So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power…?
—W.B. Yeats

On the last day of high school, I went into the alley to say goodbye to Big Al. It was late afternoon, lowering clouds, the sort of sky Mom had always called “the farmer’s friend.” Jimmy Collins—Jim, as he’d been insisting I call him since October, but I liked Jimmy, name and boy, because it contained “my Jim”—Jimmy had told me the word for that atmosphere: crepuscular. We gifted each other new words like treats. I’d said crepuscular sounded like an unseemly growth, it even has puss in it. Jimmy liked that but gently mocked, “Unseemly, eh?” and pretend-punched my shoulder. But Jimmy had skipped the whole last day of school. In two months he’d be heading off to Western University in London. I wanted to go there too, but I’d be heading to the University of Ottawa. Dad was so sad, I just couldn’t argue anymore. It wasn’t that I was leaving, it was leaving itself. We’d both already been left. I was on my own.

I found my spot in the alley where the bushes helped hide me. There was a depression in the ground there molded by my bony ass. The dry winter and spring had caused the packed earth to turn into velvety dirt fine as dust. The rain that threatened would never come, a bad joke.

I didn’t have to wait long. Big Al appeared from the brittle bushes a bit farther along and came hopping towards me. I’d not had to call, he’d known I was there, I know he knew, Big Al knows a lot, good and bad, crows are brilliant. He was big as a chicken but not squat like well-fed hens (mine), streamlined, built for flight and fight. Though Big Al would never fly again. He’d been made a joke, another bad joke, because any bird walking on the ground looks comical. Strutting roosters look funny too. Look at Fred Faucher thinking himself cock of the walk (ha-ha … Ok, Fred’s got a good ass on him, it’s just that he’s such an ass).

It was Faucher hacked Big Al’s wings—with garden shears! I’d Googled the subject of wing-clipping. The flight feathers could grow back in a year if the clipping had been done correctly. But Faucher had destroyed Big Al’s wings, near killing him.

Faucher had always acted like Big Al was his property. He had some claim because he and the posse had tamed the crow and named him (after an abandoned nearby Residential school, Alexander Mackenzie’s, which was known only as Big Al’s; boys drank there and supposedly had sex with the sluts; I’d gone in once with BFF Naomi, and there was human shit). They’d lured Big Al with bits of their junk-food lunches tossed at distance, then drawn him in, till he was hopping about their feet like a pet.

They’d taught him to talk, or at least to say one word: Fuck. So that our school had a mascot, this humongous crow hopping up and down the alleyway looking for Faucher’s posse and cawing “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

And we’re a Catholic school! Tekawitha High, still with a few nuns and Brothers teaching. Once when a foreign missions priest, primarily a Spanish-speaker, was visiting, our flustered Spanish teacher, Sister Georgina, told the cocking-eared man that the barking crow, el cuervo (nice touch that), was playing a game of cowboys-and-Indians the children had taught him (“colonizers and indigenous peoples,” she’d sputteringly corrected), and was warning a pretend Native child to “duck, duck, duck.” The frowning priest had asked but why el cuervo would call to un pato? A long pause. Big All cracked the air articulately: “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The class broke up, Sister Georgina buried her face in her palms, and the priest turned smartly on his well-heeled shoes.

The story immediately became Smiths Falls legend. Dad said they were still retailing it at Canopy Growth, which was dangerous when the workers had been sampling the product. He himself would laugh just telling that story about the story, which was lovely to hear.

But that’s the only funny thing in Big Al’s story.

The wing-hacking had happened in October, by which time Faucher had grown bored with the idea of a crow pet, and after I’d managed to befriend Big Al over September. I’d tried to teach him Mary, but by then he’d learn no other word. Faucher and posse had succeeded because of their numbers and repetitions over lunch hours and skipped classes.

Per usual, Dad had dropped me off on Sime Drive. Faucher had gathered a crowd on the other side of the chain-link fence, posse and sluts pressed against it with claws gripping through its diamond spaces, even some poking beaks. But there’d been only scattered tittering when I ran up to Big Al, who’d alarmed me at distance for his standing dead still by my place near the bushes. I could see he was shivering, and the closer I got the worse he looked. Dropped to my knees I saw that blood was dripping continuously from the tips of his wings onto the dusty dirt, then into my hands. Only Faucher stayed to watch when I sat and took the shocked bird onto my lap and, equally to hide my crying, bowed my head against its glistening black neck.

I recognized Jimmy Collins’ voice coming quickly from beyond the fence: “What the fuck, Faucher!” Big Al stirred and croaked “Fuh” as if a bird’s last word.

When I got up the nerve to glance, there was no one at the fence, no Faucher, no posse, no Jimmy. Morning classes had started, I was alone with a dying crow. … I heard scraping, didn’t have to look to know they were Jimmy Collins’ knees level with my head. He stayed only a minute, said nothing, but before he left I felt his large palm on top of my head—no patting, no roughing up, nothing but warmth and, strangely, strength. I smiled small into Big Al’s neck and shivered lovely through my whole body, and felt the good feeling go to my hands and get into Big Al.

He was having none of it, reviving and struggling in my hold. So I set him down and brushed him into the bushes. At least the bleeding had slowed to nothing, almost.

When I biked back that evening the butchered ends of the wings were crusted over, like burnt plastic. He was over the shock but I had to leave him still in discomfort. I’d brought chicken feed, which he’d begun pecking up. At least he wouldn’t die.

The next day I’d heard kids whispering during study period in the library, telling excitedly how Jim Collins had kicked the living shit out of Fred Faucher at the abandoned-school hangout. I steeled myself and at lunchtime casually approached the posse on pretense of asking the least-threatening slut where she’d bought the charming black lipstick. I glanced: Faucher’s left ear looked ruby raw and freshly crusted where he’d had his spiral piercings torn, and his face—his whole big fat Faucher head—looked like he’d got too much sun.

Now, at our end-of-summer parting Big Al was perched alongside seated me in the alleyway, looking kind of comical, but for the one black beady eye that gave nothing away. What does the world look like when you’re seeing it from two differently focused eyes? What if one side looks lovely and the other all scary? Isn’t it bad enough to have to hop about awkwardly without arms, like you might pitch onto your face? Poking about like you’re looking for some lost forelegs or something? The view’s better from the sky? But wouldn’t you still have those separate eyes seeing two different worlds way down there? The so-called “birds-eye view” has it all wrong, because instead of seeing the bigger picture, you’re likely still dealing with two views that never agree.

 I had to smile because Big Al standing there with regrown wings looked like some little professor whose gown dragged. He only half-sidestepped when I reached to take him and transfer him—his lightweight always surprised me like he defied gravity—onto my lap. There, he showed nothing, kept his head poised and alert in that prideful pose that I simply adored. Until he stretched his neck and parted his beak:

“Fuck.”

“Don’t say that, Al, please. Say Mary. Mary, Mary, Mary …”

I’d been trying over the summer to teach him my name. But Big Al would only always telescope his oil-slick-tinted black neck as if issuing a call to arms:

“Fuck.”

On YouTube, I’d found a documentary about crows. They communicate smartly with each other, teach their young, and remember across generations. I made crows the subject of my public-speaking assignment: “Bird-Brained? I Do Not Think So.” Mr. Archer gave me an A+ and asked if I knew why some of the girls, Naomi especially, had been crying? I dunno. Jimmy had smiled small and nodded when he walked past my desk. His eyes were oily but he’d not looked away. That’s when I fell in love with Jimmy Collins.

I held Big Al before me and tipped his beak towards mine: “Don’t let fucking Faucher fuck with you when I’m gone, Al, don’t—”

“Fuck.”

I inhaled sharply and screamed at his beady walleyes—“Mary!”—and was instantly ashamed. “Mary, Al,” I said resignedly. “Mary Mary Mary.”

I set him besides that depression whose dirt was as fine as the moon’s, got up, and dusted off. Waggled a hopeless forefinger: “I’ll see you when I come home, probably not till Thanksgiving. Stay away from Faucher, please, Al.” Faucher wasn’t going to university, of course. “Faucher’s a mean—”

“Fuck.”

I had to smile, puff through my nose and shake my head. “At least you’ve got that right.” I walked away quickly, crying over a stupid—

“Mary.”

I turned, bug-eyed: “What?”

But Big Al never performed on command, spoke only on his own terms, which had made Faucher come close to torturing him even before the wing-hacking.

“What did you say, Al?”

“Fuck.”

I waited, he waited. He blinked first, turned away, and commenced hopping towards the hedge, dragging his long strong tail feathers. So hopeless, grounded birds. But Big Al’s flight feathers had grown out over the past year! Had the supposedly brilliant blackbird forgotten he could fly? That’s one thing no human can teach you, big boy, and certainly not me. … So clumsy grounded, with only those claws for manipulating things. Imagine if Big Al had tiny arms and hands tucked under his wings. It’s credible that birds so armed and with millions of years of evolution would rule! Especially if they’d grown bigger, and they did come from dinosaurs. Maybe at one time girly arms and weak hands had been a good evolutionary trade-off for wings—and now Big Al doesn’t even get the benefit! If there was any justice in evolution, a man-sized and well-armed Big Al would tear off Faucher’s fat head and …

Big Al had come hopping from the bush … with something in his mouth: something pink, which was increasingly defined as he approached, a thing like a … rat fetus? He dropped it at my feet. I was too weirded out to do anything but stare. Then I crouched. It was an unborn bird, or partly born, maybe even a baby crow whose egg had been broken open for … I remembered something else from the crow show, which I’d omitted from my speech: crows are cannibals.

It hit me like a manure spreader’s first spraying of sheep shit. I’d been out here all this time playing I’m just a lonely girl and creating a Disney fantasy about my special relationship with a crow, with some stupid title like Mary and the Crow. But Big Al was an alien creature that ate the offspring of other birds, even other crows! He was as different from me as the lambs we regularly sent to slaughter! He could be offering me a last supper!

I turned and ran … and running remembered something else I’d learned: that a tamed crow, like a cat, will bring prey to its owner. Barn cats did so, Panther regularly left dead leverets on the back stoop. No one could explain the behaviour, though one egghead theorized that the animal was not offering its beloved owner tribute but teaching her how to hunt, so that one day she could look after herself in the big bad world. I picked up speed—

Sudden sound like the thump of wind on a window, black wings beating beside me. “Mary, Mary, Mary.” He was alongside at about four feet aboveground, my wingman.

I stopped dead in my tracks and he flew on for a space. Not only my name but Big Al flying? I was dumbfounded.

He hopped after me when I went and stood over the aborted chick. Ants had already moved in on it. Its beak was moving, whether looking for food or mercy or attempting some curse against the universe I sure didn’t know. But I wasn’t grossed out. That’s nature for you too, Mom had always said. I slid my toe next to it and kick-flicked it into the bushes—Big Al hopped backward. Then just stood with that beady black eye on me. What would this creature do next?

He permitted me to pick him up and hold him face-to-face.

“What the fuck, Al, you fucking crow you.”

The beak in parting: “Fuck … Mary.”

I laughed (I can’t say that verbal coupling hadn’t been on my mind recently, my burden of pre-university virginity; I’d resolved to have a go with Jimmy; not at the abandoned Big Al’s school—yuck—but at home when Dad was working, even the coming Sunday). I bowed deeply swinging Big Al back between my knees like when in gym Ms. Muscles Miranda makes us throw the medicine ball and launched him into the darkening yonder … where he remained aloft—magnificent wings thumping the crepuscular air; he was soon but a receding dot. The point bore left, kept on, circling back, growing … returning to clumsy touch-down near me.

“Al, what the fuck?”

“Fuck.”

“Mary!”

“Mary.”

“Yeah! Now this time don’t come back, bird-brain! Or Faucher will torture you to death when I’m gone!”

I picked him up and again flung away with all the strength within me. I didn’t imagine what I distantly heard: “Fuck … Mary.” That time he continued flapping away until a vanished period in the distant dark.

Next day on Sime I caught up with Fred Faucher, who was already strutting about town like a working man. I have to admit, he did a pretty good strut.

“What’s up, Freddy boy?”

I’d startled him alright. “Nothing, like, I guess. Uh, you’re Mary, right? Mary McGahern. I guess you heard I got on full-time at Canopy Growth.”

“Remember you asked me about living on a farm?”

“Uh, yeah.” He smiled, relieved. “But call me Fred, like.”

“Why don’t you come for a visit this Sunday and see for yourself. My da—my old man has to do overtime at Canopy.”

His brow lowered in the Faucher Cro-Magnon way (crepuscular Fred, though it was sorta cute). “Yeah, sure. But like, what about Jim Collins? Aren’t you two, like, sorta …?”

I was near going cross-eyed with the strain of self-control. “Don’t worry about Jim, Fred, Jimmy’s not the problem. See you Sunday after lunch?”

“Yeah, sure. Uh, but what’re we gonna do?” The imbecilic Faucher grin. “Do I need to bring anything, like?”

“Oh, as my mother used to say: Anything can happen on a farm, and usually does.”

– Gerald Lynch