White Wind Blew

by James Markert

  He’d only fully begun to understand prayer months before, when he’d asked his father why Minister Ford’s wife, Cecelia, hadn’t been at church two weeks in a row.

  “She’s sick, Wolfgang,” Charles had told him. “Which is why we pray for her every day. Go ahead, talk to God and tell Him you want Mrs. Ford to get to feeling better.”

  And so Wolfgang prayed for Mrs. Ford, along with everyone else in the congregation. He missed seeing her at church. She was wide with a hefty bosom, and every time she hugged him she pulled him close. And she smelled good. Every night for a month he prayed to God for Mrs. Ford to feel better. And it worked. Cecelia Ford walked into church one morning looking the same as if she’d never gotten sick. Wolfgang felt as if he’d been involved in the greatest miracle on earth. That night Wolfgang went home and prayed that his mother would fry bacon in the morning. When the sun rose, the smell of frying bacon came with it.

  Wolfgang looked to the cross on the wall above the piano and held back tears. What had he done, wishing pain on his father?

  “Play, Wolfgang.” His father winced on the couch.

  Wolfgang focused on the white and black piano keys before him. He started to warm up with scales.

  “Good,” coached Charles. “Good…tempo…tempo…” He screamed out. Doris was at the grocery. It was just the two of them. Charles gripped his stomach. His eyeballs bulged.

  Tears formed in Wolfgang’s eyes at the piano. “Daddy—”

  “Keep playing,” hissed Charles Pike. “And God damn it, watch your tempo.”

  Wolfgang looked to the cross above the piano. Stop it, his mind cried. God, please stop my father’s pain. I should never have prayed for such a thing. I take it all back.

  “Damn it!” Charles screamed.

  “Daddy—”

  “Keep playing.”

  Wolfgang glared at the cross. Stop it…stop it…stop it.

  ***

  Wolfgang prayed for his father to feel better. The next week Charles seemed to improve. The lethargy had passed. He stood with Wolfgang in the center of the living room floor. Wolfgang had the violin craned between his neck and left shoulder. He held the bow in his right hand and awaited the next instruction. Charles had his hair down, and it fell over his shoulders and hid his loopy ears. His red cravat hung loosely around his neck. He’d taken off his jacket and vest, so all that remained was his fluffy white shirt rolled to his elbows. In his left hand was his favorite violin, the one with the carefully burned letter P on the base of the wood—a signature-type letter, sprawling and slanted, a letter he’d spent hours practicing. It was how he would sign all of his instruments in his Vienna music store—such a dreamer. He slapped the violin bow across Wolfgang’s knees and warned him about his posture.

  Just as Wolfgang raised his bow across the strings, he noticed a look in his father’s eyes. The same look he’d seen on the couch the previous week. Charles dropped his violin and bow, doubled over, and ran that way into the bathroom down the hall. Wolfgang, still clutching his own violin, followed his father until the bathroom door slammed in his face. On the other side of the door, Charles grunted in discomfort and breathed heavily. A minute later Charles screamed. “Jesus. What the— Doris! Doris!”

  Wolfgang’s mother ran down the hall, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She backed Wolfgang away from the door and tried the knob. It was locked. “Open up, Charles.” The lock clicked. Doris Pike grimaced and forced her way inside. Wolfgang heard her gasp: “Charles, you’re bleeding.”

  Over the next several months, Charles lost weight at an alarming rate. There were mornings when Wolfgang hardly recognized his father from the day before. During school Wolfgang often lost focus as his mind drifted to his father’s health. He prayed when he should have been studying. He’d imagine his father getting better during the day, the Lord’s hand reaching down through their roof and healing him. But he’d return home and his father would look much the same. His face showed the angled form of the skull underneath his skin. His eye sockets darkened. His hair began showing signs of gray. Still he refused to see any doctor. “The Lord will heal me if he so chooses.”

  Wolfgang cursed his father’s stubbornness, and he couldn’t understand why the Lord was waiting so long. He’d been praying to Him for over a month. By November Charles had stopped going to work. He was too weak to play his instruments. He and Doris fought over money. They fought over his declining health. Every day she urged him to go see a doctor, but still he refused. His clothes hung from his thin frame. He’d had Wolfgang cut a new notch in his leather belt to keep his suit pants from falling. Charles spent most of his evenings in bed, especially after the nausea began to set in. He’d lay with his legs under the covers, his composition on his lap and his inkwell propped in the folds of the bed sheets beside him.

  One night Wolfgang knocked on his parents’ bedroom door. His mother was in the kitchen and would have scolded him had she known he was disturbing Charles while he was writing.

  “Come in,” he said weakly.

  Wolfgang slid inside the cramped room, which smelled thick with sickness—sheets that needed to be washed, clothes that needed to be cleaned, and pillows stained. Wolfgang wore a stethoscope around his neck. He’d been secretly playing doctor. Charles gave him a warm smile and beckoned him closer. His fingernails needed to be clipped. Wolfgang approached slowly, staring at the man he’d once known as his father. Charles put his pen on the top page of his work and ruffled Wolfgang’s hair. “The greatest fugue ever written.” He tapped his work with a crooked index finger. “Right here.” His favorite violin, the model for Pike Music, rested on the pillow beside him.

  Charles reached out and yanked the stethoscope from Wolfgang’s neck. He stared at it and then dropped it to the floor. “I don’t need a doctor, Wolfgang. God will do with me as He wishes. Nothing science or medicine can do.” Charles laughed. “From monkey to man? Can you believe that, Wolfgang? From monkey to man.” He pouted out his lower lip and scrunched his face. “Do I look like a monkey to you?”

  Wolfgang didn’t know whether to laugh or be afraid. “No, Father, you don’t look like a monkey.” It was during the time of sickness that Wolfgang had begun to call Charles “Father” instead of “Daddy.” This sick man wasn’t his daddy. “Did God make you sick?” asked Wolfgang.

  Charles nodded. “Yes, He did. But He had his reasons, Wolfgang. He always has his reasons.” He ruffled his son’s hair again. “Do you have dreams?”

  Wolfgang shook his head.

  “Someday you will.”

  Wolfgang stared at him, confused.

  ***

  The vomiting started in December. And the fevers after that. His mother cried a lot when she thought Wolfgang wasn’t looking. Sometimes she’d cry at night, knitting in a rocking chair next to their bed while Charles worked by candlelight. Wolfgang would watch them from his bedroom wall. Whenever his father would lean his head back against the headboard and moan, she would stand up and wipe his brow with a wet cloth. When he’d lean over the side of the bed and vomit into a metal pail, she’d empty it and wipe his mouth. Sometimes his mother would leave at night and return a few hours later with food. Fruit and vegetables. She’d fix him a plate of carrots and celery, apples and oranges, and take them up to their bedroom so he could nibble on them while he composed.

  One night Wolfgang heard her feet on the stairs. He knelt on his mattress, peered into their room through the hole and watched her enter with a plate of vegetables. It was all she could get Charles to eat. She placed the plate on the bed beside him, but she was clumsy taking her hand away. Her fingers clipped the well of ink, spilling some of it on the sheet. A few spots splattered on his work. He grabbed her hair, yanked her down, and shoved her nose in the spilled ink. He lifted the inkwell and rammed it against the side of her head, cutting her above the left eye. She staggered back with ink covering her face.

>   It was the first and last time Charles had ever raised a hand in anger to either one of them. Perhaps if he had, at least his behavior over the years might have been easier to understand. But later, before they went to bed, he kissed her forehead and told her he loved her. And that they would jump on a boat and sail to Vienna as soon as they had enough money stashed away. He would open his own music store. Doris nodded obediently, some of the ink still staining the creases of her face. Charles moved a strand of her red hair from her eyes, kissed the cut he’d made above her left eye, and tucked the hair behind her left ear. “You’ve got ink in your hair.”

  As if he never remembered hitting her.

  ***

  A few days later the stench from his parents’ bedroom was nearly toxic. Charles lay in bed. His inkwell and papers were still on the bedside table. His feet were bare, the bottoms facing Wolfgang. Wolfgang heard his mother in the hallway. He quickly hopped into his bed and pretended to be asleep when she quietly stuck her head into his room. When she left, he returned to the wall and peered through.

  His mother closed her bedroom door, paused for a moment with her nose against the grains of the wood, and locked it. She approached the bed and kissed Charles on the forehead. She stroked his hair for a moment and said something to him that was not audible to Wolfgang. She handed him the King James Bible, and he clutched it tight against his chest. Then she took a pillow and, with both hands, pressed the pillow down over her husband’s face. Wolfgang could see her back straining. She let out a soft grunt. She stood on her tiptoes. Her calf muscles strained as her slight body pressed down on the pillow. Charles moaned and grunted against the pillow, his right hand held on to the Bible while the fingers of his left hand clawed at the tangled bed sheets. His bare feet rose several inches off the mattress, kicking and falling, kicking and falling, until finally they stopped.

  Wolfgang watched, wide-eyed. What was she doing? He tried to scream, but the sound got caught up inside his throat. He froze. He couldn’t breathe. His mother moved the pillow from his father’s face and dropped it to the floor. She checked for a pulse at his father’s neck. She knelt to the floor, rested her face against his chest, and started crying.

  ***

  That night, Wolfgang lay in bed, his covers pulled up to his neck, and stared at the ceiling. His mother cried on the other side of the wall for hours. He watched the tree limbs outside his bedroom window. Shadows moved everywhere. He was too scared to close his eyes. He felt like he was wheezing. He prayed for his own safety. How could she? He’d been praying for him. It could have worked. It had taken some time with Mrs. Ford, but eventually praying had worked on her. He waited all night for his bedroom door to creak open and for his mother to walk into his room with a pillow. He waited, but she never came. When he finally fell asleep, he startled awake.

  Do you have dreams? Someday you will…

  Even after the sun shone into his room, he was slow to get up. He’d convinced himself that it had all been a dream. A terrible nightmare. His father would be alive and writing in the living room when he came downstairs, his favorite violin tucked to his neck, the bow moving back and forth over the strings.

  But the living room was empty and silent. Wolfgang found his mother sitting alone at the kitchen table. Maybe he’d gone to work? Or off to the Baroque for an early drink?

  Doris Pike sniffled into her fist as Wolfgang showed himself. “Come here, honey.” She patted her right thigh. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Wolfgang didn’t budge. He stood ten paces away from her and stayed there. She sniffled again. “I’m sorry, honey, but you know how sick your father was?”

  Wolfgang nodded.

  “Well, God took him away during the night.”

  ***

  Wolfgang sat on the piano bench with his hands folded between his legs, staring down at the floor of his cottage, the splintered slats between his boots. Only Rose had known. And now Susannah.

  Wolfgang waited for her to say something, but the room was silent. She sniffled much like his mother had that morning in the kitchen. Flames snapped against the charred stones of the fireplace. His face felt slack. He didn’t look up, afraid to look into Susannah’s eyes.

  The couch creaked as Susannah shifted her position. Her bare feet padded against the wood floor, coming closer, her shadow combining with his own. He didn’t look up. She draped her arms around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. His face brushed against the buttons of her dress, pressed against her chest. Her heart beat into his ear.

  Susannah touched the top of his head. She sunk her fingers into the fluff of his hair momentarily before moving back to the couch. Only then did he look up, watching her from behind—the way her sandy hair fell in curls between her shoulders, the way her nurse’s dress conformed to her narrow waist, the way her hips moved beneath it. He turned to face the piano as she sat again.

  “Shall I play some more?”

  She sniffled. “Please.”

  Wolfgang faced the piano keys. His arms relaxed. His shoulders sagged. He began playing, moving from Mozart to Beethoven and back to Mozart before pausing to see if Susannah had fallen asleep. Before even the last note had drifted to silence, Susannah’s soft voice came from across the room. “Keep playing.”

  He could have played for her all night. He touched his fingers to the keys again, periodically glancing toward the rose atop the piano. For the next hour he played Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms, and finished with the Mozart Fantasia in D minor. After the sonority of the final chord faded to nothing, another soft sound found his ears.

  Susannah snored on the couch. He watched her for a moment. No hole in the wall here, he thought. She was lying on her side, her chest rising and falling in rhythm, her left hand resting on the curve of her left thigh, her legs bent at the knees. Wolfgang covered her with a blanket and then got himself ready for bed. He contemplated changing into his pajamas but decided against it. He’d sleep in his pants and shirt. He blew out all the candles, then limped his way to his side of the bed. He watched the fire dwindle to ash. He stared at the ceiling, and glimpses of the city outside of Waverly Hills flashed through his mind—the growing downtown buildings and hotels, Macauley’s Theatre, an orange-and-red-smeared river sunset, the wooded parks, the brick-making kilns that created that noticeable haze over Smoketown, the hogshead barrels on the sidewalks of the Tobacco District, the Irish in Limerick, the Germans in Frogtown, the prestigious houses at Saint James Court, poor blacks and whites living in darkened alleyways, horse farms on the outskirts of the city where the grass was so green in the spring that it appeared blue.

  Wolfgang glanced at the cross on the wall as the wine continued to work on his brain. His hands fondled the bed sheets below his waist—what was he doing? Now he was helpless to stop it. He was still too aware of Susannah’s presence in the room. He thought of the patients on the hillside, black and white. He thought of the brick flying through his window. He thought of McVain and Rufus, and an idea suddenly hit him like a fist in the face. He closed his eyes and blocked out Susannah’s breathing.

  Finally he slept.

  Chapter 15

  Wolfgang had a hangover from the wine, but the headache wasn’t so bad as to cloud the memories of Susannah spending the night on his couch. She was gone now. He’d heard the door close sometime after sunrise, and she’d left the blanket neatly folded on the arm of the couch, along with a note.

  I’ll be back at 7:30. It’s a workday, you know.

  S.

  Wolfgang thought about tossing the note into the trash can, but what if it was found? Lincoln would have years’ worth of fun if he found out she’d spent the night. Instead, Wolfgang slid it beneath a stack of music atop his piano. He should burn it.

  In the bathroom he filled the tub with cold water. He sat on the edge of the tub and said the rosary as the waterline grew closer to the lip. The temperature reminded him of th
e Holy Water fonts near the entry doors of the abbey church during the winter, when they could literally feel ice crystals, it was so cold. He eased himself inside, trembling, shivering until his teeth chattered. He washed quickly.

  All out of love for God.

  ***

  Wolfgang started the morning off with a baptism in the chapel. A thirty-year-old man in the final stages of TB had lived what he’d called a faithless life, a moral but faithless life. He’d never believed in God, and the closer he got to death, the more he began to wonder, as they all did, what would happen after his death. Where would he go? Was there really a heaven? Wolfgang explained to the man that he wasn’t a priest yet so the baptism technically wouldn’t count, but the man insisted anyway.

  “You have doubt?” Jesse Jacobs had asked him with Wolfgang listening from behind, preparing the baptismal water.

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “Faith is doubt, my friend,” Jesse said, patting the man’s shoulder.

  Wolfgang stepped in. “Very well put, Jesse.” And so Wolfgang baptized the man Catholic, with Jesse as witness. They’d managed three pieces of cake and three glasses of milk from the cafeteria as a celebration before Jesse and the newly baptized man returned to their respective solarium porches.

  Wolfgang found Susannah waiting in the hallway outside the chapel, arms folded. She giggled and then attempted to hide it with a fist.

  Wolfgang touched the top of his head. “What is it?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “About what?”

  “We have women patients on the fourth floor now.”