Three Ravens

He quit the priesthood after only three years. That mystical, magical number was enough. He'd spent nearly all that time breathing the fine dust of small ecclesiastical libraries, ceaselessly turning Aquinas inside out, upside down, pulling Merton apart line by line.

He traded that for the coarser dust of a large university library, consuming archaeological texts with the appetite and ardent fervor of the newly converted. His nights he spent in the blues and jazz clubs scattered around Boston and Cambridge. He brought the same driven intensity there, listening with his whole being, the music descending upon his too open ears like manna. He suspected, he knew the musicians had what he lacked. Divinity flowed from their fingers; every note perfect, singing out to him, mocking his yearning need. Every wrong note twisted and teased, redeemed, re-inserted into the musical line, until it was revealed to be the right note after all.

He left the university five months shy of his degree; he couldn't resist the dangled plum of an unsupervised archaeology job based out of Santa Fe. The next twenty years he spent scouring the Southwest, burning to bring his life into balance, certain the key lay with the ancients, buried somewhere in the arid crust of the desert. He would lift each rock as though hoping to find some occult text chiseled beneath. He would parse pottery shards as though they were complex, difficult runes; piecing together shattered, weathered remnants with the patience of a perched redtail. Hoping to complete.

Over the years he trained his eye to spot the smallest anomaly. He could read an inconsistency, a clue in the landscape at speed, a plume of hot dust chasing his jeep. This skill had yielded discovery after discovery, each one incremental, none of them the epiphany he sought. Now he pulled roughly to the ditch at the side of the rutted dirt road, a flash of quartzite in the distance where there shouldn't have been.

Ducking through the barbed wire, he walked, dodging cacti, the fifty yards to the stone. Squatted, picked it up, heavy, sharp-edged. Balancing on his haunches against the dense weight of it, he looked where it had been, a shallow depression in the friable soil quickly giving up its small measure of coolness. He muttered to himself "Dirt. Just more damn dirt."

He was about to drop the rock, just drop it, weary to the bone, when he stopped himself; instead he carefully replaced it where it had been. Gave it a final firm nudge with the heel of his hand, returning its weight, its full energy, to the earth. Somehow aligned, he thought. He stood up quickly, too quickly; two steps away took off his hat, wiped his brow, staggered, then fell like a chainsawed ponderosa.

His head hit the rock and did not bounce. The blood that began from the wound worked darkly down the rock and under, seeping into the sandy earth, as though trying to get away from the blistering sun, seeking the very deepest shade.

The three ravens that had been closely watching left their fenceposts, each landing exactly six feet from his head, at different points of the compass. They began walking towards the small line of dripping moisture that was slowly wetting, enriching the soil, knowing, in the way that ravens know, exactly what they wanted.