A Murder of Crows

Van Gogh, A Flock of Crows

One of the definitions of murder is “a flock of crows.” It’s in Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries. but a literal-minded fool at the Audubon Society says it should be stricken not just from scientific but also from sensible discourse generally, to which I respond with the following story:

         It was early March, with freshly fallen snow on the ground, and John and his four-and-a-half- year-old toddler Molly, whom he tended to coddle,  were taking advantage of the blue sky and windless day to get a little relief from their cramped living quarters. They were walking hand in hand, with their earmuffs and boots on, when  an  Audubon  member on horseback passed by, making a condescending tip of his cap to both father and daughter.  

       Molly  pointed to the horse, telling her father, “Hossy,” and he had replied,  “Yes, Molly, hossy.” 

Not far from the father and daughter, the  Audubon horse deposited a small pile of steaming manure on the snow, triggering a strange series of events John  would not soon forget. Molly who had watched the horse’s  rump all the way, pointed to the steaming pile and asked her father, “Poop?”

       “Yes, Molly,” her father answered. “Poop.”

       As if continuing a game they were playing, her father, to turn her attention away from the poop,  pointed to a scraggly, prickly evergreen bush to their left,  under which crouched a cat. “Look, Molly,” her father said. “Under the bush. There’s Kitty.”

       “Kitty?” Molly asked excitedly. That’s what they called the pink-eyed feral albino cat they had seen a number of  times before. John had never seen an albino cat before, nor had anyone else in the neighborhood because they were rare as hen’s teeth and horse’s toes. Molly squinted to see the cat whose whiteness had lost its luster and was now a sickly gray as a result of its homelessness. 

       Kitty would not allow anyone to get close enough to pet her, not that any adults would be  tempted to, and even most children looked upon Kitty with fear and a few with loathing. “Ugh!” John had heard one disgusted teenage boy say. “Somebody should shoot that ugly bitch.”

       John looked around, trying to figure out what Kitty might be stalking. She appeared to be just hiding when he had first noticed her, a short while before, but now she seemed in a predatory posture, with her gaze fixed on the poop. Skittish and unsociable, never knowing where her next meal was coming from, Kitty looked starkly undernourished. But John never heard of cats eating animal or human excrement and doubted Kitty ever would stoop to poop, even if she were starving.

       “Daddy, wook,” Molly said, pointing again, this time at the huge ancient sycamore tree, to the right. With her slight speech impediment she pronounced her l’s as w’s. Her father assumed, or at least hoped, she would outgrow the impediment. But who could say for sure that a slight speech impediment was not the precursor of far more serious genetic problems.

       “Look at what, Molly?”  he asked. “The sycamore tree?” Because of a genetic glitch in their make-up, the bark of sycamore trees lacks the gene that makes the bark of most trees elastic, like human skin. Consequently, as the width of sycamore trees expands with growth, the bark splits annually in response to growth and then subsequently heals, giving a sycamore tree the appearance  of a scarred veteran of sylvan wars. Since sycamores are long lived, sometimes as long as one or  two hundred years, they look scarred to death, pale but in some respects like beautiful corpses. That Poe never wrote a story about sycamores seems shortsighted on his part.

       “No, Daddy,” Molly said, shaking her head rapidly to emphasize she was not pointing to the sycamore tree. “Wook at the bwack birds.” 

       “God!” John exclaimed, looking at the tree, astonished at the number of crows perched quietly in the leafless sycamore. Had  hundreds of crows been perched there for some time without his having noticed them or had they just suddenly swooped in noiselessly?  “Where did they all come from? How long have they been there?” John asked. Of course, he was asking himself these questions, not his toddler daughter. The silent, motionless crows occupied every limb and branch of the tree, making the sycamore look black instead of its customary mottled white and gray. John always found crows fascinating when dense flocks of them swirled in the sky like a black tornado. He wondered whether it was only one crow who led the rest of them to suddenly change direction,  or did they all collectively instinctively know which direction the flock was going,  as an oil spill flows in the direction dictated by the composition of the soil and tilt of the landscape.

       John’s wife Daisy had been murdered late at night, coming alone home from the tavern, carrying that white pocketbook whose glass mesh exterior glittered under the streetlight  like tiny diamonds. Because the neighborhood they had moved to was crime-ridden, he had tried to dissuade his wife from carrying the bag, especially at night, because it was an invitation to the predatory gang that lived in the nearby housing project who roamed about the neighborhood after dark. Turning state’s evidence, one of the gang members had subsequently confessed to the police that she, John’s wife, had refused to give up her bag, even with the knife at her throat held by a hopped-up member of the gang. When she started screaming, the hopped-up member had slit her throat. 

       There had been nothing of value in her bag, nothing but lipstick, a compact, and other makeup. Daisy couldn’t pass a mirror without refreshing her makeup. She had been eighteen with a clear, glowing complexion when he married her, but after the birth of Molly, the bloom  in her cheeks had disappeared completely, like a rose in an autumn drought. His drug addiction hadn’t helped, he guiltily admitted. If he hadn’t lost his well paying job as a county weights and measurement inspector after a random drug test, they would not have had to give up their ground floor apartment in a well kept up building in a better neighborhood on the other side of the city. He had never smoked or drank, not even coffee or tea. Growing up, he had avoided all stimulants, except for crack cocaine. Haunted by guilt he had vowed after his wife’s death to kick his addiction, for Molly’s sake, but he hadn’t managed to yet. He had a two-year degree from a community college, where he had studied animal husbandry. Weights and measures was not the first job he had lost because of drugs.

       “Here, Kitty,” Molly called when she finally saw the crouching cat. But the cat hadn’t heard her. It hadn’t heard her not  because her voice was faint but because almost all albino cats are deaf, as white cats in general are inclined to be.

       As if on cue, one of the crows flew down from the sycamore and alighted not far from the pile of poop, but instead of approaching the pile, the crow strutted back and forth, glancing all around  as if wary of predators. Did the crow consider John and Dolly potential predators? He doubted it because crows  were supposed to be among smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, with the exception of course of homo sapiens, the thinking hominid. Crows had been around homo sapiens long enough to know which humans to avoid.  But if it wasn’t John and his daughter  the crow was wary of, was it the albino cat under the prickly bush? Was the crow even aware of the cat under the bush? John was pretty sure it was aware, because not only are crows smart, they also have acute binocular vision. They can see much farther and clearer than people. Why then did the crow suddenly turn its back on the bush where the cat was hiding and stand stupidly in the snow on one foot, staring at the pile of poop from which it was only a foot or two away?

       The albino cat took advantage of the crow’s apparent lapse of alertness by stealthily and with increasing speed racing  toward the winged creature, hoping to pounce on it by surprise. But as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and saw that the cat was in lunging distance, the crow acrobatically lifted itself by its wings into the air six feet above the ground.  Instead of sinking its teeth and claws into the bird, the cat sank its pink nose deep into the pile of poop. Before the cat had regained its balance and composure, and extricated itself from the poop, the birds in the sycamore took flight en masse, and swooped down upon the cat, clawing and pecking at it unmercifully. In a half a minute the bird was bleeding and blinded, one of its eyeballs hanging by some kind of thin ligature or integument out of its bleeding eye socket. Afraid that the crows would turn on him and his daughter next, John  picked up his frightened daughter and hugged her protectively. Turning his back on the carnage, he put more distance between him and the crows  by walking rapidly away. When John dared to stop and look back, the cat was a writhing blob of blood-soaked skin, bones,  and intestines. Most of the crows had already taken to the blue sky. John felt relieved that he and Molly  would not be attacked by the crows. 

       “Daddy,” Molly murmured, “Kitty dead.”

       “Yes, she is,” he answered somberly, taking out a tissue and drying her dripping red nose, “or she will be soon.” He wondered as he continued to carry his distraught daughter in the direction of their dingy living quarters whether the crows had lured Kitty out of the prickly bush with that solitary crow feigning carelessness. Were crows that smart? Had they attacked Kitty simply because she was an abomination,  a freak whom mother nature had assigned crows the responsibility of culling from the herd of normal living creatures? He was not sure  what to make of it all. He wondered if Molly would always remember the shocking incident when she became an adult. When he looked up, not far from where they lived,  and saw a black murder of crows so large that it blocked  out the sun,  he was sure he would never forget. 

                                                                                                               Robert Forrey