The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  So Miss Williams continued to teach her classes and mark her students’ papers; she spoke at luncheons for village women about the books she had written, and the books they were reading. From the fields, she collected foxglove and heather, dog rose and pasque flower; she had come to favor the darker blushes, and acknowledged this was due to the risk she had taken on, in her circumstances. She did not necessarily fret over gossip or even the potential of losing her appointment, and yet she often thought she should check herself in the glass to see whether she should dedicate the time to powdering over the twitch that she detected now on her cheeks and forehead. She was more embarrassed by her concessions to vanity than by the petty morals of her so-called betters. She had nothing to conceal; Mr. Sheehan was so much the child, grateful to be permitted to roam in his own world, wherever it was: in the library, the nursery, or his own mind, in spite of the goblins he harbored in it.

  Miss Williams thought she and Mr. Sheehan might have gone on in this manner in perpetuity. But Lord Thorton’s son, Christopher, put an end to it. It was not, apparently, what Christopher intended, for he professed no particular interest in, or affection for, Miss Williams. Whatever attention he paid to her was to be expected of the son of the college’s benefactor. He did acknowledge, in his own thoughts, that she was unmarried and therefore available, but she was too educated and opaque in heritage. He was grateful that Miss Williams’s flaws were so readily apparent, for otherwise his mother and sisters, and quite possibly his father, would be all too enthusiastic in suggesting he pursue her. He had been at a loss for courtship since returning home from the war, but he did not feel the immediate need for a bride. Indeed, the war had changed his thinking on so many issues, and the thought of obtaining a bride had grown detestable in his mind. He merely came to call on Miss Williams that day, as the spring term concluded, with the idea that he was looking after his father’s interests.

  He was welcomed to the cottage, as much as any formality was possible, by The Hawkman. Sheehan had waited until deep in the afternoon to risk some work in the garden, but still he heard an “Excuse me, sir?” as he was weeding through sweet peas and cabbages. The straw hat confined the riot of his hair, but not his eyes, and the infamous yellow irises positively glared at Christopher, or so Christopher divined.

  “This is Miss Williams’s cottage?” Christopher asked.

  Mr. Sheehan returned his attention back to his work; it was best to ignore the stranger, as people had ignored him. It made them take their leave.

  “Miss Williams?” he asked, again. “Is she here? This is her cottage, isn’t it?”

  Sheehan could have nodded. He even could have turned about, tugged on his hat, kept the wildness he knew to still be on his face to himself; for it had become engraved there. But he discovered in that minute that he too easily assumed blame, fateful responsibility. It had been the step that he had taken too loudly or assuredly; it was he who had taken too grand of a breath; he who had performed some other imperceptible function that now jeopardized his life and the lives of his compatriots. He was crippled, incapacitated by all possible outcomes: discovery, expulsion, harm to Miss Williams. He could neither cower, nor flee. So he kept to his tasks and listened for the approach of the man’s footsteps. They marched up to him plainly, and Sheehan had no choice but to expose himself.

  “You, you are?” the next earl of Bridgetonneshire asked, although Sheehan did not recognize him as such. The man had crouched down to meet him, though it was apparent from his clothes that he was not of The Hawkman’s, or even Sheehan’s, stature.

  “You, do you know where Miss Williams is?” the young man now demanded. Sheehan clamped his eyes closed as if shutting down an unwelcome vision.

  “Sir, you—I—have you done something with her?”

  This accusation Sheehan could not tolerate. He found the motivation to move, to run, around the cottage to the back, where Miss Williams was recovering in the shade. The man followed him and observed how The Hawkman came upon Miss Williams and the gestures he shared with Miss Williams, as though they were portraying, if not speaking, a language. The Hawkman made a circle with his index finger, as if to say that Christopher had found him on the other side of the cottage. But he had not known that Christopher had followed him to where he and Miss Williams now stood. The sight of the young man sent The Hawkman into the cottage, presumably cowering. Christopher took this as a sign that he had no reason to be afraid, though as he walked toward Miss Williams he felt a lack of resolve, remembering how he had observed this strange man and Miss Williams together.

  “Oh, Sir Christopher,” he heard Miss Williams say.

  Christopher gathered his thoughts for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “although no. I do not yet hold the title.”

  “Then good afternoon, Mr. . . . Christopher,” Miss Williams said, and she too paused as if to register his white summer suit, crisp and spotless, while she, like her gardener, was steeped in dirt and cuttings.

  “This is a surprise,” Miss Williams said, as if to apologize for her appearance.

  “Yes, yes it is,” Christopher said.

  “You have not met Mr. Sheehan,” Miss Williams said.

  “Mr. Sheehan?” Christopher repeated in disbelief.

  “That is his name,” Miss Williams said, and she cast an approving look toward where he must have been in the cottage.

  “Michael is his Christian name,” she said. “We all have one. Why wouldn’t he?”

  Her remark may have been meant to render Christopher Thorton speechless, but he refused to acknowledge it. He took steps, the authority in their cadence diminished somewhat, toward Miss Williams.

  “Is this a formal inspection?” she asked between her laughter.

  “There ought to have been one long ago,” Christopher said. “Does the college know about this?”

  “Just what is there to know?”

  “If you insist on being coy,” Christopher said, and his marching steps took him to the back door of the cottage, where he let himself in. Miss Williams followed. Mr. Sheehan stood beside the stove, as far from the window as he could manage. He listened as Miss Williams and Christopher spoke about him, even through him, although he could not make out exactly what was being said. Each syllable, though, seemed to undermine the ground on which he stood, so that he came to think of himself as floating, although not in the way a bird floats in the wind. This was a more buoyant, less predictable sensation, as if he were confronting tides and eddies, the patterns of water as dictated by the stars.

  “But why must he stay here?” Christopher was asking.

  “Where else might he go, I wonder,” Miss Williams said, “considering the monster you have made of him?”

  “It may be, in your country, permissible to address one’s—”

  “You said you wanted to be ‘rid of him,’ so I’ve done just that. He’s no longer your concern.”

  “It is considered neither wise, nor polite, for a spinster to speak this way to her . . . hosts,” he said, relieved to have found the right words, though he regretted them almost instantly.

  “But I am not a spinster,” Miss Williams interrupted. “Please. That sounds so dreadful. I am an old maid. There is more sympathy in that phrasing. Don’t you think?”

  “I think I will have to tell my father about this,” Christopher concluded.

  “I suppose you will,” Miss Williams agreed, and Christopher embarked on his next mission: out the door and directly to the estate, as Miss Williams had imagined. For her part, she walked directly to where Mr. Sheehan was now crouching as if buckled over in shock or pain; the pain that comes not from age, nor even illness, but with responsibility of suddenly having to carry again those massive hawk wings.

  Miss Williams took him by his shoulders to pry him out of his pose. What she had made sinuous and cooperative over the weeks with Mr. Sheehan had snapped and stiffened in only a f
ew minutes of public exposure. Once she had him standing up straight, she fed into his ear: “I will take care of this, Mr. Sheehan. I promise.”

  She would repeat other such reassurances as the afternoon pressed on into evening, but Mr. Sheehan was not persuaded. He paced—although it was not true pacing, because his steps were so hesitant, as if he feared laying down some sort of pattern, a rhythm, that could be predicted. He scratched at his arms, his neck, his beard, but again he dissembled—deceptive in the force applied and the movements—as though he only meant to mime the effects of his nerves, not truly act on them. To do so would have produced a sound, abrasive, a friction, and now that his presence in the cottage had been uncovered, he required even more silence, a deeper quiet, to return to his disappearance.

  At supper he refused to eat, and he refused to sit with Miss Williams. He stood, instead, in a corner of the kitchen with his back turned, as though he was intent on tunneling into it. But that would have meant poking, digging, shoveling, or any number of actions that could not escape sound, so he merely pressed himself into the wall, as if he could will its movement.

  Of course he had always been strange to Miss Williams, but he now seemed intent on consuming himself, or being consumed. Between throwing out her promises and smiling at him as naturally as she could, Miss Williams thought it best if she continue with her regular routine, so that she might set an example. She could not eat her own meal, but made as if she did, amassing the dishes and silverware when she was finished, then washing and drying them. That he was so unmoved by all her activity was unsettling, but never more so when she finally had to leave the kitchen, and he did not follow. He was arrested in the terror he heard—in words, in nature, in the drone of the universe.

  “Mr. Sheehan,” she said softly as she re-entered the kitchen. It was too early in the evening for the moon to have any effect on the sky or the windows of the cottage. The small kitchen was clotted with night’s pitch. She might have used a candle to find her way to him, but Miss Williams thought that even a flicker could frighten Mr. Sheehan. It was best to approach him as though he were invisible.

  For at that moment, Miss Williams thought she understood why Mr. Sheehan had forsaken his voice. He had perfected a kind of shield around himself by remaining silent. If nothing need leave his person, nothing need enter. Obviously he was shell-shocked, thrown into a psychosis by some indescribable experience. Whatever it had been, it left him less than human, even if he had taken to the new life Miss Williams had provided him. Still, he could not withstand the slightest disturbance. For even a fish must bustle through water, or a rodent scamper through twigs. He took such pains not to be quiet but to perfect his silence: how carefully he turned each faucet, brought in the firewood, or removed a plate from the cabinet. It was as if he wished to leave no evidence that he had ever existed. The world would be deaf to him, and now it would be blind as well. In this way, he would eliminate himself in a manner that would be unnoticeable, undocumented.

  “Mr. Sheehan,” she repeated, and she sat on the floor beneath the door frame, sensing that Mr. Sheehan would want her to come no further. “I want to tell you something,” she said. “And when I’m finished, I will leave you alone. But first, listen.” Outside, the first movement of crickets could be detected, the initial preparations that their legs made with their wings and bodies. Some might call it a tuning up, but Miss Williams thought of the creatures as waking up the grass and soil with their practicing. Their song wove its way into the dark cottage as if it were a yarn, loosely knotted by the frogs that had joined in with their hooks and stitching.

  “I am listening with you, Mr. Sheehan,” Miss Williams said, because she realized that she would need these sounds to wrap The Hawkman in, as a man might use blinders or a blanket to lead a horse or some other petrified animal through fire or wind.

  “I know of someone else like you,” Miss Williams began, and as she built this story for him, she reminded herself to keep making room for the sounds outside to enter: an owl whose call might darn a hole in the fabric of the darkness or the paws of shrews and hedgehogs against the dew and grasses. These sounds had to be made necessary for Mr. Sheehan again, if he was to rejoin Miss Williams in this life, in the cottage.

  “A boy who exiled himself because he thought he had done something wrong, something unmentionable,” she said. “I try to think of what it must have been; had he stolen some bread? Had he been careless with a knife or an ax? Someone he loved? I do not know, for he fled his home and ran from his village, over a mountain, through a forest, as far as his legs would carry him. He came upon a meadow after all his wanderings, and there he stayed, convinced he was far enough away from people, even animals. He lived there without speaking a word, not even to God, you know. He forgot his prayers. He was utterly undone from sound, from angels, from what trails along with the movement of the planets. He wanted to disappear into silence.

  “And he might have done just that,” Miss Williams went on after a pause, during which she had found Mr. Sheehan’s eyes in the dark, vibrant with their yellow fear, just as they had been the first night he had spent in the cottage. “He might have remained mute, if not for the wind. The wind tickled at the grasses in the meadow; it assuaged their loneliness, for, without the wind, each reed was silent and could not talk to its brothers and sisters. The grasses, you see, were young, still learning, and they wanted to share what they were learning, to sing out what they knew of the sun and its travels, the moon and its reflection, the habits of the animals that darted and hummed below the boy’s notice: snails and mice, grasshoppers, a harmless snake or two. Did you ever notice how the tall grass will suddenly go flat, as if it expects someone to step on it, before a fox or a badger runs through it?”

  Here Miss Williams left open a moment for Mr. Sheehan to picture it, and when she began again, she made certain her voice was lighter, so that Mr. Sheehan might imagine his own speech in place of her words—so that he might consider the questions she asked as his own. “Is it the wind that flattens it, or does the grass summon the wind to accomplish this?”

  Miss Williams again waited. The words from the frogs and crickets were weightless, limber, with the ability to lift and carry herself and Mr. Sheehan out to a figment of a wood, the mountains and meadow of her own construction. The frogs met each turn in the crickets’ song with their breath and fiddling, so that there was an either-or response to Miss Williams’s question, a retraction as soon as there was a decision, the matter always open.

  “Perhaps it is neither the wind nor the grass that moves,” Miss Williams determined, “because, in this meadow, one day, the wind stopped, or the grasses stopped, and now the boy had what he wanted: a vacuum. He had air, and water, and food of some sort, I guess; but he had no beat from his heart, no blood in his ears, no draw on his breathing. And this frightened him, because he did not know if he was alive or dead.

  “He did not want to die only to be so securely, unquestionably quiet. He was committed to silence—but only for himself, he realized. Not for the world around him. He thought if he could bring back the sound the grass made, he would know that he was not dead, and that the punishment he had imposed on himself was only for himself. He had not harmed anyone or anything further. So he began to gather the grass, to make it into a kind of instrument, something that could be played by the wind, if not himself. Something that could teach the grass to play itself.”

  In the space that she could barely see before her in the darkness, Miss Williams’s hands reenacted the motions and actions her character made, gathering up swaths of grass and weeds, bundling and knotting them together. She mimicked the intricate pulling apart of individual reeds that was required if the story was to have proper strings for its harp, and the basting together, with ever smaller and thinner root strings, of those reeds so they would be the correct length. Finally, the harp was completed, and so was Miss Williams’s private charade, and the boy, she told Mr. Sheehan
, climbed a tree that was not so imposing that he could not carry his creation along with him.

  “He waited for a string to sound itself, but he heard nothing. He blew on all the strings, but found the same result. Finally he plucked at a string, and then another, until he dug at the instrument because there was still no sound, and he was in a panic. He shook and knocked the harp and, finally, in his despair, he threw it through the branches. He did not care where it landed or what happened to it. But as he was about to jump out of the tree, he heard something—not from the harp, but from right in front of him.

  “The wind had not returned to the leaves of the trees, to his skin, to grasses and ponds and rocks, but always it was right there in front of him, with him. For he was the wind. He skipped over the landscape. He heard the moans and whistles that his volume made. He rolled and delighted in the voices of bark and twigs. He could no longer remain silent, even if he had tried, because now he was the wind. He was a part of everything.”

  Then Miss Williams reached out to Mr. Sheehan from where she sat on the floor, just as she had once risked extending her hand to him that morning off the main road. She did not have to wait long for Mr. Sheehan’s long fingers to take her own—to take her hands and raise them to his chest, where he held them in solemn contemplation as he bowed his head, as if the gesture could convey both gratitude and regret, without having to own up to either one.

  “We will fix this,” she said, “but it will take some doing.” She put her hands to his face, her forehead to his. “I will think of something.”

  Within a week’s time, Sheehan found himself the recipient of gifts. They came from a London catalogue Miss Williams could now openly consult, as word of his presence in the cottage had no doubt spread at a lightning pace. She watched as he cautiously relieved her hands of the four white boxes and then just as delicately unpacked their contents. The first held a single-breasted jacket with a one-button closure, and he ceremoniously laid it out on his bed. The second contained a tie with a white day shirt, which he placed atop the jacket. He ran a hand over the length of the clothes with some trepidation, as though he was an undertaker inspecting the wardrobe his newest client was to be buried in. With the third box, the trousers, Miss Williams thought she had gotten through to him: he held them up to his waist. But the shoes he would not remove from the box, as though he quickly confirmed they were either too tight or too fine for him to wear.