Eating Crow: an introduction

When I wrote a novel three years ago, I had no idea it would become a critical and popular sensation, and thus I have not been disappointed. I've let it steep for awhile after a couple of rejections: Graywolf was disturbed by the lack of dialogue in the sample chapter; Coffee House actually summoned the entire manuscript before remitting a form letter rejection. I saw this as progress, because at the time I'd just gained my first freelance byline.

I have recently started to feel the pulse of inspiration to revisit the story, work out a few kinks, and flesh out the characters. And, shameless self-promoter that I've become, I resolved to do so via frequent postings to this blog. I welcome any regular reader who will not flinch from the yeoman's duty of posting honest commentary.

The chassis on which I've tried to hang this novel is the notion that we are all beings with a consciousness that, properly tended, exceeds our hat size. That spiritual fulfillment is as diverse as are the means by which life reproduces, as varied as the many shapes of seeds. That some get a second chance to sum up their mistakes and soar on the thermals for awhile, and that some get it right the first time. Eating Crow certainly will require your suspension of disbelief, but I would not call it magical realism--I'd prefer the term supernaturalism. If I have succeeded, I have adapted the story of the ugly duckling.

Chapter 1.1

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
-Robinson Jeffers


I left Calumet on a warm early October evening, riding the caboose of an ore train through the copper hills of upper Michigan, down to the Portage and a packet schooner bound for Ashland and Superior. My one friend Eino was the fireman onboard and would be glad for a little company and a younger back under the coal. There was a softness in the air that night, a feeling so suspicious after the first bracing nights of fall. Once you have given in to that next layer, it’s tough to let down your guard, but I was steaming up under my canvas coat and new woolens.
That rattly engine room would be plenty warm on the trip west. I had taken the trip twice before for a few dollars at times when Eino’s children were being born in Houghton. My first trip, the engineer had burst a can of oil all over the piping hot engine just before we left, and I spent the first six hours flustered and sick from the fumes in a four-foot roll abeam. I scrambled to keep up with the demands of the throttle above, but the schooner itself was happy as a cork. I thought that was it for me, sick and exhausted, but the engineer spelled me up through the Apostles and past the red cliffs, and I got some fresh air and salt herring in me. I guess they felt pity for my weakness.
This time I was going away on that boat. I had been laid off two months from any work and was in receivership at the boarding house. Pekka said she’d advance me another month but I’d had it with digging anyway. I knew a guy ran a skiff out of Tofte, a real upright norske I had met in Bergen on the boat from Europe. He was heading back to Minnesota, having worked the logging camps up above the mills at Cloquet for three winters. He’d made a stake, enough to come home and get a wife and buy a fishhouse cove on the Lake Superior. He had written once about trouble finding hands up there when the ciscoes started to shoal and he had more heaps of rotting fish than he could pack. That was my destination.
The train pulled into Hancock and I skipped down to the schooner, and soon we headed out on the big lake. The breeze that night! Offshore, just as soft as could be, smelling of every fresh pine stump in northern Wisconsin. I took turns with Eino going up on deck and watching the sun slant into the horizon as we came around the point into Chequamagon Bay. The Ashland docks had those electric lights since my last trip, cold jewels on the horizon that got fatter as we approached. A few moths still flew about, even in October, and they haloed those lights like crazies. The brightening was just getting started then. But that’s all I see at night nowadays, a century later, brightness. It’s all been laid bare to me.
We passed inside of Sand Island and motored easily up to the head of the lake, the breeze coming around to the east and quartering off the stern. It was fast sailing to the entrance at Superior. The boys dropped me off on the Minnesota side, and I walked a mile along the beach toward Duluth before bedding down for the night. Talk about lights! The hillside to the west was like a forest ablaze. I figured this electricity would stick. Folks like a lot of light—from an early age, I had noticed that.
I woke up chilly in my bedroll. The wind had come around so it was off the lake and kicking spittle off the surf. That damned breeze was damp and cold, and had entered my neck, kinking it up to my right. So I watched, mostly, the waves run up the beach as I walked the miles west toward the Duluth entrance. That canal is only a stone’s throw wide, but we had to ferry across in those days before they put in that bridge with the lifting deck. On the far side, I missed my step thinking too much about my damned neck. I pitched forward, stepped ahead without a sense of where I was going, and my right leg went down over the edge of the barge just before it rode up against the pier.
The next few hours are cloudy, and I wish I could travel back there now and peer over my own shoulder and see who it was that tended to me and got me up the hill to the hospital, and who it was that stole my pack. My leg was busted bad, the femur twisted, shattered into strands was how the doctor described it. I never walked right again after that slip, when I finally walked at all. That old ache, the physical memory of something so sudden and violent, is something I do not miss.
I was laid up in the seaman’s home for three weeks before somebody managed to question whether I belonged there. They gave me a week to make a go, but kept me aglow on morphine and finding every day swell, and then slung me on a stretcher and dropped me over at a Finn Church on Michigan Street. They, in turn, farmed me out to a family of Lutherans up over the hill in Esko. Those Finn farmers hoped, for the down payment of a winter of charity, to get a summer’s work out of me.
It was a bad time, then. They bunked me up in their kitchen. Plenty of heat, always somebody to fetch a slab of bread, but never a moment to crack a fart or get the crust out of my nose until night. Women jabbering about this and that, every little nicety and meaningless, a lantern burning twenty hours a day. After a month the man and his boy got me out to the sauna, and I screamed twice so sudden and loud from the leg that the neighbors come over.
The nights were dark then, and long, and I learned to sleep through all sorts of commotion, which helped, because they preached, too, all the time. But it wasn’t all hosannas and tales of the ancients. They kept telling me about the farm and how they were so lucky to be a part of something they owned. They were dirt poor, hardly owned anything that came out of a catalog, and most of those were second hand. They got along alright, I guess, always had coffee. But I felt sorry for them.
The leg knit up by spring so that I could go outside on willow crutches that the boy built. The air was good, still days with the sun dashing off the deep snow and water droplets falling everywhere. The old woman taught me to knit, and I made up enough socks that I was still wearing them three years later in the logging camps. They had me chopping wood by the end of May, and I could manage a wheelbarrow by June.
They talked all summer about how much work it was to cut the hay quick in August when it was ready, and how I was looking more ready every day to swing a scythe, how I would be able to pivot on my good leg. Damn it to hell, they went on about that hay! I grabbed my coat after dinner one cool night in early August, thanked them for their hospitality, and walked up the road to Cloquet. They sent the boy after me, and I tried to wave him off, but he came up and handed me two dollars.
I knew that fall would be the right time for a start in the logging camps. The leg felt good, stiff as a tree trunk, but little pain until the end of the day. The limp was a problem though, something that would keep me out of work. I’d never hire a gimp like me, never did. But it wasn’t a problem anyway, because they were busy like moths around the mills, and all of the crew foremen were trolling the taverns for strong young men to stack lumber. I had a job by the end of the night, and two beers from a soused Suomi in trade for a pair of socks that I had made wrong. I made both transactions from a bar stool, never walked once until I left at midnight to go find a place to sleep.
I worked two weeks with them boys, told them I had a cramp at first until they saw that it didn’t matter, that I could pull my load. That Cloquet smelled bad, though. And so much sawdust in the air that I was sneezing all the time, quick surprise sneezes so loud they sometimes called me snusa. Two of the fellers on that crew were going up the river for the winter, said they’d vouch me onto a crew to build a new camp up in Brimson. Free tickets on the train and everything. We rode the Missabe grade up from Two Harbors, sledged a load of lumber four miles on deer trails, sometimes knee-deep in loon shit. The camp site was on a high bank above a clear lake, lots of sun, nice breeze to knock down the bugs. The pines towered to the horizons, so many and so thick that they had no branches up the first fifty feet. Those top guys what decided to send us here knew what they were doing.
Once we’d built the bunkhouse and cookhouse, I stayed on with the winter crew to start the cut. The cook left after two weeks when the crew threatened mutiny over his flapjacks. He made them all runny, with little spots of flour still inside, couldn’t get it right even under threat of amputation. I got the job by default, the foreman thinking my gimp was slowing me down. It was that or leave, he said. I was steamed at first, but had a pretty good knack for it and the pay was just the same.
I made the flapjacks the old way, with lots of potatoes, and the crew ate as many as I could make. It’s cold work in that country in January, out in the woods at first light, the little birds drumming past your ears light as snow. Those boys burned up everything you could feed them. I cut wood all day, always something thawing or steeping or boiling on the stove. The smells, I’ll say, were wonderful: salt pork boiling with carrots and potatoes, herring sizzling in butter with onions. The thought of those smells! Smells that reach down and will your stomach to growl. The raw yearning of hunger! I was snug in that job all winter, a stroke of luck.
All the more lucky because I had the key to the larder. There were still some Chipeways living their old ways on Bear Lake near the river back then, and I’d trade pork and butter for furs, at great advantage for it was a hard winter, even for this country. I had a stash so big by spring I could barely keep them hidden, especially from the damned squirrels. I sold the whole lot to that half-breed dog-runner Micmac for three hundred dollars before he sledded down to Duluth. Not a fair price, but I had to keep him quiet. No other way could I have done it.
And so it was that I established myself up the Cloquet valley. Three more years as a camp cook and I had a stake enough to start up a little tavern at the rail stop. From that point it was like shooting sparrows in a birdbath. A fair percentage of loggers were dependable to drink up all of their wages, and I cornered that market by building some drafty shacks out back where they could while away their worthless bachelor youth after exhausting their backs another season. After a few years, I snatched up some equipment and ran ‘em as crews of my own, and they paid me back every penny they earned. After meals, booze, and shelter I managed to keep some of those poor bastards in debt for six, seven years. I even sold ‘em socks, finally. Loyal to a fault, stupid drunks. I’d throw in a skimpy pine box in the end to get their carcass off my place and seal the deal.
Those big money fellers cut this country like mowing a field, and built hillside mansions in Duluth, all lit up like that. I did pretty well too by the time all of the big pines were gone, and I was staying put up here in the country. I bought up cutover highlands for a pittance, and sent my bastards out to plant stock in the summers. There was still enough timber left in pockets to make a buck in the winter, but the boom was over, and new folks were moving in. They were just like those Finn farmers back in Esko, starry-eyed dreamers hoping to carve out a farmstead on the edge of a spruce bog. For a narrow profit, I happily peddled some of the “improved” real estate I had recently gathered. These folks would want something more from me eventually. Whoever heard of a duchy without peasants?
Or a duchess. One such new peasant, a Tauno Maki recently of Tower where he had labored deep in the mines for six years, a man who had shipped out of Tromso for the Keweenaw back when I was just a sniveling whelp in Sweden, purchased a stumpy forty acres up in Toimi from me, and brought three grown daughters into the fold. Helmi, the oldest, was the apple of her mother’s eye and the salt on my hard-boiled eggs. She took the tavern by storm, demanding wallpaper and privies and niceties, but I’ll be the first to say she gave the place some staying power. Boys I had never seen came in just to watch her fish pickles out of a barrel.
We ran that roadhouse for fifty years, seen a lot come and go, before I left my brittle and frozen corpse beneath the snow on a cold, cold February day long ago. That’s why I’m this now, this wispy disembodied too brainy nothing. I’m still around to tell you a story.

Chapter 1.2

It all begins with the Mutt, this half-bred kid. He’s what you would call my great-grandson, running away. I’ve shadowed him for much of the past two years, and he is damned hard to keep pace with sometimes: out to the deep woods, across broad bays in a stiff wind, down a steep ravine, up the highway in a sputtering metal box. The little mutt was always on the move, breaking camp before dawn when his breath ran in little clouds up to the trees and sheets of hoarfrost fell from his sleeping bag. His current journey has me worried, though. He is in it deep this time, deeper than before, running straight into the maw of hungry winter godlings that would no sooner blink than swallow him whole.
This adventure began on an October morning after his latest piece of theatrical nonsense. I would have turned in the little monster if I was anything more than the impotent know-it-all I am cursed to remain. Barring that I figured it best to stay with him, watch his back like had become habit, study how he figured his way at the next fork in the road. He had the instincts of a wolf, and crossed open country just as fast, sometimes outpacing his own good sense.
He drove his pop-can German bus up to the Kawishiway landing before dawn after only a couple hours of sleep, snatched his canoe off the top, and loaded it to the gunnels. He was traveling heavy for a change: a whole pack full of rice, beans, coffee and oats, must have been over a hundred pounds of food, in addition to all of the winter equipment. He packed a puffy winter sleeping bag, a stout spruce-green dome tent, a hatchet, an ice auger, two spare paddles, cross-country skis, big sheets of blue plasticky tarpage, and plenty of rope. All that bulk and several smaller bags holding aluminy knick-knacks, his usual kit, all those items that remained after months of casting aside useless gadgets that did not aid his light living. And last, though certainly not least, a stack of books sealed inside a rubbery pouch. The canoe was packed to the gunwales, and sat low in the water. He jumped into the van and backed it thumping over spruce roots until it was deep in the bog and well out of sight from the parking lot.
Mutt shoved off into the current, the canoe tippy then right, and I watched the birch woods on the banks as we slipped upriver under first light. He sprung a moose right off while quietly rounding a reedy bend, and the big bull heaved a wave off its back as it post-holed through the muck and up into the willows. It looked back with slow eyes and a snort. But Mutt and the moose did not see, as I would too much in the weeks to follow, that hairy, silver-white demon that stalked this country. And the demon saw me, of course, peering vigilant from the canoe, and backed into the birches. That one I could smell, even, a reeking vinegar mist on the wind.
The Mutt made camp after a short paddle, back up a little side marsh off the river, and hid the canoe deep in the reeds. He slept fitfully for the day, and we traveled all through the next two nights, portaging under a full moon. On the third day he stashed the winter gear in a south-facing ravine on the lower end of a long lake, and made a temporary camp closer to shore under a tight canopy of spruce tops. Dusk came earlier every day, and he would paddle out on the lake in the evenings to jig for lake trout. He ate well most days, fresh fish for the taking. I watched him use up the last of the butter after a week, a bright orange laker frying in the pan, and saw the wisps of smoke tease past his nose. I moved in closer, but nothing! Even when drifting up into the shower of sparks when he prodded at the fire. No heat; no savory, stomach-groping fish smoke.
The nights were growing colder. I noticed a glaze of ice some mornings, watched his breath become cloudier, saw a few flakes gusting under overcast iron skies. We took a side trip up to Knife Lake, according to his map, and he poked around campsites, checking for coals to see if anyone was still out in these parts. We stopped on the island of that old root beer lady who wintered here till she died, and he stepped over the old foundation of her cabin. He was skittish here, so close to a portage and on the border route, scared of his own shadow, but he slept out under the stars inside those old stones, without a fire. We made it back to the camp a few hours ahead of the first winter storm. Winter set in just like that. Two days later he was walking out on the lake and carving holes with the auger to get at the fish.
When more snow had set in, he harvested some willow rods and cut them up all the same. Then he weaved the willow patiently into a framework, must have taken half a day, and over that web he stretched the tarps, with a layer of spruce boughs between them. The result was a space big enough to pitch the tent inside, though he did not do that. He made a thick floor of more spruce boughs. The wigwam opened with a flap to the fire pit, and that he used for short stretches at night. Once he had heard something and clambered up the ridge to see a dog team pulling a sled along the north shore of the lake, and he heard planes regularly, it seemed, casting his eyes around the horizon. For my part, I saw that stinking demon twice again, once working its way up the west end of the lake about a mile off, not even bothering to stay out of sight, all hunched over and its knuckles dragging in the snow, and ravens sweeping out of the trees trying to chase it off. The second time it was in a treetop out on the nearest island, watching the mutt jig through the ice, me scribing nervous circles around him, reciting a verse from the finn Kalevala. It seemed to be learning to stay downwind.
Except for a few fishing holes nearby, he never ventured onto the lake unless it was snowing. I’d watch him there, and geez, he could be the spitting image of his great-uncle Tauno—my boy—right down to the way he gutted a trout. Tauno had been a sorry disappointment in the end. He was always in the woods, ran a trapline up beyond Toimi all his life. Tauno went native on me early, never brought in a decent wage in his life, no interest in the roadhouse whatsoever. Took a real shine to his own grandfather, who raised him up as much as me, I’ll venture, the boy always eager to go up and help in the garden or bring in some firewood.
He did have some ambition, I admit, prospecting and timber-cruising up in this boundary country. Always had a knack for sniffing things out. He once canoed down the Cloquet, when he was only but twelve, with a cousin from up the road. Tauno’s story was that he found an arrowhead on a gravel bank, flipped it in the air, and they resolved to go wherever the thing pointed and hunt grouse. I don’t remember if they got any birds, but they got into a section of white pine, ancients like I had first seen up here in ‘92. Up in the middle was a real odd one, needles all gold, lit up like a Christmas tree.
I snapped up that parcel sight unseen before those boys could blabber too much. The tall pines were really dear by that time, and it cost the mills more and more to get at them. But I had a shot at leasing a steam hauler, and I rallied my lean bastards, pulled them off of pulp work, and had them felling pines in two weeks, before the deed had cleared even. I made a handsome penny that winter. But I stopped them short of that golden tree. It was just something about it what didn’t seem like lumber. Wasn’t sure how it would pay off then, but it did so, handsomely. We planted in some new ones to make it look bigger and I just let that piece ripen for awhile.
Tauno grew more distant with the seasons. He spent a lot of time up at the co-op that used to get by up in Toimi, talking red politics with old Finlanders, snoose trickling through their stubble. Crazies with too much time on their hands, for my part, and I tried to keep him from their like. I kept him out working with the bastards until he was sixteen and told us he was moving up to his grampa’s farm. I bought him things, tried to send him to the trade school down in Duluth, anything to keep him from those lazy Finns. He was polite and all about it, but said no thanks to everything. It’s not like he hated me, I wouldn’t think. He just didn’t care for my ways. That one gave me a chill.
His sister stuck close, though. Hella was churchy as weak wine, really devoted to her ma, and helped out in the store whenever she wasn’t at school. Bookish, even for a girl, always her nose in something musty and old, or the newspaper. She went off to St. Paul to learn nursing, but returned soon after and worked at the old folk’s home in Two Harbors. She called her brother a bolshevik, a word I had thought meant something about cattle. I don’t think he was all of that in the end—he bailed out of that co-op as ready as anybody—he just liked things simple is all.
I watched both of those children die, both older than I was when it finally come about. Hella went slow with a cancer, and everybody close to her around the bed at some point that day when she finally passed. She floated up just like you see in the movies, still in her nightie. Her daughter and son-in-law sat there sharing a story so that they didn’t even notice her gone for a few minutes. Nothing you could have done about it. Tauno went away worse, on a bright day in March, snowshoeing a short trap line he still worked up in the Seven Beaver swamp. His right foot broke through thin ice on a creek, with only a few feet of water beneath. He must have torn his groin or broke the hip because he showed a lot of pain. His left leg splayed out, the heel of the snowshoe on the right wedged in the muck, and he just couldn’t manage a way out of that fix. It was pure hell to sit there and watch him suffer, my own son of seventy-seven years, however distant. He passed on just before sunset after that icy water wicked the heat out of him for four hours, and got calmer all the way, even taking off his mitts and hat. He didn’t float up like Hella, not at all. I saw a shadow, quick like an otter, slink down and melt into the red-black current that swirled around his leg. I lingered until they found him at dawn, the headlights on their snowmachines glaring off his stiffened frame and sparkling the leaves of frost that lay etched upon his open eyes.
That’s me, the lingerer. I just sit around and watch things happen, don’t smell ‘em happen, don’t hear ‘em happen, don’t feel a change in the breeze or a gush in the air. Night and day, rain or shine, indoors, outdoors, up and down, watching. Fifty-two years now I’ve been doing it, hitching rides with a living mind. A tagalong, a fifth wheel, a speck of dust. You better believe it’s tedious and maddening, like watching blood dry most of the time. But sometimes the action heats up a little.