The land was rough going, as if it had been churned and spit out, then churned again. Mud and mountains. Barren forests, the limbs of cherry trees curtailed by fire and shelling. He could smell it, a sulfurous vacuum. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers so he could raise the collar over his nose and mouth, and quickly realized he’d have to find a new way to walk, to conceal himself, in a world ripped open. He might have to adopt the viewpoint his British masters had of him, become their creature more fully, so he might be a barely detectable residue, carelessly kicked underfoot. At his feet were the remains of past fighting: pieces of wire mixed with twigs, bones dirtied and pocked so they might be indistinguishable from felled branches. He sorted through the debris with his eyes. He had become the scavenger above, lingering, balanced upon nothing.
The air was a blank wash of high white clouds and blue, as though it had lost its purpose. The soil was white with ash. No crops to feed, fruit to grow, or birds it might support on its streams and currents. He scooped up what he could and rubbed it over his face and hands, his legs, and the trunk and arms of his uniform. Now he would be a ghost, or an object without human qualities, skittering from blanched tree to tree. In the widening stretch between himself and the front lines, he was certain he heard the big guns going, but in such daylight, that would be impossible.
He watched for shadows by which to tell the hour, as he was certain he had long passed the parallel of Aubers, and figured he had five wild miles to get through before La Bassee. Five miles for him to find something proving the war was at its end while he was stranded in the middle of it. Not in the fighting, or even its aftermath—that would be peace. The defeated trees, rooted at their posts—a ghastly army refusing to acknowledge the fault of its strategy. He stepped on charred bits, branches that cracked open under the weight of his shoes, as though he were torturing once animate beings. The final insult, the shot that put them out of their misery, that was his feet. It was loud, tremendously loud. He leapt behind another tree, put his back to the bark, held his breath. He did not move until he realized his weight might push the tree out of its berth.
Where the trees ended, there were fields in all directions. He spotted a gathering of buildings: a hamlet, it was, forgotten by the mapmakers. He crouched and trotted across a field to get to it. The shops had their windows smashed clear off their frames, the glass in beads on the dirt walk. The town hall boarded up, the cottages sour and gutted, nothing officers would commandeer for their headquarters. The enclosures for the animals had been consumed by tanks or lesser transport. The only difference between this wasteland and the rest was that there was a church. From the outside, it appeared untouched.
The bell tower would afford a view that could help keep him off the ground, or the more dangerous parts of it. So he gave himself permission to enter it, and in the vestibule, came upon a massacre. A pile of faces, hands, feet, the statues of Jesus, Mary, and unidentified apostles dismantled. For which spoils he could not fathom, although he could imagine possibilities, for cement and the steel rods used to reinforce them.
He spied into the sanctuary, and saw it, straight ahead in the balcony above him.
His legs took him up the stairs, to the balconies, much more quickly than he himself could have commanded them. He was only going to look out the windows, he told himself, but the rest of his body, the parts that were not saddled with war senses, had other designs. And there, they found it—an organ. Or where a pipe organ once was, the ramparts of the instrument and its remains within. It had been gutted as expertly as each house, every shop, the apple and pear trees: what more was there to steal? The manuals, the individual keys of the five ranks, and the stops on the panels, had been separated from their bone and wood coverings, as if they were fingernails torn off, in an act of ceremonial torment.
He had not had much experience with organs; he had chosen, at an early age, to devote himself to pressure and strings, and organs were about release and air. He thought at the time he was making a great distinction between noise and sound. Noise was what imprisoned him in Dublin, and sound was the way out of the slum. The piano was sound, a clean instrument that allowed for the silences that spellbound him. Between the notes were measured intervals, moments so rare as to be numinous, if he could properly time and arrange them. He had to learn all of it: dry theory, composition, exercises that tested the resolve of his wrists and knuckles; not much came naturally to him, besides reticence, which the broad chords and bombast of the organ foreclosed.
A church organ, it would have been for him, and that meant staying in Dublin, burying the children he’d father in his own lifetime, in ground that had failed generations. One could not grow anything in rubble and cinders, and one could not be assured rubble and cinders were enough to keep the dead quiet, for the church organ seemed to celebrate their haunting and howling. If he had chosen the organ, perhaps as his mother Catherine had wanted, he would have to keep to the Summer-hill road, the lower street, Number 13-16, submerged in its chaotic noises of families and near-famine. No pauses, no patience, only the perpetual quest for scraps, each morsel less satisfying than the last. There was neither time nor room enough to draw a breath privately, be reminded of the beauty of one’s own beating heart, or the music it might inspire or remind one of.
What there was on Summer-hill was the mass of frantic clamoring, cattle yards and chicken coops crammed behind the forlorn plots of tubers and the street view of the buildings. Before the men would head out to the pubs, they’d slaughter what they could salvage from the beastly soil and load it up in a jaunting cart, one used for English passengers in the daylight. But at night, as the English were tucked in for their righteous slumber, the cart’s wooden wheels raked against cobblestone and dust, and the men threw what carcasses they could pass off as healthy inside.
As a boy, Michael could keep time by the halting cadence of this schedule, the bleats of dying animals, the slap of flesh against the cart’s benches, its departure and then return in the morning, the dousing of the cart with sluice from the gutter, and soap made from ashes. Michael awoke to the slap and battering of the cart as it was being made habitable for the day’s unsuspecting passengers. But to Michael, to anyone with enough sense to look around the surroundings, the scent of blood and concussions had long since insinuated itself into the benches and wood, and made what little food any family had to eat nearly impossible to stomach. Browning meat or yellowish fish—largess, it was said to be—from the households where the girls and women toiled, if they weren’t employed by a laundry. The vegetables tasted of mud and fungus, what lived on the walls, the dirt in the street, dust that chalked around the children’s feet and hands, under the noses of his parents and siblings.
Michael could not know where organ-playing would take him as a boy, but it did not take him long to recognize the shambles, the amalgamation of noises that could not be teased out or untangled, so that it was always too much noise to consider, to swallow. The piano he found far more orderly; its distinctions between scales, the calm and separateness of its sounds, so much more readily deciphered. It would take him far, this kind of dignity and control; what his countrymen lacked, his father Edmund said, not quite into his chest so Michael might still hear him in the single din of the room where they lived. “Get to England, or Canada, the New World,” Edmund would say when in his cups, which was comparatively rare for a man such as him, in a slum city with a passel of children and dire prospects. “Enough of this huddling despair and circus.” Edmund went on to recount other Sheehan men, uncles and cousins, legitimately farming in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There were stranger places for planting and homesteading, stranger names for sober earth, names as unfamiliar as their own Gaelic, for a right young man to take on. If Michael Sheehan could be a man about it. He needn’t bother with that ladies’ church music.
To his credit, Sheehan got himself across the Irish Sea, only to find himself engulfed by the English, the Germans, the maels
trom of an organ that had been dismembered. The keys were mere splinters, nubs, suggestions of the levers that had once been there. He checked for the bellows, and found their leather reinforcements in shreds. The pipes had been yanked off the walls only in sections, but all the connections between them and the instrument had been severed. For lead, he guessed, but he no longer felt such explanations logical. His hands found the keyboard, and he pressed. He pressed hard, and heard dull thuds, like the sound of oars in a boat, banging into one another, upon landing.
He remembered what Mozart had said, what a grand instrument the organ was, how it nearly played itself. But his hands could only ramble and bang at the air. He understood how the instrument’s anatomy had been summarily junked, to be melded into shot; to shore up the walls in trenches; for casings and shells and barrels and bayonets. He understood, as a soldier, that there could never be enough raw materials in war. But no exercise of the mind could explain the zeal in this destruction: the removal of bone from the organ’s stops and manuals. Why strip beyond the skeleton, in a beast that was perhaps the only remaining proof that men were superior to animals? Why gut it so thoroughly—surely not for survival? But war was not a time for abstraction. The operating principle was that they had done it, the Jerrys had dismembered the organ to within an inch of its being unrecognizable. And he would have done the same, if he were in their position. He knew that much about himself.
His hands accelerated, his feet were stomping where the pedalboard had been ripped out, as if he was demanding wraiths to produce music. He heard nothing as he played and then he heard a scream in the air, a siren, and he played on this nub, the one surviving connection between the pipes and the manuals, the only mechanism of the organ that had withstood the punishment. He played on that horrible note that only half came through, with the clanking and admonition that overruled in his ears, so he searched for other notes, other connections. In his mind the racket was so loud he thought he could destroy the entire building.
“English?” he heard a voice, and he thought, no, I am not English, and he kept up his playing, the Bach he decided he heard through the human syllables and the sirens, the screams and the drums. No, I am not English, he hummed to himself through his own hatred, and the human noises became only louder.
“Du! You! Deserter?” the voice persisted because it was a complete voice, more even in tone than he had become accustomed to deciphering.
Sheehan stopped to see a German soldier aiming at him. A man younger than himself, but far more steady with the weapon. He swallowed, as if he might shrink himself into his stomach, disappear. He raised his hands in surrender slowly, as instructed, to give himself time to guess at the most suitable answer, in a language his fellows thought he knew too well.
“Deserter, nein,” he said. “Aber Englisch, nein.”
“Ja, Englisch, du,” the Jerry said. “Du bist prisoner, jetzt, genau.”
Sheehan shoved the clothes Miss Williams had so decorously presented to him, just hours earlier, beneath the bed. It was still a warm day outside, the air possessing a width and height that flooded over the nursery. Yet the chill on Sheehan’s flesh was intolerably cold, and he swaddled himself in the coverlet from the bed without bothering to return to his regular wardrobe. He found the corner of the room that afforded the best surveillance of the door, and placed himself in it as though he were a clandestine sentry. If anyone dare move the handle on the door, he could dash under the bed or out the window, though he did not wish to leave. He did not wish to ever leave the room, the corner, the comfort of walls pressed against his back and sides. He wished he could back more deeply into the corner, until his sweat and flesh could be subsumed by the walls—the bones of the cottage—their quiet and implacable embrace. He wished he had a will to make it so, rather than the hopes and curiosities that Miss Williams had awakened in him.
Whether it was the riot of distractions in his ears, or Miss Williams’s effort and trepidation that kept him from hearing her return, Sheehan did not know. This being the height of summer, the nights were lax in their arrival. The darkness, in its nightly apportionments, could not deal out its merciful pieces to Sheehan quickly enough. He waited until he could be assured that Miss Williams was no longer awake before he rose and eventually stepped out of the room to breach the kitchen. There he found a plate of cheese, bread, tomatoes, and fruit waiting for him, with a note in Miss Williams’s hand:
Beast to beauty to beast again
unless he is told what he cannot
explain will not be asked of him;
unless he is told there is art in
silence, for it allows us to listen:
In the tilling of dirt, the divining
of water; in the work that is not
industry, but the private, joyous
toil; in memory that is not relaxed
but held fast, so moons and orbits
neither drive nor dislodge it; in the
stillness he might perfect, in tending
chestnut trees and peonies, and
his own sainted breath.
Seven
As the weather grew slow, thick, and, in its own way, treacherous, Miss Williams noticed a twitch in her throat. She was not ill, or she did not believe herself to be ill; it was the air, she thought, how stale, thick, and mean it had become. In the length of the days and the intensity of the heat, Miss Williams felt as though the earth had stopped turning, and if she was not attentive, she just might fall off. The twitch worsened into a catch, an occasional cough, and her extremities seemed to wilt from the suffocation. Her desire for the garden, for writing, for rising from her bed in the morning flagged from day to day. She sought out sleep as a cure, but found none, only more fatigue.
She could not hide her deterioration from Mr. Sheehan, who had sustained his own kind of injury from his visit to Lord Thorton’s. This she surmised from the handicap that returned to his movements, the great mass of grief added to his composure. And in his eyes, now, that yellow scrutiny had returned: he watched her as her own timing broke into a protracted agony. He took to pacing, to delaying tasks in the garden; and when he fetched Miss Williams a cup of tea or glass of water, he did not simply hand them off to her. He waited, as if expecting an explanation for what was overtaking her.
Miss Williams thought of that day in the rain, when Mr. Sheehan first ventured out of the cottage, and whether her shivers and discomforts had commenced soon afterward. Perhaps she had ignored the strange displacement occurring in her lungs, as though the air she took in had to work its way past an obstacle, and could not find its way back again. Inhaling a great draught of air was still easy enough, but when she exhaled, she was puzzled by how little air there was to dispose of. The natural impulse was to take another deep breath, to force the old air out, but that only quickened the disruption, and the shudder in her chest would demand to be let out. She coughed and was unable to stop. She didn’t have much in her symptoms, whenever they presented themselves, to be an indication of anything serious. Her ribs ached with the effort of breathing.
The worst of it, though, was how her obviously temporary illness blighted whatever stock of confidence Mr. Sheehan had built up over the months. This was how Christopher and Lord Thorton found the pair, dull and in an anxious retreat from the world, when they came to call a week after the impromptu piano recital. Miss Williams feigned surprise as she answered the door to find them there. She invited them in as graciously as she was able, but they refused to sit in the main room. They stood as if to deliver a final message. They said they would keep this affair mercifully short, but she already knew the course of this affair before they spoke. She saw in how Christopher paced at the window, keeping watch on Mr. Sheehan outside.
“I—we—will try to make this easy for all involved, and be simple, and direct,” Christopher said. Lord Thorton, dressed in a summer suit that was the color of what Icarus might have s
een falling away over his shoulders just before the flames began, had traded places with his son. It was for the earl to keep watch over The Hawkman.
“Of course,” Miss Williams said. She had placed herself at her desk. If they would not sit down, she would, because she was not leaving.
“That man—” was how Christopher finally decided to refer to Mr. Sheehan.
“That gentleman,” Miss Williams corrected.
“Your—”
“Friend.”
“He could very well be mistaken for your paramour,” Christopher said.
“But no one has ever remarked on it,” Miss Williams said. “So you are the only one who is so mistaken.”
“What is he, then? You cannot truly know him,” Christopher said, and his voice was high with frustration. “Is he some kind of project of yours, a social experiment? We have heard about you, you Americans; you will try anything.”
“It was one of your gentle ladies, sir, who came up with that idea. A man as man’s creation, not God’s.”
“Yes, yes,” Christopher said, but he was distracted and could not continue. Miss Williams imagined Lord Thorton casting an exasperated glance from behind her, but that was not enough guidance for his son. “In any case,” he recovered to begin again. “I—you are aware of the—incident. The incident he was involved in.”
“Yes, yes. I was there, after all.”
“Right,” he said, and he might have looked for room to begin pacing in front of the desk. A bad lecture always requires pacing, Miss Williams knew. A good one does not require such theatrics. “As you might imagine, we—my father and I—cannot have trolls wandering about, terrorizing our staff, to say nothing of our family, or His Majesty’s subjects.”
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