by Cat Rambo
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 guns, 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 in reality /But actually 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.
What plans might a bird hatch?
IV.
The Colonel died yesterday. Last night I dreamed of him, but he washed away and I was back in the dream.
It’s the one that comes each night. Every time, the same. I see the gas cloud hanging there, roiling with red shadows. Try as I might to dodge it, its depths swallow me again. I try to hold my breath but cannot, eventually taking a breath that sears my lungs, burns away the tissues.
I’ve stood beside Rappaccini while he dissected a corpse. I know what ordinary vocal cords look like; where they are buried in the body. Rappaccini has pointed them out to me, beneath the epiglottis, above the trachea, talking all the while about how mine must differ, scarred by the harsh gas, as though it was my throat beneath his knife.
I remember flying through the cloud, thinking that if I moved fast enough we’d escape. I told the captain to throw the blanket over himself, to crouch down. That saved him. But the crimson gas seeped into the ornithopter, fingers prying into the window cr
acks, drifted up through the vents. I breathed it in, swallowed it despite how each gulp burned in my throat, keeping it from reaching him.
I was lucky. Another year and they might have made me into a clank. But back then, they were still dismissing people when they were injured, not holding onto them the way they do now.
The captain came to see me in the field hospital carrier, so close to the lines that the guns still thundered to punctuate his words. He cried, though not much, just a few tears as he held my hand and told me how sorry he was, how he’d put me in for a medal. Told me that he’d look for me after the discharge.
I thought about telling him then. But I couldn’t speak; could only have tried to explain through pantomime and writing, knowing that the words would be inadequate. I couldn’t tell him enough, couldn’t say that I didn’t want him to love me for the body that had been forced on me, I wanted him to love who I was, a man loving him.
That was important. But how could I convey that to him in my poor attempts at written language, that awkward scrawl that Sister Perpetua had burned my knuckles for?
I prayed that night for guidance, the way that Father McNeil and Sister Madonna had told me that I could always do. I turned to Jesus, my friend Jesus, to tell me what I should do, how I should act, and I laid all of that in his hands.
The next morning I felt refreshed and strengthened. Jesus would help me endure. I’d tell the captain, and he would be surprised at first but accepting, or perhaps he would tell me he’d suspected it all along.
Together, we would work it all out.
They wheeled me out into the morning, and I saw him walking towards me on the deck.
The guns thundered again.
Everything was noise and confusion and shouting and the smell of blood. My ears rang, and every sound came to me as though I were underwater.
The smoke cleared, drifted down as though unable to hold itself in the air any longer, and I saw him lying there.
His head was half gone, torn away by the shell. You/I could see his brains, the color of cold oatmeal, darkened by burns, lying in a pool of red. His eye was open and surprised, still long-lashed and pretty.
Still so pretty, even then.
That was God’s message. That he hated me so much he would rather kill a good man than let him be sullied by my love.
God’s writing was as ugly as mine. But it told me what I needed to know. That Father McNeil and Sister Madonna were wrong.
Jesus didn’t love me. He wasn’t my friend.
He was like all the rest of them.
V.
I could have gone back home after the war. But it wasn’t my home anymore. The school hadn’t made me white, but it made me no longer a Navajo, no longer understanding those ways or those stories. I had come to Seattle because it was so green back then, back before the factories had grimed all the trees.
I was helping clean Mr. Abernathy’s old room, readying it for the next occupant. Doctor Rappaccini had made us try to clean the wheelchair up so it could be used again, but such a stench had permeated the wicker that even he was forced to admit it would never serve another patient. The stench even clung to the room’s faded wallpaper, and I’d been directed to wipe that down with bleach-water.
I turned around and found the Doctor standing in the doorway. Jonas was perched on his shoulder. He said, “Mr. Zonnie, I’d like to talk with you.”
That phrasing made me shiver. I’d never heard him call anyone Mister before, and it wasn’t that there was respect edging the tone. Only menace.
He said, “There’s been some things reported missing. Small thefts. A wedding ring, a medal.”
I widened my eyes and looked puzzled.
“Some cheese intended for my meal,” he continued, watching my face.
I kept it impassive, trying not to react. I don’t know that I succeeded. The Doctor kept staring at me. I could smell the acrid, sour smell from the birdshit on his back. Jonah clacked his beak at me.
“You could be sent back to the war,” the doctor said. Each time he paused between words, the crow clacked its beak again. Its head darted forward and I flinched.
The doctor noticed. “You’re scared of a bird?”
I just kept still.
He said with scorn in his face, “What do you think a bird can do to you? Let’s see.”
He shrugged his shoulder. Jonah flew at me, all sharp beak and extended talons, raking at my face.
I made a noise -- something rough and ragged and painful in my throat -- and flung my arm up, trying to dislodge it. Warmth ran down my face and the beak plunged once, digging itself into the skin at the corner of my eye.
I rocked back, thinking he wanted my eye, that he wouldn’t be satisfied till it was gone. I doubled over, shielding my head as the crow tore at me and Rappaccini watched.
Finally the Doctor said, “Enough.”
The crow stopped stabbing at me. I heard the flap of its wings as it returned to his shoulder.
The Doctor’s voice was cold. “Tomorrow’s an inspection. Take the brass appliances and make sure they shine.”
After the two of them were gone, I washed my face, thinking of the crow dipping its claws in the berries. I stole more crystals and dropped them in water, seeing the pink tinge spread across it before I used it to wash the wounds, ignoring its sting. The damage was bad, but my eye was unscathed, despite the torn skin beside it.
I tried not to think of the crow as I washed brass limbs with soapy water before drying them and taking up the brass polish, which smelled of ammonia and dust. I tried not to think that I had been asleep while that black thing hopped across the floor, perhaps perching on the end of the bed to look at me, to watch my eyeballs rolling beneath the paper-thin skin while he thought about plucking them out.
What was the crow? Because that’s how I think of it, not by the name the doctor has given it. It seems unlikely that it is the name it would have chosen for itself.
Back with the nuns, they would have told me it was an instrument of the devil, summoned by sin, bent on taking souls down to hell, to drown in the lake of fire and brimstone. If not the devil himself, one of his imps.
Someone else might wonder if it was a human soul, born anew into the feeble body of a bird, frustrated by its lack of hands and speech, bent on destroying those born into superior bodies or else carrying out some ancient grudge incurred before it was ever hatched.
Or a skinwalker, a witch who takes on animal form?
Or maybe it was just a monster.
Just because the world held monsters didn’t mean that God had made them.
When I was done, I staggered back to my room, hands aching. Something tapped on the window. I looked up to see the crow sitting there, silhouetted against sunset’s purple sky. I thought it was Jonah. It seemed unlikely it would be any other crow come visiting. It tapped on the window again and cocked its head. It wanted me to let it in.
I didn’t move. Staring back at it, I shook my head.
That sent it into an angry frenzy. It tapped on the glass, so hard I thought it would crack the thin pane. I looked away, and that made it angrier. I stared at the wallpaper, tracing the pattern of green leaves, faded now, and the even more faded yellow flowers, so pallid they were almost imperceptible, and pretended I didn’t know it was there.
I sat down on the bed, which squeaked conversationally underneath me then fell silent. I folded my hands in front of me and stared down at them. Long-fingered hands, strong hands. Hands that had flown me through shells and explosion and death.
They fell into the shape of prayer without my even thinking about it.
Father McNeill and Sister Madonna would have approved. They would have told me that if I talked to God, he would listen. All my prayers would be answered, and that was good, even if it was in a mysterious way that you couldn’t understand at the time but which unraveled itself into meaning years later.
But I had talked to God many times, until his reply had been far too myst
erious for me. Death was a shitty answer to a prayer. That betrayal still burned at me, as fresh and bitter tasting as yesterday.
I missed my friend Jesus. I used to think of him as someone I could talk to. I carried on a conversation in my mind, addressed to him, and I never worried that he wasn’t listening or didn’t want to hear what I was saying.
I’d put that away the day the captain died, the day he and God betrayed me.
I wondered if Jonah would hurt himself, the way he was squawking and flapping. I raised my head and said, not out loud but in my head: I won’t compromise myself. Take me as I am, but not any other way.
I felt the silence listening. The way Jesus used to listen.
I said, Take it or leave it.
A rap again at the window.
Maybe that was my answer. Vile creature of a viler God, a God of poison and birdshit, of malicious eyes and sooty feathers.
Let him come in, then, and give me my answer.
When I swung the window open, he exploded in at me, a wrath of feathers and squawks. Instinctively I flailed and swatted, using all my strength.
He hit the wall with a thump and a noise, quiet as a twig snapping, as his neck broke.
But he was still alive. The angry beads of his eyes glittered as he lay, a feathery lump whose only motion was the in and out of its breaths. A line of sunset-orange light played over his belly and fingered a crack in the wall, awaking an answering glint inside.
I wrapped my hand in the pillowcase before I pulled his body away from the wall. He made a rattling sound of hatred and pain, and died.
I tugged the wall board aside to widen the crack. Inside were rings, a watch, more. A cufflink set with diamonds. A $20 gold piece with the Queen’s face on it.
I felt dazed, wrapped in cotton wool that kept the world away from me, perceived through a layer of confusion or in a darkened mirror.
God had answered my prayer.
