CROWFACE. I am the storyteller, the singer of the age-old song. The big, gnarled, old tree stood like a monument to the past. I could see it from the back window of the house about fifty yards away, on the other side of the garden fence. It had been standing there for as long as I could remember. I had never looked at it before. I had walked past it so many times as a child. I had a rope swing hanging from one of its branches. I hardly noticed it was there. But in the last few days, I couldn't take my eyes off it. If you look at the top of the tree, there's a crow's nest. And, if I stood on my tiptoes I could see a big, black scruffy-looking Crow. Every morning without fail, Crowface would swoop down from the top of the tree and sit on the fence, looking around for his breakfast. And more often than not he'll find it. And you would have thought having filled his belly he would fly off and stare at somebody else's window. Instead, he sits there staring at me. When it first began it seemed rather amusing. But the longer it carried on, the more annoyed I became. I found it irritating when I was trying to concentrate on having this big old ugly thing sitting there looking in my direction. We tried to scare him off without success. He sat there and didn't move. And, it was quite disconcerting when you looked out every morning to see this scruffy-looking thing staring back at me. There's nothing particularly unusual about that you might say? I'd be there eating my breakfast and he wouldn't budge. He could almost be mistaken for dead! The only acknowledgement that he wanted to move any part of his body was when he tipped his head to one side in curiosity. Sometimes when I wake early and the sun's up I like to make myself a cup of tea, take two ginger biscuits out of the biscuit barrel and take myself down to the summer house at the bottom of the garden to welcome in the new day. And while I'm sitting enjoying my cup of tea and biscuits I suddenly notice this dishevelled-looking old Crowface with half his feathers missing, trying to sit on the garden fence staring at me again. And I almost laughed in surprise, but it wasn't funny at all. How did he know I thought to myself. And as I'm looking at Crowface and he's staring back at me I notice he seems rather wobbly and keeps his balance and sits still on the fence. A drunken Crowface I thought whatever next? So, I sit there sipping my cup of tea staring at this crow, and it's sitting there, or at least, trying to sit there, staring back at me. And, for some, strange reason it suddenly squawks and falls backwards off the top of the fence and into the hedgerow on the other side, and all I can see are feathers flying in the air and a strange kind of squawk as if it's in some kind of distress. So being the gallant Knight in shining armor that I've always laughingly believed myself to be, and in a comedy sketch that would have rivalled Charlie Chaplin at his very best, I try to jump out of the seat that I'm sitting on, and rather than moving forwards, end up toppling backwards, which usually happens when I try to move too quickly. In the meantime, there are still feathers flying in the air and squawks coming from the other side of the garden fence. The thing that I ought to mention at this point in the story is that, if you are trying to move from point A to point B as if your life depended on it, the chances of leaving point A and arriving at point B any time soon are remote, to say the least. The Chaplinesque series of events began to gather momentum because the more I tried to move the slower I became until I reached the point where I wasn't moving forward at all and I was completely frozen on the spot. Now, you would think that I might call out for help. Well, parrots move faster than jet panes or though I mistakenly thought. But the brave but sadly frozen Sir Lancelot was having none of it and was determined to stick to his quest. And, after nearly five minutes of manually trying to persuade my legs that it might be a good idea to start moving again, the squawking and flying feathers suddenly stopped. That could only mean one thing I thought to myself, and rather than having to go to the trouble of trying to get the dead bird out of the hedgerow which was not on our side of the property anyway, I decided to let nature take its course and go back and enjoy whatever might be left of my rapidly cooling cup of tea and two ginger biscuits, which I couldn't remember eating before all the commotion began. Eventually, I managed to free my legs from the imaginary bear trap that they thought they were in and go and finish my cold cup of tea and two deliciously looking ginger biscuits. Imagine my surprise when I got back to the summer house the rest of my tea had been drunk and those two deliciously looking ginger biscuits that I had been looking forward to eating had disappeared without a trace. And that literally could have been the end of the story because I could have thought no more about it. But my wife who had read about the significance of crows and their connection with the spiritual world began to feel very uneasy about what was happening and found the crow scary and wouldn't go into the back garden because of it. She always used to think that it might be one of the things that came back from another life and had decided to take the form of this enormous scruffy big black crow that refused to be intimidated by virtually anything. I could spend hours writing in the back room and he would have hardly moved an inch. It was as if he had been told to keep the house under surveillance. The theory seemed too stupid for words. I have never believed in the afterlife. As time went on I started to think that my wife's reincarnation theory might be right. It seemed such a strange idea that reincarnation could be possible. Can we come back from another life in a different form? I spent hours staring at the big black ugly crow from my leather armchair trying to figure out who it might be. And then the penny finally dropped. It was Grandpa, who hadn't been dead for too long so what was he trying to tell me? I should have realized by the fact that he had been tipping his head to one side and the only person I knew who had ever done that was him. I have some wonderful memories of him because he was a real character, not to be messed with. When he was in a bad mood nobody would go near him. He was a cantankerous old bastard, to say the least, which for some strange reason is used when describing me. The only one who wasn't scared of him was me. He would be sitting in the corner of the room in his old rocking chair, spitting fire at anybody who came within earshot, and he'd give them a tongue-lashing for no apparent reason. Because in all honesty he was as deaf as a doorpost and didn't understand what was being said to him. And I'd go marching up to him and I'd tell him off for being so silly, and he'd stare at me for a few seconds, look me straight in the eye, and he would have a broad grin on his face. He had asthma and was always struggling to catch his breath. And when he was like that he would bark at the moon. And then he could be very different. He would go quiet and he'd start shaking with fear. He started to see things that weren't there. Dad said he had been traumatized over something that had happened to him during the war but he never spoke about it. But to my grandpa, they were still alive so we went along with it. He had been like that for some time and was happy in that world, so we left him to talk amongst the spirits. And it used to be quite strange at times because without warning he would get scared of something that was in the room and start throwing anything he could lay his hands on. And I think there must have been somebody or something in the spirit world that he didn't like because my grandpa hadn't been scared of a thing in his life. After all, he had lived through two world wars, but, whatever it was frightened him. Whenever I had asked my dad he wouldn't want to speak about it and changed the subject but thinking about it now, maybe it was the grim Reaper calling time on him and Grandpa just refusing to go or it could've been something that had been locked away in his memory that had suddenly resurfaced, but whoever it was and, whatever it was about my grandpa didn't like it. He had an enormous hooked nose. A bit like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, which made him laugh. But there weren't many things he would smile about. He took great pride in the two apple trees that he had in the back garden. They were his pride and joy. Grandpa would take me out there and give me some of the apples that had fallen off the tree. But for some reason, only known to him he would never let me go near them, let alone climb them. when I asked I was always met with a stern no! Towards the end of his life, as his breathing deteriorated he'd find it difficult to get to the bathroom and would get angry if anybody tried to help him. It was almost as if he wanted the suffering to end because he had become tired of the day-to-day struggle. He didn't like people to see him like that. He had always taken great pride in being able to look after himself but as he aged he became tired of fighting. But what was he trying to tell me? That was the question I kept asking myself. The one thing that I knew for certain was that when he died he hadn't left a will, or so everybody thought but I'd always believed that he had written one but nobody had ever found it, so where could it be? And how was the old crow going to help me find it? I sat there trying to figure it all out. I must have been tired and fallen asleep in my armchair because when I woke it was dark and my wife had left me there and gone to bed. But, having slept for so long there was no point in me going to bed just yet so I decided to dig out an old cardboard box that had been given to me by my relatives who had helped to clear my grandpa's house just after he died. And I had never really looked to see what was in it. Because my grandpa had always stipulated that on his death he wanted the cardboard box to be handed over to me without being opened and to make sure that his express wish was carried out he had sealed the box completely by wrapping it up with thick brown parcel tape. He had written on it that it was only to be handed over to me when he was dead. Those were his wishes. So I began to cut through all the parcel tape that he had wrapped around the cardboard box and, eventually, I was able to open the lid and to my big surprise, there were only two things in it. There was a photograph of me and Grandpa standing under one of his apple trees in his back garden and a small key. And then I understood. He must have buried something under one of his favourite apple trees in his back garden, and he wanted me to have it. I was so lucky because I knew that the house hadn't been sold yet and we still had the keys so I went over to see my aunt who was dealing with the sale of the property and asked her if I could have the keys and go over to the house and get some apples before the property was sold. So I went over to the house with a small spade and started to dig in the exact spot at the base of the apple tree where we had been standing and dug up a small tin box which my grandpa had left me thinking would be his last will but to my complete surprise, there were two fifty pounds notes in the old tin cash box that my grandpa had buried. We never saw the old Crowface again. Robert James Keene 2024