In the Shadow of Blackbirds(45)
“You will?”
“Yes.”
I exhaled an appreciative breath. “Thank you so much. Where is the card catalog?”
She pointed to the wooden files beyond the wall of smoke behind me. “Right over there.”
“I don’t have a library card yet. I’m new to the city.”
“I’ll leave an application for you in the reading room.”
I thanked her again and headed over to the drawers of cards that indexed books by subject matter.
By the time I reached the empty women’s reading room, I carried a stack of ten books in my arms, my muscles quivering from the weight of all those cloth-and leather-bound volumes. The handles of my black bag dangled from my right hand beneath the pile and cut off circulation to my fingertips. I parked myself at an oak table, all alone save for those blue sulfur-dioxide phantoms.
The librarian had left me both the library card application and a copy of the day’s newspaper. A story below the latest flu death tolls caught my eye: the opening of a Red Cross House for healing war veterans, whom the paper described as “Uncle Sam’s convalescent nephews.” In the accompanying photograph, two local women in tailored black dresses served tea to a young man who looked like he’d just been dragged off the battlefield. His hair was as wild as mine after the lightning blasted through me, and his eyes seemed to be saying, What I don’t need after a war is two crazy society bats pushing cups of tea my way.
An urge to visit those healing soldiers and sailors welled up inside me. I wanted to learn how the war that snatched away Stephen had affected other boys—and to find some sort of clue that would explain why he claimed to be tortured by birds. Plus that soldier’s distressed face saddened me. I felt compelled to help people like him, to lend a sympathetic ear and offer comfort that extended beyond cups of tea.
At the top of my first sheet of writing paper, I scribbled, Visit the Red Cross House and talk to returning men.
Next, I opened A Treasury of War Poetry, published just the year before, and read firsthand accounts of the trauma of the trenches, told through bold and brutal poems such as “The Death of Peace,” “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” and “The Hell-Gate of Soissons.”
“Into Battle,” by Julian Grenfell, mentioned a blackbird:
The blackbird sings to him, “Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing.”
A chilling reference to crows appeared in Frederic Manning’s “The Trenches”:
Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang,
The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life,
Eyes that have laughed to eyes,
And these were begotten,
O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt
With the lust of a man’s first strength: ere they were rent,
Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn
In bloody fragments, to be the carrion
Of rats and crows.
With shaking fingers I transcribed to be the carrion of rats and crows, and gagged on both the mental image of birds feasting on dismembered dead soldiers and the rotten-egg fumes stealing through my mask. I put the poems aside and continued through the rest of the books, reading about lightning strikes, magnets, prisoners of war, and modern battle strategies. I studied trench combat, gas warfare, and a condition called shell shock that affected soldiers’ minds. I investigated Spiritualism and found stories of desperate, educated men like the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the physician Duncan MacDougall, he of the soul-weighing experiment, who were risking their reputations to find proof of the afterlife.
Desperate, I wrote on my paper. They’re always desperate.
I read about ectoplasm that was proved to be cheesecloth, unexplained spirit voices, spirit lovers, spirit writings, spirit photographs, spirit manifestations, and even two girls in Cottingley, England, who claimed to be photographing fairies. My brain raced, and my sheets of paper filled with notes and diagrams and formulas and poetry.
But I still had no idea why Stephen thought monstrous birds were tying him down and killing him.
“DO YOU KNOW HOW I CAN GET TO THE NEW RED CROSS House in Balboa Park?” I asked the same brunette librarian who had helped me before.
She slid my stack of five checked-out books across the polished countertop. “Take the Fifth Avenue streetcar up to Laurel. You’ll find a bridge crossing the canyon to Balboa Park.”
“Is the park small? Will it be hard to find?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’ve never been there?”
I shook my head.
She laughed. “Well, I guarantee you won’t miss it when you get to the bridge. It’s the former site of the Panama-California Exposition. The military owns the area now, but somebody could probably direct you to the Red Cross House. Do you know someone recuperating there?”
“No, but I’d like to volunteer.”
She leaned her gauze-swathed chin against her fist and studied me. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Does anyone know you’re wandering around in the quarantined city by yourself?”