by Carrie Brown
She stared up at him. “Once, my great-grandmother was supposed to cross this bridge; it was near her village, in Russia,” she said. “It was snowing. And she was stopped at the edge of the river by one of her angels, a man angel, who told her not to cross, that the bridge was unsafe. You see? And so she didn’t cross but stayed there instead, the lady angels blowing on her hands and feet to keep them warm. And all night my great-grandmother stopped anyone who might be thinking of crossing that bridge. All except for one man, who wouldn’t listen to her, who didn’t believe her. And when he was in the middle of the river, the bridge broke away beneath him and he was drowned.
“They tell me I look just like she did when she was my age,” she said, and she held the picture up to Conrad again, turned her shallow chin to him in profile. “Don’t you think so?”
And Conrad had nodded, amazed.
AROUND MIDAFTERNOON CONRAD went up to the house to make himself some tea. The cold wind fighting at his back all day had made him ache, and he felt tired and hungry. Standing in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil, he looked out the window and saw Nolan Peak moving furtively through the overgrown garden, the tops of the trees lashing in the wind, the flower borders flattened.
Nolan arrived as though he did not wish to be seen, sidling down the garden steps, looking intently at the ground as if following a set of tiny tracks. Conrad watched him for a minute and then turned off the gas under the kettle and stepped outside.
Nolan was standing in the center of the vegetable garden, frowning, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. Conrad walked quietly over the grass and stopped at the gate. He glanced up at the sky; it rushed overhead like a river, the clouds churning. After a minute he cleared his throat slightly and called out, “I should thank you.”
Nolan jumped, spun around, and glared at Conrad. “Oh no. Not me,” he said.
Conrad looked at him in confusion. Why did all his conversations seem so baffling today? “For my letter,” he said, thinking to explain. “For printing my letter.” He paused. “I didn’t think you would.”
“I wouldn’t have. I didn’t,” Nolan said. “I mean, obviously it has been, but not because I had anything to do with it. What I have is a—snake in the grass.” He kicked at the earth under his shoe. “And all I see here, as I predicted, is a garden. A vegetable garden.”
Conrad ran his hand over his head. He opened the gate. “Well, I guess I’m confused,” he said. “Miss Barteleme said—”
Nolan froze, held up a hand. “What?”
He was facing Conrad now, his palm opened toward him, the gesture of a traffic cop.
Conrad stopped, feeling uncomfortable. He cleared his throat again. “Well, she came by here. She said she’d read my letter. I don’t think she quite agreed with your—position on it. And then, when I saw it in the paper, I assumed—”
“Assumed what?” Nolan looked as though his collar had suddenly become too tight. Conrad saw the bow tie, green with yellow spots, bob up and down several times.
“Assumed you’d changed your mind. That she’d gotten you to change your mind.”
Nolan stared at Conrad. “She read it,” he repeated.
“Well, yes, she—”
“She read it and she thought I was wrong. About printing it.”
“Yes, she—”
“Oh,” Nolan said slowly. “Oh, I’m starting to see. No, no—” He held up his head again, as though to stop Conrad. “I’m starting to see how it is.” He turned aside, looked hard at the ground.
Conrad regarded him, his coat with the too short sleeves, his silly-looking Tyrolean hat.
“Miss Barteleme,” Nolan said slowly, “has an infinite knowledge of—” But he didn’t finish his sentence. The bow tie worked up and down, up and down. “She never said anything to me,” he said.
Conrad felt himself relax at Nolan’s tone, which had dropped from anger to bewilderment.
“I depend upon her, you see, to—” Nolan put his hand up to the back of his neck, rubbed at some old discomfort there. “Her good judgment,” he finished at last, rather quietly. Looking around vaguely, he spotted the garden bench, walked over, and sat down on it. “Miss Barteleme,” he said, “believes in angels.”
Conrad sat down beside him.
“She’s the only one who could have done it,” Nolan said, staring at the ground. “I’m there late at night, you know, writing my editorial. She usually waits for me, to lock up. She always waits for me. When I left last night, though, she was still there. Busy with the files. ‘You run along, Mr. Peak. I’ll wait for the printer.’ That’s what she said.” He pushed his hands along his thighs, a gesture of helplessness. “She must have done it after I’d gone home.” He put his head in his hands. “And she never said anything to me.”
Conrad glanced over at him. Suddenly it was quite clear to him that of all possible betrayals, this was the one Nolan had least expected. Nolan believed that a kind of brute anarchy was at work in the world, one dilemma after another, life as a Sisyphean nightmare. In a way Betty Barteleme was the one reliable force in his life; Betty with her mix-and-match pantsuits, Betty with her eyebrows plucked into an attitude of serious purpose, Betty with her hair the uniform black of ebony, no matter how old she became.
Betty was known throughout town as Peak’s lieutenant. She stood at the back of the room at city council meetings, a squat, humorless presence, and when Nolan rose heavily from his chair to approach her, she would open her purse silently and place two aspirins in his outstretched palm, this transaction completed without a single word having passed between them, without so much as a glance. If you called the Aegis having just seen Nolan walk in the door, you knew that Betty’s invariable reply to you would be, “I’ll see if Mr. Peak is available now.” She was famous for once physically blocking the door to Nolan’s office with her heroic, pastel-suited body when a hostile vagrant, odoriferous and degenerate and armed with a treatise on the approaching millennium, had demanded to see the man in charge. Toronto had called the police, but it was clear to everyone that Betty had saved the day.
Louis French joked for months afterward about putting a collar around her neck and using her as a night watchdog at Harrison Supplee’s hardware store. But Conrad knew that it was Toronto who had finally put a stop to the jokes. Some boys on the high school baseball team had growled and barked menacingly at Betty one afternoon when she’d stopped by the field to deliver a phone message to Toronto. She had burst into tears and fled to her car. Toronto, watching her go, had stood regretfully for a minute, hanging his head. And then he’d called the boys over to him, made them sit in a circle around him at first base, and told them how brave she’d been, how fearless. “One day,” he said, “one of you might have to defend someone you love. Let’s hope even some of you can be as brave as Betty Barteleme.” And because they loved and admired him, the boys felt ashamed. The next day there was a vase of lilacs on Betty Barteleme’s desk when she came to work. Toronto understood that she thought Nolan had sent them, and he never corrected her.
Now Conrad looked sympathetically at Nolan’s bowed head.
“I don’t think that’s quite fair, do you?” Nolan said to the ground after a moment, though Conrad didn’t think he expected or even wanted an answer. “I’m not an unreasonable man. Am I viewed as unreasonable?”
Conrad didn’t know exactly how to answer this question, but he felt sorry enough for Nolan to try to say something comforting.
“Well, I wouldn’t have said so. Not unreasonable.” Conrad put his hands together, rubbed them against the cold. “Maybe she just thought there wasn’t any point. That it was one of those things you’d never—see eye to eye on.”
“She didn’t come in today,” Nolan continued as if he hadn’t heard him. “Called in and talked to Kenny. He said she wasn’t feeling well. And I thought, at the time, that that wasn’t like her. I don’t believe Miss Barteleme has ever taken a sick day as long as I’ve known her. I thought she was—not
that sort of person.”
Conrad laughed in spite of himself. “What sort of person?” he said. “The kind that gets sick?”
Nolan glanced over at him, glared again.
Conrad leaned back against the bench. “Everyone gets sick sometimes,” he said quietly.
“Not Miss Barteleme,” Nolan replied glumly.
“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. My letter’s in there.” Conrad thought a moment. “There were a lot of people here earlier, you know,” he said. “To be honest with you, I was sort of surprised.”
Nolan snorted. “I should think so,” he said.
“Oh, not in the way you think,” Conrad said mildly. “You know, I wouldn’t have said I was that sort of person. A person who—sees things. But I’m discovering that it’s more common than you might imagine. Seeing things, I mean. People do it all the time.” He realized as he spoke that he sounded exactly like Rose. It was something Rose might have said, in that same tolerant tone. Or Lemuel himself.
He glanced over at Nolan, who was sitting hunched over beside him, his head in his hands.
“You’re a bird man,” he said. “Did you ever keep pigeons?”
Nolan didn’t lift his head. “I just look at them. The birds,” he said. “I just watch them.”
“Well, come on,” Conrad said, standing. “Come have a look.”
Nolan rose reluctantly to his feet, and the two men descended the steps to Conrad’s loft. Nolan inspected the building with interest while Conrad showed him around, describing his flock, its history and lineage, the flight capability of various birds. At last they stopped before the roost compartments. Conrad knew the high winds were exciting the pigeons. They shifted restlessly in their cages.
“They always fly home?” Nolan asked. “Every time?”
Conrad smiled. “It’s a mystery,” he agreed. “But it’s true.” He thought for a minute. “You want to see? Wait a minute.” He went into his workroom on the lower level and hunted around until he found a leg harness and a pencil and paper. Returning to Nolan, who was still standing in front of the roost boxes, staring in at the birds, he handed the paper to him and said, “Here. Write something. We’ll send him out, and you can see for yourself.”
But Nolan demurred. “I don’t know what to write,” he said. “What do I write? I’m writing to myself?”
“Well, it’s only for proof,” Conrad said. “Just so you can see. Write your name or something.” He waved his hand. “Just put your mark there.”
And then he stopped, thought of the archangel, his lost bird, his last, lost letter to Rose. He turned, looked Nolan full in the face.
“I used to write to my wife,” he said. “If I’d taken the birds for a long flight, I’d send her a message. She’d always be here when they got back, you see, clocking them for me.” He paused. “It was something I could count on,” he said.
Nolan stared in at the birds. “I don’t have anybody to write to,” he said at last.
And Conrad saw that he was embarrassed, that he was going over in his head all the people he knew, anyone to whom he might say something, something that mattered.
“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Conrad said, sitting down slowly on the top step. He thought of everything he knew about pigeons, all the evidence of faith lodged there, the stories he realized he’d always depended on for a confirmation of the value of hope. How was someone swayed toward belief, toward happiness?
“During the First World War,” he said at last, “frontline troops used to carry pigeons with them. It was how they communicated with headquarters if it was too dangerous to spare a runner to send back. They’d send word by pigeon instead, giving their position, describing what was going on, that sort of thing.” He stopped, thought a minute. “Ships took them to sea, too. And in World War II, the Royal Air Force outfitted the birds with tiny cameras rigged so that the shutter would snap a picture at timed intervals. The birds would be dropped from planes, and they’d fly home having shot aerial photos the whole way back. Men parachuted from planes, too, with pigeons strapped to their chests. Sometimes they even sent pigeons ahead, hoping a friendly patriot would recover them and send back word about enemy positions and so on.”
He waited a minute, glanced up at Nolan, who was staring impassively at the birds.
“Eventually, of course,” Conrad went on, “the Germans figured out what was going on and started shooting at them.” He picked a feather from the cuff of his trousers, fluttered it away with his fingers. “Nobody understood exactly how the pigeons always knew how to get home again. But they trusted that whatever they had to say would find the person it was intended for.”
He craned around again to find Nolan with his eyes. He offered the pencil to him. “You just have to trust it,” he said. “It’s a mystery, and you just have to trust it.”
Nolan stared back at him and then after a moment took the pencil. He leaned over with the paper on his knee and, after a few seconds of apparently deep thought, wrote for a minute or two. “Here,” he said finally, handing over the paper. He cleared his throat. “I have written to Miss Barteleme. I have told her—to come back. To get well soon.”
Conrad smiled up at him. “That’s fine,” he said. “I believe Miss Barteleme will be looking for this bird.”
TOGETHER THEY LOADED one of Conrad’s pigeons into a crate. Conrad selected a roller, capable of impressing Nolan with its high-diving antics, its acrobatics, how it could fall fearlessly from a great height. Conrad picked up the crate, and they headed up the hill through the garden.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked Nolan finally. But the wind had picked up even more, and his words were carried away.
“What?” Nolan leaned over the bed of Conrad’s truck, cupped his hand to his ear.
Well, we’re a fine pair, Conrad thought. He can’t hear and I’m losing an eye. He motioned to Nolan to get in the truck.
Once they were inside with the doors shut, he asked him again, “Where do you want to go? To let the bird out?”
Nolan thought. “What about the reservoir? Lake Arthur?” He leaned forward and looked out the windshield. “You know,” he said suddenly, “I’ve got a bad feeling about that sky. I think we’re going to get hit hard.”
Conrad leaned forward as well and looked up. The sky had been threatening for days, but a terrible struggle was taking place overhead now, the mountains a bulwark against the clouds, trying to contain an ocean behind them.
“I was up there yesterday,” Nolan went on, still staring through the windshield. “At the reservoir. Walked along the dam for a ways, doing some bird-watching. Fall migration’s started. I like to go up and see what’s around this time of year. But I’ll tell you—” He stopped a minute. “That dam doesn’t look good. They made a big show of shoring it up after the hurricane in ’42, you know. Havelock Eddison, that old lunatic, donated a Cadillac, drove it right into the lake in front of the dam. And the Army Corps were up there, fooling with it. But it’s been a wet summer. The water’s high. And I wouldn’t bet anything on that dam.” He set his mouth grimly. “Wouldn’t bet a damn thing.”
Conrad backed the truck out of his driveway.
“I haven’t been up there in years,” he said to Nolan. “My wife used to like to picnic up there, near the falls. She was always finding things to dig up and bring back.” He steered them down the hill, toward town and the road that led in snakelike curves up the far mountain. “She used to call it the Lost Lake.”
Nolan didn’t say anything, just craned his head and looked up at the sky again. “I don’t take any bets,” he said. “Not with a sky like that.”
ROSE HAD BEEN right about the lake, Conrad thought, when they walked in through the silent woods to the water’s edge, black ripples lapping lightly with a small sound at the top of the old stone-and-earth dam. It did seem like a lost place, a place where something had happened once, though so long ago that no one could remember exactly what.
You
might lose your memory here, Conrad thought. You might kneel down to find your face reflected in the watery mirror and forget who you were, the eyes looking back into your own a stranger’s. He stopped, stared across the water ribbed with silky silver ripples. He shivered slightly and hurried to catch up to Nolan.
The trees here were pruned high, an upper-story canopy of oaks and hickory. Their leaves muffled the sound of the wind. Conrad carried the crate with his pigeon through the unnatural darkness, following Nolan, who nosed along like a scout, stopping briefly every now and then to cock his head and listen. Finally Nolan stopped near the water’s edge, turned to face the trees, and stared up into them for a moment. He pulled a pair of binoculars from his coat pocket. Lifting them to his eyes, he panned slowly through the treetops. After a minute, he removed the glasses, wiped at the lenses with his handkerchief, and then raised them again.
Conrad shifted the cage to his other arm.
“Well, look at that,” Nolan said quietly, not moving the binoculars from his eyes.
“What?”
“Here.” Nolan handed him the glasses. “Up there. In the trees. Just look. Wait.”
Conrad set down the crate and took the glasses from Nolan. He realized again how bad his eye had become, for he couldn’t see anything at all for a minute as his good eye struggled for focus. But at last the branches became clear, though something darker, like spreading paint, moved within the brace of leaves and twigs.
And then he saw that it was birds, the bodies of hundreds or even thousands of birds come to rest in the tops of the branches, a thick darkness that shifted like ink, huddled sections rolling gently in the branches as one group of birds parted to make way for another, the flock settling and resettling, a watery sluice opening and closing. He swung the glasses slightly to the right and then the left, then backed up a step and moved the binoculars in a wider arc. He realized that all the trees as far as he could see were dense with closely feathered wings pumping smoothly, a communal heartbeat high overhead. And yet they made no sound at all. No complaint, no warning.