The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  Miss Williams went to the college that day, and she arrived home in the late afternoon to find him still there, to her relief, if not astonishment. He remained barefoot, and resolutely speechless, but he had swept and tidied, and he was in what passed for her library, in the main room. He did not smile when he saw her but rose from the chair and bowed his head, this time in recognition, Miss Williams supposed. When she offered tea, he went into the kitchen to fetch more firewood for the stove.

  “I will have to have something to call you, other than ‘sir,’” she said as they sipped at their warm drinks in the library. He grabbed at a piece of paper and pencil from her desk and carefully wrote on it. He showed her what he had written:

  Sheehan, Michael Evan

  before he threw what he had produced into the stove. He did not take his eyes off the stove until he was certain that the fire had consumed it. Miss Williams assumed he meant for her to say nothing of who he was, even if all he was now was that name, without a history or family or even an explanation of how he came to be in Bridgetonne.

  And so they went on, in their way: Miss Williams leaving for the college on the days she taught and tutored; Mr. Sheehan staying behind to sweep and tidy, or to read from her library. When his clothes dried, Miss Williams tried to repair them, but they were no longer clothes, but rags not even fit for a scarecrow. She obtained other clothes for him, as discreetly as she knew how. To colleagues at the college she announced that she was collecting surplus clothing for impoverished soldiers. To the people in the village, she suggested an appeal for those in the workhouses. Through this ruse she was able, within weeks, to accumulate more clothing than Mr. Sheehan, or any human being, could conceivably desire. But having him settle on a few items was a trial, as the trousers were often too long or too wide for his attenuated posture. When Miss Williams finally decided to outright buy him some suspenders, she may have been too eager to inform the sellers that the purchase was part of her charity efforts.

  Sometimes, in the evening, Miss Williams would espy Mr. Sheehan as he sat in a kind of strange conversation with himself, his glancing downward, toward his hands. Yet he would be looking just beyond his knees. His eyelids, when she could locate them within his hair, shifted and rested, as though he were tracing the progress of some slight occurrence, but of course there was nothing. His yellow eyes, meanwhile, seemed to fade in their crude articulation, into green and brown, as if they were leaves coming to terms with the autumn. Miss Williams wondered how many autumns Mr. Sheehan had witnessed, and how painful was the slow casting off of leaves for him.

  When the weather became more consistent, if not thoroughly agreeable, Miss Williams took to planting the garden she had spoken of. Alone, she started, as Sheehan refused her almost daily entreaties. “Good morning,” she’d say before breakfast. “Wouldn’t you like to join me?” But she was gone before he could answer, out the door and around the side of the cottage, in a long jacket she wore to protect her clothes. She worked on several small plots, and he stood by a small window in the main room, where she might not notice him. She turned over dirt, planted cuttings: chrysanthemums. They were best planted in the autumn. But, as she explained later, the bitter scent of those flowers would keep insects away. She was a small woman, and the work made her smaller still. She was often on her knees, as though the soil demanded an exacting kind of attention.

  He stood at that window and stepped back when he thought she might have caught a glimpse of his looking. He moved in closer as he thought he saw her struggling with the weeds, or the squirrels that threatened her work. She had to encase the pumpkins in wire she had found from a chicken coop, a favorite topic of hers on those evenings when she took her meal with him. She wondered if the plants could sense being caged within. Or whether they would feel doubly trapped as the pattern of the light that fell upon them would be like a net. Would the stems crane themselves into unhealthy postures, and the pumpkins come out lopsided or with some other sort of defect? In the end, she concluded that it couldn’t be helped; it was a net or certain death at the appetites of the squirrels, which were charming but voracious.

  “Would you take some air?” she’d sometimes ask, and he did not shake his head, no. But he was not leaving the cottage. He could watch the garden more directly after breakfast: once she left for the college and would not be back until long after the sunset. He watched the sun rise farther still, over the tree line before it poured itself into the garden; he saw how the soft, almost marshy, soil gathered itself together as though it was a soldier, searching out his gear after a spill in the mud. He resolved to go outside, to assist her, once he could be assured that the light would not deceive him. Once he was confident the light would not sear into his eyes only to disappear in an instant. Once the sounds the air must have made against grass, stems, and branches were secured, and he might actually hear them. Above the clanging and hum in his ears, he could listen for bees and dragonflies.

  She was a diligent gardener. She worked through the sun and through the showers. She left the watering can out in the soft rain to collect the rainwater. If she found lady bugs in one part of the garden, she’d move them to another, to dispose of the ravaging insects chewing up leaves and flowers. She planted more cuttings, blooming plants, and on the weekend sat before her work, as if to admire it. “Won’t you take a look?” she asked, with just a twinge of pride in her voice, but he could see just as well from the window.

  The cottage was dark one morning, and there was no light outside, but a storm. The kind that brought rats out in the trenches. She said nothing as she plunged outside, wearing her usual gear, though her hair was loose, not piled into her hat. She ran to the shed to find a shovel and dashed back. She started digging around a vegetable bed.

  He knew how the dirt would be heavy, uncooperative, slipping out the mouth of the shovel just as she raised it clear of the ground. The sound of the shovel landing in the mud, as if it were a cut of meat. She made little progress, gave up on one bed, and moved to another. He saw what she hoped to accomplish: a trench, or trenches, to capture the rain and keep it from flooding. The rain saturated her jacket and hat—a pelting rain that makes a froth of the dirt.

  He was out of the cottage and taking the shovel from her hands. His palms burned where his calluses rose, but that no longer mattered. He worked through his runny eyes and nose, the risky footing, and the shiver at the small of his back. The rain, the dirt, Miss Williams pacing about him, or running ahead to sort out the next turn of the trench she wanted; he could smell and feel nothing. It was such easy dirt. The occasional root or stone that emerged was not much to wrestle; he could easily grab at it with his hands and toss it away.

  During the war, in France, one might shovel on the line and find the missing, or their limbs. Joints, specifically: elbows, knees, the cut of the waist—material that allowed the body to bend and, therefore, crouch and hide. The shelling was hardest on these connections; the bombs shattered them, or made them to fly off, and sometimes buried them in the process. Digging into the mud freed them, along with swatches of uniforms, loose ordnance, rations and shaving kits, letters, locks of hair from lovers and children. If one dug in an abandoned part of the trench, the mass could come out as bricks, the human refuse like mixing material, the straw that grips onto sediment.

  In the first reprisal camp he was sent to as a prisoner of war, at Sedan, one only dug latrines, those reminders of human frailty. But digging latrines was not particularly daunting. Only backbreaking and, if done wrong, predictably foul. They were merely holes beside other holes that were used up, filled in. The lime did not smell, but it burned the skin. By the time he was made to dig latrines, the lime could only make a minor contribution to the wreckage of his hands. The lime added scales to the other offenses.

  Sometime during that autumn at Sedan, he collected a gash to his left middle finger. He noticed the cut, which began in the finger pad and plummeted past the first joint, a
fter coming off a kommando, harvesting wheat without gloves. It did not necessarily hurt, but that might have been the time of day, after his bit of bread and tea, when he was so tired he was drained of all sensation. He licked it clean as well as he could, and on the following days he nursed it with the hot water that was meant for his tea, and rags he made from his clothes. In a few days’ time, his fingernail had turned black, as though a hole had been gouged all the way through. Then the finger swelled as if it were a lip, or an eye, or any other reasonable part of the body accustomed to bulging after injury.

  His other fingers on that hand suffered through the extra burden he put on them to rest the injured finger, although what was suffering for them at this point? His hands were caked over in abuse, their skin like a prison. It cracked and bled in the colder months, as though it meant to restore itself, molt or shed, but failed in the attempt. When he dared look at his hands, he saw not his own appendages but the unguarded nails and knuckles of a heedless beast. Still human, though he no longer knew what human was.

  Then the swelling turned blue, a much more virulent shade than in any bruise of his experience, and he thought he saw the deathly cast sweeping toward his palm. At night, as he lay in his bunk, he held his hands in front of him and tried to imagine how he would cope should he lose the finger. He knew that he would still be able to play his piano; there were plenty of fellows playing with a fingertip sheared off, even some who’d lost a finger down past the knuckle. He’d seen them in pubs, playing tinny machines for tips with hardly a mark on their repertoire. The question was what would missing the finger do to his playing? How would his fingers traverse the keyboard without that one step, or curl; would phantom notes sound out like phantom pain? Would he have to have the same finger removed on the opposite hand, to keep his sense of equilibrium? Would he no longer be able to hear the keys that middle finger once graced; would those notes refuse a different kind of action, from a different kind of hand?

  As he pondered all this at night, just before lights out in the prison camp’s barracks, the unaffected fingers of the left hand seemed to move, space out from one another, as if the palm were stretching to accommodate a new arrangement. He would have just four digits, like a cloven-hoofed animal, or a bird and its talons. His hands then rushed to his face, as if to blot out the image, but he could not escape it. It followed him even as he kept the hand hidden through meals, marches, work on the fields.

  A guard must have decided to take pity on him. Or perhaps there was no pity involved. The efficiency of the unit, the cost of losing another prisoner . . . somehow, the man was inspired to give Sheehan some turpentine and proper bandages. The turpentine turned the finger yellow, but tamped down on the swelling. Another limb salvaged, but for the Germans’ purposes.

  “You’ve done enough,” she said; her voice through the rain was real, in the present. They were in her garden. She was the woman who had taken him in, and she had one hand atop his on the shovel and the other beneath his left hand, its middle finger white from rain, the rest pink from exertion; the callouses on the palm facing upward as if they were eyes, blinded.

  Their life thereafter may have been soundless, if not for the elements outside and the stories Miss Williams concocted for him. She did so in the late evenings, when she heard him shambling about the cottage, as if he was in search of something he had lost: a smoking kit, a button, or quite possibly his familiars—family or lost friends. On these late nights, from her upstairs bedroom, Miss Williams could hear his pacing, the physical execution no longer so difficult, but still distressed in its timing. Miss Williams would descend the stairs to find Mr. Sheehan in much the same condition as she had originally discovered him, and she would have to allow him to hold fast to her hand, as he had once required, and hear her voice, so he might be sent off to sleep and more tolerable dreaming.

  She told him the story of the swan king, an imperious but handsome specimen, who, by day, ruled his flock with his grace and courage. By night, he watched helplessly as his subjects gathered in a body of water that had been forbidden to them. For it was in this lake, where the moonlight multiplied in ways that was said to blind, if not burn, swans discovered their voices. Anyone who has ever heard a swan knows how disagreeable their trumpets can be, but in this lake, swans could sing like gods. And it was for this reason, a much older and wiser swan king had forbidden his charges from venturing into that nameless lake; it also was where men went to capture swans, as they were singing and unaware of their surroundings.

  But men did not come to this lake, as far as the swan king could tell; he was left to sulk in the reeds as he saw his subjects defy the word of his ancestors, and yet he longed to sing himself. He envied how the necks of his fellow swans stretched, as if to pluck out the stars, as they exercised what had been dormant in the sunlight. He also kept a keen eye out for the men who were said to be summoned by the voices of swans, to carry them away, to quarter, dress, and eat them. They were men, after all, and their own voices could not make up for the ugliness that they exacted upon nature. But the swan king could never see the men at the lake. They never materialized except, perhaps, as phantoms, dissolving as the sun rose and the swans lifted themselves out of the water to fly to their home waters by sunrise.

  The swans went to this lake only under the light of the moon; on nights when the moon was in her repose, they remained with the king. Perhaps it was not safe on those nights, or their song was not possible in the impenetrable din. But on one of these dark nights, the swan king chose to see if he could make use of his own voice; to hear his own song, and to do so without criticism. He had to fly solely on his memory, since there were no landmarks visible without the moonlight; he had never concentrated so intently on the speed and flow of currents, how they dashed and then suspended above the lake shore. He dove into the water that no longer appeared as water. Now the lake appeared as a mirror, offering the familiar, which can be even more dangerous than what seems new and different. The fall of the swan king accelerated beyond his control until he crashed through the surface. Blood and feathers piped up from the lake and then the wind that had been missing from the lake reappeared, to carry feathers and blood back to the flock. And the swan king knew the real reason why his predecessors prohibited swans from this place: he saw it when he emerged onto the other side of the surface, to find his parents, and grandparents, trumpeting in welcome.

  The next morning, the body of the swan king, perfect as it ever was, lay in the rushes, and the other swans mourned. Their cries had turned beautiful, like the voices of the clouds.

  Four

  Miss Williams took particular care to ensure Mr. Sheehan’s presence in the cottage not be discovered. Because the Bridgetonne grounds hosted a women’s college, the sight of any unfamiliar male in the vicinity, let alone the dreaded Hawkman, could be misconstrued as a presage to an invasion. So Miss Williams set to make Mr. Sheehan familiar, in the form of a servant. She ordered a gardener’s boots and uniform, a straw hat to disguise his hair, and gloves to protect the near transparency of his hands. For the windows that did not have curtains, she found cloth in a notions store that she could sew into curtains herself, and hung them at night so the addition to the cottage would not attract attention.

  She had not found this immediately necessary, for she thought surely Mr. Sheehan would soon find himself repaired in body and spirit, and would want to press on toward home. She bought for him a train ticket to London, leaving it on his place at the table as she spooned up a pudding she had brought back from the college.

  “I understand that you might need to go elsewhere after that,” she said. She expected Mr. Sheehan to look up as she addressed him, but instead his focus was on the ticket on the table. He picked up the ticket and placed it in the middle of the table, as if to say it was not adequate in some way.

  “If you prefer another destination, I can return it and make an adjustment,” Miss Williams said.

  Sh
e brought the dish to him, and stood over him as he ate the pudding. His sight and mind seemed to have disposed of the subject; perhaps he had mistaken the ticket for a receipt, a piece of note paper, a bit of rubbish, something that had nothing to do with him.

  “I would be happy to accompany you somewhere, if that would put you more at ease,” Miss Williams said. But still, a casual yet resolved, nothing.

  Her other overtures on the subject, whether they involved an offer of a ship’s passage, use of an automobile, or a walk to inquire at the General Post Office after an address he might have, were met with similar disinterest. Miss Williams did not know what to make of his listlessness in this regard; whether “home,” for him, no longer existed in spirit—so many soldiers lost their parents and siblings to the flu—or whether that home was in some hellish location. Perhaps some imagined humiliation prevented him from returning. It was also possible, she acknowledged to herself, that she was the source of the trouble, in her initial invitation that he accompany her to the cottage. She became wary, then, of speaking even of her own home, and her strange allegiance to it. While she had no immediate wish to return to the States, she knew she might be made to return from whence she came, and would, therefore, have to desert him.