Someplace to Be Flying (27 page)

“That a fact.”

“Nettie, she’ll probably marry a Miller, too, if she doesn’t get away from these hills.”

I look at her. “Nettie’ll do whatever she sets her mind to.”

She sighs. Her gaze darts across the barn to where Ray’s managed to talk his sweet young thing into going for a walk. We catch the back-end of them, heading out the door. That young woman on his arm, leaning close to her newfound fox man, has a figure to make you catch your breath.

“You’re going to lose her, you don’t watch out,” Edna says.

“I never had her to lose.”

“You think that, maybe you’re not so smart as I took you to be.”

“You don’t want your daughter running off? with some no-account hobo boy,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “I surely don’t. Is that what you are, Jack?”

“I don’t know what I am,” I say.

Her gaze drifts over to the barn door before settling on me again.

“Maybe,” she says. “But do you know what you want?”

“I don’t know that either,” I lie.

We don’t talk much after that, just watch Nettie and Randall Miller dance away pretty much the whole night. I make my own way home, before the dance is over, jackdaw wings lifting me up above the grange and off to that meadow in the hollow where I first met the fox girl. It’s just as pretty at night prettier maybe, but I don’t see much of it. I don’t see much of anything at all.

Nettie finds me the next morning, sleeping in the long grass.

“You should’ve give it a try,” she says, sitting down beside me. “The dancing, I mean. It was some fun.”

“I got that impression,” I tell her.

She has this little leather satchel that holds her sketchbook and pencils and the paint box I gave her when I first got here this summer, carries it with her pretty much everywhere she goes. When she pulls out an apple and offers it to me, I shake my head. She takes a big bite and gives it a thorough chew, like working her jaws is helping her think.

“Guess you don’t much like me,” she says finally.

“What makes you think that?”

She shrugs. “You never try to kiss me.”

“We’re not that kind of friends,” I tell her.

“Randall tried to kiss me last night.”

“He seems like a nice boy.”

She throws that apple at my head and I only barely manage to duck out of its way. The way she’s glaring at me, I hope she doesn’t have any more tucked away in her satchel.

“You don’t know nothing about feelings, do you?” she says.

I know she’s looking for a father she’s never going to have, not with Ray having sired her. I wouldn’t be much better. And I sure as hell don’t plan to start courting her like some spoony-eyed Miller boy.

“You’re too young and I’m too old,” I tell her. “That’s just the way it is.”

She glares at me some more, but I can see her lower lip start to quiver. I want to give her a hug and ease the pain, but I know we’ve got to stop this notion she has, right now, before it gets out of hand. So I do the thing I do best; I do nothing.

“I hate you,” she says.

I watch her stalk off across the field. I see the hurt in the set of her shoulders and I know what she’s feeling because she’s put a piece of that pain in my chest with her parting words.

I’m hoping we can get past this and still be friends, and I’m right about that. Things settle down to how they were before, pretty much.

I figure she’ll grow out of this notion of us being sweethearts, and I couldn’t be more wrong about that.

Summer, 1946

The high school in Tyson’s not much by big-city standards, but it’s got all the trimmings it needs: library, gym, auditorium. It sits on a wooded lot on the edge of? town, a big old brick and wood building, all those shiny yellow school buses parked in a line outside at the end of the day, waiting to take kids back to Hazard and the other small towns nearby.

Come Nettie’s graduation day, we’re sitting in the auditorium, all in a row with Edna—me and the crow girls, Margaret, Alberta, Crazy Crow, Jolene, and Bear, and some of the others. Over the years a lot of them got to know Nettie, got to love her as much as I do, so we’re all here to cheer her on. Usually you get the crow girls and Jolene together and you’ve got nothing but trouble, but they’re on their best behavior for Nettie’s sake, wearing dresses even, hair combed, only giggling a little bit. You can’t expect miracles.

Edna’s past wondering about us, me living in the barn every summer, all these friends of her daughter’s who don’t seem to have homes except for the woods. I think she liked Crazy Crow best, seeing how he’s got that coyote blood mixed up with the crow. Edna, she’s got a fondness for those canids. Without it, there never would have been a Nettie and we wouldn’t be here with Edna now, hooting and hollering and clapping our hands, when Nettie goes up to get her diploma and the principal announces how she’s won this scholarship to Butler University.

Edna takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.

“This is your doing, Jack,” she says. “Lord, but I’m grateful.”

“I’m not stealing your girl’s thunder,” I tell her. “She’s earned this on her own.”

“You know what I mean.”

I suppose I do. But Nettie was hungry to learn. All I did was point her in a direction or two.

There’s a party at the Bean farm later that day, a regular hooley with wild crow boys coming down out of the wooded hills and everybody having themselves a fine old time. At one point Maida and Zia are doing a two-step along the peak of the barn and when Jolene tries to join in, the three of them fall off on the far side of the roof, out of sight. Everybody laughs, except for Edna, who lets out a sharp gasp.

“Don’t you worry about those girls,” Crazy Crow reassures her. “They never get into something so deep that they can’t pull themselves out.”

“But the roofs so high… .”

Her voice trails off when the girls come round the side of the barn, poking at each other and giggling.

When it starts on getting dark, Bear and Nettie put together a huge bonfire in the middle of the farmyard and we all pull up chairs and stumps to sit around it, except for Maida, Zia, and the wild crow boys, who start up to dancing again with Jolene, going round and round the fire, feet stomping in time to some strange tune Alberta’s pulling from a fiddle, who knows where she got it, fiddle and tune both.

A long time later, Edna’s gone in to bed and there’s stories being told around the coals of the fire, songs being sung. Nettie comes walking up to where I’m sitting on the porch of the farmhouse. I’m looking off across the field of wildflowers that sides the house, thinking of what seems like a long ago time when this fox child was just a skinny little thing running wild. Now she’s a young lady. Still has the hills in her, the accent and the turn of phrase that make the big-city folk laugh, but she’s gained something else from these wild woodlands and fields that can’t be born into a body or taught: the grace of learning how to listen, and learning how to speak. I see the studies she does of weeds and flowers and such, I read the essays she writes, and I know these hills have found themselves a voice in her.

I think I’m proudest of her for that. These days she tells me stories, like I still tell them to her, and she’s not shy about it anymore. We’re meeting on common ground, like equals, the way I always wanted it to be but she never felt she was up to before.

“Hey, Jack,” she says as she comes up and sits beside me on the bench. “You okay?”

I nod. “I’m just admiring the starlight on that field of flowers.”

“You’re missing the stories.”

I glance at the bonfire. Crazy Crow’s telling one of his, that long rambling account of the year he and Raven wintered in Africa and found Cody teaching people how to make fire.

“I’ve heard them all before,” I say.

She smiles and gives me a light poke in the ribs with her elbow. “Wasn’t it you who told me that you can never hear a story too many times?”

“That’s true. A good story’s like a good song. It doesn’t age.”

She doesn’t say anything, just listens like I taught her to listen to the wild, and like the wild, I find myself filling up the quiet that lies between us with words. What I’m thinking is: Sometimes the love you have for someone can spur you on to great and wonderful things, takes all that potential you’ve got resting inside you and lets it blossom and grow. But sometimes a love can hold you back. Nettie, she’s had both with me, and now it’s time for her to get on with her life and stop wishing for what’s never going to be.

Corbæ and human, even a human with fox blood running strong in her, can’t ever pair up for too long. It doesn’t work because how do you reconcile a life that stretches back to when the medicine lands woke up out of the long ago to make this world and a life that’s as brief in comparison as a candle flickering in the wind? It’s why Ray doesn’t stick around, it’s why the crow girls wear their hearts on their sleeves and will share them, from time to time, but they don’t ever give them away.

And it’s not like I haven’t tried before. But it hurts too much and I’m too old to carry that pain again. Except this hurts, too. Maybe more. Who am I kidding? This calls up an ache that goes bone deep and settles in the marrow. But it’s got to be done. She needs a chance at a real life with her own kind.

So that’s what I’m thinking, but what I say is, “You’ve got a lot of good friends here. See you don’t forget them when you’re living in that big city.”

She always had insight as a child. Now she’s a young woman and that insight’s only grown sharper. She gives me a look and I know she can see straight through me. I’m like an open book to her.

She knows I’m not telling her to remember anything; I’m saying good-bye.

“I will always love you, Jack,” she says.

Maida warned me of this years ago. Zia, too. But that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

I’m carrying a big hurt when I leave the farm next morning, early, before daylight, jackdaw wings earning me south, over Newford, over the lake, all the way down to Mexico. But distance doesn’t ease the pain. Nor do the years.

And one day I just have to see her again.

Late summer, 1971

I hear about how Nettie is doing from the crow girls, from Jolene and Crazy Crow and all, never tire of it, not the smallest details that come my way. And I collect the stories that spring up like trod-on grass where she’s walked.

It’s not just the hills around Hazard that gossip about her now. She’s on a world stage—maybe not in a big way, like someone making the
New York Times
bestseller list, which she doesn’t, but her books are being read in a lot of places that never heard of the Kickaha Hills or those hollows and high lonesome ridges around Hazard until she wrote about them. So people talk. People write about her.

I have the books. The catalogues for a couple of her art shows. But it’s not enough. One day I know I have to see her. I don’t plan on entering her life again, I just want to look at her one more time.

‘Course nothing works out the way you expect when it comes to Nettie Bean. Must be the fox blood in her.

Edna took ill, the winter of ‘49, and never did live to see Nettie graduate from college. Didn’t see her graduate and didn’t see how she moved back to the farm and settled in like she’d never been off studying for all those years. Nettie just had enough of cities, missed her woods and her hills too much to put the farm up for sale when her mammy died.

Her returning would have broken Edna’s heart. Edna wouldn’t have seen Nettie’s happiness, only how she was trapping herself the same way her mammy had in her time.

But the farm was no trap for Nettie. By the time she moved back home, she’d been having essays and articles published in naturalist journals, was selling her paintings, even had a book sold and coming out in the fall. She wasn’t rich, but she could cover her living expenses and the land taxes. And maybe she wasn’t making a lot of friends in the towns roundabout, fighting for closure of the mines and to stop the clear-cutting and all, but she was still happier than Edna had ever been on that land.

Because Edna hadn’t been close to it the way her daughter was. They were neither of them farmers, though they grew their own greens and such, kept chickens for the eggs, a cow for milk. Edna had rented out her hayfields, done washing and mending, whatever she could to make ends meet. That farm was like a big ball and chain, holding her down. For Nettie it was a piece of freedom.

She was old by hill standards—almost twenty-four—when she finally married Randall Miller in ‘53, and the marriage lasted long enough to produce one child the next year, a daughter. She was baptized Lilah, after Randall’s paternal grandmother, and was a dark-haired, sullen girl as different from the wild fox child Nettie had been as honey is from vinegar. Lilah took an immediate dislike to her mother, wouldn’t suckle, couldn’t even abide Nettie holding her. I can’t explain it. Nettie might have carried her for nine months, but it was like Lilah was someone else’s child. If she had any of the blood in her, no one could smell it, which, if you know anything about genetics, makes no sense either.

The marriage didn’t last much beyond Lilah’s first year, though from all accounts, it was never any great shakes in the first place. Nettie kept her name, kept at her work, and plain ignored any attempt on Randall’s part to give up either just to fit the picture he had in his head of what a wife was supposed to be. It took a couple of years before he finally gave up trying to fit that round peg she was into the square hole he imagined for her.

He didn’t divorce her at first. What he wanted was that land, the Millers having lost all their own through mismanagement and plain bad luck over the years. So instead of having the marriage annulled, he tried to have Nettie institutionalized for incompetence, claiming she was a danger to herself and those around her. Like father, like daughter, I suppose, since Lilah took to that idea in her own time like a duck does to water.

Nettie didn’t have many friends round there by that time—not human ones. There wasn’t a whole lot of understanding or support for her fights with the mining companies and the loggers. Truth was, even before she got into all ot that, folks thought she was a little too strange, even by hill standards. So Randall might have had his way, except Alberta got wind of what was happening and she went and had a talk with Chloë, who sent this lawyer to the country seat, where the competency hearing was being held. To hear Alberta tell the story, it took maybe all of five minutes for that lawyer to straighten things out. He handled the divorce, too, when Randall filed the papers a few weeks later.