Crow and Copper

I was twenty-seven years old the summer I started following Leroy out to the old lampblack plant, and I will state that up front because everything after that makes more sense if you know I was a grown woman making her own choices, bad ones included.

The plant sat on the outskirts of Maradi, past the last of the market stalls, down a road that was more gravel than road. I drove my little beige Corolla out there after closing the shop, which meant I always arrived smelling like eucalyptus and cut stems, which meant the soot got into my hair immediately and stayed there until I washed it twice. That was the deal with the place. You walked in clean and you walked out grey.

It had been a lampblack plant once, back when people still burned oil in lamps and needed something to color it black. Now the walls were black themselves, decades of carbon pressed into concrete, and the whole main hall had this quality where the light just died about six feet from the windows. Leroy loved it. He said it was the only honest room in the city.

I got there at dusk on a Tuesday in July. The gatepost had a dead crow hanging from it, wings spread, tied by the feet with copper wire. That was for the weevils, apparently, an old tradition his grandmother's generation used against the millet plagues, and Leroy had brought it back because he said a place needed a warning at its door or people forgot what they were walking into. I had gotten used to the crow. That should have told me something about where I was headed, getting used to a dead bird strung up like a lantern.

Inside, he was already at work. He sat on the floor under the copper fountain bowl, the big one in the middle of the hall that hadn't held water in thirty years, and he had a vice clamped to a folding table and a piece of bone in it. Sperm whale tooth, he said, though I never asked where he got those and he never offered. He was cutting a koi into it. A koi skeleton, all ribs and spine, done with pins finer than anything you'd use on a human eye.

Leroy was twenty-nine that summer, two years older than me, and we'd been together three years by then. We met at a music venue near the university when I was twenty-four, his band playing third on a bill of five, and he was wearing black trousers with silver thread down the seams and I remember thinking that a man who dressed like that on stage either had enormous confidence or none at all. It turned out to be both, which is probably why it worked.

Scrimshaw was his other thing. He'd started on fake ivory, then bone, then somehow real ivory that he claimed came from old piano keys and dead estate auctions. He carved whales and crows and fish skeletons, and he'd gone from doing it in our apartment, which smelled of bone dust and made me sneeze, to doing it out at the plant, which he said had better light for working at night, which was a lie, because the plant had the worst light of any building I've ever stood in. He went out there because it was his. That was all.

"Hey," he said, without looking up. The scribe pin made a small dry sound against the bone. "You're late."

"There was an order. Two hundred white roses for a wedding on Saturday." I set my bag on a crate. "Nobody buys white roses in July. They had to special order them from three towns over."

"White roses at a wedding is asking for it," he said, and I laughed, because that was the kind of thing he said, and the kind of thing I'd spent three years finding charming instead of strange. The line between those two things was thinner than I liked to admit, even then.

He worked another few minutes and I watched. That was most of what we did out there, early on. I watched him carve and he talked, about the koi, about how the skeleton had to be cut in reverse so that when you inked it the negative space made the fish. Then he put the pin down, blew dust off the tooth, and looked at me the way he looked at things he was planning to cut.

"I brought you something," he said.

He reached into the canvas bag by the fountain and pulled out folded black fabric. Trousers and a vest. His old stage trousers, the ones from the year we met, the ones with the silver thread, and a vest to match, both of them soft from wear and too small for him now because he'd put on weight since the band played every weekend.

"Put them on," he said. "If you want to feel like part of the night, dress like it."

I stood there with my bag of florist things and my floral print shirt and I did not move. The hall was quiet. Somewhere in the walls a pigeon moved, and I heard its wings once and then nothing.

"It's your old outfit," I said. "From the shows."

"So it is." He turned the tooth over in the cloth he kept for handling it, checking his work against the light, which was failing. "They fit you. I checked against your jeans while you slept. Call it a guess if that bothers you."

I looked at the black fabric and I thought about the drive home, the gravel road, the shower it would take to get the soot out, the orders waiting in the cooler for Saturday. The sensible version of me put the trousers back on the crate and said another time. But I'd been driving out to a soot-black building to watch a man carve dead things into older dead things for a month by then, so the sensible version of me was clearly losing ground.

There was a rusted press machine against the far wall, something that used to mash pigment or carbon or whatever lampblack plants mashed, and a gap behind it about the size of a fitting room. I took the clothes over there without saying yes or no, which he took as a yes, which was the arrangement we were falling into without ever naming it.

The trousers were stiff at the waist and soft at the knees. They smelled of stale beer and sweat, his sweat from a hundred gigs, and the smell was not pleasant and was not unpleasant, it was just his, concentrated, like pressing your face into the collar of a shirt he'd left on the chair. The vest buttoned wrong at first because I did it in the dark, then right. The silver thread caught what little light came through the windows.

I stepped out from behind the machine and he stopped moving entirely. He did that sometimes, went completely still when something interested him, like a heron over water.

"Well," he said.

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's a thing," he said. "Come stand in the fountain."

The fountain was dry and copper-green and etched all around the rim with koi, and I climbed the two steps into it in borrowed trousers and his vest and my own work boots, which ruined the whole line of the outfit, and he didn't say a word about the boots. He picked up his scribe pin again and went back to the bone, and I stood in his fountain in his clothes while the last light went out of the hall, and I felt, for the first time in maybe two years of running the shop, like something other than tired.

He didn't touch the tooth again that night. Instead he set down the pin, wiped his fingers on the cloth, and said he wanted to show me something outside before it got too dark to see it at all.

We walked out through the door and down the gravel to the gatepost. The crow hung there the way it had hung the first time I came out, wings spread wide, tied by the feet with a twist of copper wire that caught the last of the light. I had noticed it on my first visit and decided not to ask, the way you decide not to ask about a lot of things in the first months of knowing Leroy.

"So it's not just decoration," I said, standing a few feet off, because the thing had been out there long enough that I didn't want to stand directly under it.

"Millet weevils," he said. "Old tradition. You hang a crow at the gate and the plague passes you by. Farmers used to do it all through this region. The birds went out of fashion with everything else." He reached up and turned the crow a little with one finger, careful, almost gentle, the way he handled the whale tooth. "I brought the