The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  If he fell asleep while she struggled through the night, he might find her as he had found so many of his fellows, as he found his own hands, his family, his own state of mind. So he watched her move off the pillows he had arranged to help her breathing, and by morning, he would have to reorganize them again. It was a trial to leave her afterward, if only to get her tea and whatever breakfast she could stomach, for that task took moments too—entire interludes when she was unattended, and she might very well slip away into the dew outside, and the daylight that made quick work of it. He was relieved to watch her eat then, once he brought her the meal. To keep her engaged he would try to describe whom they might expect that morning, or the look and feel of the garden through the window as it receded into the autumn. Then he helped her out of bed and into the washroom, where she insisted she could be left alone. He had to wait outside the door and listen, for the water, the soap against her skin, the wash cloth—for sounds he knew existed, even if they had gone beyond his hearing. He did not for a second consider making any up. That was what he had once done, teaching, performing, and composing. Filling in blanks and breaths was possible, expected, before the war; after the war, he could not forget how they could be erased altogether, and no act of will or imagination could ever bring them back.

  Once she had emerged, he would escort her back into the bed, so she might rest comfortably, a notebook in her hands in which to put down her own words. Because eventually he would have to leave her again to fetch another meal or answer the door or tend to some business just outside in the gardens, and he could only do so knowing she had ink and paper to record the seconds he had missed. She would have to account for them when he could not. She would have to account for them, because he could not.

  When she was rested enough, Miss Williams worked on a story. She did not want to tell herself it would be her last story, and instead thought it would make an appropriate wedding gift for Mr. Sheehan. What he would need most, in the coming days, was her money, and whatever measure of stability it might purchase would be coming to him, she was assured, with this marriage. What he truly needed, an explanation of, or apology for, all that had happened between them, she was less sure that she could supply. But a story was the only gift she had left to give him on this occasion.

  She began, as she usually began, with an orphan, because that was how she imagined him; it was how she imagined everyone to a degree. Everyone becomes an orphan at some point, regardless of whether or how well or long their parents survive. Miss Williams had been an orphan for as long as she could remember, with her father’s absence and her mother’s illness framing her days, her fantasies, her adventures and education. The war had likely made an orphan out of Mr. Sheehan, but unlike others, he was still fighting the separation from his people and places. Instead of running away as orphans do, he was hovering, as if waiting for that missing part of himself to be, with the rest of him, reunited. Whoever Mr. Sheehan was before the war—confident, possibly; handsome, conventionally; successful, most likely, either in music or love or even banking—was the true prey of The Hawkman, a predator who knew how to bide his time.

  So she began with an orphan, and an orphan who would, one day, fly. But how this orphan would meet this goal was not entirely clear to Miss Williams, whose simple, human powers were quickly diminishing. Her illness had been explained to her, but she still did not wholly understand the nature of it, since it was so different than what her mother had endured, in her bouts and convalescences. Finally, all Miss Williams could deduce was that like her mother, she would perish from something rooted in her lungs, and the pain that originated there before it fanned out from her chest as if it were the circumference that a bird’s wings suggest in full flight. For fever begins in birds, beneath the follicles and feathers, in the pressures birds juggle, between the air they breathe and the air that supports them.

  Her own breathing was difficult and would soon be nearly impossible; with each intake of air, Miss Williams felt as though there was a scraping among her tissues, as if those feathers at her center had become bold, sharpened, and set to whittling, prodding, poking their way out. And yet there was no blood in all this scraping and puncturing, no coughing, as her mother had been sentenced to; she had none of the grizzly liquids her mother expelled first from her throat, and ultimately her nose, and her skin; the lot of her mother was all but skeleton at the very end; there was no flesh left once the disease had finished consuming her. Miss Williams was spared most of the body’s rude dramatics. Instead there was, with each breath completed, the sensation of down and layers, heavier each moment, an uncanny smothering. There were even moments when there was no pain, no awareness, a numbness that was a welcome alternative, although Miss Williams well knew what it meant: the severing of one more connection between her mind and her breath, the mechanism that kept her heart beating and informed her consciousness.

  The orphan was given an illness—or, more suspensefully, Miss Williams thought, a deformity—whose cause and cure eluded the doctors assigned to treat it. What the orphan in Miss Williams’s final story had, precisely, were a pair of humps on her back. Almost at her shoulders, symmetrical and oval in form—almost egg-like—they comprised a gentle rise and slide in the conformation of an otherwise delightful child. The nurses who rescued the girl infant from the steps of a foundling hospital assumed them to a temporary phenomenon she would outgrow with the simple collection of height, muscle, and time. In the intervening years, they were easily hidden beneath her blouses or her bedclothes. Still they ached on the poor girl, as if they were growing along with her, and the limbs and digits of the hospital’s other charges.

  As the girl grew older, the humps increased in size. But so did her beauty, in the vivacious green-gold color of her eyes; the resilience and calm of the skin on her cheeks and forehead; in her hair, which grew thick and long, in brown and lighter hues—blonde and strawberry—that fluttered as the light passed through the strands. Her face, her voice, her soul offered a suitable contrast to what continued to amass and distend on her back; as she neared the onset of her womanhood, the humps began to appear stone-like, the skin concealing them suddenly grayer and less elastic than the rest of her vivid, soothing flesh. It was important to Miss Williams that despite the orphan’s disfigurement, she appear ever lovelier than any person or creature in history, for she herself had always wished for such beauty, to distract people from her own flaws—her impatience and neediness.

  Like all the foundlings in the hospital, which Miss Williams had decided to place in a famous brownstone building in New York City, this orphan was properly schooled, and then trained for a profession, so neither she nor her compatriots would remain a burden to society. Whether they found happiness in domesticity or other suitable arrangements was not the concern of the nurses or the hospital trustees. Yet for this girl, special pains had to be taken; the humps were making her unsuitable for factory work, for work as a seamstress, as a teacher, a charity worker, or any other occupation in which she would have to appear publicly. For while her beauty never ceased to grow richer and deeper, the humps also asserted their presence in weight and menace. They forced her posture into a terminal hunch, so much so that she was forced to walk on a horrible slant that brought pain to the rest of her body. Her smile, naturally, sagged at the same terrible angle, to the point that it might slide off her face and be trampled by her beastly gait.

  So the nurses decided to make her one of their own, a nurse who would be surrounded by other disgraced figures: the boarder patients—crippled, blind, or silent—and wards of the state. In other words, they were orphans who never grew out of their original condition. To see one of their own, this hump-backed orphan of a nurse, would be comforting, the nurses thought; she would be equally as comforted, knowing she could serve others. She had always been generous in her spirit and in the friendships she formed, first with the hospital staff; then her teachers; the adults she met on errands at the grocer’s, the pos
t office, and the butcher’s; and most of all, with the trees outside the hospital, and the dusty sparrows and squirrels which ferried leaves and nuts between branches and roots. She was never friendly with the other orphans—they shunned her, as if those humps were a mark, a sentence, a sign of why she had been abandoned and could never be made into a real girl, a real daughter.

  Miss Williams could write about the innovations the nurses created in the clothes they made for her, or the perfidy of the skin that both gave rise and protected those humps on her back: how it resembled the schist of cliff faces found along the Hudson, or how, in its restless moments, it cracked and burned like the formation of new rock. But she could not decide on the precise contents of those humps, and how they would be shed, or molt, or implode on themselves, so that they might reveal the essential nature of the girl, now an adult, now an old woman. She considered medicines, and magic potions, charms like enchanted gowns and necklaces. Miss Williams even thought of love as a cure, or a purgative, for what sickened the heroine, but she could not find a man who might administer it. How could anyone offer her anything, now that two humps had fused together into a shell over the woman, and she could live with neither her body or face above ground level. No story is a failure, Miss Williams reasoned, but how this tale came to frustrate her, just as her breathing, eating, and speaking did. The only function which did not frustrate was her dreaming.

  Fourteen

  Once taken prisoner, Sheehan was disarmed and marched out of the church and alongside an odd formation of Jerrys. Five men—four recruits or conscripts and one officer, by the way that they marched. Their packs were heavy with spoils Sheehan should have been bringing back to his units: canned goods, ribbons of some metal, and slats and plywood stripped from somewhere. Their superior officer carried nothing, of course, as the sergeant—he guessed—brayed out orders. The conscripts followed suit, repeating the words, move it, get along, faster, schnell schnell, playing out the action.

  He knew what this show of discipline was meant to communicate, and told himself it was evidence that each Jerry was held in his own secret terror. This was what he and his compatriots were fighting against, or so he had been reminded all during his training; what his parents and students and everyone he had ever known or loved in his life might face, should Germany and her allies be permitted to have their way with Europe. These were the men whose brothers had plunged Belgium into atrocity and chaos, and yet they appeared just as human as he was, particularly in the flaws their discipline exacted upon them.

  He was the only prisoner this patrol had netted; for moments, it seemed they didn’t know what to do with him. They swore at one another—or their dialogue sounded like swearing to Sheehan—over their next move. Kill him now, do it! Don’t be a coward, schwach, schwach, he could imagine them saying in words which they spit like darts at one another. It’s always, immer, like this with you, it’s not worth it, the waste in ammunition. Du, du, you do it. Leave him for the rats to eat. Nein, that is against regulations. In the halves and quarters of seconds that careered around him, they apparently decided to keep him as a prisoner, and for that he was grateful.

  But how not to show it—that became his next task. He looked downward, and if he could keep his wits about him, in this singular way, in single moments and instances, he might survive with some poise, or at least self-respect. But he was relieved as his feet followed the cadence of the enemy; but that relief was unaccompanied by warmth or release. Instead there was an awareness, a familiar tension he was still capable of affecting; his hands could be made into fists. They were still his hands even though he had been stupid, so very stupid. He could feel his fingernails grating into his palms and knew he was to immediately begin planning his escape as a bayonet urged him forward. He had to comply, in this instance, lest the bayonet find its way through his ribs. But his thoughts did not have to follow. They would remain on escape. They remained on observation, forgetting nothing, because some day he would have to report everything he had seen. Some day soon, when he escaped, or was liberated.

  In an improvised Jerry headquarters, he was set down in a chair where supplies were being ferried into the enemy trenches. Weapons and artillery. The inventory must have been reassuring to the men who unloaded it, who carried it and handed it over, one man to the next: they had enough to take them through Christmas, it appeared, and possibly beyond, even to celebrate the outcome with neutered versions of their explosives. The shooting was supposed to be over next month, he had been told; they all had been told, on both sides, this prediction. The Germans didn’t have the industry, the capacity, to keep going at this rate, the English said. But the Jerrys apparently did not believe it.

  Sheehan watched the assembly of men and their munitions with a dull realization of their strength and depth. In the next minute, he remembered not to allow the Jerrys to see him come to such a recognition. Otherwise the rain of fire and metal coming to his fellows would be unrelenting. He would be giving away all the Allied secrets. He told himself that all he saw to explain this flurry of productivity and discipline was an inspection of sorts. There was nothing more to all this unloading and assemblage. It was all a trick, he concluded, staged for his benefit. He couldn’t fall for it.

  He knew some German, primarily musical terms, but he did not know any of the words he needed now, “Red Cross” or “I know nothing.” He thought he might catch on to the language if he listened intently, but he could not listen with his ears bawling and combative. The exchanges surrounding him instead were a kind of floating madness. The words he could identify slipped in their order and placement; the rest were like notes a musician might audition without finishing.

  He could surmise, based on the flow of men and where they had erected parapets, how the Germans must have recently dug accordion-style warrens in some locations, as if there were now multiple fronts lined up, one after the other. He might have struggled out of the manacles they trussed him up in except for the sensation of his wrist bone bending each time he fidgeted, as if screws were being drilled, thread by thread, into his carpals. This was where he identified his weakness, how far he could go, when he would fold, although he had always known what it would be; it was obvious. He was obvious. What he could not sacrifice. His heart, his stomach, even his soul, yes. But not his hands. The lilt of his wrists, the tender connections between sinew and bone, every individual digit. His weakness, magnified by ten, by blood and hair and nails: his instruments. Where the excruciation had to end, if he was to live.

  Then there were the two nervous Jerry recruits, new men who had not been on the patrol that had brought him in. Their faces were still clean and their eyes clear, or that freshness was actually the fear in them. They were just as afraid to stop watching him as he was at having been captured; in his own eyes he could feel, and in theirs he could see, a rising berm of shame. Because this is where the hunger began—for him as a prisoner, for the recruits as cogs in a vastly indifferent machine.

  His captors offered him nothing to eat, and he dare not ask for anything. Then came some water, some bread, a potato that was meant to be consumed without cooking. As days wore on the lack of sustenance burred into his stomach, and crept into every fiber he could account for: his hands, heavy with their numbness, each finger indistinct in its lack of sensation. In his feet, as if tunneled out, and re-filled with sand. His legs like rubber. He fell asleep from hunger in chairs, on open fields, in billets that had been reconfigured into prisoners’ barracks. He fell asleep from hunger or he assumed he had, because he was always wrenched out from sleep, ordered to decamp in the darkest pitch of night. He was marching again, marching and starving, and he could not make out what was in front of him.

  Perhaps he was marching in place, although there was a growing column of men cuffed and shackled, added to the space around him. A regiment of debasement. A regiment of slave labor, of soldiers who were delinquent. No speaking. No signals. No looking—not at the next fell
ow, not over your shoulder. Keep to yourself. Keep to your place. These were the instructions, at the butt of a rifle, the point of a bayonet.

  How he heard them, though; in a vocabulary that was meant to convey the exquisite: am anfang, schnell, gehend, rasch, frisch frisch frisch. There were examples made of prisoners who violated the rules, shared cigarettes, gestured to one another: beatings, starvation, summary execution. One gunshot he thought he heard from a distance, but he did not know which infraction had prompted it or where in the column it landed. The sounds of other gunshots crept closer to his position or their impact was embellished by commentary of his fellow prisoners, especially those trafficking in rumor. He did not count the losses to his line because of his hands, the needles in his palms, the fire in his fingers.

  He felt as if they were being marched the entirety of the Franco-German border, and then the width of Germany, but of course he could neither firm it up in his own mind nor ask the fellows shackled on either side of him: both French, one limping terribly, something about his shin. Sheehan thought it might be gangrene, the way he wrapped and unwrapped a freckled cloth about it, how it wore a hideous purple sheen. The French soldier doused it with whatever he had; he begged for water, he begged for kerosene. The other one was taller, blond, and in far better condition than any of them, withstanding several butts of a rifle to his cheek because he had shifted his eyes in a particular direction. The Jerrys got rid of him quick, before crossing their own border. The speculation as to this soldier’s fate droned through the line as if an electric prod was being put to each one of them.

  A sameness poured over the days—not like acid, that would be too dramatic—a glaze that was cumulative. They awoke exposed, and were rousted and re-arranged into their formations. A day’s rations, when available, were plopped into the cup of their hands and then they were told to move on, move on. Into the cauldrons of German towns they marched, to be spit on, shouted down, have bed pots and other unpleasant fluids fall on their heads and shoulders. At nightfall they slept where they fell, and a fresh set of conscripts was there to guard them.