The Edge of Winter

by Luanne Rice

  “Yes,” Joe said. “He was a man of mystery. But he sure knew how to paint birds.”

  “That he did,” Neve said.

  Joe glanced over at her. “What came first? Your love of his paintings or your love of birds?”

  She thought. “Birds first,” she said. “That’s how I discovered his work. How about you?”

  “Same thing,” Joe said, glancing up at the small oil. “My brother and I used to run wild through the woods and marshes of South County; when we got older, we’d take the long journey across Jamestown to Newport. We’d hike through the woods that became the Norman Bird Sanctuary….”

  “That’s where Berkeley painted!”

  “Yep,” Joe said. “I remember seeing him there, his easel set up, looking out from Hanging Rock, painting a whole flock of sandpipers running along the sand flats below. Pretty inspiring sight.”

  “What was he like?” Neve asked, knowing she’d just come upon a gold mine.

  “Strange,” Joe said. “He wore a cape, and a hat pulled low over his eyes. Looked more as if he belonged in Paris than out in the woods.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  Joe laughed. “Try to talk to Berkeley when he was painting, and he’d go at you with his knife—I knew better than to get between him and his easel. Just made my way around him, and looked for birds on my own. I remember how weird it seemed—to be lost in the woods, listening for thrushes, and suddenly smelling oil paint. You ever heard a thrush? They have the most beautiful song of any bird….”

  But Neve was lost in the amazement of hearing about Berkeley. “There’s so little information about him. All I know is, he was a Rhode Island native, and he painted birds better—in my opinion—than Audubon and Fuertes…and then he suddenly stopped. There were no new paintings after 1942.”

  “Who knows?” Joe asked. “I guess he just disappeared.”

  “I always wondered whether he stayed in Europe, maybe even got killed during the war.”

  “Well, there were plenty of war casualties, that’s for sure.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Neve said. She waited for Joe to say more, but he suddenly seemed intent on stowing the snowy owl form in the top drawer of an old wooden file cabinet.

  “Hey,” Shane called from the other end of the barn. “There’s another snowy owl here!”

  “A female,” Mickey said, sounding excited. “Her plumage is so much darker.”

  “Like I said,” Joe responded, “I’ve only seen one other snowy owl here in Rhode Island, and that’s her. She was wing-crippled a year ago, found on Mansion Beach on Block Island.”

  “You put our owl in the cage right next to her,” Mickey said.

  Joe nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Snowy owls are shy, but they form bonds with each other. I’m hoping those two will help each other out.”

  “How will it help?” Mickey asked, her voice thin and full of longing. Neve hung on Joe O’Casey’s reply, waiting for what he would say, wanting it to ease Mickey’s mind.

  Joe stared at Mickey. He looked stern and demanding, his brow furrowed. “You’re a smart girl. Don’t you know?”

  “Because of love,” Mickey whispered.

  Joe nodded. “Love’s what counts in this world,” he said. “Even for snowy owls.”

  Neve’s throat tightened, aching so much, she turned away. She faced Joe’s workbench; right beside the Berkeley painting hung the picture of a young man in uniform. Short brown hair, wide grin, the same bright blue eyes as Joe and Tim.

  “That’s my grandson Frank,” Joe said, noticing her gaze.

  “He looks just like Tim,” Neve said. “And they both have your eyes.”

  “Big family resemblance,” Joe said.

  “He’s in a uniform,” Mickey said.

  “Yep,” Joe said. “Marine. Just like his father…”

  “Tim was a Marine?” Neve asked, surprised.

  “Sure was. A medic in Vietnam. All three generations of O’Caseys served our country.”

  “He talks like a pacifist,” Shane said. “While I’m doing my community service over there at the beach. He told me to move to Canada before going to war. He has some big quote about fathers and sons, and war being hell.”

  “That sounds like Tim,” Joe said.

  They all stood by the workbench, a draft of frigid air blowing in through a crack in the barn wall. Neve stared at the picture of Tim’s son and felt the hair on her head start to stand up.

  “When is Frank coming home?” she asked softly.

  “He’s not,” Joe O’Casey said in a low voice as raptors cawed and called around them, as wings beat in flight through the corridors overhead. “He was killed right when he got to Iraq, drowned when his tank went into the Euphrates.”

  11

  The announcement ceremony was over. April 17 was to be the day U-823 would leave Rhode Island. The choice of date—the anniversary of the battle between the USS James and U-823—felt like a kick in the stomach. Tim couldn’t even imagine what his father must be thinking. He stared at the waves, knowing that the date was only a month and a half away.

  He saw a line of big black cars driving out the beach road, followed by the TV trucks and trailers, imagined that a whole new level of preparations was now under way. The crane was on a ship from France; a work barge had been dispatched from New York; a team of engineers was planning the operation. Houses were being rented, hotel rooms booked.

  The last of Landry’s television crew left just at twilight; Tim felt a little pressure lift, his chest expanded, and he knew he had the beach back again. Throwing on his jacket, he headed along the sand to check things out.

  A steady breeze was blowing offshore; he felt the grains of sand stinging his face. They seared his eyes, and he didn’t care. All morning he’d heard the windstorm whipping the sand around, and he’d taken the card out, read the letter. He tried not to do that too often; he wanted to keep it as new and fresh as possible. He wanted to hear the voice as if it were actually speaking. And he wanted to smell his son—or at least imagine that he could—as he touched the paper he knew Frank had touched.

  Tim had spent the time lying on his bed, trying to make up for the sleep he hadn’t gotten last night. Easy to blame that on the snowy owl, on sharing his space with another creature—the first living, breathing roommate he’d had in quite some time. But the real reason he couldn’t sleep was Neve.

  Walking along the tide line now, Tim took huge breaths of salt air. Sometimes a sandstorm made him feel as if he could dissolve—he’d imagine the sand blowing all the way across the world. He’d think of that hot wind, the relentless sun. Tim kept his jacket unzipped, just so the New England cold could touch him and let him know he was still alive.

  He looked up ahead, saw that the film crew had left the beach in decent order. The sand was clean; they’d taken all their trash with them. He saw footprints all over and little marks in the sand—from where the lights and cameras had been set. He climbed over the jetty and turned to look out to sea, saw the endless spread of slate-gray water, with waves rearing up and breaking right over the sunken U-boat.

  Mickey thought she’d seen German sailors last night. Tim stared out, wondering whether that could be possible. To think that men killed in battle remained with their ships, with their buddies—not so much their bones, but their spirits. Frank was buried in Beth’s family plot up in Cranston. But was his ghost still near Baghdad, with the ghosts of his unit, in the submerged ruins of their tank? Tim’s heart ached; he didn’t want that to be true. He wanted every bit of his son home.

  He walked toward the jetty until he reached the beached driftwood log where the snowy owl had been roosting. Sitting down on it, he saw a white feather caught in the wood’s silvered splinters. He took it out, smoothed it between his fingers. He was staring at it, wondering how the owl was doing, what Neve had thought of his father, when he heard footsteps in the sand behind him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” h
e replied, without turning around.

  “I looked for you at the ranger station,” she said. “When you weren’t there, I thought I might find you here.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I came to check on the beach.”

  “They didn’t ruin it?”

  “Not yet.”

  She nodded, and sat down beside him on the log. They stayed there in silence, feeling the wind blow their hair back, listening to the waves crash. After a few minutes, Tim handed her the white feather. She started to take it, but he didn’t let go. They held the feather between them, looking into each other’s eyes—and suddenly Tim knew she knew. She had a new expression—her eyes were still so pretty, but they were deep and touched with despair. She knew about Frank.

  “How’s the owl?” he asked, sounding unintentionally harsh.

  “Fine so far. Your father has quite an operation there.”

  “He sure does.”

  “Tim…” she started.

  “Don’t,” he said, putting up his hand to stop her.

  Her mouth was wide open, the unspoken words right there; he could almost hear them, could almost hear his own response. How many times had people tried to say they were sorry? How often had he heard expressions of sympathy? He was such a good boy; he was such a great athlete; he loved the water, he was an accomplished diver, he loved nature, just like his father; he died serving his country; he was a hero.

  Neve stared at Tim. Her eyes were liquid, filled with pure shock—that’s what it was. He knew that expression so well. He’d seen it in Beth’s eyes a hundred times. All Beth had ever wanted to do was talk about their son, and Tim had just wanted her to shut up and go away. They’d been divorced for three years at the time of Frank’s death; she’d been remarried for two. But when it came to Frank, she wanted only to talk to Tim. And he’d say he didn’t want to—what was there to talk about? Frank was dead.

  And Beth’s eyes would fill with tears and shock, just like Neve’s right now.

  “The snowy owl,” Tim said. “Why don’t you just tell me what my father said about the bird? Is he going to survive or not?”

  “He’s not sure,” Neve said.

  “Well, it’ll give him something to do,” Tim said. “Trying to save a rare species. Nyctea scandiaca. Bet he’s never had another of those in that barn of his.”

  “He has a female right now. She was found on Block Island.”

  Now it was Tim’s turn to be shocked. And it was a good shock, too—the pure surprise, the unexpected thrill, of hearing about a bird you didn’t expect to be around. It was nothing like the shock of having your ex-wife call to say there were two uniformed officers standing at her door, or of getting a letter from your son two days after his funeral.

  “Well,” Tim said, “that’s great. He needs some good news, with what’s going on with the U-boat. April seventeenth; of all the days to take it away. At least my father must be pretty happy about the owl. Especially the fact it’s a male. I’m sure he’s thinking about the brood of snowy owls that will be hatching this time next year.”

  “Tim…”

  “Every day is Christmas morning when you’re a birder. Did you ever notice that?” he asked, gazing up and down the beach, then out at the horizon. “Like now. Look at all these birds: common eider, two species of loon, three species of scoter, there’s a merganser, two crested cormorants…you never know what to expect. Anything can happen.”

  “It’s true,” she agreed, holding the white feather. “You never know what you’re going to see.”

  “Frank was a great birder,” Tim said.

  “He was?”

  Tim nodded, squinting as he looked out over the waves, at a raft of buffleheads. “He birded in Iraq. We didn’t get many letters—he was over there such a short time. But the ones he wrote home were about birds. Crested larks, masked shrikes, European bee-eaters, Eurasian collared doves, house sparrows, common moorhens…He wrote about pygmy cormorants half the size of the cormorants he’s used to here, at home.”

  “He sounds like a wonderful boy.”

  Tim nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Your father has his picture hanging over his desk.”

  “I bet he does,” Tim said, tensing up. He stared out at the waves, at the cormorants swimming so sleekly along the surface. Their silhouettes were low and black, like small U-boats. When they dived below for fish, he wondered whether they’d see Mickey’s ghosts. “I tried to get my father to talk,” Tim said. “The whole time I was growing up. I’d tag along with him, trying to help him with the birds, wishing he’d tell me about what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “In the war. When he sank the U-boat. Kids want to hear about their fathers being war heroes. It was one of the biggest events of his life—and everyone knew about the U-boat. My friends would ask me, and I’d ask him. He told me part of the story once. But only part.”

  “Maybe the rest was too painful,” Neve said quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  They sat still, both staring down at the owl feather.

  “He talked about it with Frank, though,” Tim said after a minute.

  “Why?” Neve asked.

  Tim shrugged, as if he didn’t know—but he did, and when his heart slowed down a little, he told her. “Time turns war into myth,” he said.

  “Myth?”

  “History lessons. You stop smelling the blood, tasting your own fear, seeing your buddy die beside you, and you’re able to tell it like a story. My father couldn’t do it with me, because back then he was still living the war inside, every day. By the time Frank came along, time had smoothed out the edges.”

  Neve waited, listening.

  “Frank ate it all up. He’d go over to that barn after school—helped my father build more enclosures, more flight cages. My father must have talked nonstop, all through the hours Frank spent there—because Frank would come home and tell me about what happened right here that cold April day.”

  “Things you must have wished your father could have told you himself,” Neve said.

  Tim shrugged as if it didn’t matter.

  “What did he tell Frank?” Neve asked.

  “Oh, about how he and Damien had joined up on the same day, right after Pearl Harbor. About Damien in his silver plane, a B-24 Liberator, flying on daylight missions over Rostock, Karlsruhe, getting shot down on his way back from Dresden, getting rescued by three French sisters who hid him in a barn.

  “And about himself aboard the USS James, being part of a hunter-killer group going after Dönitz’s wolf pack, how U-823 sank the steamer Fenwick in the mouth of the Thames River, and how he commanded his men to chase it down and blast it with depth charges and sink it right here—off Frank’s own beach, right off the tip of this jetty.” He gestured at the crooked, ramshackle structure, sinking into the sand on rusted iron pilings. “My father made it all come alive for Frank, like a big Technicolor movie of war, bravery, and being a patriot….”

  “Your father told me you were in Vietnam.”

  “That’s true,” Tim said.

  “Your father—” she began.

  “Like I said, my father came to see things differently as time went on,” Tim said. “When I was a kid, it was so obvious that the war had left him a shell. He’d seen such horror, and his brother had come back a zombie. Talented, sweet man—and Damien wound up having a breakdown. My father never talked about it—he just…” He paused, not wanting to air his family’s dirty laundry. “Anyway, by the time Frank came along, my father had cleaned up his act. The raw pain was gone, so he was able to take the terrible stuff and turn it all into one big heroic story….”

  “You blame your father for Frank enlisting?”

  Tim started to say “No,” but he knew that was a lie. He blamed everyone: himself, Beth, and his father. If Tim had been a better father, if the divorce hadn’t gotten so ugly, if Frank hadn’t taken refuge at the raptor barn, if the war stories hadn’t started rolling…Tim stared out at th
e crashing waves, the enormous sea. He thought of the sailors Mickey had seen. His father’s voice filled his ears.

  “You know what my father told me?” he asked. “The only time he ever talked about his time in the war?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “He saw the Fenwick get torpedoed. It went down right off New London, its fuel blazing all around the wreck. He saw men swimming through the fire, heard them screaming. They were burning alive. Some of them dived underwater, choosing to drown instead of burn. He carried those screams his whole life. He said he never shut his eyes without hearing them. He told me when I was twenty-one, for one reason—to explain why he never talked, why he was so quiet, why we never had a good father-son relationship.”

  “By telling you that, he must have been trying to make up for everything. It sounds as if he had PTSD.”

  “Everyone who goes to war has it. In the Civil War they called it ‘soldier’s heart.’ In World War I, it was ‘shell shock.’ It doesn’t go away, but it gets better with time—if you survive, if you don’t kill yourself when you get home.”

  “At least your father told you something….”

  “Yeah. Once.” He paused, wondering whether he should tell her his theory. She was looking at him in such an open way, he decided to jump in. “It was Vietnam. We never talked about the war—but when he told me that story, I thought…”

  “He didn’t want you to go.”

  Tim nodded. “He never would have said that. He was all about patriotism, duty, serving the country, hated draft dodgers, guys who went to Canada or filed as conscientious objectors. But telling me about hearing those screams, I had to wonder.”

  “You signed up?”

  “After college—I had 12 for a draft number. I was going, there was no way out. My father drove me to the train that took me to boot camp. He told me he was proud, that I was joining a family legacy of serving America, that I had to ‘keep my eyes on the ball.’ Whatever the hell that meant.”