The old man's tale begins at least four clear-cuts ago. When he was your age and his parents subdivided the land passed down from their parents before them and their parents before them all the way to the natives who gifted, willingly or not whose to say, this land to his kin and ancestry. He was no foot ball star and he wasn't good enough to get the attention of the army recruiter and there certainly wasn't money to send both him and Paula to school in the city. So the old man, then a young man, took his gun and his tools and his truck that now sits on cinderblocks behind the hut and went to the little bit of land his parents handed down to him. Just after he signed the paperwork to make sure that the good old Appalachian Lumber Company could still clear cut the whole old homestead as one big project and that the moving on of other folks and the natural need for a family to pass on to their children the land of those that came before them would not stand in the way of progress and the making of fine boards for constructions and projects to happen so far away one could forget they ever existed at all.
That little contract still exists. The old man has a copy of it squirreled away in a lock box under the creaky floorboard by the woodstove. His deed, the title to the truck, and the last letter from Paula are also in that box.
He works hard and makes himself a little one room house. His daddy and mama help him send away for good windows that seal properly and a new door that wont let the heat out in the winter. He spends the early fall of that year packing asbestos laden insulation into the walls and then covering them up with thin slats of wood he gets on discount from the lumber yard for letting ALC clear-cut his land. Scraps and shingles for rape and murder.
He gets a gig cooking at the local greasy spoon, putting 30 miles a day on his old pickup to take home minimum wage and all the leftovers he can eat. He saves on food, and the mechanic is a buddy of his from school who's willing to take a look at his truck for a plate of eggs and bacon handed through the back door and a box of Pabst Blue Ribbon to split between them between the lunch and dinner rush. That little gig may have taken years of his life with all the fired greasy food, never mind the truck, but it eventually payed for a cook-top wood stove with at least some of the bells and whistles.
For Christmas, his daddy gave him a good wood axe and his mama gave him some good work gloves she made from the skin of one of the goats. Paula came home and gave him a book of fables and gave their daddy a heart attack with the short length of her hair and of her skirt. His mama just rolled her eyes and complained the girl would catch her death walking around half covered.
The young man bought some late cutting hay off a buddy and made his own mattress. He took the axe and his tools and some help from Frank the Mechanic and made himself some furniture. Frank even stayed the night once that summer.
It got late faster than they expected. Good work will do that, especially when it's fueled by beans canned by someone who loves you and beer. Frank had made to leave but then they got to talking and he never made it out the door. They woke up half naked on top of the hay stuffed mattress.
Frank had pulled on his pants, grumbling about how he was going to take the man hunting so they didn't wake up with bloody balls from the hay again. Frank stayed over a lot after they added a few deer hides to the bed.
He didn't see the crows until the next winter.
The clearcutting started bright and early, but still after he had gone to work. He came home, tired, smelling like fries, and excited to rinse off in the rain barrel before tending to his chores and getting to bed. Instead, he was treated to a home that now sat in a field of stumps and flattened briar patches and a smiling man in coveralls handing him a check. He sighed, got back in his truck, and went back to town just before the bank closed to open an account and deposit that check. He stopped at Frank's and took advantage of an indoor shower and decided to use that check to install a pump and a wash house.
He got home a little before midnight. He would have gotten lost, the land looked so alien now, if it weren't so empty.
As he came up, his headlights illuminated that pile of felled trees stacked behind his house. His daddy would later tell him to use them, they were the scraps ALC didn't think were worth hauling back. He never quite understood that. Especially when the men came back in the spring and spent three days planting new trees. Felt like a waste to just not take something they nurtured then killed just because it wasn't enough. He used them to build the pump house and the attached wash house and he even helped Frank build a shed and fix his roof before they ran out.
That night however, the Crows sat perched on the logs. He looked at them, sitting in his truck and bathing them in the headlights of his truck. They looked back at him, little beady eyes seeming to glow red and pulse in the steam coming off his idling engine. He shivered, chalked it up to the cold, and went inside.
In the night, he dreamed of crows pecking at his window. Of the ghostly hands of tree spirits scrapping at his walls.
In the morning, the crows are still there. Now however, they sit on his car and the roof. The young man is grateful he hasn't started the vegetable patch yet. They don't move. Just stare and watch as he closes his door, walks to the truck, opens the door, and shuts it again. For a moment, he stares out at them. One sits on the hood, less than four feet away through the windshield. He's never seen a crow this close before. It's a sleek bird, he thinks. Almost thin looking and he wonders if they have been able to find enough food in the last few days.
“For now”
He jumps and looks about. The wind? A hallucination from being up too late?
He starts the engine and the flock leaps to the sky, screaming in rage at the beast that rumbles below them.
He goes to work and thinks no more of it.
The crows become constant companions when he's at home. There's always at least one around, pecking at the leaf litter left from the clear cut or a group of them holding committee on the roof of the wash-house. Even Frank mentions them.
“Ya know, I heard from Missy that if ya make friends with those birds they'll bring you gifts,” Frank had said as he drank some of the tea the young man had made all on his own. It was too bitter and he should have used less sugar, but it wasn't total shit and he was please with this as a first try.
“She's into all that Witchy shit these days, I warned her Ma will kill her if she finds out, but Missy's stubborn. Maybe more than Ma.” He sighed and tossed an arm around the young man. Frank had stayed the night then. Even driven the man into town to get bird seed after.
When they got back, Frank had stood before him at the door and pressed their lips together.
The man sprinkled bird seed around the perimeter of his house as he watched Frank's headlights dim. A small smile he couldn't quite will away plastered to his face.
That night, as he lays in bed nearly asleep and drifting away, a voice echoes from the window.
“Thank you.”
The next day the young man gave them seed. And the next day. And the next. And each night the crows would tap-tap-tap at his window. The one next to the bed he made and where he lay with Frank.
“Thank You” They whisper.
Then in the morning they demand “More.”
Frank is the one who finds the small pile of beads made of ceramic and carved bone and topaz that have gathered under the window. He laughs, calls it a courting gift from the young man's new lovers. The young man shushes him and they chuckle to eachother as they put together new shelving and unbox a tree stand. They put the trinkets in an old shoe box, though the young man laments that he wishes he had somewhere nicer to leave them.
Frank drives him into town and drops him at work. They stare at eachother through the drivers window. Frank let it down so the cool fresh air of that late winter and not quite spring time could wash over them. Frank stares at his lips and the young man almost leans in, but the back door to Charlies bangs open and the proprietor asks him if he and Frank are done gabbing and if she can please have her fry cook.
Neither of them notice the crow that hops out of the back of Franks pick-up.
Frank picks him up again much later. When they first started doing this months ago, they would have met on the other side of the grove of trees that haunted the land behind the church. Locals lovingly called it “The Park” and anyone who went through grade school in the county knew there was a hollow tree in the center where one could find something green and a tin can bent just so. The young man had slipped past, and a few times scared the shit out of, the teens that hid in those dark places as he met with Frank. But they had grown bolder as the days grew longer. As yet another Sunday passed and the young man's mama said nothing but how glad she was he and Frank were buddies. Another month goes by and his daddy only says how good a hunter Frank is. Frank's sister is less dense, or maybe just more direct.
“Y'all's a sweet couple,” She said through a Cheshire grin to the young man who is not yet a hermit after Frank's own ma invited him to dinner.
It's become second nature to just not say anything. To just live in this world where he and Frank are just good buddies with bad luck with girls who meet up at the bar all the time. Who stay over to keep eachother company. To live in this world where they ignore the stares and just never fully give up the game to anyone. Not even eachother, as they share another long lingering look as Frank drops him off before they say their good nights and Frank drives off.
It won't be until the next cut that either of them ends the game.
Paula comes round less and less often as the years pass. When she is home, she fights with their parents. With daddy it's a screaming match, but with mama it's a series of whispered knives. He can barely stand to be home for her visits and while he treasures her letters and reads each one like a girl waiting on the letter of her traveling solider, he sags into Frank's arms with relief the year she doesn't come for Christmas.
The crows thrive as the new trees grow tall and get fat off the leaf litter and minced meat of their forbearers. The young man, not nearly so young as each season passes, even names a few. He's not sure how long crows are meant to live, but as the decade wears on he and Frank become convinced that the big crow, the one the call Big Papa, has been there almost the whole time. The crows build nests on the roof of the shed he and Fred built. They have babies as he and Fred put together a new dresser they sent away for in a Sear catalog. They chatter all day and then at night they can be heard on the roof, little talons on the tin, as Fred spends a whole week living out of the one room house with the man who will be a hermit.
They cover the trees behind the little ranch house like soot as Frank tells his ma that he's moving in with the young man. A sleek, cooing, mass blocking the light.
“It's just practical,” Frank tells the widowed pastors wife, “He's all alone out there with that clunker of his, I end up out there twice a week anyway.”
They are silent, however, red eyes glinting against the light pouring from the restaurant window as Frank gives the young man a gift. It's a beautiful box made of walnut. Frank wont tell him if he carved the little deer. Or the trees. Of the little house with the two simple figures sitting on the porch. Or the crows.
In the restaurant, the man is humble as pie. He nods and thanks Frank. Tells him he didn't have to. They laugh about how it's only going to hold what the crows bring. The ever growing pile of beads and bone.
The crows avoid the truck for several days after the young man makes Frank pull over on the way home. It's not polite to discus folks who would rather have that kept personal like.
The words are whispered against panting lips. Hands smudge fogged up glass. It's a chant. A religion they both belive in more than any of their kin ever believed in any church.
“More”
and
“Mine”
and
“Us”
and
and
and
Neither notice that the beads stop for a while after that,.
It's less than a month after this second cut that he finds the deer.
It's a hell of a winter. The snow came hard and early and the crows started to beg for food even at night. Frank says it's just them mimicking the human voices they hear, but sometimes when he's alone the young man swears it sounds like Frank is outside. He's woken up at least three times panicked that Frank has gone out in the snow and gotten lost or hurt or attacked or.
But it's just the crows. They usually laugh at him, staring at them through the window as he places a hand on Frank's sleeping face. Still there. Still with him.
It's on the third of these that he gets up and leaves the house. The crows wake him just as the sun touches the horizon and there's no sense in sleeping when the day has already begun. Frank grumbles and pokes at the wood stove as the young man dawns his boots and takes his gun and goes to get more wood from the shed.
End
SPOILERS BELOW
He has to shield his eyes against the glint of the snow (Everywhere he looks he sees evidence of him and frank, of the crows, and this makes him deeply happy up until he finds the deer dead in front of the shed. Gored to death and desiccated, bloodless and with sunken features)
Soft plan of attack
Paula visits while frank is helping his ma move his sister out to college - paid for by renting out the room he vacated thank you very much
- The birds ask if they can eat her. The young man is horrified
- The birds imitate frank getting home early after Paula leaves and fuck the young man. He wakes up sick and confused as Frank returns home early for real with breakfast. He chalks it up as just a dream.
The birds ask for meat after he gives them seed. He's horrified
Frank starts to worry he isn't sleeping and he's getting sick a lot. Doctors say he's healthy as a horse but run a bunch of tests thinking it's AIDS
He's gone for a few days and when he and Frank return the birds have shattered a window. They calm as he's home longer
Frank doesn't come home. His truck is never found.
Paula comes to visit cuz she knows and she asks him about the birds. Cuz she sees what he does…. they ain't normal birds
He cant sleep… they wont let him. He throws open the windows and asks what the hell they want from him. They come in through the window. Franks voice tells him that he loves him. He dashes for the shot gun and gets a single shot off at them - at Frank - before they fall on him.
He wears the bandana to over the marks they leave.
Paula asks him to visit. Asks him to stay when he does. He goes home and stops responding to her letters.
He loves Frank so much.