In the Shadow of Blackbirds

by Cat Winters

  The skin around his eyes crinkled in a way that told me he was smiling behind his mask. “For the sake of science.”

  He positioned me in front of the gray backdrop with my arms folded behind my back. I gave a weak smile while he prepared the shot with his head ducked beneath a black cloth, and he took my photograph with nothing but the kindest display of professionalism.

  Yet, in the aftermath of the violent flash, an empty feeling pestered me.

  Stephen doesn’t want to use his energy to show up for a casual picture, you idiot, I realized as stinging tendrils of smoke crept over my hair and skin. Why would he pose for a photograph when he’s suffering? You’re wasting your time trying to satisfy your own curiosity.

  Stop playing.

  Go help him figure out what’s wrong.

  ON THE CORNER OF EIGHTH AND E STOOD A GORGEOUS white mansion with Grecian pillars flanking the entrance. A trim green lawn lined with rustling, feathery palms led to castle-sized wooden doors that promised knowledge, adventure, and hope. This was San Diego’s library.

  Inside, the same surreal sulfur smoke as at Stephen’s funeral emerged from burning buckets of coal and blurred the view of the central desk and the pale green walls. Sunshine tried to stream through long windows, but the blue clouds blocked the light and cast drifting shadows across the solid oak furniture. I choked on a sulfuric stench that reminded me of rotten eggs, even with the gauze covering my face.

  A masked brunette with a soft splay of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes walked toward me through the burning haze. “May I help you?” she asked in that eager way of speaking all librarians possess.

  “I need to look up quite a few subjects.”

  She noticed my black bag. “You’re not a physician, are you?”

  “No, I just brought this to hold my notes. It used to be my mother’s bag.”

  “Ah, I thought you looked a little too young to be saving lives. You made me feel better for a moment, thinking you’d be able to help if anyone falls ill. Quite frankly”—she peered over her shoulder and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone—“I’m surprised the city hasn’t shut us down entirely. Only the reading rooms are closed.”

  “Oh … they’re closed?” My posture wilted. “I was really hoping to do some studying here this morning. I need to read through too many books to carry home.”

  “What subjects did you need to find?”

  I ran through my mental list of categories. “Well, I’d like to find books on modern war poetry, trench warfare, German military practices, prisoners of war, blackbirds, birds in mythology …” I stopped for a moment to take stock of everything else. “Lightning injuries, electricity, magnetic fields, spirit photography, Spiritualism, and true experiences of life after death.”

  Her eyes stopped blinking. She looked like a mouse that had been cornered by a cat. “Are you familiar with card catalogs and the Dewey decimal system?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “We allow our patrons to find their own books from the stacks. You seem an ambitious girl. Why don’t you try looking up these subjects on your own? I’ll even sneak you into the women’s reading room to make up for your troubles.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  I exhaled an appreciative breath. “Thank you so much. Where is the card catalog?”

  She pointed to the wooden files beyond the wall of smoke behind me. “Right over there.”

  “I don’t have a library card yet. I’m new to the city.”

  “I’ll leave an application for you in the reading room.”

  I thanked her again and headed over to the drawers of cards that indexed books by subject matter.

  By the time I reached the empty women’s reading room, I carried a stack of ten books in my arms, my muscles quivering from the weight of all those cloth- and leather-bound volumes. The handles of my black bag dangled from my right hand beneath the pile and cut off circulation to my fingertips. I parked myself at an oak table, all alone save for those blue sulfur-dioxide phantoms.

  The librarian had left me both the library card application and a copy of the day’s newspaper. A story below the latest flu death tolls caught my eye: the opening of a Red Cross House for healing war veterans, whom the paper described as “Uncle Sam’s convalescent nephews.” In the accompanying photograph, two local women in tailored black dresses served tea to a young man who looked like he’d just been dragged off the battlefield. His hair was as wild as mine after the lightning blasted through me, and his eyes seemed to be saying, What I don’t need after a war is two crazy society bats pushing cups of tea my way.

  An urge to visit those healing soldiers and sailors welled up inside me. I wanted to learn how the war that snatched away Stephen had affected other boys—and to find some sort of clue that would explain why he claimed to be tortured by birds. Plus that soldier’s distressed face saddened me. I felt compelled to help people like him, to lend a sympathetic ear and offer comfort that extended beyond cups of tea.

  At the top of my first sheet of writing paper, I scribbled, Visit the Red Cross House and talk to returning men.

  Next, I opened A Treasury of War Poetry, published just the year before, and read firsthand accounts of the trauma of the trenches, told through bold and brutal poems such as “The Death of Peace,” “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” and “The Hell-Gate of Soissons.”

  “Into Battle,” by Julian Grenfell, mentioned a blackbird:

  The blackbird sings to him, “Brother, brother,

  If this be the last song you shall sing,

  Sing well, for you may not sing another;

  Brother, sing.”

  A chilling reference to crows appeared in Frederic Manning’s “The Trenches”:

  Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang,

  The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life,

  Eyes that have laughed to eyes,

  And these were begotten,

  O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt

  With the lust of a man’s first strength: ere they were rent,

  Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn

  In bloody fragments, to be the carrion

  Of rats and crows.

  With shaking fingers I transcribed to be the carrion of rats and crows, and gagged on both the mental image of birds feasting on dismembered dead soldiers and the rotten-egg fumes stealing through my mask. I put the poems aside and continued through the rest of the books, reading about lightning strikes, magnets, prisoners of war, and modern battle strategies. I studied trench combat, gas warfare, and a condition called shell shock that affected soldiers’ minds. I investigated Spiritualism and found stories of desperate, educated men like the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the physician Duncan MacDougall, he of the soul-weighing experiment, who were risking their reputations to find proof of the afterlife.

  Desperate, I wrote on my paper. They’re always desperate.

  I read about ectoplasm that was proved to be cheesecloth, unexplained spirit voices, spirit lovers, spirit writings, spirit photographs, spirit manifestations, and even two girls in Cottingley, England, who claimed to be photographing fairies. My brain raced, and my sheets of paper filled with notes and diagrams and formulas and poetry.

  But I still had no idea why Stephen thought monstrous birds were tying him down and killing him.

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW I CAN GET TO THE NEW RED CROSS House in Balboa Park?” I asked the same brunette librarian who had helped me before.

  She slid my stack of five checked-out books across the polished countertop. “Take the Fifth Avenue streetcar up to Laurel. You’ll find a bridge crossing the canyon to Balboa Park.”

  “Is the park small? Will it be hard to find?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You’ve never been there?”

  I shook my head.

  She laughed. “Well, I guarantee you won’t miss it when you get to the bridge. It’s the former site of the Panama-California Exposition. The
military owns the area now, but somebody could probably direct you to the Red Cross House. Do you know someone recuperating there?”

  “No, but I’d like to volunteer.”

  She leaned her gauze-swathed chin against her fist and studied me. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Does anyone know you’re wandering around in the quarantined city by yourself?”

  “I said I’m sixteen, not six.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Instead of responding, I opened the wide mouth of my mother’s black bag and crammed it full of books.

  The librarian ducked below the counter. “Here.” She stood up straight again and slid a red pack of garlic-flavored gum across to me. “Take a stick or two. I can’t stand the thought of sending a kid across town without some flu protection.”

  “You sound like my aunt. If she had her way, I’d be bathing in onion soup every night.”

  “Just take it, please. Take the whole pack. I can buy another.” She folded her slender hands on the counter. “It would be a shame to waste all that curiosity to the flu.”

  I took the pack, and to make her feel better, I even slipped my mask down for a moment and popped one of the foul sticks of gum in my mouth. Instant tears careened down my cheeks. “Ugh.” I spit the gum out in my hand. “This is awful.”

  “Just chew it, OK? Stay safe out there.” She nodded toward the exit. “Now go on. I’m getting tired of crying over kids who don’t have anyone to watch over them anymore.” She turned away from me and stooped down to a collection of books on a low shelf behind her.

  I hesitated, soothed by the taste of concern trailing off her, almost tempted to stay. She looked back to see if I had gone, her eyes shining with tears, so I thanked her and slipped away.

  I GAGGED ON THE TASTE OF THE GARLIC GUM WHILE A bright yellow streetcar carried me along the rails to the hills above San Diego. Three businessmen in smart felt hats rode with me, probably on their lunch break. They buried their gauze-covered noses in the San Diego Union, and one of them read the October influenza death tolls out loud.

  “Philadelphia: over eleven thousand dead and counting—just this month. Holy Moses! Boston: four thousand dead.”

  The use of cold statistics to describe the loss of precious lives made me ill. I crossed my fingers and hoped that Portland wasn’t a big enough city to mention. Hearing the death toll up there—worrying about my father in that crowded jail—would have probably killed me.

  “New York City: eight hundred and fifty-one in just one day—eight hundred and fifty-one! Can you believe that?”

  “Laurel Street,” called the conductor from his post by the center doors.

  I pressed a fancy little nickel-plate button inlaid in mother-of-pearl, relieved for the chance to escape. The car came to a gentle stop on a flat part of the street.

  “Where’s the bridge to Balboa Park?” I asked the conductor before heading down the steps.

  “Straight to the east.” He pointed with a long arm, and like the librarian, he added, “You can’t miss it.”

  He was right. A nearsighted person without glasses could have spotted it from more than a block away: an elaborate arched concrete bridge spanned a pond and a canyon, and on the other side of the hundred-foot drop rose a city of Spanish colonial palaces, straight from the pages of a fairy tale.

  I walked briskly across the bridge, eager to reach the Red Cross House and urged on by a feeling in my gut that someone there would be able to help me with Stephen. I ran below curved balconies, wrought-iron railings, and plaster pillars sculpted with intricate flowers, grapes, and rambling vines. It would have been amazing to simply stand there and gape at the architecture, but not when I had a mission.

  The building I sought stood out like a beacon, for a large red cross marked its roof. I slowed my pace as I approached the daunting entrance, my heart thumping as if I were about to come face-to-face with Stephen himself.

  Inside, the main room must have stretched two hundred feet across, and bandaged, wounded men were everywhere. They read and slept on sofas and padded leather chairs, or hobbled about on crutches. Others were confined to wicker wheelchairs. A few groups who didn’t look as battered as the rest huddled around tables and played cards. Canaries sang from wire cages. Two open fireplaces warmed the air. No one, save those warbling canaries, made much noise.

  Along with the garlic fumes heating my tongue, the rancid taste of suffering drenched my mouth, as if someone were pouring week-old soup prepared with spoiled meat and stagnant water down my throat. I yanked off my gauze and threw the wad of gum into a wastebasket.

  A woman with eyes as amber and narrow as a cat’s came my way in a white Red Cross hat and clip-clopping heels. She straightened her flu mask over a nose that appeared rather large, smoothed out the crisp apron covering her pressed gray uniform, and took a long look at my doctor’s bag.

  “I’m not a doctor,” I said. “I’m just carrying some library books in the bag.” I tugged my gauze back over my mouth and nose. “It belonged to my mother.”

  “Oh.” She blinked like she didn’t know how to respond to such an introduction.

  “My name is Mary Black,” I tried again, omitting the “Shelley” to avoid associations with Frankenstein and Germany in an American Red Cross building. “I’d like to volunteer to help the men.”

  She surveyed my appearance, from the childish white ribbon tying back my hair at my neck to the worn-out Boy Scout boots that were coming unlaced. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen. And a half.”

  “That’s a little young to be witnessing the state of some of these men. Most of our volunteers are married women who’ve seen a bit of life already. They’ve experienced childbirth. They’ve lost husbands.”

  “I just buried a boy who meant the world to me, ma’am. I’ve seen corpses as blue as ripe huckleberries lying in front yards out there. There’s no need to protect me from anything.” I shifted my sagging bag to my other hand. “I’m tired of sitting around doing nothing.”

  She swallowed. “Very well. Are you up to serving the men refreshments and making sure they’re comfortable? Helping them write letters and whatnot?”

  “Yes.”

  She stepped closer and softened her voice. “Several of the men are amputees, and some of their faces are quite damaged beneath their bandages. You may see signs of deformed cheeks and chins and missing facial bones. Are you sure you can do this?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “All right, then. Please avert your eyes if you need to, but try not to express disgust. Our goal is to help them recover in the most soothing environment we can offer.”

  “I understand.” I peeked at the quiet gathering of broken boys beyond us. “Why are so many of their faces disfigured, if you don’t mind me asking? Is it the explosive shells they’re using over there?”

  “I’m told it’s the machine guns. Curious soldiers will often lift their heads out of the trenches, thinking they can dodge bullets in time, but there’s no way they can possibly avoid the hail of machine-gun fire.” She glanced over her shoulder. “We tend to also see several missing left arms because of the way they position themselves for shooting in the trenches. Their bones shatter into tiny fragments and their wristwatches become embedded in their wounds. There’s no way to save the limbs.”

  I didn’t cringe, for I felt she was testing me, and I was determined to prove I could handle the horrors. “What can I do first?”

  Her heels clicked over to a woven tan basket sitting on one of the front tables. “Well, I was just about to pass around these oatmeal cookies. Why don’t you give that a try?” She carried the basket my way. “Heaven knows, these boys would probably love to be offered baked goods by a pretty young girl. Just be careful none of them gets too fresh with you.”

  I looped the basket handle over my arm and soaked up the scents of baked oatmeal and roasted nuts—a divine combination that curbed the rancid
ness inside my mouth.

  “Is there a particular part of the room where I should start?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re all in need of cheering. If the men are too much for you to take, come into the back kitchen. We can always have you help bake something or roll bandages.”

  “I’ll be fine. Thank you.” I dropped my black bag by the front door, and then I journeyed into the main room, trying to convey confidence in my stride.

  Where to start, where to start? I wondered, unsure if I would be more helpful in one direction versus another. At random, I picked the right.

  The first two young men I approached were sitting in fat leather armchairs reading outdated copies of the Saturday Evening Post. I remembered the picture of the clown on the rightmost cover from way back in May or June. The black-haired boy reading that particular issue was missing both his legs, his trousers sewn to hide the two stumps. The other young man, a handsome devil with golden-brown hair and smoky-gray eyes, wore bandages over his left wrist where his hand ought to have been. An unlit cigarette dangled from the scarred fingers of his surviving hand.

  “Would you like a cookie?” I asked the black-haired one.

  He looked to be of Mexican descent, with olive skin and dark irises that brightened when he found me standing over him. “Yes, please,” he said.

  I handed him one of the lumpy oatmeal cookies and kept my attention from straying to his two stumps. “Here you are.”

  “Thank you.” He untied the top strings of his flu mask and revealed a boyish round face with a healing pink gash across his chin. “You’re much younger than the ladies who usually help around here,” he said. “Qué bonita. Very pretty.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you, querida.”

  “Please excuse Carlos,” said the other boy with a cockeyed smirk I could see through a round opening cut in the center of his mask. “They dope him up with morphine so he doesn’t feel the …” He pointed with his cigarette to Carlos’s missing legs. “He’s under the delusion he’s still a Latin lover.”