A crow at twilight - On The Other| David Scribner's column from the Berkshire Other

A crow at twilight

By David Scribner

I.

My name is Theophilus. You know me as an American crow. I keep an eye on things. I'm keeping an eye on you.

I wasn't always a crow, in case you're wondering about these words before you. Once, I was an owl, my species' mortal enemy; once, a cat. And before that, a snake, a lion, a horse, and a dragon. And very, very long ago, I was a scribe, and learned many languages. In that life I wrote with string. I still like to collect bits of string, in remembrance of those times. That script was three-dimensional, so learning your flat alphabet was a snap.

I once met a crow who said he could remember eleven past lives, but he was exceptional. Most of us can recall only seven, excluding the current one. What else I've been I don't know but I know that I was.

Crows, you must realize, are misunderstood. It's due to poets. They set up expectations. People see us drop down to nibble on a piece of road kill, and assume we've only got a taste for death. Don't you believe it. You may be unwilling to admit to a hankering for the flavor of decay, but crows are keen on life — in all its incarnations, past, present, future — and just expired. And wherever the human life and spirit is most vibrant, we'll be there, day and night, awake and in sleep. Look about you — above you, right now. Are you in a meeting house? Look in the rafters, above the heating ducts, see us peering through skylights? Are you in a theater? Have you checked out the proscenium? Are you sure there's not something watching you from the dark corner of your studio, or from the back of the sofa in the corner of your living room? Don't you feel us looking back?

I am a twilight crow. Others of my kind prefer daytime, some the night. But I am of neither world, you could say, and do my work between. You might be surprised to know that my preferred perch is one you probably could see if you'd known to look for it. It's a ledge above a restaurant in the middle of the city where on one side I can watch for any morsels dropped out back and on the other observe what's happening on the street. I need to watch humans. They're my dream.

I'm having one now.

II.

It's after dusk in August, a warm opaque evening. Down below, I'm watching a man — a tall, skinny creature, all limbs — his torso no thicker than a cattail. His head and neck sway above it like a blackbird on a reed. He's paused by a lamppost near the doorway of a bar, Lach's Lounge as you name it, to set down a coffin-shaped wooden case strapped across his back by an olive canvas cord.

It's a portable harpsichord, though no one else knows that yet. How do I know? When I said I caught sight of him, I meant it. I settle into the beams of light that come from him, like bundles of being, and the minute I'm enclosed within them, it's like an elevator. I'm there with him, next to him, as close as I am to you, closer in fact, and everything that's there and he is I can become; everything he knows, I experience.

I'd noticed the fellow when he appeared at the corner of a street called Fenn — I like that name. It reminds me of the marais where I used to feed. It was nearly dark. He'd stopped at first, then decided to walk this way, through the valley of banks and past a massive church, all the while grappling with the burden on his back, bent over as he went along. He passed between a pair of sidewalk strollers like a moving shadow, hardly noticeable upon the grid of concrete, glass, metal, mortar, plastic and tar.

With a heave he's lifted the strap over his head and placed the box edgewise on an outcropping of sidewalk that juts into the street like a low stage. He's leaned one arm against the post, wiped his forehead with his forearm.

Among the evening walkabouts he bears the aspect of someone from another time, or someone who did not know what era it was, an artisan perhaps, with his sandals, loose black pants held up by suspenders over a white shirt, all topped off by a round, stiff brimmed, black hat. How old is he, you ask? His beard is black, his skin is weathered but firm; he could be any age. He's on a journey, yet he's never left.

Dusk enfolds him like a dark mist from the pavement and cement and gutters still gritty with last winter's sand. It creeps from the marble sides of City Hall, and thickens in the night air. A line of cars glides by, headlamps blooming like fireflies. The traveler puts his hands in the small of his back, lifts his arms toward the endless darkness, then takes a seat on his wooden case.

He sits there, and smiles and touches his hat to passersby, even if they don't look down. He has a remote, distinguished way about him, though dressed so uncommonly, with such instinctive old-fashioned courtesy as to be a passenger upon a train, waving from a window to those left behind on the platform below his window. Some give him a glance, no more, curious but uneasy about acknowledging as acceptable for their city streets a fellow in odd dress of uncertain origins or purpose.

I watch him as he studies his surroundings: the block-long one-story building to his left, vacant except for the pub behind; the four lights suspended above the intersection blessing the suppliant traffic like censers dispensing movement. Across the street a sporting goods store, coffee house, and the restaurant above which I sit.

Behind him flickers red neon framing the bar's dark windows. Above it is square, glossy sign whose blue type proclaims, “Budweiser, King o….,” the remaining slogan and the place's name flaked off. An amber street lamp ignites, deepening the shadows in an adjacent shadowy doorway to what had once been Genovese Travel. It displays a sun-faded poster of a Tuscan landscape. Through that passage you could enter worlds within worlds, I'd venture.

Down at the corner, the sidewalk and the side of an old brick schoolhouse across the street, are suddenly awash in a pale white luminosity that can only mean one thing: King Kone is open.

At the intersection crosswalk, a young man waiting for the lights to change inclines at an odd angle to the universe in his white T-shirt and tan shorts. Impatiently, he fidgets with the pedestrian signal button, his hungry attention darting up and down the block. His eyes keep returning to the man across the way, the man on the coffin-shaped box. When he has the right of way, he hustles across the intersection corner to corner, past the seated man. He's eager to find his friends already jostling each other at the King Kone counter. The silhouette of a red hand pulses in his wake.

In the halogen haze, cars with open windows are lined up waiting for a green light at the intersection. Their drivers lean out over crooked elbows, right hands tapping a beat on the steering wheel. They don't notice the figure on the sidewalk. They're casting their eyes upward toward stars they cannot see through the incandescence, stars that are shining anyway upon them and upon a man seated upon a harpsichord on Fenn Street; a couple do not break stride before a display of fishing rods; fragments of laughter issue from Lach's Lounge like lightning on the horizon.

Around the corner, at the edge of a sea of dark asphalt where King Kone protrudes into the parking lot like a peninsula of fluorescent surf, a couple with two young children sit upon a low wall, eating their chocolate and vanilla cones. Beyond them, a trio of young women huddle in conversation, and further down a group of young men sit upon a low railing, rocking their bare legs; others of their group lounge against the low hoods of family cars, licking tall cool twists of soft white ice cream.

A breeze rustles the leaves of a great oak on the city Common across the street and bats dart through clouds of moths fluttering below the domes of streetlights.

All dream of another world, and in intervals, the smallest of intervals, when city noises cease, when cars and trucks, sirens and horns are quiet, between the alternating phases of charged illumination and the growl of internal combustion, when voices are still in the night air, they hear old harmonies, plucked note upon note. Tones come over the rooftops and well up into the sky. They make a sound like constellations.

The man with the harpsichord has opened his instrument, and begun to play.