“I remember the beginning, though,” he says. There’s a pensiveness to his voice that gives me pause and I look at him. Really look at him. He relights the lone candle in our crooked candelabra. He seems to sink into his memories as shadows play on his face. “I remember being hungry. So hungry.” His hand absently moves to his stomach as the ghost of the feeling sneaks over him. “I didn’t know my name or where I was from, but I was alive. It didn’t make sense to me how knowing that mattered, because I couldn’t remember dying. Just knew that I was alive. Again.” He lifts his head. “Because of you.”
His words strike me, in a good way. The gratitude in his voice thick. It makes me see how much more important my gift could be in the right hands.
He empties out the milk crate and flips it over, setting the candelabra on top.
“Was the crow always with you?” I ask.
He scrapes the leaves off the stone ledge, making a place for us both to sit. I bunch up the pile of old costumes and a dingy quilt for our backs.
“I think so. I didn’t quite feel whole to this world, if that makes sense?” He scoots back, stretching out, ankles hanging off the edge. I sit beside him, cross-legged. My bare knee presses into his thigh. There’s something about our touch that feels deeper than anything I’ve felt before. It’s like we’re part of each other. That day forever bonding us. A Death Talker and a Soul Walker.
“Where did you go?” I ask him. I don’t remember what happened afterward. I woke up a few days later, after the death flu had run through me. I tried to ask Papaw about it, about what had happened to the boy, but he wouldn’t say. Only that I should never try to talk the death out of the dead again, and I haven’t since.
Rook pulls at a dry leaf that’s tangled in the fringe of my cutoffs. He twiddles it between his fingers. “I found myself wandering along a highway. Lost. The sun disappearing behind a truck stop. I felt no sense of direction toward home or if I had one. But hunger pushed my young feet forward.”
I swallow hard. In all these years, I never heard his half of the story. I soak his every word into my bones.
“This woman—Alma I think her name was—found me. A scrawny child hidden away in a dingy truck-stop bathroom in the middle of the night.”
The thought of it breaks my heart. I squeeze his hand, a silent sorry.
“She eyed the empty lunch box I’d stolen from the mechanic’s garage. It only had a crust of a sandwich and a capful of cold thermos coffee. It barely dented the ache of my hunger. I’m sure it alarmed her, but she acted like happening upon me was all in a day’s work.”
His amused smile eases my guilt a bit.
“Half hour later, with a clean state of Georgia souvenir T-shirt and belly fully of pancakes, I was snoozing away on the red bench of a booth. Until the voices of law enforcement came to collect the ‘runaway.’ That’s what I heard them call me. I couldn’t say I was a runaway, but I also knew I no longer had a home.
“Then came this nudging. It was urgent and pressing. Something from inside myself told me to get up. To go outside. It wasn’t my own voice, but it came from within. So strong, I couldn’t deny it. The lawmen chased after me, out the diner’s door. They tried to stop me. Acted like I was a wild animal about to bolt.
“The pavement was freezing underneath my bare feet. My breath puffed white from the cold. Stars littered the sky, and I yearned to go there.” Rook pats his chest where the desire lay.
“The officer told me not to be scared, that I was safe now. I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn’t scared, but instead a caw came. A cry so loud it felt unearthly. And in a wink, my vision tunneled until the lawmen disappeared, and my mind slipped into black.”
“The crow.” My words a whisper in the small space.
He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s how it is every time, just before I disappear from here. I’m grateful for him, though. The crow. He got me through that first winter.”
An errant firefly wanders into the cave, like the pulsing light of a stray soul.
Rook’s story weighs heavy on my heart. His, too, it seems, as he sits there, letting his thoughts swirl a bit longer. I think he had to get his story out of him, as much as I needed to hear it. It reshapes everything I thought about him, how I brought him back, what it meant afterward.
And what it means for the way forward.
What if he’s trapped in this life because he is this half version of himself? A slave to the souls he carries. Do they keep him alive, those souls? But if he’s not a Soul Walker, he wouldn’t exist at all.
But what if there was a way to set him free? To release him of this duty? I made him, when I talked the death out of his dead body. Maybe I could set him free. But would he return as the boy I’d saved or as the crow? Or neither.
“Don’t do that,” Rook says. His hand comforting mine. “Don’t let your mind wonder if you could have done this or should have done that. This is where we are now. Live in the now. It’s all we can do. Okay?” He tips my chin up when I don’t look at him.
“Okay,” I say back to him, trying to push away the guilt that lingers.
“Besides...” He scoots forward, sits up taller. “Look at this incredible paradise you have here.” He fans his arms wide as if marveling over this gift he’s been given.
“Ack. Don’t call it that. It’s just a—”
“Treasure trove, a time capsule to your childhood. What’s this?” Rook mocks an overexaggerated surprised face. From the corner, he pushes aside a pile of leaves and unearths the old crank-style record player Adaire and I played with. The cracked wood lid lies helplessly on its side. The nest from some animal clogs the front where the speaker doors open. He pulls the debris out.
“Oh, wow, it’s still here!” I hop up and help him move it. “I think I can get it to work.” We set in on the stone ledge. I fiddle around with it a minute until sure enough, I get the old Victrola’s handle to crank. Some record, the label worn away by the elements, sits on the center stem.
Warbly muffled music pushes through the front. The sound a scratchy static until it hiccups as the needle hits a melted bump in the vinyl and skips to another part of the song. It hits the dip on the other side, starting itself over.
“I think that’s Dolly Parton,” I say, and I strain an ear, trying to focus on the woman’s voice before the loop jumps and repeats again.
“Go ahead,” Rook urges me. “Sing me something terrible. You know you want to.”
“You are an asshole, you know that.” The album finally gets past the warped spots, and I let loose. Crooning to “Jolene,” begging her not to take my man, even though she can. I’m pretty sure Rook’s sides are about to split from laughter.
“What are these awful lyrics?”
“They’re about a floosy of a woman trying to steal Dolly’s man.” I try to sound indignant on her behalf. I flip the forty-five over to play the B-side.
Rook gently grabs my hand after I drop the needle. His thumb and forefinger fiddle with the gold initial R ring on my pinky. I know what he’s thinking without saying it. I feel it, too. How much time do we have left before the crow makes him leave? Maybe he’s only here long enough to help me with Adaire’s death—a restless soul with unfinished business. Eventually he’ll be gone again. Something I’m not ready to think about.
I don’t remember when we finally fell asleep, but it’s the chattering of birds that wakes me. Not a soft musical twittering, but a loud squawking at odd intervals.
It takes my brain a stretched second to register where I am. The early-morning sun streams through the tree canopy. A filtered light plays along the cave’s stone wall. The night’s rain layered on top of the earthy smell.
The rattle of the chain ladder shuffles back and forth against the kudzu vines. Quickly, I turn on my side and find Rook is not there. I prop myself up on my elbows, about to ask him why he’s climbing up instead of flying, when Davis’s head pops up.
