Blackbirds (2 page)

Linda shook her head as she zipped up her flight suit. “Not a word. My mother is beginning to fear he's been captured by the Germans.”

Sharon nodded.
We can't speak about the other possibility
.
The possibility
that he won't be coming back.

“Look at that.” Linda pointed at the orange windsock whose tail began to flap as it turned into the wind with its open, fishlike mouth. “We'll get some flying in after all.” Sharon picked up the pace. “Do you think Bloggs will let us do the cross-country today?” Sharon looked at a patch of blue sky to the east.

“Why not ask him?” Linda cocked her head to the left.

“You'd better do the asking,” Sharon said.

“Maybe you're right. He found out you're a better pilot than he is.” Linda turned to her friend. “A much better pilot than any of us. I'm afraid you've bruised Waverly Bloggs's fragile male ego.”

“He's right over there.” Sharon pointed.

Bloggs smoked a cigarette and leaned against the wall of the hangar.

Sharon said, “It looks like he's got his wind up.”

Linda laughed. “You're beginning to sound like you were born here.”

“My mother was always using expressions like that. I guess she never really left England.” Sharon watched Bloggs as he dropped the cigarette and crushed it under the heel of his flying boot.

As they neared the hangar, the engine of the Tiger Moth sputtered and stopped.

Bloggs turned their way. He wore his freshly-pressed uniform jacket and pants. The final touch was slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin moustache. “About bloody time you two showed up!”

Linda reached inside the breast of her flight suit.

Bloggs watched her intently.

“We've got our flight plan ready for you, sir,” Linda said. “Course plotted, winds estimated, and time computed, sir. All as you requested.” She handed the plan to Bloggs.

Bloggs stared at Linda and then Sharon, searching for evidence of sarcasm.

Sharon raised her right hand to salute but was stopped by a glare from Linda.

“We're ready to go as long as the weather is accommodating. We were hoping you would have the weather report, sir.” Sharon looked in the direction of the windsock.

“Met report, you mean?” Bloggs looked at the flight plan. “Headed for Ilkley. It's a longer than normal trip into ungodly West Yorkshire. Well then, get going, and don't get bloody lost along the way or you'll both be washed out!” He turned his back on the pair and walked into the hangar.

“We're off.” Linda smiled at her friend.

Sharon leaned close. “Can't wait for some of that real home-cooked food from your mom's kitchen,” she said.

“And a chance for you to walk over and introduce yourself to your grandmother.” Linda headed toward the Tiger Moth.

“We'll see.” Sharon followed with a knot growing in her stomach.

The knot grew tighter as they approached Ilkley. As agreed, Sharon had flown the first leg of the flight to the refueling at Digby, in the central part of England. Now Linda took the scenic route flying overtop of a castle Sharon's mother had often talked about. It looked much like every other castle Sharon had seen from the air on the way north. She was struck instead by the wealth of green. The fields that looked so tiny from the air. They were not as big as what she was used to back at home. In England, rock walls, rather than barbed wire, often fenced the fields. As Linda throttled back and lost altitude, Sharon realized the black-and-white photographs in her mother's album did not do justice to the spring colours spread out below them.

Linda added power to the Gipsy Major engine to clear a stand of trees at this end of a field. They settled onto the grass, bounced once, and rumbled over the uneven ground until they reached the end of the pasture. Linda opened the throttle and swung the tail around.

Linda shut the engine down. Sharon saw a grey-haired woman in a long-sleeved shirt and tweed trousers standing by a rock wall. She opened the gate and stepped into the fresh silence.

“Stupid British engineering,” Sharon said as she tried to extricate herself from the cockpit without snagging her parachute, Irvin jacket, coveralls or flying boots.

Linda was smiling and placing the wooden wheel chocks on either side of the tires.

“I'll get the wings.” Sharon pulled out two lengths of rope and a pair of pegs to tie the wings down in case the wind picked up.

“You Canadians and your rope,” Linda said.

“Gets windy where I come from.” Sharon undid her jacket and set it on the wing. The sun felt warm on her neck. She took off the flying helmet and combed her brown hair with her fingers.

“You picked a beautiful day for it,” Linda's mother said.

Sharon stood and turned to face a woman with more grey than red in her hair. She was a stockier version of her daughter.

“Mom, this is Sharon. Sharon, this is Honeysuckle,” Linda said.

“Remarkable,” Honeysuckle said.

“Pardon?” Sharon felt the heat of attention from both women.

“The likeness is remarkable. It's like Leslie is back and no time has passed.” Honeysuckle wiped at her eyes and turned. “Come on, lunch is almost ready.”

Linda ran to catch up with her mother and put an arm around her shoulder. Honeysuckle hugged her daughter around the waist. “What's happened?” Linda asked.

Honeysuckle stopped. “No news on Michael's whereabouts.”

“Oh,” Linda said.

Sharon felt as if there were a hundred different places she should be other than here.

“He must have been taken prisoner.” Linda let the sentence hang in the air like the promise of a storm.

Sharon followed along behind while looking over her shoulder for a possible escape route.

Honeysuckle glanced back. “Come along. We've got some catching up to do. There are stories to tell and stories to hear. Your mother and I were friends when we were young, that is until the old bastard put an end it.”

“The old bastard?” Sharon asked.

“Your grandfather.”

Sharon trailed them to the rear of a rambling two-storey farmhouse made of grey stone. The stone was stained darker where it had been weathered by water running off the roof. Vines grew up the south side. She got the feeling that the house had been grand at one time. That feeling was reinforced by the back garden. Colours she had never seen before ran rampant around the closely-trimmed grass where a table and four wrought-iron chairs sat on a flat expanse of stone with grass and moss growing in between the slates.

A woman with short grey hair, blue eyes, a grey wool skirt, and a sweater carried out a tray with a coffee pot and four cups. “You're here,” she said, in a voice Sharon thought she'd heard before. Her stomach clenched and she shivered.
My grandmother! Cornelia!

“Sharon, this is Cornelia.” Linda rubbed her hands together when she saw the fresh eggs, bacon and toast on the table. “Mother, how did you manage this? Haven't you heard there's rationing?”

Cornelia held out her hand. It felt strong in Sharon's when she shook it. She pulled her hand away, while Cornelia seemed reluctant to release it.

The coffee, Sharon decided, was awful, but it had been so long since her last cup that she drank it anyway. She studied the garden while she felt Cornelia's eyes studying her.

“They've taken down all of the road signs. Apparently, it's to confuse the Germans,” Cornelia said.

Sharon looked at the black-winged birds darting in and out of the trees. One swooped up, then down onto the tail of another.

Honeysuckle rested her cup on the arm of her chair. “Apparently, the invasion is imminent. The only thing stopping Hitler is the fact that he needs more boats to cross the Channel.”

“Things are desperate. Everyone's got high hopes that Mr. Churchill can pull a rabbit out of his hat.” Linda picked up a piece of bacon, put it in her mouth and closed her eyes. “Mother, where did you find bacon?”

“So desperate that women are going to be allowed to fly aircraft for the Royal Air Force.” Sharon shook her head when she realized she'd added a thick layer of sarcasm to her tone of voice.

“It's the way of the world, dear.” Cornelia patted Sharon's hand. “Men are always asking women to get them out of the messes they get themselves into. If Churchill hadn't sent the
RAF
into France in that lost cause, we wouldn't be so desperately short of pilots. Now he turns to you and Linda to get the job done.”

“How do you know that?” Sharon decided that Cornelia was definitely becoming a nuisance.
That damned woman seems to want to
touch me every chance she gets
.

“I told her,” Honeysuckle said.

Linda smiled. “Father works for
MI
5.”

Sharon frowned.

“He's in intelligence, dear.” Cornelia patted Sharon's arm.

Sharon pulled away from the woman. “Keep your mitts off!”

Linda laughed.

“What's so funny?” Sharon asked.

Honeysuckle looked directly at Sharon. “She has a right.”

“No. No, she doesn't.” Sharon glared at Cornelia.

“She's family,” Linda said.

Sharon looked out of the corner of her eye at Cornelia.

“I'm your grandmother.”

“I know that, but I've just met you!” Sharon heard the sound of birds calling one another.
I'm staring at my hands
. She looked over at her grandmother's hands, searching for some similarity, some clue that they were related. The skin on the woman's hands was spotted with brown. There was a hint of dirt under the nails, something Sharon hadn't expected.

Cornelia took hold of Sharon's ponytail. “Your hair is the same auburn as Leslie's. It's the same silky hair, and you've got a cleft in your chin just like hers. I can see that you have her strength, too. You will need that, believe me.”

“How long have you known I was in England?” Sharon asked.

“Almost since you got off the ship in Liverpool,” Cornelia said. “Your blue eyes must be from your father.”

“How do you think you got the new Irvin jacket and the sheepskin flying boots?” Honeysuckle nodded in Cornelia's direction. “She insisted on buying them and having Linda deliver them. She wanted you to be warm.”

“Why did you never come and visit us in Canada?” Sharon asked.

Cornelia looked over the garden to a spot on the edge of the property only she could see. “Every year I asked him to let me go, and every year he refused.”

“Him?”

“Your grandfather,” Cornelia said.

“Why did you need his permission?”

“The bastard liked to keep us all under his thumb,” Honeysuckle said. “In his mind, he was still the lord and we his servants.”

“And how come you always call him ‘the bastard'?” Sharon took in her surroundings, searching out an escape route.

Linda touched her friend's hand. “Because he disowned his daughter and you. Because he wouldn't allow his wife to visit you and your mother in Canada. Because he died drunk and miserable, just the way he lived.”

“I can see you want to leave.” Cornelia put her hand on the back of her granddaughter's chair. “I'm asking you to stay a little longer. Have some breakfast before you fly away. I'd like to get to know you a bit.”

“You have no right to ask anything of me! I found the letters after my mother died. The letters she wrote to you! The letters returned unopened! She was dying, and you wouldn't even answer her letters!” Sharon felt herself finding a focus for the rage over the loss of her mother. “You know, the last few days before she died, she kept asking for you. She was delirious most of the time, but she hadn't forgotten you!”

“You were with her when she died?” Cornelia asked.

“Yes. The last week was a nightmare.” Sharon looked at her grandmother, who was beginning to weep.

“I was so afraid she died alone. Where is she buried?” Cornelia asked.

“Calgary. Queen's Park.” The day of the burial came back to Sharon. Its stark reality. The warm hand of the sun on her face. The faces of her neighbours and friends. “It was a beautiful day. I know it sounds crazy, but it was. The birds were singing.”

“You know, your grandfather beat Cornelia when she said she was going to see your mother before she died,” Honeysuckle said.

“What?” Sharon asked.

“Put Cornelia in the hospital, he did. Still, she was determined to leave. By the time Cornelia was well enough to travel, your mother was dead,” Honeysuckle said.

“So you killed the bastard?” Sharon asked.

Honeysuckle and Cornelia looked at one another. They said nothing, but it was obvious some silent understanding passed between them. Linda and Sharon waited for an answer. None came.

Honeysuckle turned to Linda. “Your Aunt Rose lives in a cottage near White Waltham. You remember her?”

“Oh God. That woman never shuts her gob!” Linda gave her mother a horrified look. “You're not suggesting we move in with her?”

“The beauty of it is that Rose has moved in with her daughter while the son-in-law is away at sea. The two of you would have Rose's cottage to yourself. I'll ask, if you like,” Honeysuckle said.

Linda looked at Sharon, who shrugged. “That would be great.”

“All right,” Linda said.

An hour later, Sharon checked on the port and starboard sides of the cockpit, then said “Clear!” and switched on.

Linda swung the Tiger Moth's propeller, stepped back, then moved around the wing after the engine caught.

Sharon eased the throttle forward. The engine coughed. She eased the throttle back. The engine smoothed itself out.

Linda climbed into the front cockpit and worked her way into the safety harness.

Sharon looked at the women standing by the gate at the rock wall. They stood close to one another. Honeysuckle wrapped an arm around Cornelia's shoulders. Sharon waved, and her grandmother smiled back.