In the Shadow of Blackbirds (32 page)

I dreamed of the little boys who played on top of the coffins in front of the undertaker’s house. Flies buzzed around their brown caps as they climbed over the foul-smelling caskets and pretended to hunt Germans. This time they sang the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”

The king was in the counting house, counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey,
The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

I jerked awake, paranoid once again that a bird was on my chest, watching me while I slept.

I turned to my side, blinked through the dim glow of my oil lamp’s light and saw nothing but my bedroom, quiet and still. My lungs breathed without the burden of anything squashing the life out of them. Stephen’s photographs hung on the wall across the way, undisturbed.

Yet the air burned with his presence.

I heard a sound—something wet, splashing against my bedsheet behind my back. I clenched my eyelids shut and dreaded flipping over, for I didn’t hear any rain outside my window, and so the ceiling couldn’t have been leaking.

I counted five more drips before Stephen’s beaten-down voice emerged from behind me in the bed. “Please keep me with you. I can’t stand it anymore.”

I kept my eyes closed. “We’ll figure this out soon so you can have some peace. We’re so close now.”

“I didn’t kill myself.”

“I know.”

“They’re killing me.”

“I know.” I shut my eyes tighter. A warm liquid seeped across the sheets and soaked my nightgown, but I swallowed down my fear and kept talking to him. “Stephen, does one of the blackbirds look like your mother?”

Three more drips. “What?”

“Is your mother ever there when you’re suffering from the poison?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“She isn’t there.”

“What about your brother and cousin?”

“They’re blackbirds. Enormous, vicious creatures. I see their beaks—huge, luminous scissors that could tear you to shreds.”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t understand. I need to touch the place where you—”

“No—they’ll rip you to pieces. Don’t you dare go anywhere near that bed, Shell. You’ll see them.”

“I want to see them. I want to know who did this to you.”

“Please, no.” He flinched enough to jerk the mattress. “Don’t go to my room. Swear to me you won’t.”

“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do. I can’t keep you with me. It’s—scary. It’s dangerous. I can’t do it, Stephen.” My eyes welled with tears. “I’ve got to let you go.” I covered my face with quivering fingers and cried.

Stephen wept as well—I could hear him shaking and sniffing behind me, which made me sputter sobs into my pillow all the more.

“Don’t …” He choked on tears. “Please don’t cry, Shell—”

“I should have stopped you from leaving for the war that day. I should have done something.”

“There was nothing else you could have done. I had already signed the papers to go.”

“We should have had the chance to be together again. You shouldn’t be dead. I’ve lost my entire life.” The pillow beneath
my cheek absorbed my tears until the fabric felt drenched—and all the while the dripping liquid oozed its damp and sticky heat across the left side of my body. I coughed and struggled to find my voice. “Are you bleeding, Stephen?”

He sniffed again. “My head really hurts.”

I wiped my eyes with a corner of the quilt. “I’m going to get off the bed now. I’ll move slowly.”

“Don’t let me go yet. I’m not ready.”

“I’m just standing up so I can see what you look like.” My blood turned sluggish in my veins. I had to fight against the weight of his sadness to rise to a standing position. But I made it. I stood upright.

With the softest of steps, I turned around and faced him.

“Oh, Stephen.” I slapped my palm over my mouth and burst into tears again.

Blood, thick and dark and blackish red, caked his face and shirt. I couldn’t even see his eyes and mouth—only the innards of his head. He huddled against the wall and held his hand against his left temple, but a stream of crimson seeped through his fingers and fell to a puddle on my sheets.

My legs buckled. My knees slammed to the floor. I lowered my head to the rug and fought against black spots buzzing in front of my eyes.

“It’s too late,” he said while my brain swayed on a swelling sea of dizziness. “They’re here.”

Unconsciousness stole me away before I could see who “they” were.

.............

DOWNSTAIRS, THE CUCKOO ANNOUNCED HALF PAST FIVE
in the morning.

I opened my eyes, and after several more minutes spent on the floor regaining my strength, I pushed myself to a standing position with the wobbling legs of a newborn deer.

Stephen was gone. My empty sheets looked clean and white, without one speck of blood staining them.

But I remembered what he looked like.

I staggered out to the dark hallway with nothing but the feel of the wall under my hand guiding me to my aunt’s half-open door. “Aunt Eva? Can I sleep with you until you have to get up?”

She didn’t answer, so I entered her unlit room.

“Aunt Eva?”

Strange little breathing noises rasped from her bed, as if she were crying but trying to stifle her sobs.

“Did you hear him?” I asked her. The soles of my feet found their way across her unseen floorboards. “Is that why you’re crying? I’m sorry. I’m trying to let him go. I know I need to.”

She kept breathing in that odd way. My stomach sank. The sounds didn’t resemble sobs anymore.

She was shivering.

“Oh no.” I lunged toward her bedside table and lit a match. “Oh, Christ.”

She was curled in a ball beneath her covers and trembled as if all the blankets in the world couldn’t warm her. Her
face had turned tomato red, and her sweaty hair clung to her cheeks and lips. Her eyes stared at nothing.

I covered my mouth and nostrils with my hand to protect myself, even though the germs were just as likely to be waiting on my skin as traveling through the air. The match burned down to my fingers, searing my flesh, so I blew it out, struck another one, and lifted the glass chimney of her oil lamp to ignite the wick.

“The flu got inside the house,” she wheezed. “Leave before it finds you.”

Every square inch of my skin went cold at the way she described the flu like one of Stephen’s blackbirds. “I’ve got to help you, Aunt Eva.”

“Go.”

I laid my palm against her forehead. “You’re hotter than that match that just burned me.”

“Don’t touch me.” She tried to swipe her hand at my arm. “Pack your things and leave before it gets you, too.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Go. Leave. Get out of the house.” She shut her eyes against a violent bout of shivering that gripped her the same way Mae Tate had convulsed on the floor of our high school English classroom.

“I’m going to make you some tea and onion soup—”

“Go!”

I jumped backward at the force of her words. “Who’s going to take care of you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t face your mother and tell her I let you die. She’d never forgive me. She’d want you to live.” She grimaced through the pain of her chills. “Go. Go!”

I backed out of the room, unsure what to do. At any second I might drop to the floor with the same convulsions. My life could end in a matter of hours. Stephen would never be free.

But I couldn’t leave my aunt. I couldn’t—not when I could possibly save her.

The day before my father’s arrest, I read an article about a Portland woman who cured her four-year-old daughter of the flu by burying her in raw onions for three days. The mother had fed the child onion syrup and smothered her in pungent bulbs from head to toe. Dad had remarked, “It’s like the Gypsies hanging garlic above their doors to ward off evil,” and I shook my head in dismay at the woman’s desperation.

But that Portland girl survived.
She lived. Her mother saved her.

I could save Aunt Eva.

I ran downstairs, switched on the main gas valve outside the back door, and poked matches inside the globes of the kitchen wall lamps to set them glowing. Light burned through the darkness in that cold, still room.

The pile of onions delivered the day before sat in a crate on the kitchen floor. Eleven of the dozen remained. I plunked three of them on the kitchen worktable.

“The knives!” I smacked my forehead. “She hid all the kitchen knives.”

I charged back upstairs to Aunt Eva’s room. “Where are the kitchen knives?”

“Go away.”

“I need to chop onions. Where are they?”

“Wilfred’s violin case.”

“I don’t see a violin case.” I pulled at my hair. “Where is it?”

“Under the bed.” She groaned through her spasms. “It’s so cold in here. Why is it so cold in San Diego? The weather was supposed to cure Wilfred.”

“I’ll get more blankets. I’ll be right back.” I dashed away and tugged my blankets and Grandma Ernestine’s quilt off my own bed, dragged them down the hall, and laid them over Aunt Eva’s twitching body. “Here you go. Nice and warm.”

“Kalt.”

“What?” I asked.

“Kalt.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Aunt Eva.”

“Eiskalt.”

“Are you speaking German?”

“Don’t speak German, Mary Shelley.” She whimpered through her chills. “They’ll arrest you.
Gefängnis.”

“I’ve got to find the knives. Where’s his blasted violin case?” I dug through shoes and boxes stuffed beneath the bed. “Here it is. Cripes, you really wanted to hide it, didn’t you?” I popped open the latch of a curved leather case.

The knives and scissors were tucked around Uncle Wilfred’s cherrywood violin. I snatched a knife with an accidental
strum of the E string and returned downstairs, so fueled by fear I didn’t yet feel tired from being up so early.

My fingers chopped those golden bulbs as fast as they could without severing a thumb. I stuck an onion wedge in my mouth and sucked on its potent fumes to keep my own body from breaking down. Water blurred my eyes.

“Wait—why am I chopping them?” I spit the onion out of my mouth. “She needs to be buried in them. This is crazy. What do I need to do?” I paced the kitchen floor and yanked my hair again until my scalp hurt. “All right … let’s make the chopped ones into soup and syrup and cut the other ones in half to stir up the odors. We’ll put the halved ones in her bed. Her feet—oh, damn, I forgot to check her feet!”

Another frenzied dash upstairs. I flapped the ends of her blankets off her legs and fell to my knees in thanks at the sight of shivering white feet.

“Oh, thank God. They’re not black.”

But some of the victims die within a matter of hours,
I remembered the newspapers warning.
Some last for days before a deadly pneumonia sets in, and there’s nothing you can do to free their lungs from that suffocating blood-tinged fluid.

Aunt Eva coughed a wicked cough that rattled inside her chest. Her nose bled into her pillowcase.

“Why is there blood?” I mopped her up with a handkerchief, but the flow kept coming. “Hold this against your nostrils with as much strength as you can give. I have to get the onions. We’ve got to get you covered.”

I took off again, and I heard my father’s words of advice from his letter in the rhythm of my footsteps pounding through the halls.

Human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours.

The phrase spurred me onward to the kitchen.

Human beings have always managed to find …

It sliced through the onions with eight swift beats.

… The. Great. Est. Strength. With. In. Them. Selves …

It rustled in the papery onion skins shuffling in a pouch made of my nightgown’s skirt.

… during the darkest hours. Human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours.

I lifted the blankets off my aunt.

“No,” she screamed. “It’s too cold.
Kalt! Kalt!”

“I’m smothering you in onions. You’d do the same for me, and you know it.”

I scattered the onion halves over her upper body while she pulled her knees to her stomach and hacked and shivered. More blood gushed out of her nose, this time in a stronger flow. I wiped her up again and changed her pillowcase, but she stained the new case within five seconds. I attempted to give her an aspirin for the fever, but she threw it up.

“I should call a doctor.”

Human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours.

Back in the kitchen I picked up the telephone’s black, horn-shaped earpiece and turned the crank on its boxy oak body. It took a hundred years for the operator to answer.

“Number, please,” said a female voice at the other end.

“I need a doctor.”

“A specific doctor?”

“Any doctor. My aunt’s sick with the flu, and her nose won’t stop bleeding.”

“Is it a dangerous level of blood loss?”

“I don’t …” I massaged my eyes. “Yes—it seems dangerous. She’s burning up with a fever and throwing up, too. I can’t give her an aspirin.”

“I’m afraid most doctors are too busy to answer their phones right now. I’ll try connecting you to an ambulance dispatcher. One moment, please.”

A series of clicks traveled down the line, and all I could think about was how swiftly time was passing. The cuckoo clock would be striking six in the morning in three minutes.

A man from the San Diego Police Department picked up, but he told me I’d have to wait at least twelve hours before an ambulance would be available.

“I hear sirens outside my house,” I shouted into the mouthpiece. “Why can’t one of those ambulances just stop by and get my aunt?”

“Because they’re already being used to transport other patients. We’ll put her name and address on a list and get a car there as soon as possible.”

“What if she dies before then?”

“Then cover her with a sheet and put her outside. A separate ambulance is making the rounds to pick up bodies.”