Flying Crows (8 page)

VII

JOSH AND
BIRDIE

SOMERSET

1933

It was ten-thirty in the morning and Sister Hilda Owens was at the library, prepared to read poetry by Vachel Lindsay and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow out loud.

“I could recite something else, of course, if you prefer,” she said to Josh and Birdie, the only two patients who showed up. The reading was part of what the asylum called its Cultural Therapy Program. A bushwhacker had escorted them there and then left, telling Sister Hilda to “give a holler if they act up.”

“How about this, Sister Hilda?” said Josh, handing her the library's copy of
John Brown's Body.

They were in a quiet corner on the second floor of Old Main. Birdie and Josh, as the only attendees, sat across a long narrow table from Sister Hilda, as if they were in an office conducting some kind of interview. There were several other chairs set up around but nobody was in them.

“Certainly, Josh,” she said, opening the book, while doing her best to avoid looking at Birdie, who, despite Josh's admonitions, was making a fool of himself.

He was lunging at Sister Hilda. Not physically coming up and over the table but by flicking his eyes, puckering his mouth, flexing his shoulders. It was embarrassing and stupid. If he had had a Somerset Slugger, Josh would have been tempted to whack Birdie along the side of the head.

“
John Brown's Body
by Stephen Vincent Benét,” declared Sister Hilda, her eyes fixed on the book in front of her. “It's about the Civil War, isn't it? Yes, I'm sure it is. We read parts of it in high school. John Brown was an Abolitionist and he was hanged for treason.”

“That's right,” Josh said. “He led a raid against a federal arsenal in West Virginia.”

“Harpers Ferry, I believe,” said Sister Hilda.

“Yes, ma'am, that's correct. They said he was a lunatic, but who are we to say anything about that?” He smiled.

She laughed—pleasantly, personally, almost intimately.

Josh certainly didn't blame Birdie for lusting after this woman. Her laugh, like her voice, was as much a treat to listen to as her person was to look at. He had told Birdie that a Somerset Sister was like a hospital gray lady, but there was absolutely nothing gray about Hilda Owens. Her bright hair and silky skin and round lips shouted with color, as did the yellow-and-green flowered cotton dress she was wearing this morning. Josh figured her age at about twenty-five. She and her banker husband, who somebody said was at least fifteen years older, had moved to Somerset only a few months ago from Kansas City. Calling her Sister Hilda didn't seem right for such a pretty young woman. That name would better fit an ugly old woman in her fifties or sixties.

“ ‘Invocation' is the first section,” she said. “That's where I will begin, right at the beginning. Is that what you had in mind, Josh?”

Josh said that would be splendid, thank you, ma'am.

Keeping her head and bright blue eyes down, she read:

“American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land,
As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose—”

“No! The blood! Don't shoot no more!”

Josh hammered Birdie hard on his head. “No more screaming now, no more!”

Sister Hilda had stopped her reading. “What's wrong, Josh?”

“This poor young man sees horror every time his eyes close. The poetry. . . . Well, it must have set him into a doze or something.”

Birdie, eyes open now, was smiling at Sister Hilda. “That's right, ma'am. I am so sorry that my lunacy affected your beautiful reading of that story. I was having trouble following what was happening.”

“It's not just a regular story. It's poetry. I thought you said the other day that you loved poetry,” she said sternly to Birdie.

“I do, I do. But I have trouble sleeping because of my sickness, so I am always sleepy even though I can't go to sleep.”

“That's the way I used to be too, Sister Hilda,” Josh said, trying to be helpful. “It takes time for patients like us to work through their horrors. I am trying to help Birdie here deal with his. But he is a very bad case, as you can see.”

She returned to the book.

“Swift runner, never captured or subdued,
Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,
That half a hundred hunters have pursued
But never matched their bullets with the dream—”

“The blood! No!”

Josh again hit Birdie, causing the young man's screaming to stop.

A bushwhacker appeared from behind Josh and Birdie. “You all right in here, Sister Hilda?” he asked. “I heard some yelling.” The bushwhacker had a Somerset Slugger in his hands. He was a large, coarse, fairly old guy named Roger, who was known mostly for being mean and for being from Holden, up near Kansas City. Somebody told Josh he was hired because his mother was a second cousin of the superintendent, who was also from Holden. All the Somerset superintendents Josh had known or heard about had reputations not only for hiring their relatives and friends, but also for being political in most everything they did, including taking money for admitting particular patients.

“I'm fine,” Sister Hilda told the bushwhacker. “Birdie here just had a bit of a poetry setback, that's all.”

The bushwhacker left and Sister Hilda, clearly new to the frustrations that went with being a Somerset Sister, gave Josh a look that said, All right, Josh, what now?

“There is something you might do that could be of help,” he said, his voice as peaceful and earnest as he could make it. “It's perfectly understandable if you would not want to do what I'm about to suggest. In fact, I think I probably shouldn't even suggest it, and I will understand perfectly if it annoys you that I have.”

Josh did not even try to steal a glance at Birdie. He could hear and sense the kid from Kansas City panting after this woman.

Sister Hilda seemed to take a breath and hold it tight. It was if she knew she was about to hear something awful yet felt she had no choice but to hear it.

“One possible way to help Birdie would be if you would allow him to put his hands on your bosoms for a few seconds,” Josh said.

Braced for the worst, Josh watched a burning red flash come to Sister Hilda's cheeks. Then, in a series of quick reactions, she jerked her head back and, her eyes popping, caught her breath.

Realizing all he could do now was to keep talking, Josh said, “He needs to do it for his therapy, Sister Hilda. He told me last night that if he could touch a woman's bosoms for a just a few seconds—to a count of ten or twelve, fifteen maybe—he might be able to go to sleep like a normal person. You know he hasn't really slept since he saw something awful happen—an awful massacre.”

“What massacre? Where?”

“I'm not able to say what or where,” Birdie answered. “It turns me completely crazy even to think about it.”

Sister Hilda, her face color returning to normal, shook her head as if to clear it and looked back down at Stephen Vincent Benét's
John Brown's
Body.
Josh, worried about having upset her so, turned his thoughts to poetry and to the poems of Longfellow and Vachel Lindsay. Josh hadn't read anything by either man since he came to Somerset. He would now. He would ask Sister Hilda to read their poems next time, just like she had planned to today. He wondered if there were still people out there in the world writing new poems. Josh, an avid reader of many genres, spent as much time as he could in the library, particularly at this table, reading Civil War and Missouri history.

“I know you're a sick man, Josh,” said Sister Hilda, her composure and appearance both almost back to normal. “As a consequence, I will act as if I did not hear what you said and will not report you to one of the attendants or to the superintendent for discipline.”

Josh figured there was no point in stopping now. “Sister Hilda, thank you. But if I may say one more thing. You know about culture therapy and hydrotherapy and the other things that are there to help us get well?”

She looked at him but didn't say anything.

Josh hung in. “What I'm suggesting is another kind of therapy. We had a very sick man in here from Springfield who hadn't spoken a word or walked a step since he killed a sheriff with a shotgun. One day the doctors worked it out for him to hug one of the dentist's nurses tight for just a minute or so and, presto, he shouted for joy and got up and walked away. He's been on the steady road to recovery ever since.”

Hilda Owens, the Somerset Sister, moved her head slightly but avoided any eye contact with Birdie, the potential beneficiary of the proposition. She said, “What about the murder? The killing of the sheriff? What are they going to do about that, if and when he arrives at the end of the road to recovery—assuming he does?”

“They're going to take him back to Springfield and hang him,” Josh said.

A frown crossed Sister Hilda's face. Was she imagining a man hanging?

“Did you murder anybody at your massacre?” she asked Birdie, suddenly turning to him and looking him in the eye.

“No, ma'am,” he said, his face and body clearly full of anticipation. From Josh's view, Birdie, cleaned up soft and soapy from an hour of hydrotherapy, his black hair combed and slicked straight back, didn't look so bad. If the truth were known, Sister Hilda could do worse than have his hands on her bosoms.

“Then why are you in here?” she asked Birdie.

“Watching it made me crazy. I can't close my eyes or go to sleep without screaming from what I saw. All that blood and dying and awfulness always comes back.”

“What happens to you if and when you're cured? I don't know about that man from Springfield, but they told me very few . . . I'm sorry, but they said only a few ever leave here really cured.”

“That's right. That Springfield man's still here, as a matter of fact,” Josh said quickly. “But I think our Birdie has a real chance—with the right therapy. He's still very young.”

“I'd go back home to Kansas City if I was cured,” Birdie added. “I might even try to get a job selling the
Kansas City Star.
My cousin did, and I would love to do that.”

Sister Hilda looked up toward the heavens, as if asking for permission or forgiveness, and said, “All right, then, I guess it's the least I can do—particularly for somebody from Kansas City. That's where I'm from too.”

She scooted her chair back from the table, stood, and motioned for Birdie to follow her into the book stacks.

Birdie followed her out of sight between two tall shelves of books, HISTORY (MISSOURI) on the left, FICTION (A–L) on the right.

Josh didn't have a watch or a clock and he had never been good at estimating or guessing time, but it seemed like almost ten minutes went by before he heard the first real sound. It was a male groan. Then a slight feminine chirp, a cooing. . . .

Obviously, something besides a few seconds of bosom-touching was happening back there among the books. Josh was overcome with shame for listening. He grabbed
John Brown's Body
and continued reading loudly where Sister Hilda had left off.

“Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry
And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.
You are the bu falo-ghost, the broncho-ghost
With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn . . .”

Josh paused for just a second to take a breath. “Yes, yes, yes,” said a soft female voice coming from the stacks.

“The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,
The Indian arrow in the Indian corn—”

“Oh, oh, oh,” said a raspy male voice coming from the book stacks.

“And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns
Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,
The grey Maine rocks—and the war-painted dawns
That break above the Garden of the Gods.”

Josh felt somebody next to him. It was Roger from Holden with his Somerset Slugger.

“Where's the lady and the other loony?” he asked Josh.

Josh shrugged. How would I know? he was trying to say.

Josh heard a male voice say, “Thank you, thank you, Sister Hilda.” It was coming from the stacks. “I will carry this with me at all times—now and forever.”

Unfortunately, Roger of Holden also heard it.

In a flash he disappeared, back between HISTORY (MISSOURI) and FICTION (A–L).

Josh flinched at the familiar sound of a ball bat hitting a human head— once, twice, three times—and Sister Hilda screaming, “No! Stop that!”