Chapter Seven
Present day
The dark thing that fell from the sky landed twenty feet away from Helen.
When it hit the earth, she felt vibrations from the crash, not only beneath her feet, but also as pressure in her head that
traveled down her spine. That made it all the more shocking when she saw how small it was. Its impact shouldn’t have been
so substantial.
She walked slowly toward the black form. It was a raven. She had accidentally shot a bird out of the sky. She closed her eyes.
Sometimes Helen saw ravens in the forest and around the farmhouse. While crows traveled in large groups—a murder—ravens were
often alone. They were larger than crows, and instead of flapping, they soared when they flew. Crows cawed, but ravens screamed.
This raven wouldn’t be soaring or screaming anymore though. It was dead.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
Helen finished piling dirt on the tiny, freshly dug grave. She’d placed it about two dozen feet from her garden, so she’d be able to see it while she worked on her vegetables. She planned to make a grave marker for it later out of cedar twigs.
She ran her hand across the fresh dirt on top, then picked up the Edgar Allan Poe book from the ground next to her and opened
it to the page she’d folded down: the poem “The Raven.”
Helen began to read it aloud as a eulogy.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered . . .
She continued reading the poem with clear enunciation and soft emphasis. When she reached the last lines, she took a deep
breath first, to ensure she said the words in her best rhythm with her best timbre.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Helen closed the book.
She wasn’t going to tell Wade about the raven, because then he’d ask her why they weren’t eating it for dinner.
In the kitchen, Helen hesitated. She needed to finish the stew, but she also needed to get Wade’s lunches ready for the rest of the week.
She usually would have done that yesterday, Sunday, but yesterday had gotten away from her with the cleaning and the sweeping and the moments when she paused just to keep herself from screaming.
And now today was slipping out of her reach too, all because she had unleashed those bottled-up screams.
Helen grabbed the stack of brown paper lunch bags from the cupboard. With a pencil, she wrote each day of the week on the
front of the bags.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
Friday.
Saturday. Sometimes Wade worked on Saturdays too.
She needed to prepare homemade bread for his sandwiches. Each night, she would also add fresh vegetables or fruit to the bag
for the next day. And each morning, Wade would take a bag with him when he left to work the trees.
But no, there wasn’t time to work on the lunches now. She set aside the bags and opened the refrigerator to get the carrots
she’d already peeled. She dumped them on a wooden cutting board, then was startled by the sound of an urgent knock on the
door.
She froze. Suddenly there came a tapping.
More loud knocking. “Helen?”
Everything in her body relaxed. She knew that voice. Agnes had finally come!
Helen rushed across the kitchen. She didn’t want to embarrass herself by acting completely overjoyed with Agnes’s arrival,
so she opened the door and said, “No need to break down the door,” but she smiled when she said it, and Agnes could tell she
was overjoyed nonetheless and matched Helen’s smile.
“I’m parched!” Agnes said.
Agnes was dressed in orange hiking gear. Yanking the earbuds from her ears, she headed directly to the kitchen sink to refill her water bottles. There was one in her hand, one snapped to her waist, and one sticking out of the side pocket of her small backpack.
“I was starting to wonder about you,” Helen said. “It’s been almost a month.”
It had been so long that she had even considered hiking to Agnes’s house, something she’d never done. The round trip, plus
the visit, would take up most of the day. And even though Helen and Tyler used to hike for fun, she didn’t have that kind
of desire anymore. The most she did was wander the woods to clear her mind.
Agnes brought the water bottle to her lips, then paused. “My parents. Well, my dad. He’s making me do all kinds of stuff around
the house—even putting new shingles on the roof with him. Says as long as I’m still under his roof, I have to help make sure
we still have a roof.” Agnes was a fast talker, and she got out all her words in one breath before she took a big gulp of
water.
“The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a rainy winter,” Helen said.
Agnes laughed, and Helen shrugged. She didn’t know if she believed it either.
“My dad thinks he is the Farmer’s Almanac.” Agnes was twenty, and she seemed like both a young twenty and an old twenty, still
caught between youth and adulthood—innocent and inexperienced in so many ways, yet tough and resourceful in other ways. “Is
your husband here?” Agnes asked.
“No.” Wade was always out working when Agnes came by.
Agnes picked up a carrot from the cutting board and bit off the tip. “It only took me two hours to get here.”
“Two hours? That’s fast.”
“I ran part of it.” Agnes crunched on the carrot like she hadn’t eaten in days. “Mind if I have this?”
“Do you need something more?”
Agnes waved her hand to indicate no. “I got protein bars on me.”
Good. Helen really didn’t feel like making Agnes food. “I should warn you,” Helen said, crossing the room to the side table and opening the little drawer in it. “The list is long this time.”
At the top of the page, Helen had scrawled the words Things to Talk with Agnes About. Beneath that was a list.
Agnes watched as Helen read from the wrinkled, handwritten piece of paper.
Scanning the topics, Helen said, “Okay, so here are the riveting options: I fell in the shed and still have a monster bruise
from it . . . Wade made some comments about the way I cook oatmeal . . .”
Agnes said, “I want to hear that first.”
“If we walk down to the pond, there’s a beaver den . . .”
“Sorry, I can’t stay long enough to hit the pond.”
Helen stopped reading. Agnes had just arrived and already she was talking about leaving. The energy in the room shifted.
Agnes said, “My dad wants me home by four. Roofing calls.”
“Oh.” That was all Helen could think to say.
“I’ll be back soon, okay?” Agnes looked apologetic.
“Of course.”
“I just wanted to stop in real quick. Check on you.”
Helen nodded. There was a reason the list was so creased and crumpled. On her loneliest days, she took the paper out and carried
it around with her, read it to herself between chores, and pondered the things she might say. Those lead scribbles were a
promise of future conversations that she was always waiting to have.
Helen folded the paper in half. She’d have to wait a little longer.
Agnes finished the last bite of her carrot. As she tossed the stem end into the compost bin under the sink, she said, “I have
some things to add to the list.”
“Oh?” Helen brightened up and grabbed a pencil from inside the drawer.
“Last time, you told me about that history class.”
“On the Klondike Gold Rush?”
“Yeah! So wild. I had more questions.”
Helen unfolded the paper and wrote gold rush. “Are you thinking about heading to Alaska with a pan?”
“No!” Agnes said quickly, but not before her eyes flashed with curiosity. “Why? Do you think there’s still gold?”
“Not that you can get from the river with a pan.”
“Damn. I guess I’m stuck roofing until further notice.” Agnes sighed dramatically and then laughed. “And I need to ask you
about concerts. I’ve never been, you know. I don’t count some old guys with their guitars at the grange. I was thinking maybe
I’d go to one in Seattle. Maybe you’d want to go too.”
“It might be hard for me to get away,” Helen said, and she instantly felt regret. She didn’t want to hurt Agnes’s feelings,
but she just couldn’t imagine herself at a concert anymore, and certainly not one in Seattle.
Agnes tried to cover her disappointment with a shrug. “Yeah, I get it. Maybe you could tell me which places to go.”
“Sure, I know all the best places,” Helen said as she added the topic to the list. Then she peered at Agnes for a beat. “This
isn’t on the list, but I buried a raven by my garden. Do you want to see it before you go?”
Agnes scrunched her face. “A dead raven? Definitely.”
The two women stood in front of the little grave. Helen didn’t want to tell Agnes she had accidentally shot the bird, so she
lied and said she found it by the garden.
Agnes asked, “Why didn’t you just toss it in the woods?”
“I didn’t want the coyotes to eat it.”
“They would have loved it. That’s like happy hour for them.”
“Yeah, well, Wade would have eaten it on bruschetta himself.”
Agnes looked at Helen sharply. “What? You can’t eat raven. They carry disease and shit.”
“All animals can carry disease and shit. If the meat is still fresh, and you clean and cook it properly, ravens are as safe to eat as some pig or chicken that’s been crammed into a commercial breeding barn. I mean, probably.”
“Probably? You don’t even know how long it’d been dead.”
“I do. I saw it die.”
Agnes cringed. “What do you mean? You just came out here and it was lying on the ground, like twitching?”
“Yeah. It was almost dead. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Very creepy.”
Helen smiled softly at her young friend. A dead bird was nothing compared to a masked man with a knife, and Helen wondered,
not for the first time, how Agnes would respond if she knew about Tyler’s murder. Agnes didn’t even know that before Wade
there had been Tyler. She just knew that Helen’s heart had been broken by another man in Seattle. The first time Agnes had
shown up at the farmhouse, Helen had wanted to make a friend who wouldn’t view her as a tragic widow, so she’d told a fuzzy
variation of the truth, and then she’d never corrected the record. There was something nice about just talking about everything
and anything other than the one thing she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Agnes wrinkled her nose. “Helen, seriously, you can’t just go around eating twitchy birds.”
“I have no desire to eat a raven.” Helen gestured at the grave. “Hence the burial. I’m just saying Wade feels we’re living
the life of survivalists and should eat from the land.”
“Got it,” Agnes said slowly as she studied Helen. “So what was the jerky you gave me to eat last time I was here?”
Helen waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. That was just crow.” She kept a straight face and watched Agnes process her
words.
“Crow? Seriously?” Agnes looked a little sick.
Helen waited a moment before she grinned. “No, not seriously. It was deer.”
Agnes burst out laughing. It was such a nice, boundless sound, and Helen wanted to laugh along with her.
Laughing with someone was like sharing your heart with them.
Helen felt her body loosen, and she thought she would begin to laugh too except it didn’t happen, not in the way it should have.
Instead it stalled in her throat, and the sound she forced out was like a bad actor laughing in a bad movie.
She went quiet, afraid Agnes would think she was being disingenuous.
It seemed Helen’s body no longer remembered how to laugh.