In the Shadow of Blackbirds

by Cat Winters

  “I’m twice the man you are, Jones.”

  “Said the man with no legs,” chuckled the blondish boy.

  “Not funny, friend. You’re just jealous the ladies fuss over you less.” Carlos leaned back in his chair and beamed up at me. “Do us lovesick fellows a favor, querida. Take down your flu mask. Let us see your entire beautiful face.”

  “You don’t need to see my whole face.”

  “But I do,” said Carlos.

  “You’ll be sorely disappointed.” I lifted another cookie out of the basket. “I have huge warts and buckteeth hiding under my mask.”

  “Don’t tease us.” Carlos gave me a pleading look with his big brown eyes. “We’re starving for female attention, querida. Just one quick peek.”

  “I’m afraid not.” I offered the cookie I was holding to his friend Jones. “Would you like one of these?”

  “No.” The blondish boy slid his cigarette between his lips through his mask hole. “But I’d love a light.” He raised his narrow hips and yanked a matchbook out of his back pocket with a grimace. His other arm, the one with the missing hand, lay across his left leg as if it were something dead.

  “They’re bad for your breathing, you know,” I said, nodding to his cigarette. “And if these masks do help fight the flu, that gaping hole in the front of yours isn’t going to do you a lick of good, either.”

  “Who are you, my aunt Gertie?” He jerked his chin at me and bit down on the cigarette. “I bet you’re also part of the noble crusade to outlaw booze.”

  “I just know some of the easier ways to avoid an early grave.” I set his rejected cookie back into the basket. “You should take care of yourself so you can heal. You’re still young. What are you, about nineteen? Twenty? Twenty-one at most?”

  He stared me down. “Just light my match, sweetheart.” The cigarette fluttered in his lips as he spoke. “This little cigarette is the only thing keeping me from putting a bullet in my head.”

  The chill in his gray eyes made me want to recoil, but I kept my face stoic. I lowered the basket to the ground and lit his cigarette for him with trembling fingers, as if he were an explosive I was afraid of detonating.

  He exhaled a stream of smoke out of the side of his mask instead of directly into my face, and his eyes softened. “Thanks. You’re a doll.”

  “You’re welcome.” I looked at his good hand. “Are those scars from the war?”

  He exhaled another white cloud. “Barbed wire. We rolled entanglements between us and the enemy’s trenches, and it was sharp as hell. I came back from war a real cutup.”

  I reached down for the basket, ignoring his dark pun, and felt his gaze burn against the top of my head.

  “I’d give you a hand, doll,” he said, “but the Krauts already got it.”

  “Stop it, Jones.” Carlos lowered his half-eaten cookie. “Don’t pay any attention to him, querida. He’s got a strange sense of humor.”

  I picked up the basket. Jones was staring straight at me while he took a long drag on his glowing cigarette. I turned away and left the two of them behind. My back slouched more than before. Confidence left my stride. The harsh scent of bitterness surrounding that boy hurt worse than the smell of kerosene.

  The other masked soldiers turned my way, their expressions expectant, as if I could truly do them good with a simple basketful of cookies. They welcomed me with misshapen, bandaged faces, empty sleeves where arms should have been, healing burns, gashes with red, crusted skin, crutches, absent legs, joints throbbing with rheumatism, and the taste of an indescribable weariness that made my own muscles ache.

  Unlike Jones, most of the men were polite and sweet, offering quiet words of thanks.

  I came upon a boy who was missing his left arm and leg. Between the bandages and his flu mask, his head was a jigsaw puzzle of intermingled gauze that swallowed up more than seventy-five percent of his face. He slept in one of the leather chairs, head tilted to the right, his chest rising and falling with easeful slumber.

  “That one’s in the arms of Madame Morphine,” said the man sitting in the chair across from him—a graying fellow with an eye patch. “I’ll take his cookie for him.”

  “I’ll save it for when he wakes up,” I said.

  “He might not wake up for a couple hours.”

  “If you were sleeping as peacefully as he is”—I handed the man his own fair share—“wouldn’t you be upset if someone else took your cookie?”

  The man wrestled down his mask to show a wistful grin. “I would give far more than a cookie to be able to sleep as peacefully as that, little miss.”

  “You don’t sleep well?”

  “Not anymore I don’t. Not after they dropped me down in the trenches with the rats.”

  I fetched another cookie out of the basket and nudged it into his hand.

  He patted my elbow. “Thank you, miss. I won’t tell a soul.”

  “Get some good sleep,” I said. “You’re not in the trenches anymore.”

  My next stop was a table of three young men playing poker, their wounds less visible than the others’, although a pair of crutches leaned against the back of the shortest one’s chair. They sat with more ease than the rest of the convalescing fellows, and they enjoyed touching my fingers when I handed them their treats.

  “Thank you, blue eyes.”

  “Much obliged, girlie.”

  “Aren’t you a sweet thing?”

  The tallest of the group, a scarecrow of a man with a bulging Adam’s apple, sang “Pretty Baby” to me, and I blushed and thanked him and wished he would stop. In an armchair next to them, a curly-haired redhead with a leg wrapped in bandages leaned his forehead against the palm of his hand and wept silent tears.

  “Would you like a cookie?” I asked him while Mr. Scarecrow kept on singing behind me.

  The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even look my way. Another long tear rolled down his masked cheek and soaked into the gauze.

  Mr. Scarecrow cut off his serenade mid-chorus. “That’s Mulroney. He cries all the time, which is pretty dang embarrassing to watch. You may as well keep walking so you don’t have to look at him.”

  I bent down closer to the weeping soldier and put my hand on his arm. “I know how you feel. The world’s been getting the best of me, too.”

  The soldier’s eyes met mine.

  “Would you like to escape from your troubles for a while?” I asked. “I’d be happy to go find a book I can read to you. Maybe we can both take a short vacation from the real world.”

  He nodded.

  “Something funny, maybe?”

  He nodded again, with more vigor.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I left a cookie on his lap and sought out the Red Cross woman who had greeted me.

  Society ladies were entering the building to start their afternoon shift of administering aid—a glistening, perfumed whirlwind of starched white blouses, feathered hats, waved hair, and jewels.

  “Do you know if there are any books to read to the men?” I asked them.

  A tall, spindly woman around Aunt Eva’s age beckoned with a manicured fingernail. “Over here, dear. How nice to see a young girl giving her time.” She led me to a battered crate shoved beneath a table and scooted the box out for me to see. “These were donated just yesterday.”

  I knelt and thumbed through a dusty pile of clothbound books. Chaucer. Milton. Tolstoy. Melville. Hawthorne. Bunyan. None of them were right for men in need of cheering.

  Down at the bottom, a lighter choice caught my eye: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  “Aha! That’s more like it.” I maneuvered Twain’s novel out from under the stack. It had a red cover and looked to be in fairly new condition.

  “A children’s tale?” asked the society woman in a tone that told me she was wrinkling her nose beneath her mask.

  “I don’t feel like reading anything somber.” I stood back up. “And I doubt any of them want to hear grim stories of tortured men and
tragic women. Let’s give them Tom and Huck.”

  I tucked Tom Sawyer under my arm, borrowed a spare chair from the poker players’ table, and returned to the side of the weeping curly-haired soldier.

  “ ‘Chapter One,’” I read after I gave a comfortable sigh, “‘Tom Plays, Fights, and Hides’ …”

  A collective silence hushed the poker table beside me. Knees turned my way. Heads lifted. Every single man nearby perked up his ears and listened to the “children’s tale.”

  While the ladies glided around the room and poured tea into fine bone china without a single spilled drop, the soldiers and sailors leaned on the arms of their chairs and laughed at Tom Sawyer’s shenanigans. Their chuckles rumbled around me, growing richer with each chapter, and I thought, Maybe I am doing some good. Maybe Stephen would be pleased to know I’m helping people like him. Maybe Dad would be proud.

  “‘Chapter Four: Showing Off in Sunday School’ … ‘Chapter Six: Tom Meets Becky’ …”

  I read and read until my throat turned dry, and then I took a drink of water and read some more. The canaries and society women and that foul taste of suffering fell away, replaced by Tom’s aunt Polly’s house with the whitewashed fence, and the island where Tom and Huck pretended to be pirates.

  “‘Chapter Ten: Dire Prophesy of the Howling Dog’ …”

  Despite the good I seemed to be doing, however, the section of the room where the boy called Jones smoked in his armchair still weighed me down. He was like a dark stain on a delicate fabric, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from occasionally drifting his way.

  It wasn’t until I had read nearly one hundred pages that I finally figured out why he bothered me so.

  Jones seemed bright. The way he cracked an instant joke—as dark as the jokes may have been—demonstrated a quick wit. It indicated he could’ve been someone I’d enjoy as a friend if that brutal bite of bitterness wasn’t getting the best of him. Perhaps he had once even been gentle enough to have loved a girl. Maybe he held that girl close the day before he left for training and promised in a voice not fully sure of itself, I’ll be fine.

  He bothered me because if Stephen were sitting in that chair instead of Jones, Stephen might have also stabbed my soul with the chilling stare of a person who now knew things he should have never learned.

  AT FOUR THIRTY, I SAID GOOD-BYE TO MY AUDIENCE AND went to the door to fetch my bag.

  My pace slowed as I drew nearer the exit. The same feeling of dissatisfaction that had pestered me at Mr. Darning’s studio turned my legs sluggish. I hadn’t accomplished one single thing for Stephen. I had worried too much about upsetting the men to ask them the questions baffling my brain.

  My feet came to a halt.

  I turned toward the person in the room who had spoken to me with the most honesty and marched in his direction.

  “Ah, Aunt Gertie returns.” Jones twirled an unlit cigarette around with his fingers like a baton.

  “You seem unafraid of honesty.” I stopped in front of him. “I need to ask you a question about the war.”

  I could see his mouth harden through the hole in his mask. Clenching my fists, I fought off my fear. “What would you think if a soldier told you he was being tortured by birds over in France?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “What would that mean to someone who’s been over there?”

  Again he studied me with those watchful, penetrating eyes that didn’t seem to blink. “I’d say, ‘Keep your nightmares to yourself, pal. Those aren’t the things we’re supposed to be discussing with other people.’”

  “You’d think they’re just nightmares?”

  “If I mentioned out loud half the things that torture me in my dreams, I’d be put in a straitjacket faster than you can say crackpot. And I guarantee you every man sitting in this building feels the same way.”

  I looked out at all the other men and experienced a depth of concern so overwhelming it made me tremble. I took a breath to steady myself and turned back to Jones. “There was nothing over there resembling murderous birds, then? Nothing that could have pinned a soldier down?”

  “I don’t know.” He crossed his right leg over his left knee and bit the cigarette between his teeth. “Reality and nightmares have a funny way of blurring together when a man’s fighting down in the bowels of mother earth.” He twitched his foot and kept his gaze on my face. “Why do you want to know this stuff? Who’s telling you he’s getting pinned down by birds?”

  I bit my lower lip and debated whether I should answer.

  He gave a short laugh that was more of a shrug. “You’re as bad as the doctors, aren’t you? Wanting to know what’s going on inside our heads but scared sick of the answers. Maybe you shouldn’t go asking about things your naive female brain can’t handle. Go back to your quilting bees and tea parties or whatever the hell you all concern yourselves with.”

  This time I was the one who responded with an unflinching glare. “A dead boy is the one telling me,” I said. “A dead soldier.”

  His eyes lost a hint of their chill. “What are you talking about?”

  “Even us naive women find ourselves haunted by the war, you see. And some of us have even tried killing ourselves, like you claim you’re tempted to do. I can tell you firsthand it’s not worth the heartache and pain. So don’t do it.”

  I turned and left the building.

  A ROW OF ELECTRIC LIGHTBULBS BURNED ACROSS THE ceiling of the southbound streetcar, illuminating a green-tinged poster that hung on one of the closed windows.

  REMEMBER BELGIUM! BUY BONDS

  FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN

  Below the boldfaced words, a silhouetted soldier in a spiked German helmet dragged a little girl away from her Belgian village.

  I shifted in my seat and stared at the poster while the streetcar rocked back and forth. Conflicting thoughts about the war stabbed behind my eyes like a headache.

  In saving U.S. boys from heading overseas, I realized, Dad may have been allowing Germans to kill Belgians.

  The U.S. government saved Belgians … by allowing Germans to kill and maim our boys.

  Lives were being traded for other lives. The line between right and wrong blurred into a haze. Dad and Stephen could be called heroes, murderers, or victims, depending on how you looked at the situation, and the Germans, too, for that matter. Nothing about the war made sense. None of it seemed right. The kaisers, kings, and presidents should have just had a good arm wrestle over their differences instead of bringing regular people into their mess.

  The stabbing behind my eyes worsened.

  “God, don’t let it be the flu,” I murmured loud enough for a woman in a maid’s uniform to turn my way with fear in her eyes.

  I BLEW THROUGH AUNT EVA’S FRONT DOOR JUST AS darkness was settling over the house, and I was immediately assaulted with another “Who’s there?” from Oberon. His feathers rustled in his cage, and I could have sworn a pair of wings brushed against my hair. I swiped at the back of my neck, grabbed a candlestick, and ran upstairs to drop off my black bag and sweat-soaked flu mask. My goggles—my steadfast companions during my last moments with Stephen and my lightning death—lay on my bed amid the other treasures I had taken out to make room for books and notes. I fitted the lenses over my eyes and adjusted the leather straps around my head for old time’s sake.

  After making the rounds to light the downstairs lamps, I soothed my parched throat with a cup of cool water in the kitchen. My headache began to ease its firm grip on my skull. I filled the glass again and browsed Aunt Eva’s collection of phonograph records out in the living room, hunting for the musical equivalent of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She owned several songs from the opera The Pirates of Penzance, which would do nicely.

  I wound the phonograph’s hand crank and put the needle in place. The record crackled to life. An actor with a dramatic stage voice announced he would live and die a pirate king, and a bouncy harpsichord introduction began. I leaned back in the rickety white rocking chair and listene
d to the pirate and his harmonious crew fence and sing about how glorious it was to be a pirate king.

  Oberon’s big bronze cage was starting to smell like it needed to be cleaned. The magpie swallowed seeds from a metal bowl, but I tried to ignore the movements of his crowlike head by gazing out at the empty street through my snug goggles. The world was still for the moment, unless the sirens of ambulances had become so ingrained in my ears that I no longer heard them. A glowing jack-o’-lantern smiled at me from the porch rail of a bungalow across the way, and I remembered it was Halloween. No one else seemed to be celebrating a holiday a little too closely associated with death. And nightmares.

  I sighed and held the glass to my chest. “Those poor men and their war dreams,” I said to the empty room before taking another sip.

  During the song’s second verse, I spied a roadster with shining round headlights cruising into view in front of the house. The Pirate King continued to belt out his piratical joy, while the car’s driver steered his vehicle in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and bumped the front tire into the curb. He backed up two feet, shifted again, and pulled alongside the pavement. The roadster was a Cadillac. Its sapphire-blue paint glimmered beneath the streetlight.

  Julius’s Cadillac.

  I sat up straight and stiff.

  Aunt Eva was in the passenger seat—I could see the silhouettes of her work cap and flu mask. I tore off my goggles and ran to the front door.

  The two of them climbed out of the vehicle and shut the doors. Julius wore the same gray fedora as the night before, and he lugged a crate of oranges under his arm. Aunt Eva laughed and chatted with so much giddy enthusiasm that she didn’t even notice me standing guard in the doorway until they reached the porch steps.

  “Mary Shelley!” She grabbed her chest. “You scared me, just standing there. What are you doing without your mask?”

  Julius thumped up the porch steps behind her. “Would you look at that? It does have a mouth and a nose.” He gave my chin a flick, but I jerked away.