The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  “Sir! Are you also unwell?” the headmistress shouted.

  No, no, no, he shook his head. He clamped his eyes shut at the sight of Miss Williams’s nakedness. Her skin appeared blue as though thinning. It was no longer skin, barely able to contain pulse and oxygen. The light hairs of her arm stood separate and scared; she was all goosebumps and flailing, like waterfowl that did not comprehend its injury at grounding. The headmistress took Sheehan by the shoulders and shook him fitfully. It was the only way she could get him to look at her directly.

  “Something wrong, sir?” the headmistress demanded. Sheehan took to the ground, his knees pressed into wood floor that refused to yield. He clasped his hands together as if to beg and shook them in the headmistress’s face. But she was unmoved. She was calling for assistance. The men she had just banished from the room would soon return, to draw and quarter him. “We need some help here,” the headmistress said in their direction. The groundskeeper and the man in glasses had to be nearby, otherwise she would not have been shouting after them. “Come on now. A pair of strong men I need. Quit cowering.”

  Please, Sheehan thought intently to himself. Please.

  “Sir! Sir!” The headmistress’s ire was more fully directed at him, yet she was backing away as if she were frightened—perhaps by the remoteness of his features, his size and posture.

  Sheehan drew his hair away from his face. He motioned for the pencil and paper back, but no one responded.

  “Ma’am,” Sheehan heard above his head. “The doctor.” A graying man had entered, though not in a doctor’s garb. He carried a medical bag, his shoulders seemingly tamped down by transporting its bulk. Sheehan rose, out of deference, but slipped one of his hands between Miss Williams’s fingers.

  “Now then,” the doctor tried to say reassuringly, but the warmth drained out of his voice as he saw the strength of Miss Williams’s convulsions. Worry tugged at his eyelids, as though he wanted to shut his eyes to her distress. He put his palm to her forehead and shouted, “Blankets! A hot water bottle! Something! Bertie!” He was addressing the headmistress. “Can’t you recognize a fever?”

  “I’m trying to be rid of this menace here,” she said, nodding at Sheehan.

  “You?” he said to Sheehan, who cast his eyes downward. But he did not remove his hand from the patient’s. “Who is he?”

  “We don’t know,” Bertie said.

  “And I can’t care much, at this minute,” the doctor said. He had removed a stethoscope from his bag and placed the earpieces in his ears. Sheehan held his breath and shut his eyes, as if to stop the churn of orders and whispers around him, to hold the infirmary still as the doctor listened. “And I can’t concentrate under these conditions.”

  “I said—” Bertie began, but the doctor somehow stopped her.

  “How old is this woman?” he asked.

  Sheehan opened his eyes and raised his hands, then two fingers on one hand, and five on the other.

  “Seven?” someone asked.

  “Twenty-five,” the doctor said. “Obviously.” Sheehan put his hands down, as if he had been too forward with the information.

  “You, you brought her?”

  Sheehan nodded again and put his hands to his throat to demonstrate choking.

  “She choked on something?” the doctor guessed, and he looked to Miss Williams, as if for confirmation.

  “Why must you ask him?” the headmistress said.

  “Who should I ask then?”

  “He’s dumb, obviously,” the headmistress said. “And there’s no place for him here—”

  “Bertie,” the doctor said firmly. His voice was hoarse, disrupted, but Sheehan believed he could feel the force the man used to clear out the croup to make his point. “He’s mute,” the doctor guessed, as he took in the full measure of Sheehan. Sheehan knelt to wipe away the ropish strands the sweat had made of Miss Williams’s hair.

  “The man has a fetish,” Bertie despaired.

  “You in the war, son?” the doctor asked.

  Sheehan nodded, but did not take his eyes off Miss Williams.

  “Obviously a reactive psychosis, Bertie,” he said to the headmistress. Before she could speak, the doctor declared, “Now’s not the time to debate it.” He returned his attention to Miss Williams, lifting her eyelids as he tilted the lamp downward into her eyes. “She’s responding to light,” the doctor said to Sheehan, “though I can’t see how.”

  “Please, Richard—” Bertie started in again.

  “No,” the doctor said. “He’s all we’ve got to go on. It’s as though she’s had a stroke, but she’s obviously too young. You—” he addressed Sheehan directly. “Go about and make yourself useful. Fetch us some water and towels.”

  Sheehan would not have moved from his position if the doctor hadn’t pointed where the sink was, in a far corner; Sheehan needed to be certain that this was no fool’s errand. When Sheehan returned, the doctor was listening to Miss Williams’s lungs again, the stethoscope inserted beneath the bed sheet. The headmistress was fashioning some sort of bed clothes out of linens, and the waddling secretary reemerged, her arms holding blankets.

  “Has she been ill in any way?” the doctor asked Sheehan distractedly; he seemed to be counting breaths or heartbeats; his hand had taken hold of Miss Williams by the wrist. “Has she been exposed to anyone with an illness?”

  No, Sheehan shook his head again, unsure if anyone was paying attention. The doctor withdrew the stethoscope and discovered the groundskeeper beside him. The groundskeeper handed him the paper Sheehan had written on.

  “No air,” the doctor read. “You mean she couldn’t breathe?”

  Sheehan nodded, as he would to a superior officer.

  The doctor crossed his arms. “Her lungs—” he began, but could not finish. “Her heart’s a bit fast—from the fever, I’d expect.” he said. “This is delayed, for a case of the influenza. You must have seen a lot of that.”

  Sheehan shook his head no several times, and raised his hands in surrender. As the headmistress and the doctor’s eyes were upon him, the groundskeeper’s, and the waddling secretary’s, he felt all the fury and nerve that had brought him to this point dispersing. They had taken him for a carrier, the source of infection. A quarantine would be next, questions would be put, his explanations insufficient. Unless he could write them on paper, and he began pounding his fist into his hand. He put his index finger to his palm, to motion for the pencil and paper again.

  “This?” the doctor asked, slowly returned the paper, with a pencil, to him.

  “Influenza not in camps,” Sheehan quickly wrote, and when he returned the paper back to the doctor, he found himself breathless.

  “Camps?” the doctor asked.

  Sheehan nodded.

  “Prisoner of war?” the doctor continued.

  Sheehan nodded again as he reddened, drenched in sudden shame.

  “How long?” the doctor asked.

  Sheehan kept his focus on the ground but lifted a hand to display four fingers.

  “Right,” the doctor said. Miss Williams was finally being covered with the blankets. “Someone get this man a chair, for God’s sake,” the doctor asked of no one in particular. “The name’s Weir,” the doctor said as he offered his hand to Sheehan, but Sheehan could not take it. He had returned to Miss Williams’s side, his hands busy with the water and towels he had brought to make Miss Williams a compress.

  The chair appeared; the doctor placed a hand on Sheehan’s shoulder, and Sheehan sat as if he had been commanded to do so. But for the doctor, the rest of the world fell away for Sheehan, as he had secured a foothold beside Miss Williams and had no intention of ever giving it up.

  She had not contracted influenza; this was something else, a denser disease, its prognosis impenetrable. Sheehan knew from the war, the camps, and the trenches, how a body was
put together. He knew how it could fall apart, whether it be a gradual collapse, through strain and starvation, or a violent sundering. In her bed at the infirmary, Miss Williams seemed to be enduring both conditions. Her breath shortened into a terrible panting as if her lungs had been stolen, wrenched cleanly from their perch with a furtive precision.

  Nine

  As the fever bent and jerked at her body, Miss Williams believed she was quite well, and years younger, at the children’s asylum where she had lived as her mother approached death. St. Joseph’s of the Desert, it was called. The sisters gave her a simple bed in a convent room away from the other girls, so long as her mother lingered in the sanitarium the nuns ran across town. Eva felt fortunate in her room, to be sinking beneath the blankets with the buffalo grazing in the woolen hem, and coyote howling at the summer doldrums. Winter had beset the landscape with bitter winds. From outside she could hear the wind searching for objects to scour, for the bungalows and adobe could not satisfy it. By the end of the night, it would find its power solely applied to the sand, bright and unabashed in how it threw reflections into the horizon. Each morning the world was white and new again in the distance, and her mother was that much closer in having the dry salve of the desert absorb the thrashing waters in her lungs.

  Eva had a hand in this process, accompanying the wind on its nightly visitations. She did not fly with the wind in her imagination, but listened as it rose and fell, rose and fell, redoubling its resolve with each ascent. She cheered it on, in her mind, because the sound kept her company; because should the wind tire, should it go lax in its routine of self-cleansing, her mother would be lost. I need you to be as strong as you’ve ever been, Eva said in her whispered conversations with the wind. I need you to make my mother better so we can look for my father, together. At daybreak she was anxious to look through the frosted panes just above her bed so she might see the wind’s work, the sand ablaze with the signal for good health and the return of her mother’s hardy constitution.

  She was about to leap from underneath the blankets the nuns had piled atop her when she was suddenly in a larger room—the dormitory in the children’s asylum. She had been stripped of her blankets, and given an anemic substitute that did nothing to keep out the consuming winter temperatures. Her hose were black like her undergarments, and, for working in the laundry, she had a white smock. For the kitchen, she had a white apron. She gathered all her clothes for warmth before returning to her cot. Each cot was placed at just over an arm’s length from the next, so that no girl might reach out to comfort the girl next to her. The legs of each cot had been sawed down so no one was able to stand on the bedding and see out the windows. The cots were arranged in a dreadful seniority: the oldest girl slept in the cot closest to the exit, for she would be turned out as soon as she came of age. Eva was the second girl from the door.

  Her mother was gone now; this was something she knew in her dream, though no one had explicitly told her. Helen had finally diminished so greatly that her hair and skin might have been easily confused with the lime that was used to curtail her scent, the unraveling that was both salt and metal, at burial. Eva had missed the funeral somehow; perhaps she had been prevented from attending. She was made to hang the laundry or sweep up the grit that besmirched the white sheets and gray habits. As she worked, she thought she saw flashes, pulses of light, that distinguished themselves from the dance sand performed before it climbed into the mountains. These were not mirages but the last panting breaths of a woman who was brighter than glass, her flesh and bones blanched by time in the sun, its relentless polishing. They had come to the desert, which had supposedly made the Pima men, women, and children impervious to disease. Sun, air, and stars appeared as though they had punctured the night, so urgent was the need to bring light to it.

  Still these curatives failed her mother, and Eva was about to be turned out into the infinity that blinded those who could not penetrate it. She was kneeling at the feet of the abbess, though she had not intended to place herself in such a position. The abbess had grabbed her writing hand and yanked the fingers like she was cracking a whip. Eva’s hand stung as though an electric current had been run through it. Eva withdrew her hand and coddled it to her chest; for weeks she nursed it as though it was an injured wing with time as her only medicine. But for this excruciating, interminable moment, she was freshly wounded, huddled against her pain and the nun’s rapacious need to punish her. Eva had been telling stories to the girls that evening.

  She wanted very badly to recall just what she had said to the girls in the dormitory minutes earlier. She believed it was the story of the girl who ate her own hand. She had written it for one of the other girls in the asylum, a younger child who chewed on her fingers as a nervous habit. The nuns considered it a vicious tendency, evidence of an insatiable nature, and warned it would lead to further and far more horrendous sins in adulthood. They wrapped her hands in bandages that left her unable to dress herself. Nor could she feed herself, though her place at the long table remained empty; she was to be given no food, since she had too long feasted on what God had given her for other purposes—for work and prayer.

  What was this girl’s name? Miss Williams first searched the dream, then what she could peek into of her memory, for the nuns had truly done this. They had pulled the bandages so tight the girl’s skin had begun turning, just as leaves do, the ebullience in their coloring drained away as the sun chooses to ignore them. Miss Williams could still find nothing of the girl’s name or fate in her re-dreaming, her remembering. But she could not forget how the girl could not work with those bandaged hands, and because of that, she was not to be fed. So Eva brought the girl food, biscuits and porridge. The other girls followed suit, and they took turns feeding her as though she were a baby. They helped her to wash at night and dress in the morning.

  But the bandages declined into brine and rags, as cotton does, when left on the boll to go rancid. Eva could no longer tell the younger girls how the bandages were like cocoons, and the girl’s hands were at work on a spectacular metamorphosis. A miracle Eva had promised them, fingers and thumbs molting into joints as strong and mighty as a forest. Not only would the girl be able to work again, but she’d find herself the recipient of new talents: she’d heal sick animals. Eva was about to explain how the girl’s fingers would bear fruit for the hungry, provide shelter for the dispossessed, when the nun who ran the laundry pulled her away from the others to bring her to the abbess.

  “You,” said the nun, whom they called Sister Tuber; she was rewarded with this name for the divets on her face. “I always knew you were dangerous.”

  This was how Miss Williams found herself in another country, listless in another narrow bed. She did not so much resolve to escape the children’s asylum, the Arizona territory, and the whole of the United States, as she allowed the winds to carry her away when they beckoned. The abbess could have been said to have welcomed them onto Eva’s path that night, declaring that Eva’s sins—her wildness, contrariness, intransigence, and unmanageability—would ultimately deprive her of a husband. “We’ll see how well you write stories without your fingers,” the abbess then said as she wrested Eva’s hand like a farmer’s wife might take to cracking a chicken’s neck. “The next time, the Lord will see fit to do this to your teeth,” she said, dismissing Eva into the custody of Sister Tuber. Wild, contrary, intransigent, unmanageable, and willful, she was; Sister Tuber repeated the benediction and added that final amen.

  In the dormitory, the girl whose name she could not detach from the swirl of her recollections gave Eva the sweaty, gruesome bandage the nuns had tried to emboss on her skin. Perhaps her name was Katherine or Elizabeth, something that carried with it a diminutive: Kate or Becky. On that night, the girl came into her name, and was no longer greeted as a girl. A hand for a hand, a girl for a woman. Eva’s name, trim and finished, could not be stretched into another connoting arrival, a more polished status. The bandages had lost th
eir tautness, their pull and acumen for healing. Eva thanked the girl, and said neither of them had any further need for the binding.

  But Miss Williams did need it, the restorative protection a bandage might have provided, in the narrow bed where she strained and twisted against the linens and her nightmares. Her mind insisted that she engorge herself upon these disordered thoughts, as though there was nothing else to sustain her during sleep.

  She was willful and bullheaded, also provocative, and she liked the sound of that word. Eva smiled to think of the potential it conferred upon her, to which the nun they called Sister Monsoon responded with tears. Sister Monsoon wept copiously, Eva was able to observe, when confronted with her own impotence. Unlike the other nuns, she had been raised at St. Joseph’s, in the same asylum that impounded Eva and the others. The girls were supposedly not to know this, but Sister Monsoon had attested to as much in one of her many tearful binges.

  For the abbess and Sister Tuber and all the other sisters, Monsoon was the unspoken proof of what could befall the stubborn, the dim-witted, the unruly, or the overly joyful. Worse than mere spinsterhood, she represented but the ruthless, indomitable expansion of the present day for the child inmates into an infinite permanency. To become one of them, the undesirable, undeserving, unmarried, superfluous females for which there was no other tenable existence but assuming the habits and wimples of their tormentors. Eva surprised herself with her lack of concern over which personal failing had ensnared Sister Monsoon. She was concerned only with evading a similar inculcation for herself.

  Eva’s hand healed after that night; it returned to its natural state and dexterity over the course of days and frequent dunkings in the laundry’s cold water washings. But the wind that the sisters depended on battering and bedeviling Eva lifted her up and brought into her view another way for a woman to live, especially since she had been deemed unfit for a future in the domestic arts. The sisters would have to send her away for training, wouldn’t they, since sins clung to her like a baby at the breast. “The Father will have you sucked dry as bones,” said the nun they called Sister Root, as she seemed to be in the thrall of Sister Tuber. “The only children you’ll be fit to nourish will be in a classroom.” Eva answered Sister Root’s petition with the most flagrant sin possible: another story, which the wind would conduct to the most wanton magazines that publish such things. And then an entire book of stories, to be sent to the printers of such volumes. And on to any school, anywhere, that permitted women to study literature and languages. And, finally, to the mailbox of every Catholic nun in America, if she could manage it.