by Cat Rambo
Much, much worse came later, after he died, and the school became like all the rest.
When I was sixteen and they finally let me leave, I tried to go home. I went back to Bears Ears, three days of hitching and walking. When I got there, my family was gone. No one remembered them. One fellow thought they’d moved over to Calamity Springs, so I went there too, but the trail was even colder there.
I had no money, no family, no home. So I signed up to serve in the War.
* * *
Once you’ve noticed something, you notice it always. I watched Jonah the Crow. I couldn’t help but notice him now.
At least I thought the crow was a him. Something about the way it cocked its head whenever Rappaccini spoke to it made me think that the two of them must share a gender.
The bird made his rounds every day like clockwork, checking to see what was happening, as though worried that he would come across a situation Rappaccini would not approve of. I could imagine the bird reporting to him, squawking out stories of inefficiencies and broken rules; informing on us all.
People ignored the crow, the same way that they ignored me. If you can’t talk, you become just part of the background.
It’s more comfortable being part of the background, being unnoticed and unquestioned. Neither the crow nor I were the first to discover that. But it’s something that had served me well, during my time in the war.
We are not supposed to talk to the Colonel about the war. Dr. Rappacini is convinced too much emotion will cause apoplexy, that his heart will collapse under the strain. He doses the Colonel with opium, which gives him strange dreams.
Yesterday the Colonel told me his leg talks to him when he’s asleep. He said, eyeing me, “Is that the strangest thing you’ve ever heard?”
I shrugged and shook my head.
“There’s plenty of odd things in war, my boy,” he said. He saw me raise an eyebrow at him and shrugged himself, although he flushed. “Yes, I know you’re not my boy. You’re just an Indian. But you’re a man, like I am. You had a father. I had a son.”
I didn’t say anything, of course. More importantly I didn’t gesture to contradict him.
He continued, hurriedly, as though to not give me time to reply, “Anyhow, the war is about phlogiston. You know what that is, how it powers the great engines that drive the city’s heart. Not as much now, since almost all of that is devoted to the war effort.” He spoke with conviction now, animated by his own words. “That’s the contradiction at the heart of the war, see! Fighting over a precious resource, and using all of that resource in the fight. They keep saying that once the war is over, humanity will advance, once it’s got all that phlogiston to devote to its own noble needs. But that will never happen. They’re too evenly matched. And too many people are making money from supplying the machines to fight the wars. It won’t stop.” He paused and lowered his voice, forcing himself calm. “It won’t stop till all of us are dead.”
If I’d been able to speak, I would have. But all I could do was pat his shoulder and hope he understood.
* * *
It’s quiet here when no one is screaming. That’s the biggest difference between here and the war: the noise.
There, it’s everywhere—the cannons’ boom, the machines’ roar, the furnaces’ blast, rockets shrieking, voices screaming. When I think of the war, that’s what echoes through my head, pushing out the smell of iron and electricity and blood and salt water.
I lied about so many things when I enlisted. They didn’t question any of it. They knew that most of the boys signing their names to enlistment papers were too young for it to be legal. But a war requires bodies, and it is not choosy about what kind they are.
I was assigned as a driver to a captain. Even now, when times are so desperate that they are taking thirteen year-olds, they don’t allow the People to be soldiers. We were support staff only. I couldn’t fight, but I could fly the little ornithopter that took him from ship to raft, from one battle to another.
The first time I saw the captain, I thought he was ugly. His face looked as though someone had thrown it together from lumps of clay. But his eyes were dark and long-lashed, like a woman’s, almost too pretty. He was tall but stooped, as though to hide just how tall he was. His hair was so black it had a blue sheen underneath, like sunlight on a crow’s wing.
He didn’t like me anymore than I liked him. He didn’t think he needed a driver; saw it as a way for the high command to restrict what he did. But after a while, he came to realize that I was useful and discreet.
He didn’t start talking to me, really, until after a trip in which the side got blown off the ornithopter. I’d kept flying, pulling forward as shells clattered and boomed beside us.
It was early morning and the sun was rising, revealing us. I knew I had to get us to safety, and I steered up, trying to gain the shelter of the clouds even as a shell exploded a few feet to my left, throwing smoke and fragments across the windshield, darkening the interior before the slipstream swept it away, a metal shard rasping across the glass.
The captain knew better than try to direct me, for which I was grateful. So many people think the best response to a crisis is to inject themselves into it. Instead he kept quiet and let me fly. Some corner of my mind, not occupied like the rest of it with the simple matter of survival, was warmed by that trust.
I earned it. We were shaken but unscathed by the time we landed. The only mark of the journey was the arc the shard had cut into the windshield, a curve that glinted in the full morning sunlight.
I was so glad to be alive.
The captain said, clapping me on the shoulder, “That was fine flying.” He mistook my flinch at his touch and apologized.
I just nodded. Let him think that I didn’t like other people touching me. That was easier than the truth.
I don’t know when I realized he wasn’t ugly anymore. It would’ve been some time after it was already too late. I had already fallen into love.
I didn’t do anything with it. I’d never felt like that before. So I kept it like a hand-warmer in my pocket. Every once in a while I stole a glance at him and put the picture away in my mind, and used it to warm my heart, in the nights when I could hear the shells and everything was cold and lonely and too, too close to death.
I thought so many times about revealing myself to him. Telling him who I was.
But what did I expect would happen? Every time I played it out in my head, it never went the way I would’ve wanted it to. That dream required too much taking-in at the seams. It didn’t fit what would happen. It was impossible to make it fit what would happen.
What does it say, when your deepest yearnings are so unrealistic you can’t make them work even in your imagination? Does that say something about imagination’s limitations, or, as it seems more likely to me, does it say something about that dream?
It’s not that he didn’t like women. He did, I knew that for sure. But I didn’t want to come to him as a woman. That’s not how I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to love me in the way that two men love each other.
Was that unreasonable?
It didn’t seem that way at the time.
* * *
The crow can tell one person from another. He knows who will flap at him and who will not notice his presence. And it uses that information.
I saw it hop onto Mr. Paper’s shoulder. It had realized that he would just keep staring forward at the horizon, as he has done for three years now. The crow leaned over and grabbed a tuft of white hair in its beak and pulled, savage and fast.
Mr. Paper still didn’t react, but I did. I ran forward and flapped my hands at the crow until it flew away, the hair still dangling from its beak and blood dripping down to Mr. Paper’s back.
That was when I decided to kill it.
I couldn’t do it openly. Dr. Rappaccini would have wreaked revenge on anyone who killed his pet. I had to think the murder through as carefully as though I were plotting to kill a human. Had
to do it surreptitiously, in a way that couldn’t be traced.
I thought about violent ways to do it. Catch it in a window and smash it, or find some cat or dog to kill it. But that seemed unworkable.
Here in the hospital it’s easy enough to find poison, if you need it.
I took the potassium permanganate crystals from the Condy’s Crystals jar, purple as sunset hills. If I could get the crow to ingest them, it would surely die.
I spent today watching to see what it ate, what delicacies tempted him.
Cheese. He liked cheese. So I took a lump of greasy orange cheddar from the icebox where it was stored for the doctor’s snack and put the crystals inside. I rolled it into a lump, warming it against my flesh so it would be malleable, a yellow sticky lump with death at its center. I set it out in a room where I knew the crow would come, on a china plate on Mr. Paper’s bedside table, because I knew he wouldn’t take it before the crow.
It was a terrible mistake.
I underestimated the crow, silly though that sounds.
At first I thought my plan would work. But when has anything in life ever gone the way I thought it would? The crow hopped forward on the table, head tilted to see the cheese, turning its beak to see around it and to look with first one eye and then the other, as though weighing it.
I held my breath.
It looked at me.
It saw me. It looked at me watching it, and it realized what was going on, stabbed its beak into the cheese, not to pick it up but to reveal what lay at the core. And then, watching me all the while, it ate every bit of cheese from around the crystals but left them lying there.
It stared at me. I stared back. It was seeing me, not just an anonymous human. Me and me alone.
Who would have known that a bird could become your enemy? It seems comical. But those blank, black eyes, glittering at me, were anything but funny. It turned its head again, examining me first with one eye then the other.
I knew it would remember me. I knew it knew what I had meant to do.
But what could it do, really? It was just a bird. Not capable of speech. Or at least of communicating what it knew to anyone.
Still, it scared me.
* * *
When I was twelve, Sister Madonna came to the school. She came all the way from Italy, across the ocean, very far away. She was dark-skinned like an Indian, although her face was the wrong shape. But she looked, if you squinted, a lot like the women at home.
She was kind, too. Like Father McNeill, she was someone who managed to make all the others seem as though they didn’t matter so much. When she patted you on the shoulder, you could feel the touch much later like a ghost; could lie in bed and summon up the way that the pressure had felt, reassuring. Full of love.
I had learned by then to hide myself away. My soul was like a turtle that had stuck its head out too many times, until all it wanted to do was stay inside the shell. But even turtles like the sunshine, like to crawl up on logs and feel the fierce heat beat down upon the plates of their hard shell. Sister Madonna was like that sun, that kind and welcoming heat.
That was why I confided in her.
I might not have been able to write much, might have had to struggle with that to the point where the nuns shrilled at me for the way my letters straggled, but it didn’t mean that I was stupid.
I was clever in other ways. I could add up numbers at a glance or sort formulas fuzzed with x’s and y’s and z’s into coherency as easily as combing out a greasy hank of wool. I was quick at counting, good at estimating. That’s why I was tapped to help her when she took inventory in the storeroom, counting the papers and pencils and notebooks and all the other school supplies that they sent from the East in order to make us civilized.
It was a spring day. She asked me several times if I would rather be outside, but I was content to sit there listening to her chatter in her thick accented voice. She had a habit of humming to herself, and you’d hear scraps of hymns and sometimes whatever had been sung in chapel that Sunday.
I didn’t bring it up. She asked me first. She said, tilting her head to one side to examine me, “What’s troubling you, Vivian?”
When I came to the school, I tried to keep my old name, but this was the one they gave me, Vivian. By then it felt as natural to me as the other one. Which is to say, it was a woman’s name and therefore not something that I wanted. But then I learned that it could be a man’s name too.
I said to her, “Did you ever hear of women changing into men?”
She said, “Why would they ever want to do that?” And she laughed, but not in an unkind way.
I said to her, “I don’t want to be a girl, Sister Madonna. If I pray to God hard enough, will he make me a boy?”
She took a breath and put the box down that she’d been counting through. She looked at me directly. She said, “God has decided what you are.”
I said, “Then didn’t God make it so that I would want to be a boy?”
She said, “Maybe it’s a test from God. Is that what it feels like, a test?”
I shook my head.
She didn’t say anything.
I said, “I don’t feel like this body is mine.”
I was afraid she would turn away, that she would tell me I was a bad thing, that all of these thoughts had been sent from the devil who, apparently, was the origin of many bad things, including the Navajo language and all the old ways.
But she didn’t.
Instead she said, “Sometimes people are not suited to what the world wants of us. To know yourself in the right place is a comfort, and there is so little comfort in the world. Traditionally that’s why many men and women have entered the church. Do you think that’s where your calling is?”
I shook my head immediately. I didn’t mean her any disrespect, but I had been there long enough to know that the church and I were not suited to each other.
“Well,” she said, “sometimes what the world wants of us and what God wants of us are not the same. If you ask Jesus, he will tell you what to do. You can always turn to him. You know that, don’t you?”
I did. Most of us resisted what we were told, but I had picked out bits to keep. Jesus was love, Father McNeil and Sister Madonna insisted. I liked that. I liked the idea of someone made from love, incapable of feeling hate.
Sister Madonna was the one who taught me how to bind my breasts when they emerged, so I could pass for a man when I wanted. She taught me that men and women move differently, not because their bodies are so different but because the world looks at them in such a different way.
The first day I walked out in boy’s clothes, I couldn’t believe that anybody didn’t see I was a girl; that God didn’t look down and make me burst into flame. But it felt so natural, like I had put on shoes that had been made just for me.
At least a few of the military recruiters knew I wasn’t a boy. But I wasn’t the only woman enlisting. They would have looked the other way even if we had been some new species. That’s how desperate they were for bodies to wage their war. It didn’t matter whether those bodies had a particular set of organs or not. They died the same either way.
* * *
The crow kept watching me. Wherever I went, I could look up and see its eyes upon me. Was it that it had realized I posed some danger to it, that it didn’t want to let me sneak up on it again?
It wasn’t that though. I was its next prey.
I didn’t realize that until I saw it out in the moon garden. It hopped up on the edge of the center urn and reached out, not with its beak, but with a foot. It took a purple berry in its talons and squeezed until juice oozed out over its claws. It repeated the act with its other foot.
I remembered the marks on the cook’s arm, the festering wounds. So small to have killed her. So very small that no one realized it was no accident.
That thought came with another one. I was as crazy as any patient ever shipped back from the lines, whose mind had been blasted to bits by the sound of the gu
ns, by the deaths, by the senselessness of it all. Now I was imagining things, thinking that a bird was capable of thought, of premeditation. Of plotting someone’s death.
I went outside for a walk, to try to clear my head, but all I could do was look at the birds and wonder. Maybe they were all part of it together. Maybe they all had some plot at their heart, of revenge.... But revenge for what? For schoolboys taking eggs from their nests? For women wearing feather plumes on their hats? It seemed so trivial.
I remembered the crows watching Jonah, staring down at him from the drooping lines of a cedar tree’s branches. No, there was no mass conspiracy among the birds. I did not need to flinch whenever I saw a sparrow. I only needed to concern myself with Jonah.
But how to go about that, I wasn’t sure.
* * *
I woke, not knowing what had pulled me out of sleep. The war had left me, unlike so many, more capable of sleep than when I had entered; the soldier’s ability to grab a few quick winks whenever the opportunity presented itself.
For a moment, I thought I was back there. That I could lift my head from my cot and see the captain in the tent’s vestibule going over papers and maps while I waited in case he needed me to fly him somewhere. Anywhere.
But instead this was my room in the asylum, part of the converted slave quarters, a narrow and noisome space unadorned by any amenity. Other inhabitants of the ward pinned up postcards or silky scarves or drew on the boards in chalk, at any rate did something to make the space their own, to make it show some mirror of their personality.
I had no interest in anyone finding out more about me than they needed to. My walls were bare.
I had gone to sleep with the window open. Seattle stays cool until the beginning of July, when it hurtles into heat. I’d hoped for a cool wind to stir the stagnant, warm air. No breeze whispered, but there was something outlined in the window.
Jonah, perched on the sill. Watching me. I saw the glitter of his eyes. There was no reason to think some errant crow had come to investigate me. I had never seen a crow at night before. It could only be my enemy. Watching me sleep.
