Someplace to Be Flying (46 page)

She’s got this idea that once she gets hold of some piece of magic she can call her own, once she can fly, she’ll be able to bring Kerry back from California to live with her. She’ll be able to find her other daughter, the one that got lost before she had the chance to get born.

“It’s never going to happen,” Crazy Crow tells her, trying one last time.

He’s right, but he’s wrong, too. In the regular turn and spin of the world, it isn’t going to happen. Doesn’t matter how deep the fox blood runs in her, canids don’t fly. But he should’ve remembered that nothing’s impossible if you want it bad enough-hell, doesn’t the story go that the whole reason the world’s here for us to mess up the way we do is because Raven was looking for someplace to fly? He couldn’t do it on his own, but you put enough heads together and a thing’ll get done.

Only Crazy Crow forgot that, so he didn’t think he could help. The crow girls would have known what to do, but they were off in Tibet at the time. I know, because I ran into them there, on my way back to the Americas from a summer spent on the shores of the Dead Sea.

“Give it a rest,” Crazy Crow says. “Appreciate what you’ve got.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Nettie tells him. She’s looking wild, hair all knotted and caught up with seeds and twigs, wearing a circle of burrs on the hem of her ragged dress. “You’re the voice in the wilderness, come to dissuade me. But I won’t be dissuaded in this.”

Crazy Crow gives up on her then. Most folks do. But she doesn’t give up. Not on flying. Not on finding her missing daughter. She just keeps digging, deeper and deeper, further afield, until somewhere she hears about the Morgans and that’s when it all goes bad.

In human terms, the Morgans are an old moonshining family that lives back in the hills where no one goes unless they’ve got legitimate business. If you don’t have legitimate business in Freakwater Hollow, you don’t come back.

Inbred, folks’d say, seeing how they all have that same Morgan look-tall and lean, men and women both, handsome, dangerous, clannish. They age well, silver-haired and dark-eyed from their teens on, and they don’t seem to have children, least no one sees any Morgan children. Story goes that mean as the Morgans are, their children are worse, so they keep them kenneled up somewhere out beyond where they run their stills, deep, deep in the hills. Keep them there until they’re old enough to act civilized, if that’s what you can call a Morgan’s behavior.

We know them better. They don’t kennel their children. They leave them in other people’s nests like faerie changelings, come and collect them when they’re grown. “Grown” for a Morgan usually means they’ve killed off the family that raised them and are ready to spread their wings. Round about then their birth parents come to collect them and bring them back into the hills.

There’s serious bad blood between us. Goes back forever it seems and I’ve never been able to track down the story of how exactly it all got started. I remember once, before he went away, Raven told me there was no big mystery, we just had to keep them in check because that’s the way it was. Someone had to do it and we got elected, same as that pot of his was our responsibility.

“Comes from being the oldest,” he said. “Certain things we’ve got to do.

Everybody’s got a role to play-world wouldn’t turn without us all doing our part.”

Maybe that’s why things are the way they are now. Raven’s turned his back on his responsibilities and the world’s been going downhill ever since. I don’t know what part it is the Morgans are supposed to play unless it’s to catch and skin corbæ and they’re too damned good at that.

But Nettie doesn’t know any of this. No one’s ever thought to tell her. So there she is one afternoon, walking barefoot up Plum Hollow Road, what the locals call ‘Shine Road on account of the Morgans and their stills and marijuana fields. They’re watching her as she follows that old dirt track up into the wooded hills, some of them pacing her through the trees on either side, rifles in hand, others winging it above. She doesn’t smell like the law or trouble, so they let her come, curious about this raggedy woman who doesn’t have enough good sense to stay away.

When she finally reaches their place it’s nothing like she expected. It doesn’t look magic, it just looks run-down. Big old barn up on the hill, wood beams gone the same gray as that silvery Morgan hair, tin sheets rattling on the roof whenever a wind comes up. Junked cars and pickups in the fields. A couple of others that don’t look like they’re in much better condition parked in the dirt yard that lies between the barn, the clapboard farmhouse, and the outbuildings. There’s trash everywhere. Morgans don’t keep a clean nest.

It’s so quiet it feels like there’s a storm building, but the sky’s blue for as far as Nettie can see. She looks around some, wondering if maybe the place is abandoned, until she suddenly notices the woman in a rocking chair on the porch that fronts the house, just sitting there, looking at her, smiling. Something about that smile’s not quite right, but Nettie, she’s not noticing that sort of thing. She smiles back and crosses the yard until she’s standing by the porch.

“You lost?” the woman asks.

She’s genuinely curious. There’s a throaty, hollow-toned ring to her voice, as though the sound of it’s coming up from the bottom of a well. Or a crypt. Her name’s Idonia and she’s the matriarch of this clan, hundreds of years old but she looks the same as any Morgan, late twenties, early thirties, smooth pale skin, silvery hair, dark eyes.

“No, ma’am,” Nettie says. “If this is the Morgan farm, then I’m right where I looked to be.”

” ‘Ma’am,’ ” Idonia repeats and she has to shake her head. Nettie’s politeness is even more puzzling than her being here. “You got a reason for dragging your bony self into my yard?”

“My name’s Nettie Bean.”

“Oh, I know
who
you are,” Idonia says. “I can smell the corbæ on you like a piece of roadkill gone bad-that’s a stink that doesn’t go away with a bath or two, girl.” Idonia’s been around so long, any human she meets is a child in her eyes. “What I can’t figure is what would possess you to come walking in here.”

Nettie doesn’t question that Idonia knows who she is, or worry about how maybe this isn’t the safest place to be for someone who’s known to be a corbæ friend.

While they’re talking, Morgans are drifting into the farmyard. Ambling from the barn and outbuildings, ghosting in from the woods, all of? them looking pretty much the same, the way a nest of bugs do when you turn over an old stone or stump, you can’t quite see what’s what as they go skittering away. A few of them are roosting in feathered skins on the roof of the porch and in the twisty boughs of the old crab apple tree growing up along one side of it. But Nettie doesn’t seem to notice any of them.

“I’ve heard you can teach me how to fly,” is all she says.

Idonia starts to laugh, she can’t help it.

“Where’d you hear that, girl?” she asks.

“I can’t remember-it’s like I just knew it one day. But you’ve got to tell me, ma’am. Is it true?”

“Well, now,” Idonia tells her. “That’s about as true as it gets.”

One of the Morgans in the yard snickers and Idonia shoots him a dirty look, but Nettie doesn’t catch it. She’s got a glow on her from Idonia’s news that just won’t quit.

“It’s not easy,” Idonia warns her.

“I’m not a?scared of hard work.”

Idonia gives her a solemn nod, fixes a serious expression on that long narrow Morgan face.

“And it can hurt some,” she adds. “At first, I mean. But after that you’ll be fine.”

Nettie just squares her thin shoulders. “When can we start?”

“Right now, girl,” Idonia tells her.

She gets up out of her rocker and joins Nettie where she’s standing in the dirt, puts her arm around Nettie’s shoulders and starts walking her up the hill to the barn. There’s maybe twenty Morgans standing around now, smiling at Nettie, and for the first time she starts to feel a little nervous, hesitates. Idonia gives her shoulders a squeeze.

“Don’t you be fretting yourself about my family,” she promises. “We’re going to treat you the same as we do all our guests.”

Nettie lets herself relax then, not stopping to think that Idonia didn’t say she’d treat her good or bad, just the same.

“Back off,” Idonia tells her family as the whole crowd starts to follow them up to the barn. “Give us some room to breathe. None of you got work to do?”

By the time they reach the door of the barn, there’s only Nettie and Idonia and a couple of her boys left. Daniel and Washington. Don’t wonder how I know their names. I know everybody who was there. I’ve got their names chiseled in my heart the way a stonemason works letters into a tombstone- big and plain, for all to read, so the weather can’t wear them down, so nobody can forget. So I can’t forget.

So they’re at the door of the barn and everybody else fades away, going back to whatever it was they were doing when Nettie first arrived. The birds that were perched on the porch and in the crab apple tree fly in through the doors ahead of them and get swallowed by the dark lying inside.

“What’s in here?” Nettie asks, feeling a little nervous again.

There’s a smell in the air she can’t place. Like something died, but not recently. An old dead smell.

“This is where we’ll fix you up with your feather skin,” Idonia tells her as she leads the way inside.

Nettie follows her in, blinking at the dark. The smell’s stronger here so thick it seems to layer like fine dust on the walls of her lungs. Then her eyes start to adjust to the dimness and she feels faint, would have fallen except there’s a Morgan boy on either side of her, keeping her on her feet, fingers holding on to her arms like vises squeezed tight.

“You’re not changing your mind, are you?” Idonia asks.

“I … I …”

Nettie can’t talk. All she can do is stare up where thousands of crow skins hang from the rafters, dangling on long thin strips of leather like herbs drying-heads, legs, black feathers all still attached. Most of them are our little cousins, but here and there’s a bigger shape, some corbæ got too close to Freakwater Hollow and didn’t get away fast enough.

“Where’d you think you’d get your feather skin?” Daniel asks her, his voice a throaty rasp in her ear. “Outta thin air?”

“Now don’t you go scaring her, Daniel,” Idonia says.

Washington laughs. “Too late for that.”

Nettie finds a last piece of strength, lying there at the bottom of her heart, half-buried by the sickness that seeing all those dead crows has put in her. She tries to pull away, but those Morgan boys just haul her along, deeper into the barn.

It’s not Nettie’s dying that calls to me, but her need to make her peace. That’s what brings me to her where she’s lying at the bottom of the craggy point up past the Bean farm. The Morgans left her there, broken like a raggedy doll, made her a skin of feathers and then dropped her off the top of the cliff. They left her for dead but she’s too strong for them, can’t die until she knows that lost daughter of ours will be looked after.

That need of hers focuses sharp as a knife. It reaches out to me where I’m visiting some cousins on the coast of northern Oregon, puts a fire and a pain in my chest and draws me to her side. I take the first flight out of Portland to Newford and fly the rest of the way under my own steam, but I still don’t get to her until late in the day. And then I’m standing over her and all I can do is weep to see what’s become of my little wild fox girl.

“God … goddamn … you … Jack … ,” is what she says when her gaze focuses on me. “Always … too late. …”

I can’t talk. There are no words to ease what’s been done to her. I kneel at her side, drop some water between those parched lips of hers, wipe her brow with a wet cloth, and all the time I’m dying inside.

“You … you’ve got to … do this … thing … for me… .”

The peace she needs to make isn’t with me. It’s with that lost daughter of hers.

“You got to … promise me. You’ll … find her. You’ll … keep her … safe.”

I haven’t got crow girl magic. I can’t mend the broken bones, the torn flesh. I don’t even know if they can, this is so bad. But I’ve got to get them to try.

“Let me get the girls,” I tell her. “See if they can’t-“

“Promise me.”

Those sky-blue eyes of hers are cloudy with pain, but their gaze pins me and I can’t turn away.

“I promise,” I say. “I’ll find her, no matter how long it takes. I’ll find her and bring her over from wherever it is she’s gotten lost.”

“Suh … safe… .”

I nod. “And I’ll keep her safe. But right now you’ve got to let me …”

But that’s all she was hanging on for. She hears me say what she needed me to say and then she finally lets go. I stare at the stillness that she’s become and all the darkness in the world comes swelling up inside me. I can’t hardly breathe. I can’t think. My hand’s shaking as I close her eyes, then I bow my head to the ground and I can’t stop crying.

I keep asking myself, over and over, why’d I ever have to come into her life? Why’d I have to make such a mess of everything?

But there aren’t answers to that kind of thing.

I lift my head and scream my grief into the sky, scream until my throat’s torn raw and all that comes out is a whispery rasp that still holds more pain in it than I ever thought a body could bear.

It’s almost dark before I can finally stand up and carry her back to the farmhouse. I take out those feathers, one by one, wash her body, dress her in one of those pretty flower-print dresses of hers. I comb out her hair and then I carry her again, down that familiar path we used to take through the woods.

I bury her in that field of grace, with the stone where we first met to watch over her. With every shovelful of dirt I can feel myself growing colder and colder, like I’m carrying a piece of winter inside me. When I finally get the job done, I stand there in the moonlight and look down at the grave.

“I know I made you a promise,” I say, “and I’ll keep it. But …” I have to swallow, but it doesn’t do much for the big lump that’s sticking in my throat. “I’ve got me some other business to get out of the way first, Nettie. I … I’m hoping you’ll understand.”