The Newford Stories Read online

  I lower myself down onto the cobblestones and sit with my back against the brick wall of the house behind me. This is a piece of magic, one of those moments when the lines between what is and what might be blur like smudged charcoal. Pentimento: You can still see the shapes of the preliminary sketch, but now there are all sorts of other things hovering and crowding at the edges of what you initially drew.

  I remember how I started thinking about superstitions when I first saw these two girls as crows. How there are so many odd tales and folk beliefs surrounding crows and other blackbirds: what seeing one, or two, or three might mean. I can’t think of one that says anything about seeing them flying at night. Or what to do when you stumble upon a pair of them that can take human form and hold a conversation with a dead man….

  One of the girls perches by the head of the corpse and begins to play with its hair, braiding it. The other sits cross-legged on the ground beside her twin and gives her attention to the ghost.

  “I was a knight once,” the ghost says.

  “We remember,” one of the girls tells him.

  “I’m going to be a knight again.”

  The girl braiding the corpse’s hair looks up at the ghost. “They might not have knights where you’re going.”

  “Do you know that?”

  “We don't know anything,” the first girl says. She makes a steeple with her hands and looks at him above it. “We just are.”

  “Tell us about the King’s Court again,” her twin says.

  The ghost gives a slow nod of his head. “It was the greatest court in all the land…”

  I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wall of the building I’m sitting against, the bricks pulling at the tangles of my hair. The ghost’s voice holds me spellbound and takes me back, in my mind’s eye, to an older time.

  “It was such a tall building, the tallest in all the land, and the King’s chambers were at the very top. When you looked out the window, all creation lay before you.”

  I start out visualizing one of the office buildings downtown, but the more I listen, the less my mind’s eye can hold the image. What starts out as a tall, modern office skyscraper slowly drifts apart into mist, reforms into a classic castle on top of a steep hill with a town spread out along the slopes at its base. At first I see it only from the outside, but then I begin to imagine a large room inside and I fill it with details. I see a hooded hawk on a perch by one window. Tapestries hang from the walls. A king sits on his throne at the head of a long table around which are numerous knights dressed the same as the ghost. The ghost is there, too. He’s younger, taller, his back is straighter. Hounds lounge on the floor.

  In Old Market, the dead man talks of tourneys and fairs, of border skirmishes and hunting for boar and pheasant in woods so old and deep we can’t imagine their like anymore. And as he speaks, I can see those tourneys and country fairs, the knights and their ladies, small groups of armed men skirmishing in a moorland, the ghost saying farewell to his lady and riding into a forest with his hawk on his arm and his hound trotting beside his horse.

  Still, I can’t help but hear under the one story he tells, another story: one of cocktail parties and high-rise offices, stocks and mergers, of drops in the market and job losses, alcohol and divorce. He’s managed to recast the tragedy of his life into a story from an old picture book. King Arthur. Prince Valiant. The man who lost his job, his wife and his family, who ended up dying, homeless and alone on the streets where he lived, is an errant knight in the story he tells.

  I know this, but I can’t see it. Like the crow girls, I’m swallowed by the fairy tale.

  The dead man tells now of that day’s hunting in the forests near the castle. How his horse is startled by an owl and rears back, throwing him into a steep crevice where he cracks his head on a stone outcrop. The hawk flies from his wrist as he falls, the laces of its hood catching on a branch and tugging it off. The hound comes down to investigate, licks his face, then lies down beside him.

  When night falls, the horse and hound emerge from the forest. Alone. They approach the King’s castle, the hawk flying overhead. And there, the ghost tells us, while his own corpse lies at the bottom of the crevice, his lady stands with another man’s arm around her shoulders.

  “And then,” the ghost says, “the corbies came for their dinner and what baubles they could find.”

  I open my eyes and blink, startled for a moment to find myself still in Old Market. The scene before me hasn’t changed. One of the crow girls has cut off the corpse’s braid and now she’s rummaging through the items spilled from the shopping cart.

  “That’s us,” the other girl says. “We were the corbies. Did we eat you?

  “What sort of baubles?” her companion wants to know. She holds up a Crackerjack ring that she’s found among the litter of the ghost’s belongings. “You mean like this?”

  The ghost doesn’t reply. He stands up and the crow girls scramble to their feet as well.

  “It’s time for me to go,” he says.

  “Can I have this?” the crow girl holding the Crackerjack ring asks.

  The other girl looks at the ring that’s now on her twin’s finger. “Can I have one, too?”

  The first girl hands her twin the braid of hair that she’s cut from the corpse.

  After his first decisive statement, the ghost now stands there looking lost.

  “But I don’t know where to go,” he says.

  The crow girls return their attention to him.

  “We can show you,” the one holding the braid tells him.

  Her twin nods. “We’ve been there before.”

  I watch them as they each take one of his hands and walk with him toward the river. When they reach the low wall, the girls become crows again, flying on either side of the dead man’s ghostly figure as he steps through the wall and continues to walk, up into the sky. For one long moment the impossible image holds, then they all disappear. Ghost, crow girls, all.

  I sit there for a while longer before I finally manage to stand up and walk over to the shopping cart. I bend down and touch the corpse’s throat, two fingers against the carotid artery, searching for a pulse. There isn’t one.

  I look around and see a face peering down at me from a second-floor window. It’s an old woman, and I realize I saw her earlier, that she’s been there all along. I walk toward her house and knock on the door.

  It seems to take forever for anyone to answer, but finally a light comes on in the hall and door opens. The old woman I saw upstairs is standing there, looking at me.

  “Do you have a phone?” I ask. “I need to call 911.”

  - 3 -

  What a night it had been, Gerda thought.

  She stood on her front steps with the rather self-contained young woman who’d introduced herself as Jilly, not quite certain what to do, what was expected at a time such as this. At least the police had finally gone away, taking that poor homeless man’s body with them, though they had left behind his shopping cart and the scatter of his belongings that had been strewn about it.

  “I saw you watching from the window,” Jilly said. “You saw it all, but you didn’t say anything about the crow girls.”

  Gerda smiled. “Crow girls. I like that. It suits them.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t think they’d believe me.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”

  “I’d like that.”

  Gerda knew that her kitchen was clean, but terribly old-fashioned. She didn’t know what her guest would think of it. The wooden kitchen table and chairs were the same ones she and Jan had bought when they’d first moved in, more years past than she cared to remember. A drip had put a rusty stain on the porcelain of her sink that simply couldn’t be cleaned. The stove and fridge were both circa 1950—bulky, with rounded corners. There was a long wooden counter along one wall with lots of cupboards and shelves above and below it, all l
aden with various kitchen accoutrements and knickknacks. The window over the sink was hung with lacy curtains, its sill a jungle of potted plants.

  But Jilly seemed delighted by her surroundings. While Gerda started the makings for tea, putting the kettle on the stove, teacups on the table, Jilly got milk from the fridge and brought the sugar bowl to the table.

  “Did you know him?” Gerda asked.

  She took her Brown Betty teapot down from the shelf. It was rarely used anymore. With so few visitors, she usually made her tea in the cup now.

  “The man who died,” she added.

  “Not personally. But I’ve seen him around on the streets. I think his name was Hamish. Or at least that’s what people called him.”

  “The poor man.”

  Jilly nodded. “It’s funny. You forget that everyone’s got their own movie running through their heads. He’d pretty much hit rock bottom here in the world we all share, but the whole time, in his own mind he was living the life of a questing knight. Who’s to say which was more real?”

  When the water began to boil, Gerda poured a little into the teapot to warm it up. Emptying it into the sink, she dropped in a pair of teabags and filled the teapot, bringing it to the table to steep. She sat down across from her guest, smoothing down her skirt. The cats finally came in to have a look at the company, Swarte Meg first, slipping under the table and up onto Gerda’s lap. The other two watched from the doorway.

  “Did…we really see what I think we saw?” Gerda asked after a moment’s hesitation.

  Jilly smiled. “Crow girls and a ghost?”

  “Yes. Were they real, or did we imagine them?”

  “I’m not sure it’s important to ask if they were real or not.”

  “Whyever not?” Gerda said. “It would be such a comfort to know for certain that some part of us goes on.”

  To know there was a chance one could be joined once more with those who had gone on before. But she left that unsaid.

  Jilly leaned her elbow on the table, chin on her hand, and looked toward the window, but was obviously seeing beyond the plants and the view on the far side of the glass panes, her gaze drawn to something that lay in an unseen distance.

  “I think we already know that,” she finally said.

  “I suppose.”

  Jilly returned her attention to Gerda.

  “You know,” she said. “I’ve seen those crow girls before, too—just as girls, not as crows—but I keep forgetting about them, the way the world forgets about people like Hamish.” She sat up straighter. “Think how dull we’d believe the world to be without them to remind us…”

  Gerda waited a moment, watching her guest’s gaze take on that dreamy distant look once more.

  “Remind us of what?” she asked after a moment.

  Jilly smiled again. “That anything is possible.”

  Gerda thought about that. Her own gaze went to the window. Outside, she caught a glimpse of two crows flying across the city skyline. She stroked Swarte Meg’s soft black fur and gave a slow nod. After what she had seen tonight, she could believe it, that anything was possible.

  She remembered her husband Jan—not as he’d been in those last years when the illness had taken him, but before that. When they were still young. When they had just married and all the world and life lay ahead of them. That was how she wanted it to be when she finally joined him again.

  If anything were possible, then that was how she would have it be.

  The Buffalo Man

  The oaks were full of crows, as plentiful as leaves, more of the raucous black-winged birds than Jilly had ever seen together in one place. She kept glancing out the living room window at them, expecting some further marvel, though their enormous gathering was marvel enough all on its own. The leaded panes framed group after group of them in perfect compositions, which made her itch to draw them in the sketchbook she hadn’t thought to bring along.

  “There are an awful lot of crows out there this evening,” she said after her hundredth inspection of them.

  “You’ll have to forgive her,” the professor told their hosts with a smile. “Sometimes I think she’s altogether too concerned with crows and what they’re up to. For some people it’s the stock market, others it’s the weather. It’s a fairly new preoccupation, but it does keep her off the streets.”

  “As if.”

  “Before this it was fruit faeries,” the professor added, leaning forward from the sofa where he was sitting, his tone confidential.

  “Wasn’t.”

  The professor tched. “As good as was.”

  “Well, we all need a hobby,” Cerin said.

  “This is, of course, true,” Jilly allowed, after first sticking out her tongue at the pair of them. “It’s so sad that neither of you have one.”

  She’d been visiting with Professor Dapple, involved in a long, meandering conversation concerning Kickaha Mountain ballads vis-à-vis their relationship to British folktales, when he suddenly announced that he was due for tea at the Kelledys’ that afternoon and did she care to join them? Was the Pope Catholic? Did the moon have wings? Well, one out of two wasn’t bad, and of course she had to come.

  The Kelledys’ rambling house on Stanton Street was a place of endless fascination for her, with its old-fashioned architecture, all gables and gingerbread, with climbing vines and curious rooflines. The rooms were full of great solid pieces of furniture that crouched on Persian carpets and the hardwood floors like sleeping animals, not to mention any number of wonderfully bright and mysterious things perched on the shelves and sideboards, on the windowsills and meeting rails, like so many half-hidden lizards and birds. And then there were the oak trees that surrounded the building, a regular forest of them, larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one easily a hundred years old.

  The house was magic in her eyes, as much as the couple who inhabited it, and she loved any excuse to come by for a visit. On a very lucky day, Cerin would bring out his harp, Meran her flute, and they would play a haunting, heart-lifting music that Jilly never heard except from them.

  “I didn’t know fruit had their own faeries,” Meran said. “The trees, yes, but not the individual fruit itself.”

  “I wonder if there are such things as acorn faeries,” Cerin said.

  “I must ask my father.”

  Jilly gave a theatrical sigh. “We’re having far too long a conversation about fruit and nuts, and whether or not they have faeries, and not nearly enough about great, huge, cryptic parliaments of crows.”

  “It would be a murder, actually,” the professor put in.

  “Whatever. I think it’s wonderfully mysterious.”

  “At this time of the day,” Meran said, “they’d be gathering together to return to their roosts.”

  Jilly shook her head. “I’m not so sure. But if that is the case, then they’ve decided to roost in your yard.”

  She turned back to look out over the leaf-covered lawn that lay under the trees, planning some witty observation that would make them see just how supremely marvelous it all was, but the words died unborn in her throat as she watched a large, bald-headed Buddha of a man step onto the Kelledys’ walk. He was easily the largest human being she’d ever seen—she couldn’t guess how many hundreds of pounds he must weigh—but oddly enough he moved with the supple grace of a dancer a fraction his size. His dark suit was obviously expensive and beautifully tailored, and his skin was as black as a raven’s wing. As he came up the walk, the crows became agitated and flew around him, filling the air, their hoarse cries growing so loud that the noise resounded inside the house with the windows closed.

  But neither the enormous man, nor the actions of the crows, was what had dried up the words in Jilly’s throat. It was the limp figure of a slender man that the dapper Buddha carried in his arms. In sharp contrast, he was poorly dressed for the brisk weather, wearing only a raggedy shirt and jeans so worn they had almost no colour left in them. His face and arms were pale as al
abaster; even his braided hair was white—yet another striking contrast to the man carrying him. She experienced something familiar yet strange when she gazed on his features, like taking out a favourite old sweater she hadn’t worn in years, and feeling at once quite unacquainted with it and affectionately comfortable when she put it on.

  “That’s no crow,” Cerin said, having stepped up to the window to stand beside Jilly’s chair.

  Meran joined him, then quickly went to the door to let the new visitor in. The professor rose from the sofa when she ushered the man and his burden into the room, waving a hand toward the seat he’d just quit.

  “Put him down here,” he said.

  The black man nodded his thanks. Stepping gracefully across the room, he knelt and carefully laid the man out on the sofa.

  “It’s been a long time, Lucius,” the professor said as the man straightened up. “You look different.”

  “I woke up.”

  “Just like that?”

  Lucius gave him a slow smile. “No. A red-haired storyteller gave me a lecture about responsibility, and I realized she was right. It had been far too long since I’d assumed any.”

  He turned his attention to the Kelledys.

  “I need a healing,” he said.

  There was something formal in the way he spoke the words, like a subject might speak to his ruler, though there was nothing remotely submissive in his manner.

  “There are no debts between us,” Cerin said.

  “But now—”

  “Nonsense,” Meran told him. “We’ve never turned away someone in need of help before and we don’t mean to start now. But you’ll have to tell us how he was injured.”

  She knelt down on the floor beside the sofa as she spoke. Reaching out, she touched her middle finger to the center of his brow, then lifted her hand and moved it down his torso, her palm hovering about an inch above him.

  “I know little more than you at this point,” Lucius said.

  “Do you at least know who he is?” Cerin asked.