The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  His father had been the one to spur him into enlisting. “You might as well go all in, King and country and the sun never setting,” was how Edmund had Catherine put it in a letter, since Edmund had no sense for reading, and could barely put his own name to paper. Edmund knew the light that was made to always shine on the British empire, particularly its squalor. Edmund Sheehan of Summer-hill Dublin was one of the light’s unwitting caretakers. Edmund Sheehan was a candlebox man, one who brought the dawn once night had spilled across the continent and over the islands.

  From house to house he traveled, through blight and rubbish, as night struggled to gain a foothold. He seemed to require mere moments to climb up his ramshackle ladder to the box, ignite the wick, and speed back down, to admire the candlelight spreading like daybreak through the Georgian window. He said he gave eyes to those houses, or a procession of torches for drunkards, whatever was considered by the most people to be practical or reasonable. It was quite a satisfaction, he would often declaim, to turn on his heel and bear witness to the pageants he had kindled. The lights in their cradles seemed to hum in concert with the stars’ assistance.

  The older Sheehan boys fought over who might accompany Da, and perhaps be compensated with a farthing for all the trouble and disruption a candlebox man’s rounds could inflict on his sons’ sleep. Ma tried setting a schedule for each in his turn, but Edmund decided it was best to have the boys settle it in their usual brilliant fashion. “They’ll be fighting all their lives for a mite less,” Edmund had reasoned, according to the stories that went back and forth like rags and twine improvised to provide a football. “No harm in getting them better acquainted with it.”

  Liam and Christopher, eleven months separating the dates of their birth, were said to wrestle not only between themselves but with the sticks and cushions that passed for the family’s furniture to settle the question. Aidan, five years behind Christopher, and Patrick, two years behind Aidan, switched between throwing punches and bargaining with the older two, until Aidan took ill the year Easter came around late—too late, everyone said, for it was nearly May and the weather endeavored to foist summer before spring had a chance to flourish. Aidan was gone by the end of that week, and Patrick had joined him by August. There might have been an explanation, a malady they shared, but once Aidan had died, Catherine burned everything the boys had used in common, from their stockings to the straw that filled their mattress. It did no good and only made more to burn, once Patrick slipped away from them. By the time Michael could grasp that he had, through no fault of his own, lost two of his brothers, Aidan and Patrick were but the sunnier apparitions of the household. These ghosts did not all have names, and some had enjoyed too many days of this life while others starved or were worked to death in a poorhouse. Ma had preserved the fine linens that had belonged to her grandmother, and at Easter they were removed from their box to grace the table where they ate their Easter meal. Once, Sheehan could remember, a pair of baptismal cards fluttered out from the folds of the linens as they were being lifted from their cradle. Aidan and Patrick’s, they were, his sisters immediately recognized them but said nothing until Ma had her back turned. The sound of those cards falling took up an almost infinite space in the tenement, like dried leaves receiving one of their species as it descends from twig and branch, to its final place of rest.

  The competition to tag along with Da and witness his candle lighting prowess removed, Michael was invited to throw his arms around Edmund’s neck and go at a far earlier age than his brothers. Catherine insisted that the boy be wrapped and attached to Da’s back as if he were stowing away in a haversack, but no one knew the source of this fabric, and no one dare question its origin. In Dublin, the sun did not entertain closing its business until the hours of the following morning were near to beginning, and the sky clutched onto its streaks of pink beyond the dusk. Edmund hitched Michael to his back as the grip of those pink streaks was undercut by the darkness, the stars having yet to claim the night territory. Being that it was late, when a boy should be sleeping, Edmund was prepared for the boy to fuss, cry out for his mother, or for something to chew, a biscuit or soda bread or the carrots they tried to grow behind the tenement building. So Edmund tried singing a tune, and he carried some treats for Michael in his pocket for when the boy began twisting in the haversack as a lamb might, squeezed between ewes and rams at the feed trough. Edmund would halt his marching, and ask his son, “Would you rather walk then, little soldier?” before he launched into his tunes, the one about the shadows, ash, and silences ending once the sun had risen. The sound of his father’s voice was not so much soothing as it was a distraction, a trinket with a reflection constantly changing, according to the wind and light, though Michael learned eventually how to follow Da’s voice, from its natural lows to its dizzying heights.

  From a distance, what his brothers must have seen as they watched from the street, their father’s task of lighting the candleboxes appeared simple. A stroll up the ladder Da carried, a flash at the top, a jaunt down, and it was over until the next address. There, the process was repeated, until his father had ignited a procession of flame that pressed against the night. “Please, say nothing of the fairies,” Edmund had intoned to the boys. He said this also to Michael, as Michael grew older and could better understand what his father meant from the tales his mother and sisters told him. “If the fairies could do this,” Edmund often mused, “I wouldn’t be so afraid of electricity. But there it is, a man’s fears laid bare by candlelight. It should be good enough.”

  But because he was so secured to his father’s back, and because the weight did not seem to hamper Edmund as he gamboled up and down his ramshackle ladder, Michael was treated to glimpses of the light that his brothers never witnessed, from its apprehensions, to its acrobatics in the candlebox, and finally to its silence, when the morning struck. From behind his father’s shoulders, Michael traced the progress of a gas lamp his father carried, the tapers Da lit before together they ascended up to the box, and the moment of contact—a distinct sound it had, of fire and falling just as the flame was caught and given a second chance. There were times when the box had been tampered with, and Edmund could not see properly into it, so he would have to intuit how deep the taper had to be placed inside, and how to steer it toward the candle. In this way, lighting a candlebox was much like the work of a fisherman, who must read the surface of the water to discern where the fish were gathering or survey the riverbank for which vantage would afford the most prosperous launching. But a successful catch was something one felt with his hands, a tug of resistance, and the flame caught by the candlewick was something Michael could hear, the temporary displacement of air, like breath, as the candle recovered the spark of the taper. It was this action, this momentary drop and restoration, that Michael found the most arresting of his father’s errands: a sound with its own moments, the anticipation between them; as if time could be held, pulled apart, gently, and its power and logic observed and appreciated.

  Once the candle was lit, his father rapped his knuckles against the glass above the door, and they returned to the street. From there Michael watched the light stretch through the Georgian windows overhead, half a sunrise, the curve of the world contained in the plates of glass. Forty, sixty, hundreds of sunrises he could attest to seeing, at the command of his father’s arms and hands; only later, as he progressed through his studies, could he understand how his father conducted light and sound as though his taper was a baton to be rattled before an orchestra; how he summoned one out of the other, sound out of light, a 1-2 with the instance between acts, between beats, between movements of the hands and minds and the music they made together and, simultaneously, all through such modest materials, a bit of pressure, and grace.

  It was after his father had minded all the boxes and brought Michael to the pub and treated himself that Edmund sat the boy on the piano bench, and together they explored the instrument. With his right hand Edmund tapped out th
e melodies he sang, and then asked Michael to play it back to him. He couldn’t, of course, though his fingers could ascend and descend the scales as nimbly as Edmund danced on the ladder. “What have you got to run from?” Edmund admonished his son. “No need to be so fast, laddie,” he went on, because only by slowing down could one detect the possibility of a pattern, a D-E-rest-F-F-F-rest-E-F-A that made the song emerge from scales. “Take a few steps back now,” Edmund would often say. “Take a listen to what you’ve done.” From these variations, flashes of repose and movement, Edmund demonstrated how music is assembled, a quiet drawing together. “Listen,” Da urged him, “not just to what you bang out. Not just the notes, but how they go long or soft, not all the same at once.”

  It was his father who taught him to play, who urged him into University in Manchester, for there never was an Irishman worth his heritage who did not aspire to escape the land and start afresh. Edmund would have done as much himself, if he hadn’t met Catherine once she had lost all her siblings to famine, and then her mother gone too; she could not be coaxed far from their graves. Someone had to attend to them. And it was Sheehan’s father, of course, who put it into his head what enlisting might do for him: coming back a hero and never wanting for work or kind favors again. The only man on Summer-hill who agreed to paint his door black when Queen Victoria died, as the English demanded; Edmund said he had no problem as long as he could take the door down, and dance on it for a session. By then there were no more candleboxes to tend; electricity had made good on its threats to flood the city from the high streets to the slums. Edmund was without work, though he still had the two girls and Ma at home. Michael had begun to display the prodigious nature of his talent such that music teachers from Belfast to London were paying him regular visits, with the hope of taking him under their tutlege. It was a deal with the devil to enlist, Edmund had said at the war’s beginning. But Sheehan already met the devil halfway, living among the English as he had since anyone could remember, throwing his lot in with their teachers and patrons. He might as well go all in, for King and country, the royal family and Victoria’s grandchildren too. Why not, when it would all be over by Christmas, and he might not see a lick of fighting. What did he have to lose?

  Sheehan jammed the letter his mother had written into his fist, and then he picked it apart, as if dressing a chicken. He threw the head and feathers in the gutter, clenched the rest of it by the neck. He might have swung the surviving body as if it were the band on a slingshot, aimed at himself. But there was nothing left to shoot at. He was a git, a feb, a bloody Brit, one of them now; they had said as much, his own parents.

  Sheehan’s fellows saw him on the street outside the school and gathered around him, to slap him on the back, sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow;” and invite him back inside to play and discuss. He smiled and nodded, careful not to say anything. There were fewer of them now, their ranks diminished by the war or the flu. They led him into a rehearsal studio, where they sat him at an instrument. A colleague, sitting beside him, pantomimed on the keys one of the Satie pieces everyone knew Sheehan had loved. Furniture music, it was called, because of how it was meant to melt in into the wallpaper, settees, the Turkish carpets of a Paris salon. That it still stood out for its melancholy and yearning was not lost on the other instructors, though no one but Sheehan was as dedicated to the composer.

  Sheehan placed his hands for the first major seventh chord and pressed; he found rearranging his hands for the subsequent chords simple enough, though the music did not come through to him in complete batches. He heard the shift in the pedals, the hammers that were required by his playing to avoid certain notes; he heard levers, mechanics, if not the notes he meant to sound, because of what had happened to his ears, his head.

  To play Satie required a kind of stillness, a method of handling time that was not possible with his relative deafness. The pianist must pay as much attention to the beats between chords as the notes he must touch on, for it was the intervening silence that made the music so remarkable. For Sheehan there were no silences. There were hushed, quieter seconds, but always the persistence of tones that did not make sense, an intensity of noise with a needling persistence. Without the silences, the mazes of harmonics and dissonances in Satie’s work were lost. He was playing over them, he knew; the emotion in the piece was unrequited. It was in these dark moments the audience compares what they have just heard with their own memories of love, longing, the heartbreak that was sweet because it was necessary. But no one, it seemed, wanted to remember such things; and no one said anything as he plumbed his way through the piece, and made such rough work of it.

  When his performance was over, his colleagues applauded and then politely admitted they had no place for him. There were so many fewer students between their lot. So many had made economies that did not allow for musical instruction; some of their students had been orphaned by recent events. Still, they took up a collection so he could get what he needed: at least a pint to celebrate, a comfy room for a few nights, clothes, decent meals. They were well-meaning, his colleagues, and the headmaster wrote letters of introduction for him. He had for himself no expectations other than to survive, to start over, to live as he had not during the war, as a human.

  He thought he could teach children. Their capacity for memory rested still and only in their muscles, and not yet where it would become debilitating, in their hearts. But the parents of his pupils complained that he did not give enough instruction; just a grunt here and there, and his repetition of the scales, or appropriate Hanon exercises. Sheehan told himself there was about as much talent in the north and midlands as there was income, and soon he was off to Bradford or Liverpool. Having failed there, he would gather his belongings under his arm—his clothes, the few notes he had managed to make, the scores and songbooks, and find his way to Newcastle or York. His travels must have worn a rut into the landscape. When he had the moments to consider where he had been, and where to go next, he thought he must be wearing the ground down to rock, boring new trenches for warding off the next enemy.

  Sheehan dared not to ask his brothers for help; Liam and Christopher had become confirmed Republicans, from what he could gather through the rare correspondence he cherished from their younger sister, Lucy. She offered assurances that their parents would be taken care of, even if it was now his responsibility as the only unattached one among them. If he came back, his prospects outside the home were to be equally grim, regardless of his profession, as there was little money for music lessons and music teachers, and certainly there was no interest in tutorials from anyone who had made a traitor’s bargain with the British. As Lucy’s voice was completely lost to him, for she was barely a girl when he had left for school and time had since remade her into a mother and maid, he could not judge the underside of the things she said—that he should sell his soldier’s uniform if he needed money, as there were plenty of Englishmen who might make use of it. They were marching all about Dublin in such dress, bashing the ribs of whomsoever’s glance they found offensive.

  He found one position transcribing the compositions of a self-made munitions baron in Birmingham. The man fancied himself an autodidact and genius, and said he understood, even welcomed, Sheehan’s reticence. Sheehan’s task was to listen as he rambled through the opus he had written for his long late fiancée. He had imported from Hamburg a baby grand Steinway for the project, as if looking to redeem himself from the fortune he had secured through the deaths of so many. The instrument was more than fine in all aspects; Sheehan tested it himself. But as the hands of this Mr. Havisham played, the piano’s upper treble rang. The felt of its hammers had worn clear to the wooden mechanism. Sheehan was sacked when the maestro saw that the higher registers of his masterwork were missing from the notations.

  Soon enough his grooming became reason enough to deny him the least daunting of any work: sweeping up classrooms and studios, stoking coal in furnaces. He thought of returning to Manchest
er, seeking his professors from University. They did not think of him as a musical genius, but they had been sympathetic, possibly encouraging. Hadn’t he only needed more time, some seasoning? He thought better of the idea once he realized just what he would have to explain to them, the words he would have to call upon. First and foremost, how his hands had come to be in such a state, cracked to bleeding. In a shop window he saw the mask that dirt had made of his face, the gravelly sheen stuck to his trousers. In his condition there were fewer rooms to let, and, eventually, no rooms at all. He kept to doorways and tunnels, deserted stalls in the markets, dry walks beneath awnings. As long there was some roof above his head, so he was not forced to confront the sunlight, so he might not be assaulted by the brightness and its disquieting symptoms, a bash and clamor that ploughed on through the darkness. The worst was beneath the bridges of railroad trestles, where the sun barged through in the mornings.

  But he was not hungry. And the longer he remained in this condition—the farther he traveled by foot, as his clothes and body, his beard and fingernails, accumulated soot and dust—the less need he had of food. For he could remember the hunger that was the ache of the prison camps, a low grinding murmur in the belly that could not be satisfied. Such was not the case now, though he did not have his three meals daily; on more days than not, he lacked all forms of nourishment. But he ate according to his own desires—if not the desire for a particular food, then his initiative to go find anything. The sticky remnants of jam or honey, cores and stones of fruit. Once the foam on a pub glass he found. Bread and cheeses his fingernails wrested from the attacks of mold. He ate from bins, from gutters, from the blooms and grasses he discovered in his wanderings. Bones he found most satisfying, a memory of stews and meats.

  Milk from a pail at a dairy he took shelter in; it was fresh, and he drank too much. It made his stomach sour. He tried begging, on the steps of churches and the entrances of pubs, but hadn’t the nerve for the touch that accompanied the crowns or shillings: a slap on the back, a squeeze of the shoulders. He had his routines, and he had his rules. As he walked, marched, stomped, waded through muck, he felt he was becoming large, massive. A halo of dust, lint, silt, and mire proceeded him, a darkened ring that people would not breach. The Mick from Ireland, he had been; now he was neither man nor animal, and whether he had succeeded in becoming something inbetween, he did not care.