Crows
I have never broken a promise. Not one that mattered. I
was married for four years but do not think I am telling
secrets to say that my wife had a breakdown near the end
and believed, apparently, I was to blame for everything.
It is only human to feel this way, and it would be
unbecoming to argue matters so far after the fact,
especially since neither of us lives any longer in Huber
Heights or even in Ohio, which seems very far away, a
moon you see from your window peering out between
drifting clouds. More recently I have begun to wonder if
the child was even mine. Such thoughts arise of their
own volition, or rather, despite my best efforts to stop
them. I used to think you might choose what you did not
want to dwell on, but perhaps we are not so free in such
things. Which applies, as well, to promises. To imagine
otherwise is to be as naïve as both Hali and I
undoubtedly were once upon a time when we first met and
believed we might make a life together.
Marriage itself is a promise, though one that is broken
so frequently it hardly seems so, and in this particular
case it was not my decision to end it. Hali was a
reporter when we met, and I was a copy editor, and we
both still were when we parted. The Dayton Daily News
was suffering through the usual financial woes, but
it was still a fine enough place to work. And work is
not the whole of a life in any case. If you stood on our
back porch, you could see most of the five acres we had
inherited from Hali’s parents, and though we were
technically in the city, you would never have thought
so. There was a small man-made pond with bullfrogs and
raccoon paw prints along the shore, with cattails
growing in great abundance. Hali and I appreciated our
good fortune, especially given how new we were to
adulthood, in our late twenties, how young to be able to
look across a property and to know it was our own.
Probably we felt on the cusp of something, but maybe
that is how most of us feel most of the time.
Which is not to say that Hali and I were always on the
same page. Most days there were crows near our house or
in the dense thicket of white oaks and shagbark
hickories. From the windows, we watched them row out on
the boats of their bodies, otherworldly. We studied them
like black obelisks in the neighbor’s property. Their
lives appeared primitive and completely separate from
our own, so I found it puzzling when Hali first began
placing the tin plates in the yard, then, over time,
moving them closer to where she stood standing in the
sunbaked grass, waiting. She used meat scraps or peanuts
or grapes or cooked beans. All those black veils winding
around her as though to tie a knot, though maybe that
interpretation is a product of hindsight. She was a
mother to the creatures, or maybe it just seemed so
given the cast of her hair. I’ll admit it had drawn me
to her early on, had enticed me to watch her from a
distance at work, and the first time I saw her naked I
was struck by the stark contrast with her skin, the dark
strands reaching nearly to the small of her back.
She talked to the crows while she was feeding them.
There were clucks and clicks and soothing words of
comfort wafting up from the yard while I watched from
the porch or from the windows of the house. It had been
a hopelessly muggy summer, the heat slipping its weight
around us most nights as we lay in bed, making a salt of
our skin, the blades of the ceiling fan whirring like a
living wheel, so the windows were always thrown open.
One evening I was placing dishes in the washer and
listening to her voice when suddenly her tone changed. I
leaned closer to the screen mesh, straining for a view.
The crows were leaning their dark heads into the silver
tins, but my wife was moving off, and I realized,
suddenly, she was calling my name. It was the urgency
that caught me up, that drew me toward the door and out
in the yard.
I could see to the distant pond toward which Hali was
running, her hair sailing out behind her. It could be
anything, I knew. Her enthusiasms were always getting
the better of her. There might be the long neck of a
turtle sticking up at the far edge of the pond, a
submarine’s periscope. There might be a garter snake she
was chasing through the rippling grass. There might be a
rising moon appearing impaled amid the hickories. I
squinted toward her. The pond, at dusk, carried in its
body the blood of the sun. Then I saw. Saw. There
was no doubt. I began running myself, as quickly as my
body would carry me. Hali, far ahead, did not break
stride but splashed into the shallows, up to her knees
then thighs then waist.
The neighbors to the east of our house—we barely knew
them—had the last name of Graham, and the husband worked
at Wright Patterson, while the wife was a nurse at Miami
Valley. The first time I had heard the name of the son,
who was four, I had tried not to smile. It was a grownup
name from another century, too large for such a small
boy. George. Hali had the child by the shoulders in the
deepest waters of the pond, was dragging him back to
shore. I swam out to help, the cool waters, brackish and
fetid. We dripped when we sat on the grass, the boy
coughing, his blond hair slicked back, his chest
heaving. I was amazed by how calm Hali sounded, how
comforting her tone as she spoke to the child while we
walked him past the fence and home, while she described
to the mother how she’d seen him tottering along the lip
of the pond then suddenly losing his balance on the
loose rocks. The green towel the mother fetched was
massive enough to enfold George nearly entirely, and her
thanks effusive to the point of embarrassment. How, she
kept asking her son, had he left the house without her
noticing? Why had he wandered so far?
“Take a deep breath,” she said. “Does anything hurt?”
It turned out, of course, that this was the start of
things. Of that I am certain. Perhaps I should have
realized it at the time, but it is easy to be blinded by
a good deed, particularly when a child and a mother gaze
up at you with gratitude.
I should explain that Hali had no brothers or sisters.
She was raised for much of her childhood in the house
where we now lived, by college professor parents who
taught at Wright State University, the father in
philosophy, the mother in journalism. They were both
nearing forty when she was born, and by the time she
reached her teens they were the age of the grandparents
of many of her friends. Whenever she spoke of growing up
in the Dayton suburb, she focused on how her primary
friends were the family pets and her books—the first
time I saw her at her desk, she had beside her a slim
novel by
Fyodor Dostoevsky—and how her parents, though busy with
their jobs, had doted on her. That is the cliché that
most of us accept. The only child feels the gaze of the
adults until the
narcissism is
fully formed, irreversible. But I never felt that with
Hali. I will defend her in this and in most everything
else. I think what she actually learned in her childhood
was loneliness. My two brothers and my sister taught me
the opposite, the pleasure of a room to the self, a
bathroom with no one else jostling beside you, but Hali
learned the way you can hear your own breaths when you
close your eyes, the solitary thump of the heart.
She approached me while I was mowing the lawn a few
weeks after the occurrence with the boy. I liked the
smell of cut grass and gasoline, the deafening roar of
the John Deere engine, the yard cut down to the
precision of a golf course, the leavings bagged and
scattered at the edge of the woods.
I stepped off the mower. “Is something wrong?”
“I fell asleep,” she said. “I lay down on the couch and
drifted off.”
I studied the map of her eyes. “You’ve been crying?”
“In the dream.” She lifted her chin as she spoke,
squinting. She added, “From happiness.”
“You don’t look happy.”
“I was in the dream. I woke to tears coming out of my
eyes.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I want a child,” she said. “I want us to have a baby.”
“Now?”
“I know what you’ll say. We’re just getting started in
our careers. We’re young. I don’t care. I want this.”
The lawn mower was still thrumming beside us. I said,
“What was the dream?”
“I heard what I thought was an animal crying in the
woods. It was tucked into the hollow of a log. Our
baby.”
“Hali,” I said.
I have always believed that dark eyes are the most
intense and imposing. Her hand was gripping the crook of
my elbow, clamping down.
“Promise,” she said.
So I did.
And I kept my word, after a fashion. I had never before
thought of myself as father material. There was an
awkwardness that isn’t easy to describe. The natural
response was supposed to be a certain ooh-ing and
ah-ing, but for me, at the sudden sight of an infant,
especially one close at hand, even the ones belonging to
my siblings, I recoiled. The word sounds strong, but
aren’t young children even more primitive than crows?
All blank eyes and wailing to no purpose? All bodily
leaking? I did not want one, but I did want Hali to be
persuaded that I did. Perhaps that is the secret meaning
of a marriage. You hide the full truth of yourself for
the good of the other. But I should not go overboard.
What sacrifice was it when she drew me down onto our
bed, or into the shower to join her, or sometimes on the
living room couch or even on the floor, and a few times
on a blanket in the back yard, the eggs of stars
watching us, the rounded eye of moon? The crickets
serenaded us, and the mosquitoes anointed our skin in
blood. How could I have loved her any more than I
already did when she whispered her warm breath against
my ear? Something was forming. Something was taking
hold. Wasn’t this what we were making? Wasn’t this what
arose from our joining?
Then it was winter. The pond froze into stasis. Snow
covered the grass, and the limbs of the trees became
empty scaffolding. At night, sometimes, I heard the
winds moving across the carapace of land, an ancient
music, and I listened to Hali’s breaths. The bedroom
cattycorner to ours, which had, years ago, been Hali’s
room, was now being slowly transformed. The bookshelves
had been removed, the walls painted, the outlets baby
proofed. I’d noticed this last change one morning while
searching through the desk for paperclips. We hadn’t
bought a crib yet, hadn’t discussed directly that this
would be the room for a child, but the closets had been
emptied, as though in waiting, and the dresser drawers
slid open easily to reveal nothing. Hali was sitting on
the bed one early afternoon when I returned from the
YMCA. She was dressed in navy blue sweat pants and a
white sweat shirt, her hands hidden inside the sleeves,
and sunlight was slanting through the window and forming
a living rectangle on the carpeting, a glow from some
other realm. Her socks were pink, her hair tied back.
I said, “I brought home pizza.”
The words felt strange inside the presence of the room,
an imposition. She looked up. “I was thinking names.”
“Okay.”
“I know you don’t approve.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“You think it jinxes things.”
“Of course not.”
She rose and stepped into the ghost light on the
carpeting. “It’s never going to happen, is it?”
The words twisted in the room, dangled on their noose. I
said, “We’ve been over this.”
“I know, I know. 70% within the first six months. We’re
past that.” She rushed ahead before I could interject.
“I know we’re supposed to wait at least a year. I know
we’re not supposed to worry.”
“Dr. Marcus was absolutely clear,” I said.
“But I keep being sure. I keep thinking I feel
something.”
One of Hali’s earliest memories, I knew, was of a shy
raccoon using its gentle paws to accept from her fingers
in the back yard a gift of peanut butter smeared on
toast, while her parents watched. Continuity offers
comfort, we imagine. It beats back death, as though the
rote nature of any activity means it can never fully
end. When Hali’s parents had died—one after the other,
of cancer, not two years apart—those had been the
stories she had turned to again and again. The baby
robin the three of them kept in a shoebox until it was
old enough to fly. The gray squirrel that waited by the
back door for their arrival, its tail twitching.
I am convinced that the good in life, for the most part,
is confused and dreamlike, but the bad is visceral and
well-defined. Winter drifted toward spring, and Hali
stepped into a room inside herself and closed the door,
or she brooded in the hallways both at home and at work,
or she dabbed at her cereal or lay on the couch with a
blanket pulled to her chin. It had been easy, in the
past, to see past the adult to the child she’d once
been. Her smaller ghosts still roamed the house, after
all, or out into the property, singing in the hallways
or playing on the rusting swing set or wading in the
pond. If childhood is a great and empty expanse—one that
seems, at the time, as though it will never end—spring
was, too. And didn’t it seem I was to blame? Why hadn’t
I given her this gift she so dearly wanted? Why had our
bodies betrayed us? Why was I there to witness the
depths of her disappointment? These are the questions we
ask ourselves when reason no longer applies. This is
what we are left with.
Then there was the affair. Or maybe I shouldn’t call it
that. To give a thing a name is to imagine it has power
over us. Hali’s duties at work left her always on the
go, out into the city, while I was hunched before a
computer or a desk, laboring. While she was asked to see
the larger picture, I focused on minutiae. And the
particular minutiae I noticed this time regarded Greg
Gaines, new to The Dayton Daily News, a
photographer. There are men who hold themselves a
certain way, especially around women, especially around
young and attractive women, especially around young and
attractive women who are going through difficult times.
They lean close. They hold the gaze. They project a kind
of ownership, even when it is not appropriate, even when
it is unwelcomed. There is a predatory quality that
cannot be denied, and I noticed that characteristic in
the handsome face, in the too-long dark hair, in the
casual way he leaned against a wall or even yawned. Once
I just happened to be standing at the window near the
copy machines when the two of them returned from
somewhere in the city, he with his camera on its sling
across his shoulder. It was raining, the drops splatting
against the open sea of glistening cars, and they ran
together from the parking lot to the back entrance of
the building, and her hand reached out to grip his
forearm as they moved together, and they were laughing.
It was difficult to carry that memory with me through
the rest of the day, to ferry it home at day’s end. Hali
and I bumped against each other in the small kitchen,
making salad and spaghetti and garlic bread. Meals are
their own form of intimacy, especially between a husband
and wife, and I studied her as her fork clattered and
her eyes darted up then down and she sipped red wine. We
walked to the pond after that, the wind rippling across
the surface and making of it a living thing. Dragonflies
darted low. We circled and saw shadows of the bass and
bluegills and fathead minnows, and I could feel her
sullenness returning, the lethargy of her home mood. I
almost spoke, but then the low-slung sun emerged from
between a thicket of clouds, and it was bright across
the waters, and my words were swallowed into it, erased,
and in any case I couldn’t be certain what I’d seen,
regardless what paranoia followed me that night into
sleep, infiltrating my dreams.
Later, when the heat of summer was back at full force,
our ceiling fans moving out with their eternal wheel, I
asked directly. But by then I was believing everything
Hali told me, so my words came out more as an apology
than an accusation. You will never guess, I stammered,
what, at our lowest moment, I suspected. The words she
spoke without hesitation in return were a relief.
The child was due in April. There are those who believe
that all we think and do is actually a form of
selfishness, even apparently generous and altruistic
acts, their secret design to have us viewed in a certain
way: the kind one, the saint. But there was a happiness
I felt for Hali that seemed much larger than myself,
separate from me, a creature on its own as much as the
moon perches distant from the Earth. Ever since she’d
taken the home test then had had it confirmed, she had
seemed, somehow, to sail around the house, running up
the stairs or laughing from the kitchen sink, even after
the morning sickness diverted her at intervals to lean
before the toilet and to chew on Saltine crackers, as
though this, too, were part of some adventure. One
evening I saw her in the back yard while the crows were
gathering round, and she twirled like a child on the
grass, her bare feet and legs performing their intricate
dance. And I saw her standing sometimes before the
mirror, her blouse or T-shirt lifted, feeling with her
hand for the bump, or turning sideways to study the
contours of her breasts. As a child I was forced weekly
to sit obedient and still on hard pews, listening to
prayers drifting upward from the congregation. There are
mysteries in this life, whether we want to believe in
them or not. Pregnancy, for Hali, was spiritual. She was
connected to the long road backwards, to the human
caravan, and now she was carrying it forward into the
unknowable future.
I was happy then. You can fill a day like that. You look
up from your desk—from the cuneiform maze of the
page—and suddenly you envision the tiny smallness of a
hand, the sound of a baby stroller over gravel, the
sweet cry in the night then the suckling sounds, your
wife’s soft voice cooing in the dark. I wanted these
feelings to go on and on, to multiply like dandelions.
But the sorrow of the world must have its due, which is
something we are taught over decades.
Things began with the Brandenburg Concertos. It was a
Sunday afternoon in October. Hali was listening in the
bedroom, the curtains drawn, the blankets pulled up over
her expanding body, the music from her phone a whisper
from the dressing table. I silently opened the door to
check on her again, hoping she had finally slipped into
sleep, that the queasiness that had seemed abnormally
strong that day had at last dissipated. She was moaning
from the bed as I stepped into the room, and within the
hour we were at the hospital, and within an hour after
that the doctor—a young woman originally from Barcelona,
with hair as long as Hali’s—had given us the news, and
by the next day we were home again and I had thrown away
the bedroom sheets, not wanting to risk the stains
remaining even after I washed them, even if I used
bleach. Grief can seem like the curling of a body on a
bed, the eyes clamped shut, the breaths slowed until
they nearly stop. I lay beside Hali in the night,
listening, not wanting to risk being rebuffed again if I
reached out to touch her. If happiness had been
something we had shared, this loss was her own, or so
she made clear.
“We’ll wait a year,” I said in the next day, the
mattress sagging as I sat beside her.
A dark strand of hair was matted to her cheek, clinging.
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ll try again.”
She rolled over.
By January I was living in an apartment a few miles from
Riverview Park. I could walk to the Miami River and
watch the snow falling into the gray waters, which moved
forward on their conveyor belt, the current seeming like
a force that was older than anyone I’d ever known, older
than the planet itself. I shivered with my hands in my
pockets, wondered how a life could be so suddenly
subtracted, pared down. At work I saw Hali at her desk
or in the halls or out in the parking lot, and always
there were plans to concoct, strategies. What if I said
this or that? What if I pointed out that happiness ebbs
and flows, that patience was in order, that soon the
medications would lift the darkness and she would be
herself again? What if I asked her to lunch at her
favorite Thai restaurant or suggested a spring trip to
Costa Rica? She had told me once it was her secret wish
to walk on their sandy beaches and to see the jungle
greenery and to witness first-hand an anteater, a
boat-billed heron, a canetoad, a howler monkey. Mourning
had consumed her from the inside, and the shell of her
existed when I heard her voice over the phone, when I
stopped by the house and stood on the front stop, my
shoulders slumped, and rang the bell while hearing the
crows in the distance. The divorce was completed by
early summer, and in August I arrived one early morning
at work to see her stepping from a car with Greg Gaines.
He was driving, and she stood in the lot in sunglasses
and a short blue dress and sandals I did not recognize,
her purse hiked over her shoulder, her long hair
enclosing her. They walked side by side, Greg with a
hand pressing its imprint against the small of her back.
Hali didn’t see me until they were nearly at the
entrance.
“Oh,” she said.
Greg blinked, seemingly not knowing who I was.
“Oh,” Hali said again.
There are promises we keep, promises we change our minds
about, and promises that evolve or devolve of their own
volition, beyond our control. In some sense they live on
without us, have their own lives, and that’s probably
how it should be. To make a promise is such a strange
thing anyway, as though we are a seer or a prophet, as
though there are ever enough facts to know any future
with certainty. I imagined that I would be with Hali
forever, that we would grow old in our bodies, would
pass thousands of days together, a great empire of
decades gathering.
So when her shadow crossed my desk later that morning,
and I looked up into the sputtering fluorescent lights
to see her, her hair a black shawl, her mouth contorted
with feeling, I still believed that the words that would
rise into the air would draw us back together.
She said, “You’re wrong in what you’re thinking.”
It was my turn to blink, the world appearing then
vanishing, appearing then vanishing.
She said, “Listen to me. He came after, not before.”
There is a space between heartbeats that fills the world
with silence.
She said, “Promise you believe me. You have to promise.”
Any words I might have spoken were beyond the truth of
daily life, or maybe beyond any truth at all.
I promised.
Doug Ramspeck
is the author of The Owl That Carries Us Away,
which received the 2016 G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for
Short Fiction, and is forthcoming from BkMk Press
(University of Missiouri-Kansas City). He is also the
author five poetry collections, three of which received
awards: Original Bodies (The Michael Waters
Poetry Prize, Southern Indiana Review Press),
Mechanical Fireflies (The Barrow Street Book Prize,
Barrow Street Press), and Black Tupelo Country
(The John Ciardi Prize, BkMk Press). Individual stories
and poems have appeared in journals that include
Kenyon Review, Slate, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly
Review, Georgia Review, and Iowa Review. He
is a two-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council
Individual Excellence Award and teaches creative writing
at The Ohio State University at Lima.