In the Shadow of Blackbirds(2)
Never worry about me, Shell. I chose to be here, so anything that happens to me is my own fault. You told me in your letter you wished you could have stopped me from leaving for the war when we were together in April. I was determined to go, and you know better than anyone else I can be as stubborn as you sometimes.
Write soon. Send me a book or two if you can.
I miss you.
Yours with all my love,
Stephen
A sneeze erupted in the seat in front of me.
My eyes flew wide open, and Stephen’s letter fell to my lap. All heads whipped toward a skinny redheaded woman, who sneezed again. My lips parted to utter a taboo word—gesundheit—but I quickly clamped them together.
“My wife has allergies!” said the woman’s companion, a man with thick, mashed-potato swirls of white hair. He scooted closer to his wife and tightened her mask. “It’s not the flu. Stop looking at her that way.”
The watchful stares continued.
At that moment, the train jerked into motion, knocking us all off balance. The whistle’s cry evaporated into the October mist. I tucked Stephen’s letter into my bag and gazed at the brick buildings passing by, followed by bursts of red and amber trees that offered small reminders of what I’d miss most about Portland. Autumn had always been my favorite season, with the smells of burning leaves and mulling spices and the arrival of bright orange pumpkins in my father’s grocery store.
Rain soon drummed against the window.
Everything outside turned to gray.
Beside me Mrs. Peters knitted her furry eyebrows at the lady who had sneezed. “We’re all going to be dead by the time we get off this train, thanks to that woman.”
I nearly replied that if we were dead, we wouldn’t be getting off the train, would we? But, again, I clamped my jaw shut—something that had never been easy for me.
Everyone around me sat stone-still with straight backs, stinking of folk remedies. The stench of my neighbor’s medicine pouch and someone’s garlic-scented gum was strong enough for me to taste through the four-ply barrier of my mask. The wheels of the train click-clacked, click-clacked, click-clacked over the lack of conversation.
Was I dreaming? Could it all just be a terrible, terrible nightmare that would end if I pried my eyes open? I dug my nails into my palms with high hopes of stirring myself out of sleep, but pain and half-moon marks emerged. I was wide awake.
Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H. G. Wells–style world—a horrific, fantastical society in which people’s faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn’t be real. And it couldn’t be the United States of America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
But it was.
I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed.
1918.
? San Diego, California—October 18, 1918 ?
AUNT EVA DIDN’T GREET ME ON THE RAILROAD PLATFORM when I arrived, which meant one of three things: she was running late, she hadn’t received my telegram, or she had been stricken by the flu. The third possibility made me shake with both dread and loneliness, so I refused to dwell on it.
I slouched on a hard, uncomfortable bench in San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot and stared up at the white plaster arches that spanned the ceiling like rainbows leeched of color. Great wagon wheels that held electric bulbs also loomed above me, so heavy they required a battalion of metal chains to keep them fastened to the arches. Sea air breezed through the open entryway—a mixture of salt and fish smells that made my empty stomach growl. My back ached and my brain longed for sleep after traveling more than a thousand miles. All I could do was sit and wait.
The posters hanging on the blue and gold mosaic walls had changed since my visit six months earlier. Back in April, signs in vivid red, white, and blue had screamed fear-inspiring slogans meant to rally us around the fight against the Germans:
BEAT BACK THE HUN WITH LIBERTY BONDS!
GIVE TILL IT HURTS—THEY GAVE TILL THEY DIED!
ARE YOU 100% AMERICAN? PROVE IT!
DON’T READ AMERICAN HISTORY—MAKE IT!
I remembered Aunt Eva grumbling about “questionable taste” when she steered me past an illustration of a slobbering German gorilla clutching a golden-haired maiden with bare breasts. DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE. ENLIST. U.S. ARMY! barked that particular poster.
Aside from one navy recruitment notice, the propaganda signs were now gone, replaced by stark white warnings against coughing, sneezing, and spitting in public. The words INFLUENZA and EPIDEMIC watched over me from all directions in bold black letters—as if we all needed reminders we were living amid a plague.
A half hour after Aunt Eva was supposed to fetch me, a new train arrived, and it was full of U.S. Army recruits on their way to Camp Kearny, on the northern outskirts of San Diego. After a great deal of fuss and shouted orders, officers in olive-green tunics and flared-hip pants marched through the station, accompanied by a silent herd of young men outfitted in flu masks and Sunday-best clothing. The boys were young—most of them not much older than eighteen, now that the draft age had dropped from twenty-one. Some of them saw me, and their eyes lit up above their gauze, even though I must have looked like a sack of potatoes slumped there on the bench and wearing my ugly mask.