In the Shadow of Blackbirds(50)
I looked out at all the other men and experienced a depth of concern so overwhelming it made me tremble. I took a breath to steady myself and turned back to Jones. “There was nothing over there resembling murderous birds, then? Nothing that could have pinned a soldier down?”
“I don’t know.” He crossed his right leg over his left knee and bit the cigarette between his teeth. “Reality and nightmares have a funny way of blurring together when a man’s fighting down in the bowels of mother earth.” He twitched his foot and kept his gaze on my face. “Why do you want to know this stuff? Who’s telling you he’s getting pinned down by birds?”
I bit my lower lip and debated whether I should answer.
He gave a short laugh that was more of a shrug. “You’re as bad as the doctors, aren’t you? Wanting to know what’s going on inside our heads but scared sick of the answers. Maybe you shouldn’t go asking about things your naive female brain can’t handle. Go back to your quilting bees and tea parties or whatever the hell you all concern yourselves with.”
This time I was the one who responded with an unflinching glare. “A dead boy is the one telling me,” I said. “A dead soldier.”
His eyes lost a hint of their chill. “What are you talking about?”
“Even us naive women find ourselves haunted by the war, you see. And some of us have even tried killing ourselves, like you claim you’re tempted to do. I can tell you firsthand it’s not worth the heartache and pain. So don’t do it.”
I turned and left the building.
A ROW OF ELECTRIC LIGHTBULBS BURNED ACROSS THE ceiling of the southbound streetcar, illuminating a green-tinged poster that hung on one of the closed windows.
REMEMBER BELGIUM! BUY BONDS
FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN
Below the boldfaced words, a silhouetted soldier in a spiked German helmet dragged a little girl away from her Belgian village.
I shifted in my seat and stared at the poster while the streetcar rocked back and forth. Conflicting thoughts about the war stabbed behind my eyes like a headache.
In saving U.S. boys from heading overseas, I realized, Dad may have been allowing Germans to kill Belgians.
The U.S. government saved Belgians … by allowing Germans to kill and maim our boys.
Lives were being traded for other lives. The line between right and wrong blurred into a haze. Dad and Stephen could be called heroes, murderers, or victims, depending on how you looked at the situation, and the Germans, too, for that matter. Nothing about the war made sense. None of it seemed right. The kaisers, kings, and presidents should have just had a good arm wrestle over their differences instead of bringing regular people into their mess.
The stabbing behind my eyes worsened.
“God, don’t let it be the flu,” I murmured loud enough for a woman in a maid’s uniform to turn my way with fear in her eyes.
I BLEW THROUGH AUNT EVA’S FRONT DOOR JUST AS darkness was settling over the house, and I was immediately assaulted with another “Who’s there?” from Oberon. His feathers rustled in his cage, and I could have sworn a pair of wings brushed against my hair. I swiped at the back of my neck, grabbed a candlestick, and ran upstairs to drop off my black bag and sweat-soaked flu mask. My goggles—my steadfast companions during my last moments with Stephen and my lightning death—lay on my bed amid the other treasures I had taken out to make room for books and notes. I fitted the lenses over my eyes and adjusted the leather straps around my head for old time’s sake.
After making the rounds to light the downstairs lamps, I soothed my parched throat with a cup of cool water in the kitchen. My headache began to ease its firm grip on my skull. I filled the glass again and browsed Aunt Eva’s collection of phonograph records out in the living room, hunting for the musical equivalent of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She owned several songs from the opera The Pirates of Penzance, which would do nicely.
I wound the phonograph’s hand crank and put the needle in place. The record crackled to life. An actor with a dramatic stage voice announced he would live and die a pirate king, and a bouncy harpsichord introduction began. I leaned back in the rickety white rocking chair and listened to the pirate and his harmonious crew fence and sing about how glorious it was to be a pirate king.
Oberon’s big bronze cage was starting to smell like it needed to be cleaned. The magpie swallowed seeds from a metal bowl, but I tried to ignore the movements of his crowlike head by gazing out at the empty street through my snug goggles. The world was still for the moment, unless the sirens of ambulances had become so ingrained in my ears that I no longer heard them. A glowing jack-o’-lantern smiled at me from the porch rail of a bungalow across the way, and I remembered it was Halloween. No one else seemed to be celebrating a holiday a little too closely associated with death. And nightmares.
I sighed and held the glass to my chest. “Those poor men and their war dreams,” I said to the empty room before taking another sip.
During the song’s second verse, I spied a roadster with shining round headlights cruising into view in front of the house. The Pirate King continued to belt out his piratical joy, while the car’s driver steered his vehicle in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and bumped the front tire into the curb. He backed up two feet, shifted again, and pulled alongside the pavement. The roadster was a Cadillac. Its sapphire-blue paint glimmered beneath the streetlight.