Once incarcerated by the Germans, he found there was more marching to be done, and marching on those kommandos, whether to a farm or a factory, was the safest of all. Sentries barked and men sickened; diseases and gangrene could not be outrun. But there was no need to prove loyalties, which is where zealotry and competition begins. There were no rumors, since there was only the marching to get through, even if they were to be taken across France, to build new camps for new prisoners, due to overcrowding in the homeland. On the marches there was no crowding, five-hundred men to a faucet, or a thousand. There was only the next step, and at some points not even the one after it. To place one foot ahead of the other so squarely, with the proper rhythm, was quite enough to accomplish.
He was able to march as a prisoner of war; to walk, to wander as a beggar after the war, because he did not allow himself to think of a destination. But today, with Miss Williams on his arm, he most purposefully had an objective, even if he was not entirely certain as to the nature of their mission.
Miss Williams knocked on the tall door, and they were met by a butler in full dress and polish. The butler escorted them from the atrium to a second floor sitting room and library. Miss Williams thanked the butler, and then asked him if he might show her to a wash room. She was panting, as if only able to collect flat, shallow breaths, and her face showed the red of her exertions.
“I only need to cool down a bit,” Miss Williams said to Mr. Sheehan. “You’ll be fine, and I will be back in seconds.”
When she left the room, he remained standing. He calmed himself by thinking he’d just let this Lord Thorton speak whatever gibberish his mind meted out for the occasion. Then Sheehan saw his own reflection in the ebony finish of a piece of furniture. But it was not merely furniture, though it may have been to His Lordship, his family, and their servants. Sheehan knew it as something else entirely. He might investigate the piece further, to help him compare himself to what he had been, before the war, and what he could be again. He wanted to approach the piece slowly, but rushed ahead, as he found that he could not keep still in its presence.
A Blüthner. Sheehan smiled, and inhaled that smile. German. He would have thought a man such as this lord, or his predecessors, would demand nothing less than a Broadwood, though if they had, it might not have spoken so well of the family’s musical acumen. But he also knew the accumulations of an empire are inherently self-aggrandizing, and Sheehan posited there must have been someone in Lord Thorton’s lineage who imagined going beyond the whims of a dilettante, so this piano was obtained. How it had survived the war, and Lord Thorton not taking the patriotic action of destroying it, was nothing short of a miracle.
Sheehan did not immediately sit himself at the bench, but instead randomly put his fingers to keys as he imagined the mechanics he was setting off, the hammers and strings, and the sympathetic notes Blüthners were known for. The Aliquot string. He was more accustomed to the Bechsteins that made their way to Ireland, the Collard & Collards; a Blüthner, such as this, he did not encounter until University. There were none in the music school; they were the instruments of symphonies. He had always been curious about this extra string, its indirect life, at a remove from the keys and yet closer to the source of the music. It was said to produce an effect more tender, romantic even, than other pianos. But what would it do to his beloved Satie, with its silences as integral as the chords and dissonances? Would they be erased, as if silences could be made mute? Would the echo destroy the original?
He sat on the bench, placed the book of poems to his right. His hands fell as if they were still soft and ready, denuded of years and experience, but he mimed the Gymnopédies at first. His hands felt small, shrunken at the expanse of the keyboard. Perhaps they had shrunk from misuse: shoveling that kept them in an abbreviated grip; weeding in which his fingers plucked and grabbed, without reaching their full length. Digging, molding, patting, all the actions that transformed fingers from free agents into implements of more immediate elements: earth, water, and wind. Or perhaps he had no fingers, only the slight differentiation of digits that a pawed animal uses to grasp and scratch. His fingers had retracted, and as he played now, in actuality, he felt initially as though he was using his knuckles, with his span so diminished.
The sparse melody, the 1-2, 1-2, came easily enough at his right hand. The haze in his ears almost parted, but he could not be certain. The agility of his fingers in the left hand was quite rough. But the wrist and arm could make up for some of the handicap, and he listened as the notes took longer to finish than he remembered; whether it was the tantrum of noise in his head, or the true production of the instrument, he could not determine. It made him stumble, poorly time his transitions. But the keys themselves were still like the prow of a narrowboat, taking in waves and eddies. They just did so at odd intervals as he struggled to make them respond to fingerpads. They felt remote, trussed up in the insults to his skin he could not prevent.
Yet he was on the verge of mastering something; a kind of control, mainly of his expectations. Since he could not assume that he possessed as much control as in his earlier playing, he had to be more solicitous, less demanding of the instrument. He had to find a balance between what he knew of its theoretical possibilities, and what was the actual result of his senses. He hesitated, repeated himself, balked at notes and phrases that struck him as incomplete, unburnished. What he could hear, make out of his performance: he did not know if it was his performance of the room, or his imagination. He was working from memory that he had alternately tried to preserve and discard.
The collar and sleeves crisp against his skin. The length of him cosseted by what had to have been made by hand, attention to detail in every stitch. He was close to being properly outfitted for a performance, although perhaps not a recital. That would have required more confining, formal dress. This was like an afternoon of tea, or a luncheon, a garden party where the flowers and fascinators would draw all the attention. In his new clothes, his still awful hands, he faded into the furniture, and only the notes baited the limits of the room and its decorum. He had not always been a monster: a bird shorn of its repertoire, a reminder of lost souls, and a lost nation. Once he had been a kind of caretaker, one who ferried the moments before sunset as the sun drips down, the deliverer of water in its rebirth from the grip of a dead season. He once plodded the earth to place seedlings in a field. All he would leave behind would be bright, if anonymous.
He had not played at this length since his training, when the NCOs would set him up on Saturday nights in a makeshift concert hall. At 1700 hours, after the last meal, the men were shuffled from the junior mess to the rec compound, where the only instrument available was a doddering old thing with a brassy sound. He discovered on one of these Saturday nights he could play “Je Te Veux” and the “Valse Ballet,” if he was not too particular about the piano’s defects. The men waltzed with each other, there being no women available to partner. He played it over and over, and at the end of the night, the men, still standing, gave him a bracing round of applause.
He had kept his eyes open so as not to lose himself, but now he could not stop thinking of other pianos, his own at the third studio in the music school; the hours that he spent with her, hours that spilled, dissolved, scattered before they could be measured, like the distance between planets. He could not avoid how his playing had changed, how cautious and timid it had become, unable to capture those moments. But he could revisit when he tried to rescue time, the music like moments when diamonds are first exposed, before their light turns garish. He could find a way to be in the world, after the war and too much time away from the instrument. He could provide each note with the isolation it deserved, before it was grafted onto the next; he could make way for the slip of an instant, so the phrase could be savored, without his crushing it. This was a compromise, between music and vacuum, and he would jeopardize neither if he could keep what his hands and body had suffered away from the instrument. W
ith this pledge, he exhaled; he was finished.
He bowed his head, then glanced away from the keyboard to Miss Williams. Instead he found a crowd, with Miss Williams in front. She was tightly holding the hand of the woman who must have been the lady of the house; behind them were the maids and footmen. The lady of the house looked pale for the season, although he detected a kind of blush pulsing through her neck.
“Please,” the lady said. “Continue.”
Sheehan stood. The servants, it seemed, retreated with shuffling. Miss Williams took a step toward him and Lady Thorton, if he was correct in his identification, turned around briefly as if to invite the servants back. But it was too late. Sheehan had stepped away. From the bench, then from the other furniture. He thought of grabbing Miss Williams as he bolted, but it was best to leave her out of this. He leapt as if he were a goat or antelope, then ran as he had when sighting a flare, a firebomb, a grenade. His gait accelerated once he was clear of the house, on his way toward the college.
His breath was ragged by the time he reached the cottage, his vision blighted. By the hair that fell over his eyes, the sweat that fell into them; the wind he had to press himself into, to run without stopping. He took to the nursery, secured the door with a chair. The door that he and Miss Williams had made a habit of leaving open, so he might know he was neither confined nor unwelcome here. The curtain he pulled shut, the child’s chest of drawers pushed against the door as well. A barricade: all he needed now was to find the room’s darkest corner. He stripped off the new clothes; in his pants and undershirt, he waited for reinforcements.
Six
He needed water for his face and throat. He was hot with shame, trembling with anger. He could leave the nursery to sate his thirst, subdue his humiliation, but he could show himself only to Miss Williams. Yet he could not allow her to see him in this state of abject failure. He could have been shot, a fitting consequence for his stupidity. Soldiers lose their vigilance at their own peril, and he had lost his at the Thorton estate, just as he had lost his timing.
He had believed, wrongly or not, that he could hold onto his timing in the trenches through his finger exercises, through his imagining the immediacy of sound to result, action to sound. The music his hands made had always been immediate, an indivisible logic that drove his mind, fingers, the keyboard, pedals, hammers, and strings, as if all acted in concert, by instinct. This was what Sheehan had striven for as a player, a flow and current in his playing that he recognized he could very possibly lose without practice. But if he kept a hold on the way he had learned to perceive cause and effect through the ruminations of his fingers, through music, then he might get through this war, and go back to his instrument unfettered. With this in mind, he gladly took to the regimen of arching a single finger, holding it steady, applying pressure from the tip and then squeezing back against it in an instant. Shooting: shooting would preserve his sense of order, of direction. The shooting drills made sense to him in training, simultaneous time, reaction for action, a sinuous chain of sound and movement: an arrangement.
But war also requires a certain kind of patience he hadn’t anticipated, like the patience called for in the launching of a grenade. In the launching of a grenade, there was a moment of waiting—of praying as if God had taken His glance away and shifted it toward someone else, if not the enemy—until the device landed, so one could be sure it landed on its nose and detonated. When the rifle delivered its kick to his side and shoulder, he had to learn how to wait for the jabbing sensation to fall in his shoulder so pain would not interfere with reloading of the weapon. These vigils, which he thought he could measure, would have to be inserted, worried over, calculated with a ferocious rigor because one measure off could mean the difference between survival or death. But then came the harrowing interludes between light and darkness in the trench, the light that did not hold to any schedule but to its own indecipherable purpose. Flood and flare, a surge or a disturbing trickle, light ruled a soldier’s movements, his decisions and gambits.
The training officers warned them: their first firefights would be chaos. Yet each man finds his own way of coping. Look out for yourself and your fellows, Sheehan and his unit were told. Look elsewhere, and you may not live to tell about it. Sheehan thought he might cope by orchestrating the chaos, at least to his own mind: he would build out of the chaos a chorus of light and thunder, light and percussion. He knew light announces sound, and thought war could not reveal too much more in this regard. He knew lightening announces thunder, and the gas lamp and taper escorted that sound of air surrendering to fire, the sound the candle made, like sating a thirst or drawing a breath, within its wooden chamber. A parade of light and sound he would make of the firefights.
His father, on candlebox rounds, hadn’t prepared him for anything more than a lost vocation, it turned out. But Da did prime him for these principles of sight and feeling; he applied them to buck up young Michael against stage fright. “They’ll see you first, sitting out on the stage with all the other students,” Edmund had said, “nothing you can do to stop that. Once they’ve got a look at your mug, what more is there to worry over? Play your heart out.”
In a firefight the object was not to be seen, but to make one’s impact felt. To affect the advantages of darkness while exercising the privileges of light. To no longer count in such docile measurements but be prepared for weights and tonnage, regiments and battalions: the only signatures of time he would have at his disposal, but only in the sense of time lost, time squandered, time given over to the enemy’s advantage because there was no time for frivolous counting, unless one was prepared to be liable for more carnage, more destruction.
Sheehan entered his first firefight with more of a sense of what not to do than any particular reaction he should have, or action he might take in response. He was not surprised by the demand the light from the shells made on his eyes, nor the convulsive dialogue between trenches that followed. But the persistence of both light and sound together, the sound slapping over light so that it became impossible to ferret through which flash of light was responsible for which explosion: that unnerved him, because it made all the calculations he had practiced irrelevant. Smoke and cordite poured through the light, prolonged their heat and scent as if aided by the force of the explosions. Everything was echo and source, then echo without source, the elements pulled apart and yet not independent. The light continued to insist on seizing distinguishable moments, plumes of smoke, the bewildering whiffs of cordite: they leapt from nostrils to behind the eyes as if a frigid wind meant to blind a man, though the odor dispelled as soon as one thought he might identify it. The light froze soldiers in action so Sheehan could not be sure if grenades had been tossed or shots successfully fired. The man that was hit—the men—had they been taken away, or would he find them underfoot? The sounds that landed together forced earthen walls into collapse, remade trees on the battlefield into torches, their trunks torn open, their branches a scaffold for fire.
Was it the light that did this, or the collusion of light and sound—not sound, but petulant, unschooled noise—with a velocity that had been armored and sharpened so that when it made contact, it ruptured, gashed and mangled. There was a sound as metal rent its way through tissue, like the amplified landing of a butcher’s knife. In the slaughter and confusion, Sheehan aimed his Lee-Enfield where he could see bursts of white dust coming from the opposite trench—enemy fire. More light, and the object was to snuff it, quickly, as if sweeping away candles like they were dominoes refusing to yield to their comrades.
In that first firefight the batches of light and sound seared Sheehan’s retinas and battered at his eardrums. Against his legs he felt weight falling—initially at the ankles, then up to his knees. The weight kept piling on, and he kicked it aside—when he could. He was sinking below it, and he would have to climb atop it if he were to keep his focus on the bursts of white dust from the other side, the reports of German rifles amid the i
ntervals of blinding light and deafening noise. He found he had to hunch lower, shorten his posture, to keep his aim without getting himself grazed or worse; as though the bottom of the trench was rising. At sunrise, as the parapet of the opposite trench became visible, the shooting halted, and Sheehan and the other men were ordered to shovel out the mess. And there, they discovered their colleagues.
Gorham, the shopkeeper’s son, was the first Sheehan recognized. Face down, mud in his eyes and nostrils, his neck elongated at an impossible angle. Had he died of a broken neck from the fall, or was a bullet responsible? The fabric of his uniform had been dug away into an arrangement like the rays of the sun, as a child might depict them. Perhaps Gorham had turned around to look at something, and this was how he was hit, but what could he have been looking for? There was nothing to see but one’s own men, and less than that, in the slew and punctuation of the firelight. The blood from the point of impact to his uniform was sticky, black, probably because of the cold. The chill and dampness accentuated the darkness in everything.
After Gorham, they would find Arden, the dairy man’s son; Collins; Owens; Douglas; Rogers; the Scotsmen, Ross and Thomson; Armstrong and Gardener—they were musicians, a violinist and a coronet player. They had studied at Manchester before him. As they continued digging, Sheehan’s hands blistered inside his gloves at the dorsal muscle between index finger and thumb, and the faces appeared more furiously clotted over with mud and trampling, though no less recognizable. Palmer, the footman in service. Hughes the miner. They died in the same way, if not by the same cause: they slumped upon impact of some ordnance, whether it was inside or beside them. How they flailed before falling, their arms and torsos arrayed in the contortions of acrobats: this would be the only inquiry made to distinguish them, if any inquiry was made at all.
The Hawkman Page 7