“Should I get you to a Voluntary Aid hospital, then?” Miss Williams asked. This time when he showed his face to her, he shut his eyes and shook his head. His next object of concentration was on the last slice of tomato, which he pushed into his mouth. He edged the plate toward her once he was finished.
“Might I get you anything else?” she asked.
No, he shook his head again. He was no longer shivering, but both his arms still hugged the coat, as if to drive it deeper into his flesh. One eye had seemingly retreated behind the tussle of his curls, and the other appeared as fierce and bright as it ever might have been, stronger than the sun. A corona of stain spilled out, onto his eyelids and circles around and beneath, and he rocked in the chair. If he was still in need, he could not bring himself to admit it.
“You could have a bath,” Miss Williams said, because her solution was to keep things moving—herself and him. She sprung up from the table for the back door. Just outside there was a shed with garden tools and odd pieces of clothing for what must have been the groundskeeper, for a time. A small man, Miss Williams thought, and those clothes were likely as dusty as her guest’s; they would have to do long enough for her to wash and mend whatever he wore. Upon her return to the kitchen, she found The Hawkman to be dutifully standing by the table. She presented him with the old clothes, but he did not take them from her.
“It’s all right,” she said.
His one visible eye was honey-bright, and Miss Williams presumed the eye followed her as she swung around the kitchen to lead him up the stairs. He labored to climb the short steps, his breath was thick with nuisance, coughs, and phlegm. She left the clothes and the towel she collected from the hall linen closet on the side of the tub, and shut the door to leave him to his business.
Darkness had begun its walk on earth by the time he emerged downstairs. He found her at her desk, her eyes squinting into a book, through the colors of the approaching evening. She was not generous when it came to her candles and lanterns, lighting them had always been a trial; she could not adequately judge the distance required to light a taper to begin the candles, as if she did not know the reach of her own limbs. She would often find herself surrounded by nightfall before she would be forced to oil wicks and strike matches. She felt more secure in the darkness, as if it were a fabric, a net that would stop her falling. But she could sense him, see him, through Browning’s words and the book’s spine. His eyes were like a sentry, guarding his inexplicable history.
“Those clothes do you well,” Miss Williams said. They even fit, to a degree; he was much smaller in the shoulders and legs with his coat removed than she had expected. He was, she was afraid to admit, substantially more delicate than a soldier should be: the mass of him almost doll-like, and his hands finely boned in length and width. If he had been a soldier, it was certainly not through his own volition. Perhaps he was a deserter, a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance. That would justify, in some minds, the villagers’ treatment of him.
He extended his arm, the coat draped over it, and Miss Williams retrieved all the garments underneath the coat as well as the coat itself. Everything was so caked over with road dust and field mud that the cloth had a strange, second presence, beyond its bulk. There must have been a ghost in the clothes, within the fibers, where the soil and moisture had created something like vellum, important and delicate.
“Now, you should have a haircut,” Miss Williams declared, to which the man took a demonstrative step backward. He shook his head—no, no, no.
“Oh,” Miss Williams said. “I’m sorry. Would you like to rest now instead?”
She had to step around him, his last declaration was so rigid, to take him to her favorite room in the cottage. At one time it might have been a nursery, judging from its light and airiness. The room looked out over the open fields that buffeted the cottage, and the sun always rose first there, leaving it warmer than the rest of the house. Miss Williams imagined that the crickets and frogs that would live in the field during summer would be best heard from this room, a gentle infantry that carted children and troubled souls off to sleep most efficiently. This being still so close to winter, it was too early for those sounds, but the sweet green trim of the ceiling beams and moldings still enlivened the room, with its pair of twin beds and a nightstand between them.
Miss Williams turned down a bedspread and then a blanket for her guest, who could move no farther than the doorframe. Neither eye was visible. When Miss Williams finally turned to formally invite him into the room, she thought she might be hearing the verge of a sob in his throat. She had never considered that, having slept without shelter from both the natural elements and man-made harassments for so long, he might be afraid of sleep and the unique class of demons it might bring to visit him. “I promise: nothing to disturb you,” she said, and she sat on the other bed, leaving a clear route for him to walk on his own.
He approached the small bed as if driven by contradictory instincts: one to rest, the other to remain vigilant. He could not tell the difference between an offer and a demand. His eyes revealed themselves, trained as they were on the sheets meant to match the trim and molding. He could sleep in green without it cutting or scratching. The fresh bedclothes, the mattress, the ache of his exhaustion—he could defy them no longer. He had fallen into the mattress.
As she stood over him, to tuck him in, after a fashion, she was taken by how large his eyes were, how they resembled packets of amber—clear yet intricate, but not symmetrical. Their irises did not quite match, the left eye consistent in its hue, and the right flecked with brown and green that lunged from the background. She turned toward the window to draw the curtains when he stopped her. He grabbed her by the wrist.
Miss Williams had long been in the close proximity of men: her father, for one, in the tenements where they slept, four families to a room. She had watched the backs of other men as they slept in their corners, the strain and pressure that their naked muscles could not relinquish, even in slumber. She had sat across from men at tables and in classrooms before lecterns. But she had never found herself so near to a man and his bald demands, and instinctively she resisted.
He put a finger to his lips, and with the other hand, he pulled her down so she was sitting beside him on the bed. She sat up straight, defiant, yet there seemed not to be a need. He merely moved his hand from her wrist to her fingers, and took the fingers into his own hand, then rested the pair he made on his chest. She thought he should turn his head, close his eyes, but instead he looked to her, boldly, without blinking. He meant for her to watch over him, she guessed from the wideness of his eyes, persisting despite his obvious exhaustion. She remained there until he fell asleep, his misery temporarily lost in the night. It had been an uncomfortable experience, his hold on her hand, the naked feeling in his eyes. But she did not protest as she reminded herself that she, too, as a child, had been afraid of the dark—the night could take more than her dreams, but her last thought of the day, the picture she might have made of her and her mother, together.
That night, with a candle at her desk, she listened for his breathing. Would he wake up, wander about the cottage, pillory the kitchen; would he shout out his story in a nightmare? But she heard nothing. When she was convinced there would be nothing more from him, she wrote in the book where she let her ideas run:
Beast to beauty to beast again:
all beasts have a soul
but a human who loses his core
to circumstance and language
is neither human nor creature
but a pinnacle of all the things he fears:
dirt and hunger, his lathered clothes and
the evening chill; the song that bleeds from nightfall
to daylight; a song of what he lost and cannot regain;
except for the moments in between when he remembers
the needs of an infant, and the gold of sustenan
ce
offered to him in modest presentation.
Three
When her mother told her never to touch a bird, Eva and Helen were in the Public Garden. This is what her mother knew: scents and ointments, waxes and fingertips, the consequences of her touch. She could set a demure string of curls in front of her daughter’s ears, or one perfectly placed in the center of her forehead, with a bobby pin and dab of petroleum jelly. She changed her husband’s appearance with a straight razor, scissors, pomade, and a hairpiece, when necessary. And it was, on many occasions, though Eva did not understand what brought these occasions about. She only knew that when her mother trimmed her father’s beard, or elaborately waxed his moustache; if she ripped up one suit to amend another, with a leaner fit for the jacket, or new cut for the trousers, the family was soon to be on the move again.
On those days her mother would scrub the floor or polish the balustrade of the soon-to-be-abandoned apartment with a solvent that made her hands smell of mothballs, fiery yet chilling. The scent made Eva dizzy as her mother bore down to remove all the residue of their lives, so nothing might be dug up and identified. Talc in the air, hair grease that drooped from shoulder to floor, discarded handkerchief or bandage that stopped up the blood when her mother jabbed herself with a seam ripper or her father’s nose was punched in an argument. A miasma must have been following them, like a stock of sore luck, and it marked them as a mother bird marks her offspring, invisibly but definite.
“If I were to touch a baby bird, I would confuse its sense of smell,” Eva’s mother said one spring afternoon, as they chanced by a family of wrens bathing in a marble bath. The air was luscious enough for breathing, as her mother said, and Eva’s father had need of the flat for a meeting with a business associate. Whenever he had one of these meetings, Eva and her mother set out for the day with a basket that was mostly empty, with nothing more than an apple or a heel of bread inside. But, by carrying it, they appeared not as vagrants, but reputable citizens, entitled to a rest on the Common, or a wander around a busy market, or a quiet walk of contemplation through the Public Garden.
“If I touched a baby bird, it could be overwhelmed with my scent,” Helen said.
From the side of the bath, the mother wren dipped her head into the water; then she waited for her hatchlings to perform the same movement, until they were equally rinsed to their necks. “The baby might think I was the one who hatched it, and preened it, while it was still wet and bewildered,” her mother said. “Then it might follow me everywhere, and think my fingers are worms its mother stuffed down its throat.” Her mother’s hand took on the shape of a beak and pinched at Eva’s cheeks and nose.
“But what if I touched the bird?” Eva remembered asking. She remembered smelling her fingertips at that moment, but she detected nothing remarkable there. She still thought of herself as not that different from the birds she and her mother saw each day. Small, hesitant, likely to be lost among the legs and feet of adults who did not notice the hue of another person’s eyes, the dawns and sunsets in the coloring of their collars, and crowns of feathers on their heads. The birds also tired as Eva did when the day lagged on, so far away from their nests. They could not muster the strength to fly sometimes and simply jumped, or hopped, away from her approach. The sparrows did not bother to find water sometimes and bathed in the dirt alongside the public garden’s paths.
“Especially if you touched the bird,” her mother answered. “If you were a baby bird, wouldn’t you want a little girl of your own to run with you as you learned to fly, to cuddle you when you were cold, to sing to you all the songs she knew?” The answer chagrined Eva further, for a bird could not “have” a little girl any more than her father could have one of the chickens behind their flat, or a carriage horse in the street. Chickens and horses, goats and sheep—those had to be bought, with money or favors, she knew, two things her father could never seem to hold in decent supply.
“When we are rich, may I touch the bird?” Eva asked.
“Oh, especially not then,” her mother said.
“Why not?” Eva asked.
“Because that is the problem with the rich. They must own everything.”
Her mother swept her up in her arms from the bench where they’d been sitting, and together they twirled in a tight circle. “But not you,” her mother whispered in her ear. “You’re all mine. I won’t let anyone have you. Not a bird or the richest person on earth.” Eva buried her face in her mother’s neck. She smelled strongly of cloves this day; there were days she smelled of lemon, and orange, and sometimes of combinations of the three. Eva wondered how her mother might smell to a bird, like some kind of impossible flower or tree.
“If I can make you fly like a bird, you do not need to touch one,” her mother whispered, “so put your head back, and look up.”
Eva complied, and loosened her legs from around her mother’s waist. Her mother quickened her pace, and Eva focused on the blossoming dogwoods above her head. Is this what a bird sees? she wondered, the white petals shaped as stars must have been, should she ever get close enough to the stars. Did birds find their way by the stars as sailors do, or were they confused by these petals in their color and balance? If they could be tricked by the smells of human hands, surely they could be fooled by white petals, or anything almost clear and very bright: the rings some women wore; their chokers and bracelets; and the feathers they wore in their hats, as if they were trying to lure birds into a false nest, a trap.
Birds must not be as smart as she was, Eva told herself, and her mother must be very honest, by not wearing jewelry or a hat with feathers. She was glad of both thoughts, and brought her head and neck back up straight so she could kiss her mother on the cheek, the color deepening on her mother’s skin much like the cloves her mother used to make perfume: rich and exuberant.
“Will you take me faster now?” Eva asked after the kiss, to which her mother said, “Only if you promise.”
“Yes, yes,” Eva might have said, because she was laughing and screaming all at once, the amalgamation of fear and joy on her face; she did not want these sensations to end for, in a way, they depended on each other.
Miss Williams remembered how her mother extracted other promises: to learn to read and write, not throw rocks at squirrels, or feed the raccoons rooting about in the garbage, to also learn her figures when she was old enough. To not marry so young; or tell anyone where her pin money was; to never give up on her schooling; and find her own profession in life, because to be so dependent upon a man was dangerous. As dangerous as touching a bird or taking in a stray or living, as her mother did, at the elbow of a man always on the run and in need of disguises.
Yes, yes, Mother, I promise, I promise, Eva always relented, but whether she acquiesced at the moment these requests were lodged, as completely and affirmatively as her mother came to demand, Eva could not say. For then, as it was once she was on her own, Miss Williams was too enamored of the air when it was clean and exhilarating with possibilities for birds, and little girls.
In the morning, before he was up and about, Miss Williams sunk The Hawkman’s clothes into the wash tub. She pinned his coat on a line where it could catch the air and expel whatever gave it such a terrible cast: a scent like smoke, damp soil, and the hides of any life that is neglected—fruit and livestock, pets and vegetables. The wind might do well enough by the coat’s lining, she thought, but the rest of the dirt would have to be beaten out of the coat, as if it were a carpet. She found an old wooden spoon among the kitchen equipment and whacked at the coat for a moment, driving out clods of dust in the process. She would have done more, except for the spitting and coughing it brought from her throat, and the feeling she had that she was hammering after a swarm of devils in the fabric.
She was feeding the fire on the stove when he finally appeared, a bit bewildered, from the nursery. Miss Williams glanced up from the furnace to see him at the bottom of
the stairs, in his new clothes and bare feet, and she marveled again at how tiny he was—a wren or a finch—his hawkish shoulders and carriage diminished. He parted his hair from his face, as if he was unaware that she had been watching him, and she saw both his eyes, in concert, as they tried to remember the cottage, the kitchen, the sleep and dreams that now swelled on his eyelids.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked.
He tilted his head, slightly—enough to have the curtains of his hair draw closed again—and nodded. Then he slightly bowed his head, as if to show gratitude.
Miss Williams could not imagine what she might do with this odd bird, who was not only brief in stature but also in entire body. His bones showed through the thin shirt and his feet appeared immeasurably long, possibly because of the small width of his ankles. He was no longer the quaking mass he had been the day before, but she could see how a simple night of kindness did not strengthen him. It only made him more vulnerable. She did not know if she had done him a service or had helped to sharpen the tools with which the world was waiting to consume him.
“There is breakfast, if you like.”
He nodded, and, in an instant, he seemed to have sprung up beside her to help her load the firewood.
“Then I must go to the college,” she said, because she was not quite sure what to say. Should she have him stay, or drive him out—if he was her responsibility now, as much as any injured being becomes the responsibility of those who minister to it, regardless of how effective they have been? “Would you like to stay and wait for your clothes to dry? Of course, you are free to go, and I could still return them to you. We could make some arrangement. Or we could find you a place here, on the grounds . . .”
With a man now in her house, Miss Williams thought of how she was not opposed to marriage for others, but could not fathom herself making such compromises on where to live, how to spend, even whether to raise children. So she knew there would always be speculation as to her status, no matter how sparse or elaborate her household arrangements. There is always speculation where the sexes were involved, and as she filed out loud through their options, she felt something of a bird herself, running through the available scales and ensuring that she hit each one at the right interval. “Of course it is all up to you, of course,” she said, as words became ridiculous to her, to both of them, because he said nothing as she ran through her vocabulary and etiquette. “The spring should be spectacular here,” she went on, “if I could get a proper garden in. I’ve never been able to do that by myself.”
The Hawkman Page 3