The Knowing

Originally published in Women Speak, the Journal of the Appalachian Women’s Project

The older she’d gotten, the more skittish she’d become. This was surprising, one believing more experience ought to add up to more confidence. The opposite was true, though, the wisdom of her years proving instead just how random and untrustworthy the known world is. And this was just fact. Case in point: the morning’s headline news. Student Assaults Principal; Group Storms Library Calling for Ban of Books; Neighbor Shoots Neighbor Over Barking Dog.

It was all so much.

She steps outside for air. For trees, for birds, for her view of the mountains that wrap this valley like a deep green cloak. Her eyes train west to the high-wire ridge where sits the old cabin she and Dave built in 2006. They loved that place, spent many a long weekend there him tending the wild lands and her doing whatever, in the moment, struck her fancy: reading, writing, collecting fistfuls of wildflowers she’d later press or paint. She’d not been up there since that last time in early COVID—the journey having somehow become arduous, and sad.

The crow is at the railing and he hops, expectantly. Top of the day, she says to the bird, and he caws and clicks, and she sees he’s brought a new shiny, his latest offering in their ongoing game of give and take. She steps to retrieve it. Oh Bertram, she says, seeing it’s a locket, the silver tarnished, the monogram scratched. She rubs the front gently with her thumb, and for a moment breath catches in her throat. Was that a J? Surely not. Bertram hops, okay okay, she says, and she opens the patio’s side door, steps into the utility space and scoops a cup of peanuts. It’s the roasted kind he prefers, and she’s hardly dumped them onto the flat feeder before he flaps his wings, takes a beakful and flies off into the late morning.

Coffee. She’d like more coffee. She’d already rinsed the pot, so she considers making another while weighing the pros and cons. She could outline her week’s To-Dos, that would be productive, and she shakes off the basket, lines it with a filter, then carefully measures three scoops. The pad and pen are in their spot and she brings them to the two-seat dinette by the window. She’d never particularly cared for this set but it’d come with the house and fit the space and she couldn’t make a rational argument for discarding it. Never mind the cavernous wound, the hollowing ache reconstituted by the empty chair. The world was made for two. This she knew, and conditioning the heart for acceptance was called for.

Steaming cup, she sits. She takes her time. Considers. She picks up the pen and slowly, carefully, makes a perfectly round bullet. Which one is this? Stolen from the Mackey Law Firm it says, and she shakes her head, mystified by the joke.

She taps the pen, now, to her cheek. What. To Do. First.

Get more peanuts.

She crosses the note out immediately, she’s just bought a 25-pound bag why on earth did she start this list in ink.

Tap tap on her cheek. Tap tap nothing comes. There must be something—when a tap tap sounds behind her, a sharp tap tap and she turns to see it’s Bertram, pecking at the slider to the patio. What on earth, she thinks, and she rises. She reaches the glass and unlocks the bolt, and he takes three decisive hops away. He keeps an eye, though, watching her slide the heavy door open, she’s careful to not let the rusty edge scrape. She steps through the opening and he watches with interest, tilting his head such that in the sun it shimmers, the feathers at once black and blue and the rich green of emeralds. The big bird hops again but doesn’t go in the direction of the feeder. His motion is forward, onward, his black beak lifted and leading.

She follows. He reaches the edge, the curve where patio meets grass and stops. He stretches his long body in a motion that starts with tail and moves slow along the spine until his head raises sure in gesture. It’s a point, she’s sure, the way his neck slips back his head, the way his beak pulses once, then twice. He cuts quick to see she’s watching, then repeats. This time, he produces a click click and a long caw. Again he turns. He needs her to see.

But what? Nothing’s there but mountains, the same daily mountains, layer upon layer of Appalachia’s every blue, ridge after ridge pointing, dipping, curling in the way a child’s drawing might, a crayon pulled across a broad sheet to make a dancing line, continuous if inefficient. Closer still is the mountain face she loves best, the rising from valley to peak of Ogle Ridge. It spreads before them an accordion unfolding as the morning’s clouds throw shadows that shape-shift and change, lighting ridges, then hollows, then throwing entire swaths into darkness.

Bertram waits.

What is it, she says. What should I see?

He flicks his head again, up up. Up to the top of Ogle.

It cannot be, she thinks. You cannot know, she says. And he takes flight, Bertram does, in one grand swoop as his wings push sure against the day’s quiet air in a motion that at once startles and reassures her. She lifts her own arm, her hand coming to rest at her brow and shading her eyes as she sees the bird fly high and away toward the very spot—top of that mountain—where lies her husband in a shallow cove.

She does not move, believing the bird—hoping the bird—will presently return and this will be done. He does not, though, and as time passes and her anger finds space to grow she moves to the feeder, lifts its flat bed and in a wild motion throws peanuts into a wind that has picked up, now, and blows cool, the portent of a coming storm. She looks to the darkening sky, then slips back through the slider. She pulls it closed and twists tight the lock.

Damn that bird, she says.

And she goes to gather her things.

She knows the way. She’s traveled this route a thousand times—Dave at the wheel, her to his right, the two of them chatting away the miles in a discourse both interesting and amiable. There is so much to see! So much to discuss. Nothing offers the color and contrast of a country road with its vast fields and tender crops, its haphazard lineup of ancient barns and gated estates. And oh, the yard art. Today, though, she hardly notices. She sits forward, hands tight on the wheel, eyes straight ahead as the wipers wipe swish swish in time with rain that’s come, lengthened, strengthened. It’s a passing storm nevertheless, a summer shower, she knows this and still she finds it disconcerting.

You can do this. You can, Jules, she tells herself. You can do this, over and over.

She’s not traveled this route since the day they buried Dave, in the awfullest time of COVID. Since then no one had encouraged her to come, most especially her city daughters who, when she sold their childhood home, simply would not allow her to move to the mountain alone. It had been quite a concession, she had to admit, when they agreed she could buy the small “manageable” place sitting at its base. And sat she had, not even once summoning the courage to drive this twisty road, to make the climb, to reach the summit and step out alone onto 40 wild acres filled with black bear and bobcat, timber rattler and coyote. To face the memories and sorrow.

It lay ahead of her now. She notices the rain relenting, she sees spots of sun peek intermittently from clouds laden with wet, with dark. Thick mist rises from the asphalt and she makes the turn onto the unpaved drive, a bumpy, private road that will take her the last four miles and an additional 3000 feet in elevation. The forest thickens as heavy water collects and falls from the flapping, blowing leaves, making a loud splat as her wipers wipe intermittently. She checks the clock—2:22 pm—and notes the temperature has already begun to drop. In contrast, she feels her anxiety rise. I will not turn around, I will not turn around, this is her chant now, a fortification.

She reaches the final turn. She braces for sight of the driveway, a short spit of a road her husband put in himself in the first months they owned the property, Dave and a tractor and a few blasts of dynamite. They’d meant to build here where there was a natural spot with contours that were gentler, flatter, but upon further consideration they’d decided to do what it took to get the best views. If that complicated the build? So be it. Complicate it did, but in the end the house was perfect, clinging to the side of the mountain as if it had been carved there, overseeing a vast meadow filled with more rhododendron and laurel and wild azalea than an artist could dream. The driveway itself required seasonal maintenance and even with the clearance of this big SUV, which she’d kept despite the protestations of her children, she wonders if she’ll be able to make it to the house.

What she sees surprises her. The vertical log they’d sunk as a signpost still stands, its base surrounded by a thick mass of happy white daisies. Nailed to the front is the wide metal arrow, bent, now, and slightly askew, most likely loved by a bear in that way they like to stretch and stroke and rub against the small pines. The paint has faded but her word is still there: Heaven. Sitting atop is Bertram. It has to be Bertram, his head bowed, his oily feathers glistening in rain that has become soft, malleable. The crow takes flight, stays low, bobs up then down as he follows the short path’s hills and valleys, as he stops to wait in this tree and that, intending to lead her on. She makes her way slowly, the grasses have grown high and unruly, and twice she has to park, get out, clear fallen branches. She’s brought her snake boots, which she puts on, and a pair of thick leather work gloves and also the handsaw which Dave insisted they have in the car at all times, one never knows what one might encounter. It was good practice then, on these roads, even if she teased him. It’s good practice now.

Then there it is. The house, their house, low-slung and waiting. The roof intact, the windows closed but hoping. She parks, gets out, shuts the Ford’s heavy door. The rhododendron they’d literally built the house around had become monstrous, a statement, obscuring the steps, the front walkway, the glass door that led to the mudroom with its pine bench and hanging hooks, with its insistence that things that belonged there be collected there. She stands at the top of the descending stairs and reaches for the railing to steady. She feels the second Mrs. de Winter, the thump of her heart, the strange prick of tears. She cannot do this, she should not do this, and she waits.

Bertram squawks and she sees he is on the roof, perched to the right of the widow’s peak. No, she says, no. But he calls again and she finds she is moving, her feet carefully ascending the wet mossy ramp. Her hands hold to the railing and she steels as she meets it all, step by rising step—her anger at the world, at that goddamn, pointless pandemic; the unimaginable loss, the loneliness she cannot bear; the knowing this is life, her life, this is who she has become.

She reaches the top. The sky has cleared. The sun has emerged, escaped, electric it lights a vast wet world below her. The whole of it shimmers with a glory that overwhelms. She cannot breathe; she breathes so deep all of creation rests inside her. Her legs give way; she stands so sure she is sky and mountain and rock and stream. She is broken and bone-tired; she is released and free and wild and soaring. She is the beginning, she is the end, she is all that came before and all that will be and she knows she is not, she will not, ever be alone.

There is the cove, behind the row of pines, and a white mist rises as if orchestrated. It is beautiful the way the vapor lifts slowly, wafts patiently, strands curling and twisting to a music only it hears. Bertram watches this intently, his eyes round and deep yellow and trained until he breaks to look to her. They are face to face, she and the bird, eye to eye, and neither looks away. He does not make a sound, just holds her gaze until he’s sure she knows. He’s sure she will follow. Then he raises his wings, lifts to ride the air, and flies through the mist to the grave.