The Hawkman
Page 25
He moved the locks of her hair to reveal her eyes still open, still disquieted. He tried to confine his concentration to her eyes as his fingers teased through her hair, but he could not help himself. Her hair came to feel more complex in its individual strands. It had become more like a nest of feathers, shaft and stylus for each one—the system connecting keys to the strings of the piano. Each piece of a feather held its position in an array, and together feathers moved and reacted, moved and reacted, to lift a body, bank it against winds, glide it through clouds. He did not know about birds when he was a boy, but he did know the strings of the piano: their resolve and responses to the instrument’s felted hammers.
“My skin,” she said, and she sent his hands to her neck, her arms, the opening of her dress. He ran his hands just as she instructed, and for the first time in so long he found himself unafraid of touch, of his own touch. He ran his hands over the pores of her face, the follicles of the hair on her arms, and did not worry where he would leave the terrible impact of himself upon her. “My skin,” she repeated as she opened more of her dress. “My skin,” she said as she revealed her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, and then had him remove the dress completely, and she was revealed to him in full. In that instance the pallidity that was the dominant quality of her flesh changed, as though thickening like a mat of leaves on the pavement after the morning’s first rainfall.
“My flesh,” she said as she directed him to her arms again, her breasts, her thighs, and her back. He noticed a confusion to her skin now, as though she was coated in a slight down of something newly born—damp and roughened in parts, but smooth in others. Each touch of his hands changed her in some way, just as a feather never recovers its precise symmetry once it is scaled by the wind. With his touch, her skin rose to meet him, so that she flushed with color from the silken crown of her head to her torso and where her color ended in a different nest of hair.
“My flesh,” she said, but he detected a presence growing in her shoulders: a rise in the bone, or a pair of rises, equidistant from where her back dipped, curved, and led outward toward her breasts. These rises, new appendages, felt sleek yet delicate, as though constructed out of soft, even hollowed material. He had anticipated such delicacies further down her body, where he feared his touch would become frightful and pitying to her. But not so here, so close to her lungs. His touch should not have so much meaning here, on her back; and yet, it was everything. She flushed deeply, so much more vividly than the simple moments previous.
“My bones,” she said, and pressed her face to his. “My eyes,” she said.
He could feel their blinking like palpitations, an exchange of commands and answers, or a pair of brushes rather than sticks against the drum of his chest.
“My bones,” she murmured, and beneath his hands her back seemed to be splitting, separating, layer from layer, bone from organ, into two equal portions. Something was trying to escape from within. Something had an urgent need to stretch, to meet its full length and agility, and his touch could stop them. “My wings,” she said, and she no longer felt tethered to him or the bed; she seemed to be floating. She threw her head back, as if to remind him of her eyes, but she did not say anything. Her eyes were slurred in a kind of flame.
“I tried to explain,” she said, “but now, now, my love—” and the flesh that colored and ripened so flashed back to white again, glossy and hard, yet delicate. Throughout her body it had hardened, except for a glimpse of liquid running beneath it. “Now I am ready,” she said, and he entered her.
The drafts and flutters that had been barely contained within her body blew through her flesh. Suddenly Sheehan’s hands were drenched, with what he could not name. The smile in her eyes was rapturous. Where her skin had been hot and wet and cold and white, all turned into an ecstatic blankness. He pressed his hands deeper into her back, wanting to hide his face in her neck. But her neck was no longer there as he understood it; there was only the consistency of muscle and feathers. He meant to look into her eyes, to check on their sentience, but instead he saw what could not be real: the drapes cloaking the windows had been peeled open. A thunderclap shook the cottage. The blast nearly threw him off the bed. But it was not a bomb, a flash and concussion that stole time and distributed bodies. This was too slow, disciplined and controlled, a sound that restored time to the light.
The wind in his face was not wind, but the effects of a tremendous fanning; and the sensations against his body were not the result of a deliberate desire, but a symptom of proximity. What he felt may have been the chance encounters between different realms. A feather fell from the giant body hovering above, and came to rest on his chest. When he cleared his mind, he saw the neck of a magnificent bird reach for the still closed window, beyond which the heavens waited in their heady radiance. Then he saw the face and neck of that bird arch back down toward him. She beat her wings with a gentle assuredness, so that she neither threatened the human being below nor appeared as if she was threatened by him. Sheehan immediately thought of opening a window—the door, even—and raised himself to do it. But the bird maintained her distance, as if to tell him there was no need; she wished to stay awhile.
Sheehan lifted his arms, and the bird descended until it was close enough for him to embrace. She was whiter than his wife’s denuded flesh, whiter than any cloud, than all the ivory he had once lived only to caress, but had denied himself this most instinctual of his needs, because of what the war had done to him, eroded his ability to sense its patterns, and to delight in its answers. The bird’s head was crowned by an array of short, downy feathers. Sheehan watched them curl and sway, so precisely sensitive they were to the currents the creature’s birth had portended. The eyes and beak were thrilling in their luster and darkness. Sheehan could not fathom why, or how, but laughter began in his chest as he touched the bird’s feathers, as he smoothed them. He likely had only a few moments to learn their flow and direction. Now it was his throat that had turned useless as his hands had been, for it could suppress nothing. Sound rolled out, drafts of laughter. The great bird reacted, stretching out her neck as if she could laugh, too, and then bending her head to meet Sheehan’s own.
Sheehan now felt himself lighter than air, coreless and hollow: how this grand animal must feel when it first resolves to fly, the joy and weightlessness when the wind is underneath it, but no longer upon it. He jumped onto the bed, standing at the bird’s level, as if he intended to follow her out the window. The bird dipped its crown to ruffle Sheehan’s chin, for its eyes to pass as close to Sheehan’s as possible, and then it shifted its focus: first to the pillow where only moments earlier its precursor had rested her head. Sheehan’s eyes dutifully followed. There was a note there, one of hers, but before he could read it the bird had raised itself before the now open window. Sheehan kept his eyes on the magnificence he had married: the span of her wings, the translucence of her body. Sheehan lifted a hand—to wave, not to beckon. The bird thrust herself through the window, and in her wake, the note on the pillow rose to catch Sheehan’s notice.
It read:
Fever begins in birds,
in flocks or cosseted by
the precocious yet delicate
ambitions of those who believe
they will tame creatures before
their disappointments can first
tame them. When I was a child,
I was told never to touch a bird,
so as not to confuse it about its
purpose, so I left the speed and
industry of birds for others to
master, like the dew that must
moisten their songs to one
another; or the insects that
compete with them for nectar;
or the plumes and diagrams
a flower gives off, in search of
a plough, or a lover. This is
how fever begins, in shaft
feathers for hats and cushions,
and from there it travels, much
as its precursors do, in darts
and arrows, and into the lungs
and other febrile organs. This is
not a fairy tale. This is a fable.
So let me go, love; let me
love what I have left, the rise
of fevered air into clouds and
relief; the floating life that will
not break, so long as I have this
love as my guide in the aftermath,
until we again meet.
Epilogue
There was no need for Sheehan to speak once he arrived at Lord Thorton’s estate; the servants had been instructed to immediately fetch Christopher or Lady Margaret should he turn up there. He arrived after the evening’s cigars and cocktails, and appeared to have walked a longer route to the estate than should have been necessary. It was Christopher who acted quickly to send for an ambulance before he drove himself and Sheehan back to the cottage.
The ambulance driver and his assistant said nothing about the condition of the bed clothes, soaked as they were in an unfamiliar transparency. Neither did they remark on the body, which seemed empty and wet in comparison to any form of humanity. The medical examiner and the registry also remained silent in their descriptions of the corpse, and officially listed the death of Eva Williams Sheehan as attributable to suffocation, and/or drowning by consumption.
If anyone—or anything—knew what precisely happened, it was the Great Snowy Egret espied around the cottage in the days following, but no human can speak to birds properly. So no one could ask the bird what it was doing there, without a body of water to scour for food or marshes for its nesting materials. The Egret paced around the cottage and did not appear lost so much as expectant, and it remained on the grounds for several days, though Sheehan was immediately evicted from the location.
After Lord Thorton’s death, Christopher had the new bride’s body moved from the churchyard at the western edge of the college to the estate. Mr. Sheehan could more easily visit a private grave than one so public, given that he was suspected in some way long after the death. He no longer needed to leave white flowers at the doorstep of the cottage, and became a frequent visitor at the proper resting place. At the change of the seasons; and on the anniversary of her death and their marriage; on cold spring days that reminded him of how they had met; and on long summer evenings: the flowers were no longer white or just cuttings, but those morning glories, foxglove, and trumpet creepers he had planted. He’d watch them fall away from the sunlight and into somnolence. Occasionally Christopher would join him at the grave, although they did not speak, and Christopher never brought any tokens of his respect. He left the tending of the grave to Mr. Sheehan, who took up weeding, raking, and seeding the area, although the groundskeeper would have gladly taken care of it.
Suitable employment and lodging were found for Mr. Sheehan at St. Thomas Hospital, where he performed small repairs and tidied the rooms and common areas. He was invited to play and maintain the organ in the hospital chapel, but he declined, although he did live to play piano again. Once Lord Thorton passed away, Sir Christopher secured for him a position in the college infirmary. Mr. Sheehan was offered, but refused, all manner of a traditional room on the estate, so Christopher gave him an outbuilding to do with what he liked. Christopher’s sisters assumed Mr. Sheehan to be one of their brother’s compatriots from the war, someone he had rescued; they were gracious and fair when Christopher announced Mr. Sheehan had been invited to Christmas or some other family obligation. Christopher eventually started his own family, and Mr. Sheehan was there for the more important moments, in the back of the church, or some grand room, before he predictably slipped out early.
Mr. Sheehan maintained his position at the infirmary, such as it was. With what he could buy or find in materials, he made himself a kind of loft bedroom, and below that, a library and sitting room. He furnished the library with Miss Williams’s books, which Christopher had managed to save for him, and he relished the shelves he had built to properly house the volumes. Because his home was one of the outbuildings, it could not be outfitted with a kitchen, although Mr. Sheehan did keep a few provisions on the shelves, especially those he was able to raise himself from the garden he started. He took his meals with the servants in the main house when it suited him.
And on the instrument that had so troubled him that one day, Michael Evan Sheehan made use of his renewed sense of touch, and eventually even his timing, although his playing was inexorably different. He had to learn to play through the calluses that came to bind his hands, so that everything he had once perfected—his posture, pace, resistance—had to be adjusted. He did not play regularly, but at random intervals that corresponded to no particular circumstance. He no longer played with any particular goal, but to summon something within himself: a memory, a moment, an instant when time might end, and there would be nothing left to do but listen. At first, it was said that he played just as he spoke, in his snippets of obligatory greetings and courtesies: “Please,” and “Thank you,” and “Good morning,” or “Good evening.” But as the years stretched beyond what any of them expected, it was Lady Margaret who, believing herself to be the one person to have truly heard Mr. Sheehan speak, thought that his playing was not like his diction but the quality of his voice, if he would ever see fit to give people more of it: low and restrained, briskly eloquent, and, if not sweet, than sympathetic, to other sounds—of people, of the house, its guests, residents and servants, of nature, wind through branches and grass, and birdsong especially—that surrounded them.
Source Material
The Hawkman was primarily inspired by a reading of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “The Bearskin,” in its original German, in which it is known as “Der Bärenhäuter.” The Grimms’ stories often share elements of metamorphoses between good and evil, man and animal, and the impoverished to the unaccountably wealthy and powerful. These transformations are often linked to love and marriage; “The Cat Skin” is another example. Similarities may lead readers to believe that The Hawkman is a retelling of the more popular “Beauty and the Beast,” but “The Bearskin” is the controlling tale here, as it explored one man’s journey from desperation to deviltry, and the consequences it had for those who helped him come back to himself.
The fictional Michael Sheehan’s experiences at the front and in German prisoner of war camps are loosely based on the recorded experiences of Lance Cpl. F. W. Harvey of the 2/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment. In the Great War, English-speaking prisoners of war were relatively rare compared to French and Russian prisoners. For the sake of authenticity, I wanted to use the record of a documented English prisoner. Harvey’s book, Comrades in Captivity: A Record of Life in Seven German Prison Camps was highly influential. I have added and subtracted certain details about the execution of the war and the treatment of English and Irish soldiers in POW camps to serve the plot. Locations and approximate chronologies are also based on The Story of the 2/5th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment 1914-1918 by A.F. Barnes. Both books have been reprinted by many publishers since their original publication. Barnes’s book is available through The Naval and Military Press Ltd. of East Sussex, England. Comrades in Captivity was originally published by Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd. of London, in 1920.
Other books that were consulted for information are Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (Plume/Penguin Group 2002); The First World War: A Photographic History, edited and with an introduction by Laurence Stallings (Simon and Schuster 1933); and A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie, edited by Ornella Volta (Atlas Press 1996). By happy accident, I also listened to Dan Carlin’s six-part podcast, Blueprint for Armageddon, sometime during the years of the writing of this book, and it surely had its influence.
Acknowledgments
Jess Winfield suggested that I write a fairy tale, so this book would not be here without him. Dan McLaughlin was just as encouraging with this project as he’s always been, and he deserves much gratitude. A conversation with Ellen Kushner about the purpose of fairy tales inspired the ethos that I hope is apparent in these pages. I wish to thank Brett Cott for research materials, and Victor Greenberg for his knowledge of history. The fine eye of Jim Meirose was instrumental in getting through the revisions. It should go without saying that I am indebted to Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes, Michelle Hoover, Patricia Horvath, Kate Southwood, and Michelle Valois, but I’ll say it anyway.
Without the editing team at Amberjack Publishing, this novel would have been a far slighter, much less mature work, so I’m also grateful to Cherrita Lee, Kayla Church, and Dayna Anderson.
Finally and mostly, I thank Patrick J. LaForge and Eva LaForge for the trip to Ireland and anything and everything that can be thought of, forever and always. I love you both so much.
About the Author
Jane Rosenberg LaForge was born in Los Angeles to a pair of political and news junkies. As a child, she grew up in Laurel Hills, a suburb adjacent to the storied, some say enchanted, enclave of visual artists, hippies, rock musicians, and Hollywood actors known as Laurel Canyon. This milieu shaped her lifelong fascination with history, politics, subcultures, and folklore. She also studied ballet, which introduced her to the world of fairy tales and legends of supernatural transformation.
Jane’s first professional writings were as a journalist. Her reporting took her throughout California, Maryland, and upstate New York. She enrolled in a graduate creative writing program in order to write a novel based on a court case she covered. Her studies led to a career as a college English instructor and writing literary criticism. She has published articles on fairy tales and the influence of African folklore on contemporary authors. As a college instructor, she has taught composition, children’s literature, and African American literature.