Amalia and the Crows
Amalia befriended the crows by accident. When her husband, César, “took a job,” as he said, in another state and slowly stopped calling her on Sundays after Mass, she took it as quiet permission to do all the projects he’d disallowed during their 27 years of marriage. In her first act of aloneness, she painted the dry shutters of their stumpy, brown house the juicy pink of ripe prickly pears. Sanding the splintery shutters in preparation was just as unpleasant as César had predicted many years ago when she’d first suggested repainting, but when she smoothed the first stroke of hot pink against the soft wood, she felt the movement vibrate down her arm and into her chest, as if a musical string had been plucked within her body. Feeling like a divine instrument, she painted every shutter in careful layers, and then the front door, too. The neighbors called the color “loud.” Amalia called it perfect.
Next, she bought tiny, brittlebush-yellow chicks from the local feed store and put them in the long-empty coop that came with the house. The chicks brought fresh life to her dusty yard, peeping and scratching at the dirt with comical determination, like children playing at being adults. They grew with astonishing quickness, transitioning from puffballs that huddled under the heat lamp to awkward, long-legged birds that pecked at each other when food ran low. Amalia became concerned when several started emitting patchy, long squawks that were clearly a teenage version of rooster crows. Ay, she thought, the neighbors will complain.
Amalia did not mention the success of her bright shutters and her growing chicks to César when he called; she’d never been one to say, “I told you so.” But, she felt emboldened enough to start an open compost pile for her garden trimmings (minimal) and food waste (maximal), much to the satisfaction of the local skunks. The compost pile, which César had adamantly refused to sanction for decades due to a fear of attracting rats and making their sparse, flat yard look “trashy,” also perturbed Amalia’s neighbors.
She could admit that the skunks were not an ideal addition to Ocatillo Street, though she liked the way they pranced across her yard, carrying their dainty tails aloft like parasols. And, while their stench sometimes hung so greasy in the air that she could taste it, their obvious enjoyment of her compost pile felt like a private kudos, a pat on the back that she would never get from César. So, Amalia was almost reluctant to see the skunks abandon her yard when the crows asserted dominance over the wilted cabbage, coffee grounds, slimy cilantro, dried petunias, and the rest of the mixed organic detritus that her new, single life created in a pile in the southeast corner of the yard.
Once the crows discovered the heap, they claimed it expediently and with no mercy, diving fearlessly at the skunks like black harpoons from the sky. The skunks proved cowardly against the noisy birds, loping away rather than standing their ground. Adíos, skunks, Amalia thought, as she watched the last one wiggle under her fence and trot off into the desert sunset like some lily-livered bandit from an old, black-and-white western.
“Hasta la vista, Stinky,” she muttered, and then shook her head at her own silliness. She pictured César’s incredulous face whenever he caught her talking to herself, and she felt instantly self-conscious, her hands squeezing the dishtowel tightly, creating cream-colored lines in the folds of her wide knuckles. Sighing deeply, she carefully relaxed her fingers, slung the dishtowel over her shoulder, and gazed slowly around her living room, verifying that she was alone and free to mutter. Up on the power lines that ran in front of her house, two crows cawed victoriously.
At first, the prevalence of the crows in Amalia’s yard made her a bit uneasy. Her great-aunt always said that the hoot of an owl foretold death and the caw of a crow served as a warning, but as a child, Amalia could never understand what the warnings meant. When she heard the crows cawing in the palo verde tree that bloomed in Títi Marta’s front yard, Amalia knew she had been warned, but had no inkling of why. What was she supposed to do differently? What was the message? The crows of her childhood were unsettling and unclear, and these days Amalia wasn’t in any mood for spooky messages; she was a grown woman with no time for all that nonsense.
The crows acted guarded around her, too, always keeping an eye on her if she went outside to fetch the mail, to add to the compost pile, to water the droopy marigolds in their cracked pots on her front steps. Her presence made the crows scatter nervously, feathers fluttering, cawing loudly to one another in warning. Their fear pleased her; it felt like respect.
Amalia had an excellent view of the compost pile from the window over her kitchen sink, and she often watched the crows while she did the dishes. One crow would scout the pile, fly away to collect its peers, and return to eat together as a group. The scout crow never gorged himself on the tastiest bits of the pile before fetching the others, which seemed so equitable, so thoughtful. The skunks never did that; it was every skunk for himself in the compost heap. The crows were also much pickier than the skunks, which ate everything. The crows liked grapes, but not citrus; tortillas, but not cantaloupe; eggs, but not fibrous kale stems. Their choosiness felt classy, somehow, as if the compost pile was not a heap of garbage, but rather a collection of treats to be sifted through with care.
One still spring day when the air smelled of sticky creosote, and the dust was mostly staying on the ground, Amalia looked out the window and found that the crows had pulled all the avocado peels out of the compost heap and created their own mini-pile five feet away from the central heap. She went outside, gathered the brown peels, and dropped them into the trash bin. If the crows felt these peels were not worthy of the compost pile, so be it.
A few weeks later, when the creosote was blooming yellow and the beavertail cactus were sprouting pink buds, the crows grew especially loud. She looked up from the book she was reading on the porch and saw them attacking a rat that had clearly been headed for the compost heap. Her first thought was, Thank God César is not here to see that rat. Then her brain slowed as she watched the crows attack as a mob, beaks flashing, swiftly killing the rat before eating it. They swallowed chunks of fresh rat flesh with the cool remorselessness of professional assassins, squawking loudly as they ate. Amalia wondered if their satisfied caws were a warning to any other rats in the area. She hoped so; she found that she liked the idea of her compost being under crow protection.
After a few weeks, Amalia’s initial unease about the crows’ warnings wore off entirely; instead, she looked forward to the sound of their caws approaching as they flew up the street or swooped in from the desert. They were certainly more entertaining than anything on TV, and she often watched them from her porch. The crows seemed to converse the whole time they ate, picking through her discards, discussing the best pieces, and flying away while chatting about the meal they’d just had, leaving a straggler or two behind to guard the pile.
One Sunday, the phone didn’t ring after Mass for her usual check-in with César. Amalia felt surprised to discover that she did not miss him, though when he first left, she had sometimes found the house oddly quiet without his MMA on the TV or his baseball games on the radio, which he insisted was the only way to really appreciate baseball.
“You have to truly listen to follow the game when it’s on the radio; it’s better than TV. Real fans are radio people. Don’t you see, Ami?” he’d asked her too many times. But she didn’t see, and honestly, she didn’t care. She didn’t miss the sound of baseball on the radio, and with the crows in her yard now, there was plenty of noise. None of the new noise was radio ads with stupid jingles designed to sell car parts or antacids for old men; Amalia felt she had upgraded her soundscape significantly.
After months of daily visits from the crows, Amalia started to feel distinctly that they were sometimes cawing at her about the items she added to the compost heap. The lookout crow, whom she had privately named Loupe due to the way he studied her from above with a critical eye, watched her adding yard trimmings, or tamale husks, or carrot tops to the heap. Loupe seemed to comment on each item in a variety of low caws and clicks, and then either fly off to collect his crew or–and this was more and more common–just caw loudly as if reporting the daily menu to his fellow crows within earshot.
Loupe often remained on a high perch while his buddies feasted on the pile; perhaps his job was to ensure their safety. Amalia began saving a few special scraps for him, which she placed in the yard after the departure of the big group—she refused to think of them as a murder. Loupe craned his neck and watched her carefully as she put his meal out, waiting for her to go back to the porch before coming down for his private reward.
The habit she developed of saving Loupe his own meal made Amalia feel like a housewife from the olden days, the kind that didn’t work and wore tailored dresses to vacuum their carpeted homes. Had any such wives ever existed, or had they only been characters on TV when she was little? Amalia was not sure, but she imagined Loupe coming home from a hard day’s work, briefcase under his wing, to find the meal she saved for him still warming in the oven. She didn’t have carpet, and her bosom would never fit in a tight TV-dress, but she chuckled to herself, doubly pleased by the image and her ability to make herself laugh. Then a third wave of satisfaction rolled through her when she realized she could laugh as loud as she wanted, and no one would ask her in an irritated tone, “Hey, what’s so funny?” No one was there demanding to be let in on the joke.
On a particularly dusty Thursday during a particularly dry summer, Amalia went to the feed store for more chicken scratch. Her chickens were producing eggs now. She felt like a homesteader from Little House on the Prairie. So capable, so independent. Plus, every egg offered proof that César had been wrong for all those years when he said, “No, no, no!” to filling their coop.
The chickens had very little personality, especially when compared to the crows. The week prior, Amalia had witnessed one of her Rhode Island Reds trying to fight a reflection of itself in an old mirror leaning against the shed she was cleaning out. The fight lasted for hours; she had to shoo the hen away to make it quit its frenzied self-assault. Amalia decided that she felt no guilt about consuming such an idiotic bird. Better to put you in an enchilada, she thought, as she ushered the tired hen back to the coop.
But the crows were different, smarter than she’d suspected, aggressive but also charming and sly. So when she went to buy chicken scratch, she asked the whiskery shop-keeper at the Blooming Desert Hay & Feed Store what to get for crows. With no judgment on his lined face and not a single word, he added a huge bag of peanuts in their shells to her cart.
At first, Amalia had thrown some peanuts onto the compost pile, but it felt wrong, like dirtying up the clean peanuts. So she filled a few old pie tins with peanuts and placed them on the ground several steps away from the compost. The joy amongst the crows was evident from Loupe’s first caw to his peers. It was a demanding caw.
“Come now!” he seemed to call, “Come see!”
They came, they ate, they rejoiced, they fluffed their feathers to maximum fluffiness. They picked up the peanut shells in their shiny beaks, flew up to the power lines, and dropped them so they would crack open on the hot sidewalk, ready for consumption. The yard smelled like warm peanut butter and sounded like a celebration. From her creaky, plastic folding chair on the porch, Amalia watched the crows and felt as if she were hosting the world’s best party. Everyone was having a great time, and she didn’t have to make small talk with anyone.
After the peanuts, Amalia expanded to sunflower seeds and some sort of seed-brick that looked like a horrible granola bar, but which Adalberto, the whiskery feed-store owner, assured her the crows would like. She also bought dried mealworms, crispy chapulines, raisins, and fresh grapes, which were Loupe’s favorites. These treats never went on the compost pile; instead, she placed them in the pie tins that she attached to the top of a rusted café table that she’d dragged to the center of the yard when it became clear that the crows felt safer off the ground. Her café table was the life of the neighborhood.
She named more crows. Stumpy had one mangled foot. Chismosa never stopped squawking, regardless of whether anyone was listening, and regularly flew around with her mouth wide open. Sugar doled out affection left and right. Panzón ate with enthusiasm, evident in his thick torso. Eagle was invariably serious and judgmental, and he spent hours rubbing his beak back and forth on the power lines as though sharpening it.
When the crows began bringing her gifts, she knew they had named her in return. She would’ve given up her air conditioning for the whole summer to know what they called her.
Old-Food-Pile-Human? Ground-Based-Treat-Bringer? Earth-Bound-Crow-Worshipper? She smiled at the thought.
On the Sunday when César finally called and suggested a separation, the crows brought her their first gift: a shiny piece of plastic, a thick strip of tinsel that people put in their apricot trees to keep the birds away. The crows placed it in their empty pie dish on the rusty café table as if to say, “We are smarter than those people and those other birds.” Amalia took it inside and used a magnet to display it on her refrigerator, as she had done when her boys were little, their hot hands shoving papers at her, practically yelling, “Look what I made, Mama! Look, look!”
The crows’ gift was instead given in silence, like a test, to see if she would notice. Her joy about the gift bubbled inside her, and she wondered if she should be more upset about the separation, which she knew really meant divorce. Should she feel abandoned? Sinful? Sad? She felt around inside herself, searching, but she didn’t feel any of that. Looking at the glittering plastic stuck to her refrigerator, she just felt important.
Amalia began talking to the crows. They were talking to her, after all. It was only right to talk back.
“Hey, Loupe!” she would shout up at him as he rested on the telephone line in front of her house. “Loopy Loupe! I got some crunchy grapes for you at the market today!” Out the window, she might affectionately shout, “Chismosa! Your chisme is too loud! I’m trying to watch TV in here!”
By the time Amalia signed her divorce papers, nearly a year after César’s departure, she was convinced that many of the crows knew their names. It felt like progress, the measurable kind. It felt real.
The gifts continued, and she had to build a small altar in the living room on top of her grandmother’s old upright piano to display them. Four soda can tabs. Three screws. One playing card (a 7 of clubs). Several food wrappers with shiny interiors. Two dented keys. Several beads. Five bent Jarritos tops. One small crystal. A quarter, a dime, and a 100 peso coin. Two earrings (not a matching set). One plastic gecko toy. A fake pearl hair clip. The silver cap of a lipstick tube. Each time, the crows put the gift in the empty pie dish. Just one gift at a time; they didn’t want to spoil her.
By autumn, the crows no longer feared Amalia. When she shuffled outside to leave some pea shells on the compost pile, they hopped out of her way, but few bothered flying up into the tree or onto the power lines anymore. She greeted them by name. They cawed and clicked back at her. She fed them the two roosters that had come from her batch of chicks, cleaning and cooking the carcasses first, of course. Only the best for her crows. This solved the cock-a-doodle-doo problem with her neighbors, and the crows seemed delighted since they were voracious omnivores. She imagined they also enjoyed consuming their competition for her avian affection.
With the rooster issue fixed, the neighbors began complaining about the crows. She got an earful about it from both Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez when she was fetching the mail. The crows were too loud, too messy, and “a little creepy,” they said. Amalia told them to park in their junk-filled garage if they didn’t like caca on their cars, and then she laughed and walked back to her porch. César, who always believed in “keeping the peace,” would’ve been appalled. Amalia settled into her plastic chair, cinched the too-short belt on her cotton bathrobe, wiggled her tiny toes, and returned to shucking peas with the crows, Loupe standing vigilantly on the low porch wall beside her like a living gargoyle.
Amalia’s younger son, David, visited in the early winter and marveled at her crows. He watched his squat little mother from inside the house as she fed them, chatting to them nonstop as she unpinned sun-bleached laundry from the clothesline, as she walked across the yard to feed her hens, and as she shuffled to her mailbox on the sidewalk. The crows regarded David with suspicion, mistrust, and an obvious fear that he was going to interrupt their routine. He didn’t. He came and went, telling his mother she was becoming “some kind of bird witch” in her old age.
“Works for me,” she had replied breezily. He’d expected to find her shaken at the loss of her marriage, but instead he discovered that she had grown particular about what was allowed in the refrigerator (no beer!) and where food scraps went (not in the trash!). She’d admonished him when he put banana peels on the compost pile, saying, “No, no, Davey. They hate banana peels. They will pull those peels out of the pile and leave them all over the yard.” Confused, David asked, “Who will?”
“My crows!” Amalia replied with exasperation, gesturing to the front yard with both hands to make her point. David followed her gesture with his gaze and saw no fewer than 15 crows in the yard, on the fence, on the phone lines, and standing atop a rusty café table.
At the airport, David called his big brother, Martin. He didn’t bother with small talk, instead stating immediately, “Marty, man. Mama is getting so weird. She named all the crows, and she buys them treats. Treats, man! Remember when she wouldn’t even buy us Fruit by the Foot?!”
But Martin just laughed his slow laugh and said, “Cálmate, little brother. Relax, she’s probably just lonely without dad.”
But Amalia was not lonely. Her collection of gifts grew. Adalberto from the feed store ordered special treats for her crows. Kids stopped on the street to watch her feed them, giggling, their dark eyes shining with the young wonder derived from seeing something for the first time. They’d seen crows and ravens and roadrunners their whole lives, but now they saw those birds anew. It was as though Amalia had peeled the birds like black fruit, revealing that they held sparks of magic inside, hidden just beneath their feathers.
When school started in the fall, the children began stopping at her gate nearly every weekday during their walk home, saving snacks from their lunches to share with her crows. The young audience called her Tía Crow, or sometimes Títi Cuervo, and they gasped when Loupe landed on her shoulder, and they laughed when Chismosa performed the Peanuts-Are-Delicious Dance, mouth open, comically kicking up spirals of fine dirt. Amalia and the crows were the best entertainment in the neighborhood. All the kids said so.
In the last bit of that winter, when the sun shone daily but the thin air refused to hold any heat, Sugar and Panzón disappeared with a few younger crows. Amalia worried. Had they grown sick, gotten lost, died in a storm, joined a crow commune? Not being able to ask the survivors pinched at her. She gave the remaining crows extra treats. Nearly all of the crows took peanuts from her hands now, and the old regulars were downright affectionate, but Eagle would never even consider such a thing, and he clearly judged his compatriots harshly for fawning over a human. Amalia could almost hear him thinking: sycophants, sell-outs, suck-ups! You shame the Noble House of Crow! Eagle took himself too seriously; it amused both Amalia and Loupe endlessly.
Amalia’s collection of gifts deepened. A dried, white vertebra. A laminated baseball card with milky, curling edges. A snail shell. Two sparkling black arrowheads. A collection of smooth, polished pebbles that she eventually recognized as part of the gravel from a yard renovation a few streets over. Amalia did not return the polished gravel pieces to the neighbors’ yard. The treasures all went atop the piano, where she laid them out like a mandala. Each new gift meant rearranging all the others, a meditative act, creating an ofrenda for her living self. She thought of it sometimes as the altar to me.
The days were always sunny, and the crows kept her company when she was home, which was most of the time. When she was indoors, Loupe sometimes landed on her windowsill to ask for food, or maybe just to check on her. Amalia had happily retired from her job at the middle school cafeteria three years ago, but in the spring, she began working one day per week at the feed store when Adalberto, in a parched whisper, asked her if she was interested. He was old and wanted a day off. Plus, she got an employee discount, and she liked the sort of folks that visited the feed store. Most were quiet and knew what they wanted, but a few asked her interesting questions that she knew the answers to: When would there be more baby chicks in stock? Can you keep chickens and turkeys in the same coop? How can you get cholla out of goat fur? No one ever asked about crows.
One day after coming home from a quiet shift at the feed store, she found a small ring in the center of the empty pie dish on the rusty café table. It was a gold ring, with a single clear stone, so dusty that she took it inside to wash it with dish soap. It looks like an engagement ring, she thought, an old one, the kind from her parents’ generation, not like these new rings with so many stones. A simple gold band with just one perfect, circular diamond, made to last, made to keep.
She’d never gotten a diamond ring from César; instead, she’d gotten pregnant and married fast, a plain silver band on her finger and a promise of something better someday. But Amalia had insisted they not waste money on another ring. Spend it on the boys, the house, the groceries, the health insurance, the new roof, the baseball uniforms, the plumber, the transmission; she’d insisted. There were always more practical ways to spend any few dollars that they managed to save. The silver band was “good enough,” she’d said. César, never a romantic about anything other than baseball, was pleased to agree with her about the ring.
Amalia slid the clean ring onto her ring finger and was surprised to find it fit just right. Tight enough not to fall off, but not so tight that it made her short finger look like a tiny sausage. She held her hand out and looked at it. The gold shone, making the skin of her hand appear rich and warm. The stone blinked alive in the light, sparkling.
Amalia’s breath had gotten stuck in her lungs, and she pushed it out in an audible “woosh” as she realized with astonishment that she actually had wanted a real ring all these many years. She had wanted to feel intentionally chosen, like a first pick, a top priority, a prize. All her life, she prided herself on being pragmatic, but now, as she scrutinized her bejeweled hand, she came face-to-face (or face-to-hand?) with some ignored piece of herself that wanted to feel cherished, worthy, even a little spoiled.
Amalia coughed, her eyes watered and dripped, and she laughed aloud at herself. Crying over a crow-gifted ring! She hadn’t even cried over the divorce. She hadn’t even cried during confession when she had to tell the Padre about her divorce. But this? This makes her cry?! She laughed even louder at her crazy self.
“Caw.” she heard from the open window, “Caw! Caw!” It was Loupe, bending his neck side to side, regarding her intently with one eye, then the other. She twisted her hand around to show him the ring, wiggling her fingers daintily, like a cartoon princess.
“Thank you,” she said gently, her words carrying through the window screen. “I love it.” Loupe watched her for a few more seconds before jumping off the sill and into the air, where he ascended to his usual perch on the power line. He looked secure and relaxed, a crow “about his business,” as her boys would say. Smiling, she wiped the tears that dripped from her nose and hung on the soft skin of her jaw.
Amalia went to the kitchen to wash her hands and some fresh grapes, noting with pleasure how the ring sparkled in the faucet water, catching the desert sun shining in through the window above the sink, peppering the tile countertop with dashes of white light and tiny rainbows.