Newford Stories (5 page)

The ghost is sitting on the edge of the
cart—an insubstantial version of the prone figure, but this one is
wearing a rough sort of armour instead of those layers of raggedy
clothes. A boiled leather breastplate over a rough sort of tunic,
leggings and leather boots. From his belt hangs an empty scabbard.
Not big enough for a broadsword, but not small either.

I start forward, only I’ve forgotten the
crows. The flap of their descending wings draws my gaze up and then
I can’t hold on to the idea of the dead man and his ghost anymore,
because somewhere between the moment of their final descent and
landing, the pair changes from crows into girls.

They’re not quite children, but they don’t
have adult physiques either. I’m just over five feet, but they’re
shorter and even slighter of build. Their skin is the colour of
coffee with a dash of milk, their hair an unruly lawn of blue-black
spikes, their faces triangular in shape with large green eyes and
sharp features. I can’t tell them apart and decide they must be
twins, even dressing the same in black combat boots, black leggings
and black oversized raggedy sweaters that seem to be made of
feathers. They look, for all the world, like a pair of…

“Crow girls,” I hear myself say in a voice
that’s barely a whisper.

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 laden 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.”