Page 83 of The Devil Knows Her Name

The truck rumbled down the driveway, its old bed rattling as I passed over stones and potholes. A brisk wind chased crimson leaves across the driveway, bright as tumbling gems, and the gray clouds above scudded across the sky but never broke. A fine autumn day.

With a wave of my hand, the snarl of briars that covered the driveway furled back. I pulled out onto the road and made my way down the hill, admiring the splashes of lemon-yellow hickory leaves among the wine-dark maples and surly evergreens. On the narrowest parts of the road, the trees touched overhead, and their roots had begun to eat away at the edges of the asphalt.

When I reached the main road, I braked only out of long habit; the stop sign was completely overtaken by sumac, and no one had thought to cut it back. So too had the Welcome to Burrsville sign disappeared under a curtain of ivy, and many of the streetlights were surrounded by trees, their bulbs glowing like fairy lights at night.

The village was quiet, its children walled up in the school for a few more hours. In a year or two, the school would close, and whatever children remained would be bused to the neighboring town. Their new teachers would ask where they lived, and when they answered, “Burrsville,” they would hear, “Hmm, I’m not familiar with it,” so often they’d begin to question whether it really existed. When they eventually left, for college or for work, they would not return. It was the way of things.

As I came to the village proper, I braked again for a doe and her pair of fawns. These would’ve been born in the spring, when fawns were meant to be born, and they were more than half their mother’s size, but they still tagged close behind her, gawking at the truck as they passed. Somewhere else, it was bow season, and they would’ve been watchful and skittish from the intrusions in their woods, but not here.

My hand rose to my neck as I waited for them to cross, fingers absently playing over the teeth strung there. It was a gift from the devil, my mother’s teeth set alongside those of the fawn. It was surprisingly difficult to tell them apart.

The little family made its way fearlessly into a front yard, the lawn overtaken by meadow, and I watched until they disappeared behind the house before driving on. Here in the heart of the village, most of the street signs were still visible, but the curbs had been swallowed by moss and the yards had all grown up high as my knee or more. It was hard to tell the houses that were empty from the ones where people still lived, because green had engulfed them all. Most people would probably say Burrsville looked abandoned, but all I saw was life—wild dog roses peeking over sills like curious children, squirrels running unhampered through broken attic windows with their winter storage, songbirds resting in the hedges before beginning their journey south. These houses were still homes.

The Pentecostal church and its parsonage, however, were truly empty, and had been for two years. The bell tower of the church was missing its roof; inside, the bell was a moldering heap of crumpled copper on the ground. A wild rosebush had taken root in the amassed leaf mold and branches that piled on top of it, and its canes had begun to climb the inside of the tower.

For a short time, the only thing the town could talk about was the Abdee family and their untimely end. The pastor, feared dead, returned miraculously as they’d all gathered to pray for him, only to strangle his wife in their bed. He then climbed the condemned bell tower—to jump, everyone assumed—and instead was crushed when the tower collapsed, the ancient bell crashing through three rickety floors before ringing its last at the bottom. The pastor’s son disappeared the same night, and was never heard from again.

I passed the strip mall where the feed store used to be, great swaths of the asphalt buried under the flowers and grasses that sprung up in its cracks. Georgie had only stayed long enough to convince Evelyn to join the slow but steady exodus, and together they’d left Burrsville forever, headed for Chicago in Georgie’s little navy-blue sedan. She’d abandoned the store with boxes on the shelves and pennies in the cash register, and even though I needed very little now, sometimes I would go inside and wander the aisles, just for the smell of the feed and the fertilizer.

The old woman’s house was just beyond the former library with its thistle and milkweed roof, and I pulled up to the curb with a flutter of excitement in my stomach. The front yard was a fairy-tale tangle of color; she’d planted pumpkins this year, and the vines sprawled lazily across the ground, the occasional curve of orange or yellow peeking through the large, flat leaves. A stuffed scarecrow had been tied to one of the porch posts as decoration, and a mouse scurried up one arm and disappeared into the seam of the shoulder.

I hoped she’d gotten the message I left on her machine. Her grandson had gone back to live with his parents out of town, and I’d called three times in a row, thinking I might annoy her into picking up, but no such luck. This moment had been two years in the making, and I wanted her to be prepared.

I got the carrier out of the back and went down the driveway to the back deck, where I normally found her. She was there, barefoot in the wild lawn, stuffing a white slab of suet into a wire feeder, and her eyes narrowed suspiciously when she saw me.

“Can I help you with something?”

“I’m Tess,” I said, just as I had when I’d brought her a cutting of my old rose wards, and when I’d come to fix her porch step, and when I’d dropped off a basket of tomatoes and zucchini. “I’m a wildlife rehabilitator. I have a surprise for you.”

Her eyes narrowed further, but I was too excited to care. I reached into the carrier with both hands, earning myself a hard bite between my thumb and forefinger, and withdrew my prize.

“Shadow!” she cried.

After Shim raided my barn, it had taken me two years to find the crow. The trail went cold last year, and I’d given up hope of ever seeing him again; his injury wouldn’t have demanded a multi-year rehabilitation, and the best I could expect was some record of him having been released. Instead, I’d found him at a wildlife center halfway across the state, having failed several reintroductions back to the wild and multiple attempts to acclimate him to educational demonstrations.

“As far as we can tell, he’s perfectly healthy,” the director had told me, no small amount of exasperation in her voice. “He whips around the flight cage like he’s making fun of us, but whenever we try to release him, he just won’t go.”

But here, in his home, Shadow seemed ready to go. His wings strained against the gentle cage of my hands, and I could’ve sworn his beady black eyes glinted with eager recognition. He clacked his beak impatiently and took another half-hearted stab at my fingers.

The old woman crossed the yard to us, all the hard lines of her face made soft with wonder. She held out a chunk of suet in the flat of her palm, and he snatched it greedily, neck feathers bristling as he gulped it down. “Where did you find him?” she asked.

“With another rehabilitator. They were taking good care of him, but they said he had no interest in being turned loose. I’m hoping, now that he’s home, he’ll feel ready. Should we find out?”

She nodded silently, her eyes fixed on the bird. I carried him up onto the back deck and set him on the railing so he could get something solid under his claws before I let him go. He took off as soon as I released him, the wind from his wings buffeting my face, and a single blue-black feather drifted down to land in the coneflowers.

Shadow took three languid spirals over the yard, climbing higher and higher until he landed in the boughs of the tall pine in the northwest corner. He cawed loudly, and the old woman clasped her hands over her heart.

“Listen to that! He’s telling them all he’s back. You’re back, aren’t you?”

I hid my smile—she always seemed wary that she was being laughed at—and closed the carrier door. “I’ll stop down in a couple days and see how things are going, if you don’t mind.”

“I can email you. I do that now. It’s how I keep in touch with my daughter.”

I wrote down my email address on a slip of paper; she folded it and tucked it in her pocket, where it would stay until it went through the wash and emerged as indistinguishable fibers. I left her there in the yard, staring up at Shadow with such awe and delight he might’ve been a phoenix rather than a common crow.

The way home took me down Fourth Street, past Max and Christine’s old house. Like many on the block, no one lived there anymore, but if you pushed aside the curtain of Virginia creeper to look in the windows, you could see their matching armchairs in front of the fireplace, the books still on the shelves, the coats still hung by the door. They’d gone to visit their daughter after she had her baby, and they’d forgotten to come back.

I had gone in, just once. I’d taken a few boxes and filled them with all the things Christine loved the most—her wedding jewelry, the crooked vase Max made her during his pottery phase, the silk scarf she wore at Christmas, all the odds and ends she’d collected over the years. I’d placed the little book of poetry she read at our last Mabon dinner on top, and then I’d found her daughter’s information in the little book on her desk and shipped them off with no return address.