The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  With the windows closed in the car, the air turned warm. Miss Williams removed the scarf, and Christopher caught himself, at that instant, delaying the next beat of his heart. Her neck revealed itself to be a vicious red, and in a lingering motion, Miss Williams used the scarf to whisk away the moisture that had formed at its back. Her neck was so much longer and thinner than he had imagined, and, although its slope and reach were not as graceful as he would have preferred, they were daunting, as if impossible on a woman.

  “Is it too warm?” Christopher asked.

  “Not necessarily,” she said. She had trained her gaze on the scenery and did not wish to give up her concentration.

  “I—we could open the windows,” he suggested.

  “No,” she said. “No, thank you.” She had moved herself forward on the seat, as if to be closer to the window, but she dared not draw herself beyond it.

  “Do you think I should be buried with my parents?” she asked suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I suppose I should be,” she answered, and she sat back from the window just as quickly, as if she had found something repellent in the landscape. “I have no idea where my father is buried. I barely knew him.” Again she moved toward the window. “He died in the Philippines, during their revolution.”

  “We—I—did not know,” Christopher offered in response. “I’m—I am sorry.”

  “Oh, you needn’t be,” Miss Williams said. “It was his sentence to serve, you know—to avoid prison.” Her voice had taken on a lilt, as though it was not meant to produce words because words no longer mattered. It was the song of what she said, the tune and rhythm, that he would remember. She shifted her head back and forth, as if in wonderment, at the village coming into view. “He was a confidence man. Do you know what a confidence man is?” She did not give Christopher a chance to answer. “I have always thought it is something like I do—telling stories—although the confidence man has to be far more persuasive. My mother always said he was charming.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She was buried in the desert. Arizona. We had been told to go there. She was a consumptive,” Miss Williams continued. Christopher knew nothing of the desert, of the kind of air that could milk the illness out of one’s lungs. He knew only that the pattern of her voice had changed, and he needed to memorize it, before it became like birdsong, and the wind made its source invisible. “I suppose the doctors will make the same recommendation in my case.”

  “If you—if you took him with you, he could—” Christopher ventured.

  “I don’t think he could stand it,” she interrupted. “There’d be nothing familiar. It would all be confusion to him.”

  “Then you should remain here,” Christopher said, as if he alone could resolve the situation. “If not in Bridgetonne, then away but still in England. We—I—my mother and I, we could find you a place at St. Thomas’s—”

  “If the only place I can go to live in this country is a hospital,” Miss Williams said, “then I might as well drop dead. And that I would prefer to do in my own country.”

  Christopher was accustomed to the idea of Miss Williams flitting about as she spoke. Even though her hands and arms, her whole body, could no longer produce such restlessness, her voice suddenly veering into unknown directions made him uneasy, apprehensive.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as if she had heard herself too closely. “I shouldn’t speak this way, I know. But the closer it draws, the less elegant it appears.”

  “You are not afraid of dying,” Christopher said.

  “I tell myself I am not afraid,” she said, and she took hold of another breath; this one she did not let end naturally. She held it as if she meant it to stretch it into the words she needed at that moment, but they did not seem to materialize. “But I am sorry,” she said. “Sorry everything is so unfinished.”

  Her eyes did not know, at that second, just where they should hide their discomfort. They flashed about the car’s interior, searching for some previously undisclosed spot where her thoughts might appear opaque or ambiguous. But there was a gleam, a burnishing, that betrayed their interest; something like tears had begun to overtake them.

  “You—we should marry,” Christopher found himself saying. “We should have you marry him, I mean. Mr. Sheehan. He would be your heir, then. He would be assured of receiving whatever . . .” Christopher also found he could not finish.

  Miss Williams nodded close enough to Christopher’s shoulder that he might have imagined she was about to rest her cheek there. But, just as quickly, she was sitting up and firmly declaring her approval of his idea. Her eyes still and resolute, she studied his face, as if to judge how serious he had been. She shifted forward, eagerly, as if to hurry the car and the time it traversed the road. She might have made other gestures to Christopher’s thinking, and he hoped that as her hands moved she might rest them upon his own hands, where they sat folded on his knees. But this show of strength on her part fled in the next moment; her tremors reappeared as if they had proliferated through her arms and reached for her wrists and fingers. Christopher took her hands into his own to press the unevenness out of them.

  Thirteen

  The world pressed into the small cottage in the days that followed. There came acquaintances and associates of Christopher’s: solicitors and clerks from the registry. They made the days go by faster, and last longer, as they gathered at the small table in the kitchen to work. Mr. Sheehan brought to them messages that Miss Williams wrote from her bed. Lady Margaret was also a regular visitor, leading tours of bakers and cooks, tailors and seamstresses, florists and photographers, through what vegetation had managed to hold through the last of the summer in the cottage’s front garden.

  At each visit they were met by Mr. Sheehan, who appeared serene and ever more close to handsome than Lady Margaret thought possible. She offered him her hand, but he would not take it, although he nodded respectfully both to her and her entourage. And just as quickly, he would shake his head and shut the door, so the tour would be restricted to the gardens. The bakers and cooks, tailors and seamstresses, florists and photographers, all insisted to Lady Margaret that they had yet to lose their resolve in the endeavor of making a proper wedding for the village curiosity and her mute idiot. But after each of their unsuccessful encounters with Mr. Sheehan, Lady Margaret found it more difficult to boost their spirits and enthusiasm. Finally, when Mr. Sheehan refused to answer the door at all, they tendered their regrets, declining to offer their services for the wedding.

  The minister, who had so often been a guest at the Thorton estate and publicly enjoyed Miss Williams’s storytelling there, was not permitted to as so much as enter the grounds. Mr. Sheehan saw to that. The reverend had appeared at the front gate several times, unbidden, only to find himself confronted with The Hawkman. Mr. Sheehan would put a hand up, shake his head, and place a hold on the gate’s swinging entrance that must have been convincing. The reverend, unable to lodge any protest, would nod and then depart with the small package he had brought—a Bible, no doubt—tucked under his arm, as if to shield it from offense.

  Christopher was the sole witness to the reverend’s last unsuccessful attempt to gain access to the cottage. It was just two days before the wedding, and Christopher had taken a break from combing through documents and signatures when he looked through the window of Miss Williams’s library and saw the reverend in the distance. The reverend must have finally learned that any approach through the front was impossible, and he took to the college grounds to slip through the back garden. Mr. Sheehan was bent over a bush or a furrow of dirt, his hair beneath the straw hat Miss Williams had given him. Yet he still appeared intimidating, as if he might pop out of the hat—his clothes and boots too—and shower anyone who disturbed him with his squalidness.

  Mr. Sheehan spotted the reverend and rose to meet him. Mr. Sheehan raised both hands, though not to surr
ender; there was a resoluteness in the way he now stood that had been largely absent from his comportment. Perhaps the nonthreatening churchman may have inspired it.

  Christopher had become familiar with Mr. Sheehan’s methods for communicating: beyond the obvious nod for agreement, there was the raised chin for what he was not immediately amenable to; the slow blink of his eyelids when he relented; his hands clenched together, near to a position of prayer, when he hoped his assent would be acceptable. But in this conversation, Mr. Sheehan employed no such signals, at least none that Christopher could discern from his standpoint. He did not seem to even shake his head. Instead, he stood there in a kind of perfect concentration, as a soldier withstanding a dressing down might do, if the reverend had the presence of mind to give one. This only prompted the reverend to make ridiculous gestures of his own, unreadable except for their agitation. To which Mr. Sheehan remained as still and polished in his impassivity as he had been during the man’s previous visits; the two men stood there, the silent beggar and the reverend, who was silenced by the prospect of a man such as Mr. Sheehan truly living and breathing before him.

  Christopher watched Mr. Sheehan take several steps forward with a quickness and determination uncharacteristic of his movements; the reverend found himself pacing backward. Mr. Sheehan managed to escort the reverend to the tree line that formally delineated the college grounds, but the reverend stepped to the side, as if to lead Mr. Sheehan back to the garden, the cottage, to Miss Williams, or whoever he so frantically needed to meet with. But Mr. Sheehan would not be bypassed by such a circuitous method. He stopped suddenly, raised his hands again, and then pressed them to his chest, as if making a pledge. Then Mr. Sheehan bowed slightly to the reverend before bowing deeply in the direction of the cottage.

  Now it was the reverend who could not speak. He shuffled, wiped at his forehead with a handkerchief he found in a back pocket, and searched for ways he might avert his glance away from the confrontation. The reverend was forced to speak Mr. Sheehan’s language—signs and signals that, without context, appeared to be insanity. The reverend concluded his pantomime by offering his hand to Mr. Sheehan. But Mr. Sheehan kept his hands over his heart. It was the most detailed communication Christopher had seen him complete.

  The reverend was waiting that evening for Christopher up the road as if he were a cat determined to collar something for the day, though frightened by animals larger than itself. “Sir Christopher,” the reverend called.

  “How would my father feel,” Christopher asked, “to hear you address me as if he were dead?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I must—” the reverend began excitedly.

  “You must what?” Christopher asked impatiently.

  “I must know,” the reverend said, and he began to pace—to finish formulating his thoughts, Christopher guessed.

  “You must know what?”

  “For her sake,” the reverend began again, and what followed was a speech, both tentative and frantic. “I must know. Whether he is capable. Signing his name, nodding, shaking his head, of course, all fine and well. But refusing to speak? At the registry? In a church? How could he, in any legitimate sense, make a pledge—”

  “For God’s sake,” Christopher interrupted.

  “I mean, it could affect the marriage,” the reverend said. “In a spiritual sense.” The reverend was pacing now and failing to look at Christopher directly, as if he did not have faith in his own message. “I’ve spoken with Lady Margaret about this, and she promised—”

  “I hope she didn’t promise you anything,” Christopher said, “because she’s not in a position to give it. No one is.”

  The reverend placed his hands behind his back and glanced about him as though he was about to impart some gossip. “She said she would speak to Miss Williams about it. But I haven’t heard a word.”

  “And you won’t, I expect,” Christopher said.

  “Then how—?” the reverend started in, but Christopher began to walk away, trying not to smirk. He could be too much like his father; Christopher knew this about himself. But, at times such as this one, it paid to be Lord Thorton’s son, for Christopher had come to understand that there was no reasonable way in the reverend’s philosophy to ever satisfy him.

  The cottage seemed ablaze with activity in the last days: the composing of telegrams, witnessing of affidavits, attempts through messengers and telephone calls to obtain the language of publishing contracts Miss Williams had signed at one point or another. But such legal papers were not accessible within such short notice. And the bride could not be interrogated. She remained shut away, Mr. Sheehan her veritable sentry. He had moved her from her upstairs bedroom to the downstairs nursery, where she could be kept in her own bed and still he could sleep beside her, on the other. Though he did not sleep; he did not so much as rest his head. He watched Miss Williams through the night, as if to catch the moments of her transformation.

  Each morning she appeared different to him: smaller, thinner, and yet her frame elongated, as though she had spent the night preening—indeed, stretching—whatever the disease had left behind in her. To measure these changes, Sheehan tried any number of tactics: he propped her up carefully on the pillows to ease her breathing and weigh how much lighter and lithe she had become. He attempted to remember what kind of impact she had made on his arms, his muscles, the day before, but the change may have been too slight. He wanted to envision her face from an earlier time, how her limbs had moved in their small ways, but he could not. Each new permutation of her form edged her closer to a kind of perfection, and all prior iterations of her visage melted. He studied the twitches and ripples that fluttered beneath her skin as she slept; he made mental notations as to the frequency of tremors that overtook her in her dreams, the restlessness that he was certain would drive her awake, but never quite did. And in the morning, he was confronted with Miss Williams just a bit paler yet with a tentative vibrancy in her cheeks and forehead, her arms and fingers hanging onto whatever grace the disease spared.

  If there had been an official diagnosis, it had never been shared with Sheehan. From what he knew of pneumonia and tuberculosis, neither seemed to fit her symptoms. Pneumonia galloped through its victims, trampling and breaking them, while tuberculosis was a kind of drowning. He had seen that happen too many times to children and adults: a body pulled under a current without ripples or eddies to soften its effects, so that everyone could see how a stricken body seethed when bloated with illness. By then, the soul within would be overwhelmed with water, its weight and minerals, and it would draw away as if retreating to the bottom. But Miss Williams was not drawing away from anything—not from him or her many visitors. She had lost the quickness, the acuity of her habits, and yet her being still darted about—if not in happiness, then in a comforting tranquility. More than the water that threatened to overwhelm her, a wind buoyed her, buoyed them both, when they were alone in the cottage.

  Just as she had once sat up nights with him so that she could safeguard his sleep from dreams, he sat up with her now. He knew he was losing her as she ruffled and fluttered, as the illness redefined her. Her death would be like no other he had experienced. The others had made some kind of sense, whether they were from war, or the dampness that was life in his own country, as well as the country he had gone off to save in trenches of waste and mud. To save the Britons, he had given up every measure that made sense to him, from his fingers to his imagination.

  There was always something to do during the war, if not for the fellow who was dying, then for the next one marked for death. Stopper up the works, for instance, by harrying the enemy: lob more shots, demolish his roads and bridges, blight his food, and poison his men against him. That was part of the training, part of the desperate struggle for survival—always find another way to be ingenious. In war there are so many things to hate; Sheehan did not have a moment, in the trenches, when he could rank them. But if one kept s
hooting, or left a man to die in No Man’s Land, or cracked the enemy on the neck while he was not looking, one would also miss the moment another man—his mate, his fellow, his superior officer, or underling servant—met his end. One could lose this moment of witness.

  Miss Williams was dying, and there was something he could do about it. He could behold as many moments of it as nature granted. He did not mean for her to collapse in one minute only to be found, evaporated, in the next. She would not die in her sleep for him to discover the following morning, for him to step into a wholly changed universe, desiccated and shrunken, as if she had never existed. Already the world that she had given him was dwindling, as she was no longer able to speak to him as she once had, in the voice she could not quite control. It was a voice that raced and sometimes ran over itself, so eager was it to come to the point, even if she could not capture it. He wanted to see her walk, and gesture, and even rest as she had once tried to rest, for she had never been able to maintain the kind of stillness expected of women. She was more of a wing, a chime, a vane, than she was a person alert and attuned to the changing discipline of the wind. So he would have to watch carefully for what breath might transpire. For every twitch and every drop of sweat.