by Cat Rambo
I could probably find better employment than an asylum for those broken by the war. But here, there are so few questions, so little time for looking at those around us, that it hopefully will always be safe for me, even though all of us are overworked and underpaid. I can find what comfort I can here, in a world where there is so little.
Cook died last night.
Sepsis, Doctor Rappaccini said. From some small injury she must have sustained in the kitchen and carelessly left untreated. He said the word “carelessly” as though her death was just a matter of her being too stupid to take care of herself.
He didn’t say that she was a careful woman who kept things as clean as she could. He didn’t say that she tried her best for the patients, to comfort them not with her body as she once had but by making the food less wretched. She was good at bargaining on the black market, and she never used those skills to enhance her own table, only to get suet or sugar or spices that might make them happy for a moment when they tasted a favorite dish.
The replacement that Dr. Rappaccini finds for her will not make anyone happy but him. He doesn’t own the asylum outright but he might as well, having been appointed by the board of directors after he’d convinced them that he could make it turn a profit. That seems odd, to think that an asylum can be profitable, but at the heart of things it is a business.
And a business that the doctor knows well, in terms of how to cut corners. Before he came, patients wore their artificial limbs every day, a practice that Rappaccini says only leads to wear and breakage. Back then whenever someone died, their artificial limbs were buried with them. Now they’re wiped down with a solution of Condy’s Crystals and put away to be used again and again.
Food arrives from the War Office each week. Never enough. The cook used to send the off-duty orderlies out to forage for greens to supplement what there was. Some grumbled, but it was in our best interest to cooperate.
The first day I foraged, I was so pleased to bring her back several armloads of fiddleheads. I knew they were edible, although I had never seen ones before with such a faint purplish hue to them.
She made a face and picked one up to sniff it. She shook her head, setting it down, and said, “Boy, you took these from the Doctor’s garden?”
I had been here only a few days and didn’t know what she meant. My face showed it.
She said, “Come with me.”
She led me to the garden where I’d found the ferns. Surrounded by cypress, it seemed half-abandoned at first. A fountain, its white marble confines crumbling, burbled and splashed in the center, wild iris flowering around it in shades of blue and purple. But when I looked closer, I realized many of the plants were caged in urns and other containers. The largest stood next to the fountain, a bush covered with purple flowers, brilliant as gems, so lovely they seemed to illuminate the garden when a cloud flickered over the sun.
“You don’t come here, and neither do you bring me any food from it,” the cook directed. She was thin and wiry. Freckles splotched her skin, the color of weak cocoa. “You stay away from it.” She pointed at the flowering plant. “See that? Another month and it’ll fruit. Don’t go eating those or you’ll regret it. This is the doctor’s personal garden.”
I can glimpse that garden now as we line up around the grave, in the cemetery that adjoins our grounds. An unobtrusive white stone, skull-sized, rolls in the grass to mark each dead patient. Name and dates applied with black paint that wears away quickly, leaving a shadow like a day’s worth of stubble on the cold stone.
The priest says, “Let us pray.”
I close my eyes to hear the breathing of the men around me, the shuffle of their feet and crutches, the creak of wheelchairs.
“Requiem Aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis…”
I always associate the sound of Latin with furious whispers, with sharp pinches. With eyes like freshly broken blue/black/brown glass beads, pressing down from an adult’s height over my vantage point as a child.
The nuns were unhappy with their assignment to an institution devoted to making Navajo children assimilate into white culture, and the children were the closest outlet for that frustration.
I was six when they came for me and my two brothers. They split us up and sent us to different schools. That was the rule, break up the families. They didn’t want Indian children banding together, didn’t want them telling each other memories of home, reminding each other of what they had left behind.
We could not call ourselves The People any longer. They wouldn’t let us speak our own language. If we spoke in Navajo, they beat us; forced us to find the English words to say what we wanted. Not that they would have given us anything we wanted.
In the mornings, we ate burned bread and cold oatmeal and listened to Sister Perpetua barking out the day’s reading from the Old Testament. She looked like a china doll from a Christmas tree, but she didn’t talk like one. She never seemed to pick the Bible’s kinder parts, only the pieces calculated to frighten us. The story of the prophet Elijah telling bears to eat the wicked children who’d mocked his bald head was her favorite.
We heard the Bible at breakfast, and at the noon snack, and at dinner. We swam in stories from the Bible, all of them telling us how wrong we were. They told us we could never be like whites; they told us we had to be like whites. On Sundays, they prayed over us from dawn to dusk. I never understood how they could despise us so yet devote their lives to teaching us.
So few of them seemed happy. So many of them seemed ready to lash out at us, swift as a scorpion, angry in a way that confused and bewildered me.
But for every few dozen scorpions, there was someone whose presence outweighed the rest. Like Father McNeill.
He was tall, so tall. I’d never seen a man stretch that high before. You would’ve thought it would have made him frightening. But he had a way of leaning down to listen, blue eyes intent, that made him comforting.
He was head of the school when I came there. He stood at the entrance as they marched us in, two dozen Navajo children from Monument Valley and the Bears Ears and Moenkopi. Unhappy and frightened, and not knowing what sort of place we had come to.
His smile made us feel better, at least some of us. Others had learned already that when whites smile, sometimes they don’t mean it.
Father McNeill meant it. He talked to each of us. He told me that Jesus was my friend, a friend I could always rely on. A friend who would comfort me.
I liked that. I liked the idea of a friend in those lonesome times. And some of the pictures of Jesus didn’t make him look like a white man. I couldn’t imagine him a Navajo like me, but I could imagine him a cousin from very far away. I liked the Jesus that Father McNeill talked about, a kind and loving and honorable man. A man someone could try to emulate.
In years that followed, I got a chance to compare stories with other children who’d been shipped off to places that didn’t have anyone like Father McNeill. It was only then that I realized how lucky we’d been.
He kept things sane for us. It could have been much, much worse.
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.
II.
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.
III.
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,(Linked Comment) 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.
