Concerning the Unkindness of Ravens

In one of the religion classes I attended, the prof talked about primitive tribes who believe that the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby’s skull, is a doorway for spirits. Through membrane where the brain pulses underneath, stretching and flexing like spongy muscle, spirits trickle in. This makes babies both holy and wholly vulnerable, attended by seraphim and spectra, until the bony plates grow over that fleshy place, hardening, and a world of possibility shrinks to the mundane every child must muddle through to reach a humdrum adulthood, where no spirits ever visit.

My car accident split me open body and mind. I’d broken three ribs in my left side, had four silicone screws stitching together a busted collarbone, and my left hip had been fractured. At the hospital, the attending surgeon told me he had expected to put me into a medically induced coma so he could drill into my skull to release the pressure, but my brain hadn’t swollen. I was lucky, he said, to emerge from the wreckage without any lasting damage to my spinal cord and neck. After I recovered from the concussion, troubling migraines lingered, so I left the hospital with a serious arsenal of medication: Percocet for pain, sumatriptan for the migraines, Effexor after they diagnosed me with what they called “situational depression.” While I didn’t drink, partaking of this cocktail of pharmaceuticals played with my perception of reality. I hurt all the time and couldn’t imagine a life beyond the hurt. My survival didn’t feel like luck, but there is this: when my skull cracked like a clay jar, I didn’t just become ultrasensitive to light and sound. I saw things I had never seen before and have not seen since. My damaged skull throbbed like a fontanelle opening unto a spirit world where most mortals cannot tread.

All these years later, even if this second sight has dimmed, the cracked places healing over, I can’t forget what I saw. The Apostle speaks of powers and principalities at work in this world that are invisible to the human eye, a struggle beyond flesh and blood, a spiritual evil that lies upon the earth. I am not certain about any of what happened next—some of it feels so impossible—but I know this much. That winter of 1999, just before the turn of the millennium, I walked with angels and demons.

Following my visit to Rose of Sharon, the demons came for me first.

Ravens arrived the next morning, blown south from Canada as if by fallout. Big black birds with glossy wings and devil eyes. When I took Kaiser on his morning walk, I marveled at the storm of birds up in the barren grove, all bristly like wind in leaves. A hundred and then a hundred more, filling up the pines on the ridge. I heard anger in their croaky choir. So many, it was as if a seam had unzipped in the gray sky and out poured these birds, bickering in the branches like they had taken a wrong turn somewhere and couldn’t agree on which way to go next. Kaiser made a whimpering sound, like he could sense something wrong in the ravens, both of us stunned by the confabulation of their caw, caw, cawing. I had never seen such a wonder, both beautiful and terrible.

Branches creaked and cracked under the weight of so many birds, ravens on every bending bough, painting the pines inky-black. A shiver scratched at the base of my spine. When the migraines came on it felt like an electric storm, fast-moving flashes of light and dark gathering at the corners of my eyes, my world shrinking to a trembling tunnel. If I collapsed in such a place, I was sure these birds would drink my eyes from the sockets.

“Don’t be scared,” I told Kaiser, my voice a little loud to be heard over the ravens. “They call it a ‘murder’ when so many flocks gather. No, that’s not right. A murder is for crows. Flocks of ravens are called an unkindness. An ‘unkindness of ravens’ is the right term.” I coughed into my gloves, because naming them correctly had not taken away any of their dark magic. “I know, I know. Ornithologists are major fans of understatement where ravens are concerned.”

His hackles up, Kaiser turned back toward the house.

“Not yet,” I called after him. The old dog had shat himself the day before, right at the door to the backyard, and I didn’t want any more messes. It was only seven in the morning and I had meant to walk the dog and then get back inside and start working on my programming for The Land. The first week of my convalescence had passed and I had little to show for it. I knew if I had any chance of getting this project done, I had to establish a regular schedule: creativity only came if you made time for it. Let Kaiser finish his morning business and then we could take shelter. But the dog wasn’t cooperating, spooked by the ravens.

I figured he needed some encouragement, so I unzipped my pants. The cold nipped at my nether regions, but I shut everything out, the ravens’ sonic disturbance, my failures so far to make progress on my program, the sorry work I had done as a self-appointed detective investigating the mystery of Maura, the weeks I’d spent with my privates hooked to a catheter. The golden arc I managed to carve into the snow felt triumphant, but Kaiser only sat on his haunches, unimpressed. I quickly zipped my pants.

I shared the dog’s unease. It wasn’t just the sight of so many ravens massed together bothering me. I sensed something else stirring in those birds, a carrion cry up in their heads, a darkness that had harried them here. Inside my brain I picked up a vibration, a humming of fear and hunger ahead of the long winter night, joining with a sibling shadow inside them. These birds were only birds, I reminded myself, just animals, and so who knows why they do what they do, but I couldn’t shake a supernatural sense of foreboding. What had Pastor Elijah called the devil? The Enemy. He was here. I sensed Him. He had come with the birds. In the trees I heard the steady splat of their shit dropping from the branches as they emptied themselves. I put up the hood of my parka in case any winged overhead.

Finally, Kaiser finished his business and the two of us were hurrying through the falling snow along a compacted path we had made between the back door and the grove. Flashes of color lit up the edges of my vision, dark approaching wings, the onset of another migraine. This one was going to be a doozy. I was jogging as quickly as my aching hip would allow when I slipped in the snow and went down hard, striking the back of my head. Before I could rise again, the migraine had me in its talons, pinching until it punctured through membrane. I cried out thinly, so intense was the agony, as I fell back in the snow. It was like the shadow I had sensed up in the birds’ heads had overtaken me, pecking and shredding light and sanity from my brain.

I believe I went unconscious. When the pain finally released me, I believe I even dreamed, encased in the warmth of my parka. I saw Maura again, that first time at Bay City Mutual. I had known before I even met her that I would like her. Transferring from a branch in Duluth where I’d been living with a cousin and attending Lake Superior College part-time, to Aurora Bay where I was starting school at NMSU, I had read the list of names ahead of time and tried to imagine my new life there. Maura Cosette Winters stood out among the list of tellers. I remember putting my finger on her name, whispering the pure musicality of it aloud, all iambic pentameter, the same cadence as a beating heart. Maura. I already knew before I even saw her that she would be beautiful.

And Maura was. She had wild, gingery brown hair she tried taming in a bun, but wisps were forever escaping in a spill of curls down her neck or wavy strands she had to brush from her large, mercurial eyes. Her high cheekbones and olive skin made her look foreign among the pasty white northerners that inhabited Aurora Bay, like she stepped from the pages of a story Scheherazade told to save herself from the Sultan’s executioner. She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met before. Quiet and reserved at first, she shook my hand formally when we met, and something caught within me when I looked into her eyes. Her eyes shifted color in different lights, green one moment, then blue or brown. She slid her hand from my own and walked away. That day, she had hardly said two words to me.

Our small bank branch kept longer hours and a smaller staff than main locations. A few nights later we closed together for the first time. Near the end of a long day, I got stuck dealing with a rich old crank who was shutting down his checking account, angry it didn’t pay him enough interest. I had tried getting him to keep the account open at least until he spoke to our investment specialist the next day, but he proved intractable. This would mean trouble for me in the morning when our manager came in. Harry Larkin hated losing accounts, especially premium, gold-star accounts. That this guy earned any interest at all on a checking account made it exceptional, but it wasn’t good enough.

While I went through the procedures, the old man further treated me to a long harangue about how he shouldn’t have to pay taxes for education because he already put his own children through school. By the time I had his account closed, a cashier’s check for his substantial balance printed, I had heard an earful about the troubles with the world these days. I should have just let him walk away, but everything about this squat little man bothered me, even the clothes he wore: a turtleneck with high-water golf pants and Italian loafers with no socks on. He had the hairy feet of a hobbit. I handed him the check, and the words “Good luck on your quest” just slipped out because I doubted he would find a better deal at any other bank.

With him halfway out the door, I thought I could get away with a little sarcasm, but his gray wattles flushed a dark purple above his turtleneck. His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed. “What’d you say?”

I shrugged. “I only meant to wish you well. Have a good night, sir.”

One fat vein pulsed in his balding pate. Even if he was no longer a customer, he wasn’t going to let this go. “You were mocking me.”

I shrugged again, which further infuriated him.

“I’m going to let your manager know about what you said,” he said, jabbing a finger at my tie. “I will be filing an official complaint.”

“Sir,” Maura said, stepping in. “I’m the Ops. Supervisor. I can help you.” She locked her till and came around the counter, opening the half door that separated us from the rest of the lobby, empty of any actual management at this time of night. Maura guided him over to the desk and pulled out a chair for him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, because there were other customers in line to deal with, just the low murmur of her consoling voice as she scratched something down on a blank form. They talked for a long time—long enough that I was sure I was in trouble—before finally he left, Maura escorting him out the door, the guy glaring in my direction, muttering something about “this insolent generation.”

Maura still had the form as she came back to her place. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” She looked prim and disapproving, her face not giving anything away. I still didn’t have a firm read on her. Was she going to turn me in? “As your Ops. Supervisor,” she went on, “this is the part where I’m supposed to bust your balls.”

I blushed. “There’s no such position at this branch,” I said. I was pretty sure Maura was a Customer Care Specialist, level two, just like me.

Maura showed me the page, a blank loan application sheet where she’d printed official complaint form at the top and the name lucien swenson underneath with details of my transgressions. She smiled and then dropped the form into the shredder. There were no customers in the lobby. She set one hand on her hip, shaking her head at the departing customer. “Good luck on your quest,” she said, “Frodo Douchebaggins.”

After that, we were tight. “So you’re a student at Northern? What are you studying?” she asked during another lull between customers. I liked the sound of her voice, too, a little husky for a woman, tinged with smoke.

“Life,” I said. If that sounds like a smug answer, I was twenty. A dumb punk. I already knew then that I wasn’t cut out for biology, though I had doggedly enrolled in calculus and anatomy that semester. I wanted to study English, but my dad ruled it out. It was pre-med or econ like him, so I could grow up and work for a bank, groom myself for management. That was my dad’s deal for me. He would pay my tuition so long as I stuck to marketable majors. My job at the bank covered most everything else.

“Life studies must be one of the liberal arts,” she said. “Something in the humanities?”

“It sure as hell isn’t a science.”

Maura just laughed. “No,” she said, “it’s more like a poem written by a drunkard, down in the ditch looking up at the stars.”

“Something like that,” I said, recognizing the Oscar Wilde reference.

I didn’t know many people in Aurora Bay. My cousin in Duluth had moved to Sioux Falls and the rest of my family lived in Chicago. After the move I lost touch with friends from high school, most of whom had gone on to better things at the University of Chicago or Loyola. Northern had proved to be one of those suitcase campuses, a ghost town on the weekends, and I’d only made a few friends. Where Maura was concerned, I was doomed from the start.

And from the start, I idealized her. One time Harry Larkin held the monthly staff meeting at night to go over changes in procedures and projected growth in branch checking accounts along with new marketing pitches. Maura brought her daughter, Sarah, to the meeting, then just a baby. Baby Sarah had thistledown hair and the huge round eyes of an anime character, and she delighted the loan supervisor and other female tellers with her cooing charms, though Harry had been clearly displeased by the distraction. He was introducing an important new marketing blitz—No monthly fees! Automatic overdraft protection!—and tellers would now be expected to make cold calls during lulls in the day. I sucked at sales, so I ignored much of Harry’s instructions and instead made faces at the baby, who had the trilling laugh of a bird.

After the meeting ended and everyone else skedaddled, another teller named Dorothy—a stout, matronly woman—and I were handling final closing procedures. Dorothy was the only female I’ve ever met with a mullet, which somehow suited her personality and her square face. She was already a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven.

Maura had not left with the others because baby Sarah needed to be fed and so she had discreetly rolled her chair over to one corner by the branch manager’s desk to unbutton her blouse. She’d positioned the chair so it was facing away from us, so from behind the teller’s station I could just see the crown of her head, see how she cupped the baby by the back of her head, both of them bathed in the soft green glow of the branch manager’s lamp. In the quiet after closing, I could hear the baby feeding. They were held by the light, mother and child. I could see how much Maura loved her baby.

Maura, do you know what I felt most in that moment, what I still feel? I wanted to protect you. Even before I knew you were in trouble. I wanted you and Sarah to stay in the warm light and not have to step outside into the icy, outer darkness. I wanted to be the one who kept you safe. I didn’t know how much pain this would mean for both of us, but even if I had known, I think I would have still done the same.

I hadn’t realized I was staring until Dorothy nudged me. “She’s sweet on you,” she said.

“I’m good with babies,” I said. But of course, she hadn’t meant the baby and I knew that.

Dorothy gave me her cut-the-bullshit look. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, patting me on my shoulder.

I woke, not unlike Maura’s man down in the ditch, but I wasn’t looking up at any stars. Instead, I woke to a nightmare. I woke when Kaiser stuck his icy muzzle right into the soft of my neck and let out a snort. The pain softly thrummed behind my temples, but I could see again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I woke to the rage.

I stood up in the ringing din, in the falling snow. The reek and scream where ravens dark as bruises blotted the pines. Something must have torn up inside their heads. All these years later, I can still feel it inside me. A rip in time. Whatever tissue that had penned the boiling shadows inside their brains at bay disintegrated. Or, when I stood I snapped a branch, sharp as the report of a rifle.

All at once they lifted from the trees, flinging their bodies from the branches, screeching, rising into the sky and then diving with talons outstretched, one whisking right past my head. Still groggy with the remains of a migraine, I didn’t even duck. At first I thought they were attacking me. I was about to be the first man in America to die by being pecked to death by an unkindness of ravens, or carried off like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The air whirred around me, a maelstrom of beak and talon. Then I saw one impale its beak into the chest of another. Those two plummeted to the ground, locked in their fatal embrace. I realized what was happening. They were killing each other, killing their own kind. Mothers and brothers and friends. Hundreds battling. Whirling black feathers and bones cracking. The thump and thwack of bodies smashing into the icy ground.

Kaiser and I stood in the vortex, stunned by their savagery, the birds’ minds bleeding red, all pulsing shadows. The birds did not see us. They shuddered at each impact. They flew all around us, but we were not touched. What a terrifying thing a nightmare is when you stand in the midst of it.

How long did it last? How long? Time elongated.

When the battle was done, the shadow lifted, ascending like a breath, one last gasp before perdition. Around us lay the dead, dozens bleeding out in the snow. The Enemy gone. It had taken all morning for so many ravens to fill up the pines on the ridge, but they died in a few minutes.

The survivors, most of the birds, winged off north again, climbing vanishing ladders of snow into the clouds. Black feathers clotted the ice, pinkish streaks of blood and bird brain. We stood in the middle of it, untouched. A great silence spread and deepened. The pain in my mind quieted.

Kaiser and I walked back. A metallic taste burned in my throat. Blood spattered my coat and one long bloody streak marked one of the bay windows where a raven had struck in its madness. I shucked off my coat inside, let Kaiser in, and closed the door. Numb with shock, a shock nearly as visceral as I’d felt during the accident, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and wandered naked upstairs and took a sumatriptan and a Percocet and climbed under my sheets. Sleep is an inhospitable country if every time you roll over on your left side barbs of pain spike throughout your entire body, but I slept, and this time I did not dream. My sleep was like the snow, a whiteout, and when I woke it was as if the massacre had never happened.

I shrugged on a t-shirt and some sweatpants and wandered downstairs to feed Kaiser. The clock showed it was a little past three, so I had slept much of the day. Outside the bay windows, I saw a few wolves had appeared to drag off the corpses, at least three with maybe more circling deeper in the grove, ghostly shapes. The wolves should have thrilled me. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing one in the wild, but I was too shell-shocked to wonder over their primal arrival, so intent on their feast they did not lift their bloody muzzles to see me watching them.

Near the birches, one fox, a splash of fiery orange, made a feast of his own, keeping a nervous eye on the larger predators. I felt sure watching that no one would ever believe me. In the years since, I have heard of ravens doing this up in Alaska when their flocks grow too numerous, driven by starvation or overpopulation. Surely, there is a natural explanation. Such rationality insulates us from suffering. I know I didn’t just imagine my mind spreading out to touch the minds of those birds. I felt their hunger and pain. I sensed the drained emptiness in their bellies and in that emptiness, a place where shadows seethed.

In that moment I felt I had seen the Enemy and I knew now what he could do. And I knew he could do the same to the human heart.

Snow kept falling and falling. I was about to turn away when I saw a fleck of black stir in a snowdrift nearest the bay window, a smaller raven struggling to rise. Alive, a lone refugee of the war. The fox and wolves hadn’t noticed it yet, but they would soon. I didn’t stop to think. Barefoot, I opened the back door and waded into the snow to fetch what I figured was a dying animal.

The door snapping shut behind me startled the predators. A large gray timber wolf lifted its muzzle from the red-soaked snow. It had eyes like white fire in the dark, lit from within. Too late, I remembered old man Kroll advising me about the .30-06 in the gun cabinet. Could I make it back inside if they came for me?

Yet I did not feel that same sense of dread as I had caught up amid warring ravens. Her glowing eyes held my own and I sensed her intelligence, her rightness in this wintry world. She belonged here as I didn’t. I write she even though I had no way of knowing for certain if she was the alpha female. In a fellow mammal I just remember sensing a distinct motherly presence.

“Mine,” I told the wolf about the surviving raven behind me. “I’m taking this one.” She huffed in dismissal and, with her tail bristling, retreated into the woods, taking the rest of the pack with her. I watched her go and then turned to my task.

I took off my sweatshirt, wrapped the bird in it, and carried it inside. The sleek black body quivered as I cradled it to my chest, holding it against my bare, goose-pimpled skin. Its eyes were sealed shut, covered in a gray film, like it was sick with some disease.

I thought about calling animal control, but it was already too late at night and I would have to also tell them about what I’d seen in the woods, try to explain it somehow. The sheer savagery. I couldn’t do it. Holding that breathing bird against my chest, I had this feeling it had been sent. A messenger from beyond. Wrapped in my sweatshirt, the raven made a muffled caw of protest, unhappy with the effort I had made to save it.

Unsure what to do next, I brought the wounded bird into the garage, found a discarded box, and made a nest of newspapers. I sat on the garage step and rubbed the glossy black body in my sweatshirt trying to revive it. The eyes never opened, but I could feel the tremor of its breathing in my hands.

I’m the caretaker, I remember thinking. And for the first time in a few months my life made sense, had some purpose. This is why I was put here, in the midst of this madness. I was here to care for things, and not just the house and dog. I had failed to take care of Maura. I couldn’t fail again.