins and rises among the opposing mass, who begin to move, the ones on Horses directing them by waving their swords and hats and crying out.

“Those,” Dar Oakley says, “are the winners. The others the losers.” The Crows ponder the words.

It seems that the winners will pursue the losers up the wooded slope and kill more, but after a time they cease, and turn back. Night thickens; the Crows retreat to farther trees, deep evergreens where they feel safe. Through the dark hours one or another will wake, startled by far-off cries and screams, animal and People. Many dull fires can be seen; the crackle of guns from nearby or farther off.

By dawn there are no more cries. The mass of those who fought have moved away. The fires gutter out. The dead remain, and they lie out on that field for days; the Crows return each dawn to find the wealth still there. It’s unsettling, so much of it, so violently produced; they take their time to approach it. Easiest to get at are the bodies smashed apart by the flying balls. Dar Oakley takes his turn as a Bigger to watch over the field (but watch for what?). The hum of flies is loud; soon enough these bodies will be white with maggots.

The Biggers call warnings: There are living People going among the dead, opening their clothes and digging in their pockets and taking away paper or other things—the Crows see them take shiny things on chains from around some necks, and that interests them, but the People keep all these. For some of the dead they dig holes through the day and put one of the dead in each, and then hammer crossed sticks there to mark the spot, stand staring at it a time with hats in hands. The Crows avoid them and gather around the disemboweled Horses and the Mules that are waiting to be thrown on piles of burning logs.

Through the next days, other People come onto the field bringing oxcarts, which they fill with their dead. The task seems hateful to them; they wrap their faces in cloth, and often turn away as though unable to keep doing it. Sometimes an arm or a foot in its boot will drop away from a body as it is hoisted onto the cart, and the Crows will draw closer. By now Vultures, who hunt by smell as well as sight, circle high up, waiting their turn. Within days the feasting Crows have grown so used to the carts that they hardly look up even when one draws up near them, and once one of those who’ve come to collect the bodies cries out in rage or loathing and takes out a small gun and shoots at them. The Crows fly up, scolding, and go on to the next nearest. The masked People lift up the Crow-picked body.

“What will they do with them all?” asks the Crow Toebone.

“Wait and see,” Dar Oakley says, as though he knows.

What they do is to carry them a ways away, not far, to where other carts are coming with more dead, and where other People (mostly the darker-colored kind common in these regions, Dar Oakley sees) are digging a wide, shallow cut in the earth. The wagons stop; the dead are carried out, stiffened in death or flopping will-lessly, and each is wrapped in a coarse sheet and placed crosswise in the trench. Pretty soon there are no more sheets and the dead are put in without them, their heads without eyes (that’s the Crows’ doing) turned to the sky. As they are laid down, other People move along the trench, shoveling back in the dirt that they dug out. Other diggers lengthen the cut to accommodate more. Crows look down on wrapped bodies covered with dirt, then more not dirt-covered; then not wrapped but bare, then empty trench awaiting more, and the diggers continuing. One of these diggers can be seen to faint, or die, falling down for no reason. When night comes and Crows depart, the work goes on by the light of torches.

It’s all right with Crows. Even when these buried ones are subtracted from all the dead of the Battle, still those who lie out ungathered and uncovered, and those whom a few shovels of earth can’t shelter from Crows and others, those who are left behind when the living People give up the work and march away—they are more than the whole nation of Crows and all other eaters of the dead can ever finish. Dar Oakley, surveying what the People have made of the Future, how they’ve slung Death over a whole valley floor for others to live on, not for a day but a whole season, thinks of saying to the Crows, This is good. This is what they should do. And I knew that they would. He’d like to say it, but it’s not true, and he can’t.

When they returned to their summer demesne up billwise, the Crows told and retold what all of them already knew: what they had seen, how much they’d eaten, how fat they got, the wonder of it, like nothing ever seen before, People flesh, Horse flesh, dead Dogs even that the People shot when the Dogs tried to get in on the wealth. The few Crows who had wintered nearer home also listened, annoyed at the stories finally, Yes, yes, we heard you, flesh too plentiful to eat; and they vowed to go farther this winter and see what there was to see, get what there was to get.

“It can’t be they’d ever do such a thing again, though,” one said to Dar Oakley. (She was a Cherry, and thus a descendant of his own, though she didn’t know that.) “Would they?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Dar Oakley said. “You never know, about People. You can never come to the end of what they’ll do, or stop doing.”

And when the cold weather came and again Crows went down that way, it was the same. By then the Crows of that land, Na Cherry’s old flock and its neighbors, had also discovered the riches; through the spring and summer they’d learned to keep an eye out for ranks of People all moving together to where the killing would be done. Beat of boots on the earth. The local Crows would keep a distance but never lose sight of them. Now and then one of the dark hats would turn and a white face look up at them in fear or hatred.

Death-birds.

The great encampments like the one the Crows first saw, the gray tents and the massed People all dressed alike, the campfires multiplying to the distance and the mounted fighters rushing here and there—they became less common. Fewer of the great black guns that threw the balls, and more men on Horses fighting others on Horses, the clashes short and furious. There were barns burned by night and People hanged from trees and cattle shot dead and cut up for the fighters to eat and the remainder left to rot. This sort of fighting Dar Oakley recognized. He had seen the like, in other places and times; had seen victors cut away the ears and other parts of the defeated to keep or to wear, as these did; had seen them bury their own fighters but leave their enemies to rot and to Crows, as vengeance, so that they might never rest in death. Yet sometimes now they must abandon their own dead too where they lay, both Horses and People, and ride on. It was all normal, long-standing; Dar Oakley forbore even to explain it to the others.

One thing that was new was the single fighter who with a long gun climbs into a tree and waits there hidden, watching. When a number of fighters from the other side come near and dismount to look around through their black tubes or study papers or rest, the shooter in the tree lifts the gun with slow care, aims, and fires. One of the group falls; the rest then drop down too to hide, not knowing just where the shot came from; when they can, they creep fast away. Most often the dead one is left behind. Crows learn to watch and wait for this, calling others—come here, look in that tree crotch, there—which obviously angers the one in the tree. The hubbub will draw the eyes of his prey to him. Get! Get! he whispers at them fiercely, yet staying as still as any Owl.

The Crows don’t care. There was always further wealth to be found, that was the main thing, no end to it: obscured in the woods and in the long grass, muddied in the drying creek beds, having lain there while Crows ate elsewhere. To find it Crows just followed the Pigs of the farms, who nosed it out from the undergrowth and rooted in the rotting cloth. The local Crows could afford to be generous, invited Dar Oakley and the transients to begin, Have at it, you’re welcome, no, no, you first. When two Crows out of lifelong habit started to squabble over some piece of cadaver, the others laughed until the squabblers recollected where they were and what they had. And where there is Plenty there is Peace. At evening they all gathered, laughing, heads shiny with fat, reeking of the rich smell of death. A dozen new names were earned for feats of gluttony never known before. The farmer-People of that region would never forget their exulting.

Unlike migrating Blackbirds or Swallows, the Crows went home in slow stages, small bands, foraging and resting or ranging wide as they went. Often a Crow would find herself alone, out of range of Crow calls she knew. Dar Oakley was alone when he first sensed the ones who accompanied the flock, moving over the ground below, going the way the Crows went. It wasn’t any noise they made that drew his attention, or that they appeared along open People roads—they could actually be seen anywhere, and were silent. It took Dar Oakley a time of watching for them, or seeking their presence, to understand who they were: People fighters.

“Are they following us?” he asked another of his clan, who happened to be by. “Are they going where we’re going?”

“Who?” said the other, lifting her wings and looking around for a threat. “Where?”

Dar Oakley tried to locate one to show her but somehow couldn’t, though a moment earlier several had certainly been there, passing through the thin Aspens over the fallen leaves. The other Crow gave him a doubtful look and went on.

He couldn’t really see them: he just knew they were there. As he had known the clans of the elder People who long before had walked darkwise following One Ear. The harder he looked, the less he saw them, and the more of them he knew were there. Whether they were all the dead fighters, or only the dead that the Crows had tasted; if they followed to claim something from the Crows, or to revenge themselves on them, Dar Oakley didn’t know. He didn’t know if they bore the wounds they had taken, he didn’t know if they went in the clothes they’d worn or without any. What do you see? the Crows asked Dar Oakley, watching him twitch and start. But he couldn’t say.

They were unlike One Ear’s West-wandering dead in one way: One Ear’s had grown more numerous the farther they moved, as Death moved before them and made more, who rose from where they lay to join them. These ones, though, grew steadily fewer. Why? Dar Oakley began to perceive how by ones and twos and threes they’d leave the crowd, turn away daywise or darkwise toward the People towns and farms that appeared now and then. And at length he understood. These fighters had lived in those places, had left them to go to fight in Battles, and now were heading home, as the Crows, too, were heading home.

By the time he began to recognize the billwise country again, there seemed to be only a few around or below him. He wondered if some had just grown tired of journeying, as some among One Ear’s People had, and stopped for good in the woods or hills. It was hard to track them, in any case; they were as much not there as there, shadows that nothing cast. Finally he sensed only two remaining: they seemed related, though he couldn’t say why. Without really choosing to, he began to keep close to them—following them as they’d followed him. They’d come and go as though lost, then be near him again and walking purposefully. Dar Oakley knew that following them he’d drifted far from the way to his old demesne, but he didn’t mind. Spring was a hard time for a single Crow like himself to be among friends and kin: maybe just as well to wander, learn something new.

There: the two of them, sitting motionless together in a clearing, a small fire between them. Of course there was no fire, only the thought of one. Or perhaps a memory: two People at a fire. His memory, or theirs?

Apple trees were white with blossom, fields turned brown by the plow, when the two in plain day came to a stream beneath trailing willows. Across the stream on higher ground was a small plot set apart by a low fence and a gate. A few upright stones marked the People remains laid beneath. The two seemed to strive to cross the stream and reach that place, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t go any farther. Dar Oakley knew this, but they didn’t know it.

Crows—those that chose to take notice of such things—knew by then something about graves and graveyards; they knew that the long boxes put into holes dug deep in the earth contained each a People body, child or old one, the size of the box would tell you, though you saw nothing of that body and never would. The two blue-clad fighters longed for that dwelling-place. He knew they longed, but not why; he knew that even those who were buried in these places set aside for them couldn’t remain there, though some People believed they could and did. Fox Cap long ago had brought home the bones of her People from where they were scattered, and placed them in the cairns that had been made for them; but she had told Dar Oakley that those dead were by then in another Realm the living couldn’t reach. (She had reached it, though, and he too with her.) The only happy dead, she said, are those who know where their bones are laid: only they are free to go and never return.

Beyond the fenced and separated space, the bare ground rose farther to a white farmhouse with two chimneys. The land around it hadn’t been turned or planted; there seemed no one there, except that in the yard a lean gray Horse harnessed to a little carriage with a black hood cropped the grass. As Dar Oakley watched, two People came out of the house, females, one in white, and young, Dar Oakley thought, her hair light; the other gray-haired, in black. The young one stepped from the porch—though the one in black tried to hold her back—and walked with a kind of dreamy certainty toward the little graveyard. Dar Oakley felt the two fighters strain toward her but make no advance.

So there they are, the three of them, motionless, with the graveyard and the stream between them, the Crow watching.

The two men are the woman’s brother and husband, and she has suspected, even known, that they are dead, but has received no news of that or of their whereabouts; their bodies will never be brought home and placed here beside her parents and her first child. In the woman’s apron pocket are photographs of the two men: perhaps it’s these as much as her person they are drawn to. The pictures are kept on the mantel most of the time, but now and then she must have them with her. The other woman in black is the husband’s mother.

I know these things about her, which Dar Oakley didn’t then know; and I know more than that. I know that in that year she stood by her window for hours, facing toward the little home cemetery; that with a crow-quill pen she would write down what she felt there:

There is within the Earth a Door

That opens to the Sky—

And there Integument and Self

Part Company—for aye.

She knows that we leave the husk of the body behind at death, and go on without it to our next habitation; that somewhere Death has drawn out the essence of her husband and her brother, just as the essence of them was drawn out by the camera artist and fixed on the glass, where it will never change; that wherever, on whatever field they lie, no more harm can be done them.

She knows all that and yet nothing can console her finally that she cannot touch their dead faces, brush the hair of their heads, bathe their limbs, and wrap them in clean linen to be put in that ground where she herself will one day go, only to depart again. If she can’t lay them to rest in earth, bid them farewell at that door, then she can’t lay them to rest in herself. It’s as though she carries a dead child in her womb that can never be born. And now in the spring of the year she feels them, their selves, souls, persons, returned to here where they ought to lie, from where they might have been able at last to detach from the earth and the world and go on. They want her help, and she can’t help them.

After a time neither long nor short the two men were gone, despite all their longing, as though even so little existence as they had was hard to maintain. And she knew, and Dar Oakley knew, that she looked at nothing.

Of the many human persons in Dar Oakley’s stories, she is the one who for certain lived and died in a place and time in our history. I know her name, though Dar Oakley never learned it. My mother said the name to me. She used to hear it spoken, as others also did, by the living and by the dead.

Dar Oakley never returned to the freehold he had held in that land he’d called the Future, or to that flock he brought there. The Crows of this new country he’d come into, after a time of wariness and even some hostility, came to hold him in some esteem; they could laugh at his brags, but—Dar Oakley notes—nearly all of them bore that old invention of his, a name of their own, whether taken from a parent or a parent’s parent from long ago, or given just yesterday for some deed or some accident: Ran Foxglove, Ke Rainshower, Fats, Muleskin, Gra Brokenfoot. They called Dar Oakley Whitecheek, for the tale he told about his dealings with the Snowy Owl, which of course they didn’t believe. But it wasn’t because of Na Cherry and his failure in the Ymr of Ka that he hadn’t returned to the old place. It was because he was held here now in the Ymr of Ymr: by the People’s dead he had seen in these lands to which he’d wandered, and now could not stop seeing.

Autumn, and Dar Oakley and the other Biggers—Ke Rainshower, Muleskin, and the rest—led a large band going at evening darkwise toward their roosts, passing over the barns and yellow fields, following the clear line of a small river through the valley. They’d pass over the white farmhouse to which the two dead fighters had come, whose family dead were buried in the fenced space. Crows took no interest in it, could hardly be said to perceive it. But to Dar Oakley’s sight it seemed to brighten, to be larger than others; to glow, at dawn or evening, against the dark earth around, as though a setting or a rising sun struck it but not the land it stood on: of the world but not in it. He saw her, too, on the porch: in white, her light hair disordered, dark shawl over her shoulders; the child beside her angry and beseeching—why? He left the gang and let himself down toward her, called, hardly knowing he did so. She loosened the hands of the boy tugging at her skirts and came to stand at the railing of the porch, putting her hands on it and pointing her face outward and upward but not looking, not at Crows or at anything: he felt sure of that. And yet he felt her seeking.

Anna Kuhn. Child or grandchild of German immigrants. There are certainly written records of her, and if I had the capacity, I could travel to the archives where they are kept, I could find the letters she wrote or dictated, and the little books of her poems that were put out by her friends and devotees. All that’s beyond me now, and the resources that not long ago could be reached from anywhere—they’re largely in chaos, or locked, or fouled in one way or another. They’d be inaccessible anyway to me here. What I do know about Anna Kuhn is what my mother told me, and some pages about her in those of my mother’s books I still have; and the witness of the Crow. Mother wouldn’t have been surprised that by such means the woman reached me. She was by you, Mother would have said, all along.

In adolescence Anna was known locally as a somnambule: a sleepwalker. There were many famous somnambules in the years before the Civil War, suddenly appearing across the Republic, exhibiting strange powers. Maybe they’ve been common in all ages, but at that time they seemed to herald something new, or to embody it: an opening to an unseen world. They’d get up and walk dark lanes in their shifts (they were almost all women, as I understand it) or set tables in the night and make meals for no visitor, as though other senses awakened within them when they slept, by which they could see what was concealed in the day, hear what made no sound, feel the sympathetic vibrations that physical nerves could not. Others didn’t ambulate, kept to their beds, lay unmoving nightlong with eyes closed while in a voice unlike their usual one they would sermonize to listeners, answer questions, tell of God’s love and the world beyond death, and yet have no memory in the morning of what they had said.

Anna Kuhn didn’t speak asleep, didn’t preach, hardly spoke, apparently; in the dark she could see into mirrors, and read her Bible, but when she later recounted the days when she had walked asleep, she mostly remembered being spoken to. Her eyesight was never good; she trusted hearing more than sight. She said she had always sought for the way ahead by ear, and by ear she understood the place that the way led her to. Of those Mansions and Gardens I only hear, I do not see them, but in Hearing I do see, tho’ whether I may trust what I see I do not know—I think the Reality must exceed all that my mind can picture. The harder she tried to see, the less clear the way and the place became.

She became entirely blind in the years after the War. She told her correspondents that she despaired then—as much for her fatherless son as for herself—but that in time she felt an inward sense open that was more perceptive than her physical eyes had ever been:

Before Dark fell I fear’d the dark

And shunned the Shadowed way—

But now—awake—I know a Night

Much brighter than the Day.

She came to wide notice through accounts published by the minister of her church, who was interested in questions of mental sympathy and the condition of the dead. He took down what she told him about her brother and her husband, that she knew just how they had suffered, how they could not free themselves of the burden of their dreadful deaths. They are like living people who have taken terrible wounds: they can think of nothing else, all their energies devoted to healing and the sufferance of pain. I believe (she said) that in time—though truly there is no time, nor space, there where they now are—their eyes and hearts will be opened, and they will know their true condition. They were heroes of a great crusade, and there is nothing to prevent their entry into joy. A blessed doctrine, the Reverend concluded.

Among other remarkable signs of her sympathetic powers, he reported that if Anna touched either one of the two ambrotypes she often carried with her, she was able to identify instantly which man it pictured, though the frames and the cases were identical. He’d known the men: had given them their lessons as boys, had prayed with them the morning they went to join their regiments, the day the pictures had been made. Her touch upon their pictured faces, the Reverend wrote, was as gentle as the touch of a mother’s hand upon the eyes of a sleeping child. He couldn’t know—Anna Kuhn herself hardly knew it then—that without a Crow who came near her, a Crow overburdened with stories that he didn’t want, she wouldn’t have been able to know the true deaths and afterlives of the two men shut in their cases of wood and plush.

Late winter, a day of dense fog, the naked trees black and dripping, black earth pied with white. Perched aloft, Dar Oakley looked here and there for a way to go more promising than any other, and saw none. No Crow called from any direction. He seemed, for this moment, to be the only Crow in existence. Shifting his feet on the branch, he turned his head and caught sight of a crimson smudge in a stand of young trees by the small river.

A fire. Who would make and keep a fire there? He watched for a time, and the little fire neither grew nor sank away. Dar Oakley felt his wings open; he closed and settled them; they opened again, as though they knew where he should go even if he didn’t. What, was this any business of his? It wasn’t.

He lifted off the branch and beat toward the grove.

The two of them sat as they had sat before, looking into their imagined fire—Dar Oakley was sure he could fly right through it without harm; it gave off no heat, heat was not what it was for. They took no notice of the Crow; they seemed to be speaking in turns, but their eyes never met. From a high branch Dar Oakley fell to a lower one and to a stump.

He couldn’t understand their speech; it wasn’t a language he knew then, it wasn’t One Ear’s or the Saints’. Yet as they spoke, the matter seemed to enter into him, so that he saw what they spoke of. It was as though he had seen enough on the battlefields to see without hearing.

Caught under a gun carriage when it rolled over. Horse ran away with it in the retreat. Caught up in the reins, trampling me, my legs caught under the gun. The others ran past, didn’t stop, on the run, left me there to die, others too.

It might have gone something like that—Dar Oakley can only give me hints; the ghost at the fire spoke low, motionless, as though he had said all this many times, as though the saying of it was all he was.

Cried out as long as I could for help, for water, blood in my throat, Rebs passing over chasing us, them; stepped on my face, one gave me the bayonet, see him still, the teeth in his mouth, old man, broken hat, I see it.

As he spoke these things, Dar Oakley saw the wounds he named appear on him, eye driven from his head by the boot, his breast opening to bleed. The wounds vanished as soon as they appeared.

Then he ceased to speak, if he had ever spoken. Dar Oakley’s mind cleared. Then the other began.

Sent away from my brother-in-law, been promised we would serve together, cruel officer, made to go on patrol leading a squadron of niggers, me but a corporal, never saw or spoke to such before, sent out to look for dead and bury them. Caught by Rebs; they hanged the weeping niggers as I watched, cut at their private parts with their great Reb knives, blood running down, shot me then, though I begged them in Jesus’s name to spare me, threw me headlong in a muddy stream. There I still lie.

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.

That was before the War. Before the War, progress on earth had seemed to model progress in heaven. This earthly Republic had grown not just richer but wiser; the principles of peace and loving-kindness would surely expand, following the railroad and the westward wagons. Unlike the Crows of Dar Oakley’s old demesne, the People who participated in the great sympathy knew what the Future was: It was land they were bound for, this land’s true reality, inside them now, outside them as well in times to come.

For all its justice, all its nobility, its necessity—as the President insisted—the War seemed to quench that progress, stifle sympathy in horror, bring back Death’s old dominion. If the true Republic that the fellowship of sympathy had envisioned could begin to advance again, those who had the talents and the will would have to steel themselves to suffering such as they could not before have imagined. Only by entering into the suffering of others with all their being could they free those whose dreadful deaths trapped them in the grief and horror in which they had died. That was what Anna Kuhn must have gained through Dar Oakley: a suffering like that of the mother of Jesus, like Jesus’s own in the dark of the Garden. If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. After that suffering came new power, caustic as lye to use; yet to use it was all that she and her sisters and brothers in spiritual science wanted to do for as long as it had to be done: to reach these souls, entangled in their deaths, and free them. For they are inhabiting felicity; they are standing in its environs; they just don’t know it:

Just beyond where the shadows are falling

Is a bright, summer land, ever fair

Surely the powers on the other side would be at the same work. Surely there would be great hospitals and sanitariums there, airy, clean, and temporary, like the ones built by the Sanitary Commission vastly multiplied. There salvation, incomplete at death, would be continued.

And the work of salvation there as here was a work of knowledge.

It didn’t matter that a loved one’s physical frame, the abandoned support of the soul, lay somewhere unknown, didn’t matter that his bones had no rest: that was what Anna Kuhn would tell the heart-shattered mothers in black bombazine who sat opposite her at the trembling parlor table. The soul had left all that behind, didn’t rest or want to rest. In the vastness of heaven the dead began a life busier than their lives on earth, and part of their business was reaching and guiding those still in the body. Every communication strengthened the bond between the living and the dead; it was a work with the same gravity, the same promise, the same wild successes and failures as the laying of the Atlantic cable, and just like that cable it canceled a gulf simply by crossing it. A bond that joined all places and persons in an immediacy that was not different from the instantaneous motion of electricity: an Alternating Current running through the whole extent of Spirit, which was likely infinite.

That’s how it felt, I think. That’s how it must have felt to them.

In the celestial system, however, sender and receiver weren’t so easily and surely joined as in the telegraph system. The chords of sympathy weren’t as certain; a call to that realm might reach many, or none—though the ones who responded to a call, who stepped forth, so to speak, from the murmur of voices indistinctly heard, almost always proved to be if not the one called at least one who knew that one or who agreed to seek for him: the child or brother of the one whose hands Anna Kuhn held.

A precious bit of a conversation I’ve found transcribed in a spiritualist pamphlet my mother preserved, taken down by I don’t know who, sometime in the late 1860s:

MRS. KUHN: Is there someone near? We welcome you. There is someone. There are voices.

VISITOR: Mrs. Kuhn, who speaks to you? Is it—

MRS. KUHN: Hush, I hear. Is it you, D—? Your mother is here.

VISITOR: Oh, oh, my child.

MRS. KUHN (possessed, a different voice): Mother? Is she here? Munny?

VISITOR: D—! His name for me. Oh darling.

MRS. KUHN (possessed): Munny, I am afraid. I cannot see.

VISITOR: Oh my lovey. (Weeps.)

MRS. KUHN: You need not be afraid. Where are you? Can you tell us where you are?

A pause.

MRS. KUHN (possessed): Cold. They are all dead, I know. There is a crow. Something presses me—yet I do not feel it. I feel nothing. I do not know where I may be.

VISITOR: Where is my boy? Ask him to tell me.

MRS. KUHN: Wait, have patience. (Listens.) D—, your Mother is here. There is love here. Yes. Soon you will have comfort.

VISITOR: Tell me what you hear, I beg you.

MRS. KUHN: Gone. I hear—Speak!—No, now silence.—No, don’t weep, he will return, I am sure. Come—

The transcript ends there.

There’s a poorly reproduced photograph, Anna in a straight-backed chair, hands folded in front of her. Her dress is, surely, black. She wears an odd pair of oval black glasses that I don’t think she wore in daily life—Dar Oakley would have noticed them. Her hair—it looks dark here, though it was always described as light—is sharply parted and tied back.

A Crow. I admit that I was startled to read that, and my eyes filled suddenly: the evidence of my friend there. It’s true, I thought; which of course isn’t proven by that. But if it is so?

One other thing: among the spirits who are reported in this cheap little pamphlet (half of it is missing) to have spoken with Anna more than once are an Indian chief and a monk. They both spoke to her in English—but maybe English is the language of heaven. Were a monk and an Indian reached, or did they reach Anna, because of the current that ran through Dar Oakley? Well, I don’t want to make much of this; it appears that a lot of mediums heard from Indians and conversed with them at length. And with George Washington, too, and Ben Franklin.

Enough.

What Anna Kuhn enjoined on Dar Oakley—what anyway he felt compelled to do for her sake—was to go as far as he could to find as many as he could who had died so hard: who were still at war, still untranslated. He was to sit with and listen to each one, because every story, every disaster, every death was different, and had to be experienced freshly if the medium—the coming word for those who stood at the juncture of currents, who both transmitted and received—were to help them make their way, take that single step toward the light.

For this, Dar Oakley became what no Crow had ever been: a night bird. The ones it was his remit to find could be seen in the day—he’d seen them in their numbers coming North, most often at dawn or evening, in fog or mist, as he had seen Anna’s husband and his brother. But they were more numerous at night, brighter against the dark world.

He’d always believed he couldn’t fly at night, and he didn’t know even now that he could, didn’t know if this dark was night itself or some other place that came after day. He’d slip away from the flock as it headed for the evening roosts, fly to a high Pine he knew of that had a long view; there he watched the sun set and the further world arise. He learned about moonrise and moonset; saw the white stars and found that they turned through the night, some going down darkwise below the black land and others arising daywise, as though they flocked. He thought of Kits: the world is round, and if you go far enough, you return to where you started; did these lights do that, all in a night? Sometimes he’d fly, exalted and afraid. From a height he’d see the People, concentrated in some places, scattered thinly in others; roads and inhabited places were marked by the greater numbers of them there, a dull sparkle of drifting souls, like the lines of fires set across the land by One Ear’s People that he’d once looked down on.

There were so many. Not all were soldiers: no, he knew they weren’t, he could in time separate the blue-clad foot-dragging limb-shattered ones from all the others he perceived, whose sorrows glowed around them too: the ones murdered at home, the diseased, the ones frozen alone in their cabins or burned in fires, killed at birth by mothers who then killed themselves or were hanged. Men killed in knife fights or caught in iron machinery or shot by their friends, some of them once soldiers. However close he came to them, however long he sat by them, he wouldn’t learn the stories or fates themselves; he heard the vague murmur the souls made, felt their rage or regret, but he was only a conduit or collector of them. Don’t kill me, Sam, don’t kill me now and send me down to Hell with the sin of what we’ve done all on me. Anna Kuhn then drew the stories out of him, her blind eyes weeping, her fingers like the dipper that draws up clear water from the black rain barrel. He couldn’t tell the stories, but still they were his; in the day as he fed and flew with the others and as he sat the Pine in the night, they were with him.

Pity. He felt it in his breast and in his hooded eyes when at dawn he roosted to sleep in hiding. He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.

If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out. He saw the earth and the night as People did, and it wasn’t a different place from their day-world. It was all one now, Ymr was, and he was in it.

The Crows had taken notice of Dar Oakley’s visits to the white farmhouse, that he seemed unafraid of the People or animals there. It was something to gossip about, as anything out of the ordinary was.

“So what do you get from that?” the Crow called Ke Rainshower asked him. Late summer, and a dozen Crows were laid out on a sunward bank, wings spread out, eyes half-closed.

“Oh, nothing special.”

“Uh-huh. Well.” She was a lean and suspicious bird. She didn’t suggest that Dar Oakley was hiding something, but it wasn’t like a Crow to do something for nothing.

“Let us know if you need some help,” she said. “Distract the Dog. Get the Ducks away from their wee ducklings.”

“Sure.”

“All for one,” Ke Rainshower said, not as sleepy as she seemed. “Right?”

Watch out, watch out, the lookouts on high called. Gun, gun. Wearily, reluctantly, the sun-drugged Crows roused, looking the way that the cries pointed. The hunter was there, creeping to a clump of tall grass, likely thinking he couldn’t be seen; the Crows could certainly see him, see the color of his hat, the color of his eyes, for that matter. It was the boy from the farmhouse, who’d shot at Dar Oakley from the window, and then later from behind a shed.

“It’s not a gun,” he said.

“It sure is,” Ke Rainshower said.

“Well, it is a gun, but it can’t hurt you.”

“Oh yes?”

“Watch,” Dar Oakley said. He pulled his sun-softened parts together and got aloft. He flew low and slow over the place where the boy hid, and the boy swung wildly with the gun to keep him in his sights. Then the sorry little sound. Dar Oakley turned back to where the Crows had taken to the trees.

Too little caution is rarely better than too much. Sometime afterward the Crows spied the same boy making his way toward them, squirming on his belly, the gun cradled on his arms. They came closer, ready now to be amused, calling to the others, Come, come. The boy raised and aimed the gun, and it went off with a true bang. The ball shattered leaves and twigs passing amid the Crows.

“Not a gun, huh,” Ke Rainshower said to Dar Oakley, not without some harshness. “Can’t hurt you, huh.”

What could he do? He becked, shrugged, held his tongue.

They watched that boy closely from then on. He always came alone, toward evening; he never quit till the light failed. His first kill—a fledgling he got by luck and the little Crow’s inexperience—came the next spring. The fledgling’s parents cursed and shouted but didn’t dare come close; the other Crows joined in. They saw the boy kick the dead bird with a cool ferocity until it was hardly a Crow at all.

The young man’s name was Paul. He hated Crows; he’d later become famous for it. He hated his mother’s blindness; he hated his father for being dead. But more than anything he hated Mental Sympathy.

When he was old enough, it would become his duty to drive to the station in the trap, collect his mother’s Visitors (as they were always called), and bring them to the house. He also was the one who received from the visitors the coins and envelopes of dollars—differing amounts, whatever they chose, no one in the house spoke of it to them—which they didn’t care to press on Anna. Sometimes a father or a mother would take Paul’s hand or try to reach him through his eyes, but he’d just return to the trap and the waiting nag, and climb aboard. Along the road to town he’d see Crows sitting a branch above the road, or cruising not far off. He’d snap the reins, turning his head to look up and around, old enough now to know that if the Crow his mother favored—the Crow with the white cheek—wanted to track him from far away, he’d never see it. And of course Dar Oakley did track him, unseen himself; likely the boy Paul didn’t know that a Crow sees four times farther and three times sharper than one of us can. But he gave far less thought to the young man than the young man gave to him.

The great commonwealth of the dead, which had for a time grown so close to the living as to be identical to it, had begun to seem farther off now. Perhaps the elder spirits had by now finished the work of leading the lost war dead into felicity, work that Anna Kuhn had labored at too; perhaps to some extent they’d lost their interest in the living, had turned to face the other way, toward the nested spheres of the higher realms and the infinity beyond. I don’t know. Dar Oakley stayed at his work, kept his watches in the night, but like the great flights of Passenger Pigeons that he and the Crows had watched in awe and then over time had seen grow fewer and fewer, the flocks of the wandering dead grew less.

At the same time there began a great movement to account for, locate, disinter, and honorably rebury as many of the fallen as could be, and it continued for years. Families were able at last to lay wreaths over beloved bones; those who had long laid wreaths over the wrong bones were led to the different ones, made to learn a new story. Still, more than half the dead, North and South, were never accounted for; the ploughs turning battlefields back into fields would bring up their brown skulls and corroded brass buttons for decades after. Among the ones who remained unfound were Anna Kuhn’s two menfolk. She had seen them through the Great Change, as it came to be called, but never did learn from them or from the Crow where their bodies lay; surely—she tried to be glad of it—they themselves didn’t care at all.

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.