Ben Bedard: The World Without Crows

His birthday was in August. He was now seventeen, he reflected. But he could no longer be sure what day that was. It was also the end of birthdays.

Had he been seventeen in the Cave? Ever since he had first been shackled to the steel rebar, he had felt seventy. He couldn’t remember being whipped. He only remembered being dragged out into the crowd, and then nothing but a red wall. He thought he had died.

Instead, he had come alive again in Maine. He was only miles from the island. It didn’t seem real. They were going to make it. After all they had been through, after everyone who had died, they were going to make it.

His heart was a hard thing now, like a stone, polished smooth with suffering and grief. He felt everything from a distance, a careful, considered distance. From this distance, his heart would not allow him to rejoice. In it there still glowed a modicum of doubt.

They hadn’t made it yet. It wasn’t over.

Four days they remained in camp. Lucia wouldn’t allow Eric to move. She changed and washed his wounds several times a day. She could tell it caused Eric a great deal of pain, but she was worried. It would be easy for the wounds to become infected. He could die. Lucia had enough ghosts haunting her. She couldn’t take another.

When she wasn’t cleaning Eric’s wounds, she was fishing and gathering food with Birdie. It was late summer and Birdie found blueberries to pick. Lucia stood at the edge of a stream with a fishing pole she found in the farmhouse in Bethel. She wasn’t as good at fishing as Sergio had been. It was impossible not to think of him, peaceful, thoughtful, gentle, pulling the fish from the water with grace.

One day, perhaps the third day of their stay, Birdie came and sat down on the moss beside the stream where Lucia was fishing. She wrapped her arms around her legs. “You know what?” she asked.

Lucia turned to her. Birdie spoke so infrequently that when she did, she commanded attention.

“What, Birdie?”

“My Daddy had to kill Mommy because she was sick.”

Lucia felt her heart drop. She went to Birdie and sat down next her, putting her arm around her. “I’m sorry, Birdie,” she said.

“She had the worm,” Birdie said. “Then Daddy had it. He told me to go to my granma’s house in Grafton. He made me write it down. He said I had to leave, but he would meet me later.” Birdie looked up at Lucia. “Daddy shot himself, didn’t he Lucia?”

Lucia shook her head. “I don’t know, Birdie.”

“He did,” Birdie said. “He isn’t ever going to meet me, is he?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucia said.

Birdie put her head down on her knees and cried. Lucia held her and tried to think of something to say. There was nothing to say.

Lucia brought out some extra clothes and took Birdie down to the stream. There, the stream curved around a corner and left a small, eddying pool, shaded by pine trees. They crept in the cold water with bars of soap and shampoo. Birdie let Lucia scrub her, though Lucia could tell she didn’t like it. They washed for a long time. Lucia had never felt so filthy, or so clean when they were finished.

Birdie had to wear a pair of jeans and an oversized t-shirt while Lucia scrubbed their clothes and put them out to dry.

It was a beautiful day.

They stretched out under the sun to dry. A blue jay squawked in a tree while little black and tan chickadees flitted restlessly from branch to branch.

Birdie reached out and held her hand.

It was the closest thing to perfect Lucia ever remembered feeling.

After four days, Eric insisted on leaving. He was anxious and irritable, jumping at the slightest noise. Lucia tried to argue with him, tried to tell him that there was no rush, they should stay a week, time enough for his wounds to heal well. But his face darkened.

“There is a rush,” he argued. “It’s late, Lucia. We need to get ready for winter. We need food. We need to build a house. We need supplies, food, maybe a generator, portable heaters, medication in case we get sick. We need coats and mittens, maybe a snowmobile.” He said none of this gently. “There is a rush, Lucia.”

“Don’t lecture me, Eric,” she said.

“Someone has to.”

They didn’t talk again. She couldn’t stop him from packing his material. Birdie helped him, after giving Lucia a shrug. Annoyed, she could do nothing but begin to pack herself.

Suddenly, it seemed, Lucia found herself hiking behind Eric and Birdie. They were on their way, the last miles on their journey.

At first they tried to hike in the woods, to keep away from the roads. But Eric wasn’t capable of it. It was too strenuous. Even he had to admit he was risking ripping open his wounds. When they came to Bemis Road, they stood silent, breathing hard in the hot, late summer sun. Then, instead of crossing into the forest, Eric stepped on the road. They would have to risk it.

Eric remembered the sweet smell of pine needles. He remembered the sound of wind through the tall pines and the chirping of chickadees as they flew down to investigate the newcomers. He remembered the moist wind, with its promise of cool waters. They were so close.

But Eric no longer cared to remember his father. That was in a different world, long ago and unreal. Now when he thought of it, he saw himself as if from a height, sitting in an aluminum boat, a child, frightened by the thought that his father did not love him, and a spiteful, shallow man who wanted nothing to do with his own son. He saw little connection to himself in that child or that man. They were phantoms. It was as if he had lived fifty years time since the Vaca B began. Life was not the same. He was not the same. Neither was the world.

Crows were the proof of it. There were no more crows. It was something that struck Eric suddenly, a silence he suddenly noticed. He had not seen crows since, well, he couldn’t remember when. The crows, unlike most birds, fed on corpses. Perhaps they too suffered from the Vaca B. It had wiped them out.

Some things would not survive. Parts of his past, whole regions of his heart, all were gone now. They still had to discover what kind of people lived afterward, in this new land, in his new skin.

In a world without crows.

When it happened, it was sudden. There was no warning. One moment the three of them were walking along the curving road, forests on both sides. Then, as they came to a winding curve, the forest dropped away, and they saw it below them. Mooselookmeguntic Lake.

And in the middle of it, an island, shining emerald green in the sun. Breathless, stunned, the three of them stared down soundlessly. It was Birdie who spoke first.

“The island,” she said, pointing. She looked up at Eric. “It looks like an eye.”

It did. The island seemed the pupil of a great eye staring up at the sky.

They were silent. There were no words for the sight. It was the end. Their hearts grew and spilled over. Lucia trembled. Eric took a numb step forward to the edge of the road.

The island.

How far he had come. Over hills and bridges, through death and fear, down a long road of grief and suffering. He thought he would be ecstatic when he saw it. He thought they would cheer and embrace each other. He thought there would be some revelation, some feeling of wholeness, security. Righteousness. But the island was silent, unseemly in its reality. And instead of the people standing next to him, the people he would have died to save, Eric thought of the people who had not made it.

Poor Brad, angry and foolish, but loyal and strong. Burned to smoking bones on the shore of a lake. Sarah who had taught them how to fish and cook, who had held them together through disaster until she too was burnt to ashes, the first woman he had ever kissed. John Martin, tall and steadfast as rock, who had saved Lucia and Sergio, who had shown him it was no sign of manhood to kill. Shot down for no reason but his strength and the fear Doyle had in his heart. Sergio, poor Sergio, fearful but gentle, killed for nothing. Charlie who died at his feet. The men and women of the Slow Society, so brave and kind, dead only because they had dared to be hopeful. His mother in her burning bed and Jessica in her ditch. His friends. The herds of men and women, minds eaten by the Vaca B, shambling toward water, drowning, dying, or living on, meaningless and vacant. The cracked ones, furious to continue in the world of beauty and pleasure, minds bent and broken by their proximity to the cold darkness of death, killing and dying with equal ferocity.