Beneath Ceaseless Skies #151

by Cat Rambo

  Issue #151 • July 10, 2014

  “Rappaccini’s Crow,” by Cat Rambo

  “Crossroads and Gateways,” by Helen Marshall

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  RAPPACCINI’S CROW

  by Cat Rambo

  Doctor Rappaccini has a pet crow named Jonah. He says he raised it from a chick, but I have trouble imagining Doctor Rappaccini patiently nursing anything, tucking a blanket around it to keep it warm or feeding it mealworms and apple shards. If he has such a faculty for tenderness, he doesn’t exhibit it towards any of the patients here.

  Today he made an appearance to supervise Mr. Abernathy’s removal from his wheelchair.

  Someone should have realized Abernathy was never moving from it, but the orderlies probably welcomed not having to lift him back and forth. Bedsores must have formed while he sat there. Over the weeks, they split and healed, split and healed, finally fusing him to the wicker.

  The orderlies left him there, looking out over the garden’s distant purple leaves. Never showing any sign of pain, till his flesh grew into the chair. Today at 2:45 PM, he screamed while they cut it away, and Doctor Rappaccini and his crow watched, unspeaking. When they were done, he leaned forward to listen to Mr. Abernathy’s heart with his stethoscope. By then Abernathy had lapsed into silence, but I wondered that Rappaccini could hear the beat of the man’s heart over the painful wheeze of his lungs.

  The Doctor wears a pad on his shoulder for the crow to shit on. It misses most of the time, and gray and white clots the black coat’s backside.

  It’s hit or miss whether Abernathy will survive. I don’t know that he cares either way.

  Before this, all he did was stare out his window, day and night, past purple and green leaves towards the east, towards the mountains the white men call the Cascades.

  Over the mountains, they tell me, the sun shines all the time.

  Thunder last night. Not natural thunder, but echoes from the unending battle being waged far out among the San Juans. The great phlogiston-fueled battle rafts crash against each other day and night, pushing their claim to territory back and forth. We’re close enough to those battle lines that many people have fled south to Oregon. Others have stuck it out, saying that the lines will shift again, in a different direction.

  I have stayed. Where else would I go?

  * * *

  I wheel the Colonel out into the watery sunlight. He can walk, but he prefers the dignity of the chair, in spite of its awkwardness, to having to struggle for every step.

  Two days ago, when he surrendered his artificial leg to me after a visit from his niece, the Colonel said, “I knew every man of the three who owned this before me.”

  He slapped the cloudy brass surface of the calf. “And some fella will get it after me. Maybe someone I know, maybe someone I don’t. Do you think ghosts linger around the objects they leave behind? If so, I’d be surprised if there weren’t three ghosts riding this one.”

  I didn’t answer, and he didn’t expect me to. He knows my vocal cords were seared away in the same war that stole his leg. The same war that’s furnished most of the inhabitants of this asylum. Broken soldiers, minds and bodies ground-up by its terrible machines.

  Used to be an injury was enough to get you out. Now if they can, they turn you into a clank, half human, half machine, and send you back to the endless task of pushing the lines back and forth. Nowadays we receive only the men who cannot be repaired, and here they sit or lie in their beds, waiting to die a slower death than the war would have given them, tended by orderlies like me, other broken men and women who can function enough to pretend to work.

  People forget. Even though I can’t speak, I can still hear. Or maybe they don’t forget that. Maybe they just figure I’ll never be able to tell anyone.

  True enough. I don’t have many who understand hand signs here in the asylum. But I can write out messages, even if it takes me a long time to construct the letters, even if they waver and bobble in a way that got me beaten over and over by the nuns back in school. As though your relationship with God was reflected in the character of your handwriting.

  I don’t see Dr. Rappaccini that much. But that crow goes everywhere in the asylum. No one pays it much mind. It flaps along corridors and perches on the back of chairs, goes into patient rooms and pokes through their dressers. Mr. Whitfield told me it took his wife’s wedding ring, which he’d had on the night table in a china saucer so he could look at it when he first woke up.

  Maybe the crow took it. Or maybe another orderly slipped it in his pocket, thinking to himself that we’re not paid that much, or at least not enough to be able to resist temptation. I don’t know.

  Either way, even if Mr. Whitfield lost it himself, he cried when he told me about it; ineffectual old man sobs. I patted his shoulder, feeling how thin and bony it was under the threadbare garment. Dr. Rappaccini says Mr. Whitfield is one of the lucky ones. His body wasn’t harmed by the war. Instead he has war shock, pieces of his mind blown away instead of his flesh.

  Is he truly one of the lucky ones? Sometimes I think that must be; having something broken in your head must be better than having something broken in your body, visible to anyone who looks at you.

  Other times I’m not so sure.

  * * *

  I watched the crow this morning, thinking that if it had taken Mr. Whitfield’s ring, it would have put it somewhere. That it would have some treasure trove of what it’d stolen, somewhere in the asylum, and that I’d be able to retrieve the ring from it.

  Mr. Whitfield was so upset. His white hair stood up in startled tufts and his eyes oozed tears. It was as though all his soul was in that ring. He told me that it was the only thing that let him remember his wife.

  So I watched the crow. It made its rounds like a doctor, room to room, checking on each patient. I hadn’t noticed that before. Who would; who has time to watch a crow, here where we are overworked, where every idle hand is quickly put to labor?

  It’s odd how everyone seems to defer to it, almost as though it is Dr. Rappaccini himself. The only person who dares defy it is the cook, when she shoos it away from the beef roast being readied for the dinner.

  She never speaks of her past, but it surfaced in her language, the spray of invective, filthy and informative, spat in the crow’s direction.

  She flung a saucepan at the crow as well. The crash as it hit the wall cupboard made everyone in the kitchen jump. Everyone looked around, afraid that Doctor Rappaccini might have seen .

  He wasn’t there, but the crow was indignant enough for both of them. She was lucky it couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell the doctor what she had done to his beloved pet. It hopped away on the counter, then flapped up to the high shelf held up with iron corbels and perched there, clacking its beak and cawing at her as though about to explode with indignation.

  She went over to the window above the sink and opened it, stepped back, and gestured at it. As though it understood her, the crow flapped and flew out, still berating her with squawks and quonks.

  By evening though, it seemed to have forgiven her. Or maybe it was taunting her, I don’t know which. Either way, it hopped on her shoulder as she was trying to ladle out dinner to the shuffling rows of patients. She couldn’t push it off, since the doctor was standing there watching.

  But it couldn’t resist payback. She showed me later the blood on her arm where its claws had dug in, a cluster of discolored oozing marks. If I could have, I would’ve told her to wash it. I tried to mime that out. Demons live where there is dirt, and who knows what kind of demons a crow harbors? Instead she wrapped
it back up, winding the bandage around her arm, hiding the damage.

  * * *

  Last night I dreamed I was the crow.

  Crows aren’t male and female the way we are. Or at least it’s a matter of indifference to humans, and something that presumably only matters to other crows. I flew among men and women and all of them looked at me and knew that I wasn’t like them, but that was all right, because I was a crow.

  Other parts of being a crow were less appealing. I flapped my wings and made a gravelly sound in my throat as I plucked an eyeball from a corpse. I popped it in my beak like a grape squeezed between thumb and forefinger, full of juice, to the point where it burst, spattering liquid over my wings.

  I woke with a coppery taste in my mouth.

  Over breakfast, I watched outside where Jonah sat on the fence post, calling to the other crows. None of them came down to sit with him, no matter how much he cooed or wheedled. Several times he flapped up to try and land beside them. Each time they pecked at him until he flew away.

  No one else seemed to notice except the Colonel. He caught my eye and said, “Probably doesn’t smell right to them. Doesn’t smell the way a proper crow should.”

  So Jonah pays some price for his life here. It must seem worthwhile to him, or he wouldn’t stay.

  Perhaps that’s why his temper is so nasty; why he cannot stand to be thwarted.

  I wonder what the other crows must think of Jonah. A crow that’s allowed itself to be tamed in order to make its life more comfortable. Do they envy it, or think it’s sold its soul?

  If there was someone else like me, what would that reflection say about me?

  Would he envy me?

  Or think I’ve sold my soul?

  Sometimes prejudice works to my advantage. I don’t have to share a room with any of the other orderlies, because they are white and don’t want to sleep with the dirty Indian.

  That saves me trouble. I can unwind the bandages around my breasts and breathe.

  I’m still a man. That’s what I feel like.

  But sometimes my body doesn’t agree.

  It’s always been that way. I knew I was a man, even when everything else was telling me differently. It wasn’t until I ran away from the orphanage, lied and enlisted in a war that was eating up soldiers faster than anyone could produce them, that I could live the way I wanted to.

  It wasn’t something I could have accomplished on my own. Here and there people have helped, looked the other way or let me slide by. When I was injured, of course the doctors knew. They could’ve caused a scandal. As it was, all they did was make sure I couldn’t draw on my pay, because I’d accumulated it under false pretenses, or my pension, which fell into the same category.

  But there is plenty of work for those no longer fit to be soldiers. My options, the options offered an Indian who could no longer speak, were certainly not those offered someone with paler skin or whose gender was unquestionable, but I did all right.

  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.