A fortnight later, as it was pleasant enough for a bicycle ride, Miss Williams pedaled around the village and back to the college grounds. She had been in Bridgetonne since the autumn of the previous year, but she had come for the spring. Although it had yet to make its full entrance, the sight of its green shoots and scent of its grasses would have to suffice for Miss Williams for the time being. Miss she believed the season inspired the best stories with their possibilities of renewal. Not that she hadn’t attempted, in the autumn and winter, to think or use such emotion in her writing.
But she had not found the England she expected when she arrived. The place and its people were impenetrable in all aspects: the tart curve in their speech, the defeated fabric of their clothes, the sallow nature of their complexions. The war had done just as much in the States, but, in England, the heft of wartime still rode on the shoulders of both people and nature. The very atmosphere of the place, the fields and its pavement, even the space people afforded one another during conversations, was cumbersome, as if everyday tasks had become Sisyphean.
Miss Williams did not like such comparisons, between the contemporary and the patently mythic. The old legends of gods and demi-men were unyielding and afforded too little to transcendence. She preferred folk tales, old wives’ advice, the magic and malleable. It might still be possible for a pauper to become a prince, or for a bundle of poppies or cowslips to loosen an old crone’s embitterments. Those possibilities were all that were left in this rock of a world since the whims of the old gods, set to work on these descendants of Troy, seemed to preclude happiness.
But spring was inevitable; it always was, and winter was unraveling. She could smell it as she rode past the baker’s, the grocer’s, the seamstress’s, and the millinery: the nectar of fresh bread loosening the air’s hold on the dampness. The scent turned the village woolen and inviting. In the combination of warmth and bustle she felt and witnessed, Miss Williams thought she might unearth here what had always been such a font of wonder for her and discover, if not fairies living in the trees, then monarchies of a similar resourcefulness. The flowerbeds she would plant at her cottage; the bark on cedar and oak trees, lined with the impressions of frost and thaw; the soil that would part for roots and fresh stems, and then close around them, just as quickly. Was there a sound, a score of this minute, as when a breath is held in anticipation of joy? Miss Williams was determined to hear it. She must ever be on the alert, now that spring was within a reasonable distance. She pedaled on toward where the roads gave way to gravel, to pebbles, to the paths that were more like berms in the landscape, toward the back entrance of the college.
At a rise of earth she knew she could not surmount on the bicycle, she hopped off and saw him: his posture like that of someone or something trying to conceal itself, as if ashamed at its molting or some other natural process. As she drew nearer, he no longer appeared animal, but strangely human in how he attempted to disguise himself. A man, possibly, his hands and arms behind his back, walking with his head leading, pitched forward to the point of almost falling. He walked stiffly, as though he lacked joints that bent. The sum of this effect was a strange gait that accomplished little movement, other than an arduous shuffling. As a bird might try walking, although Miss Williams did not consider this association until she was much closer indeed, close enough to observe the indignity of this landlocked creature.
From the bundle of clothes, mud, and dust that composed this man materialized a hand, with long, fine fingers. Against the mass of filth from which it emerged, the skin of that hand was brilliant and ghastly, bright and scaly. The hand opened its palm and extended toward her, almost daintily. The man was begging. The skin of his arm was black, as if encased in a miasma. He smelled as a city does during the long, sultry nights: of garbage and excrement. He then leaned and paced, as if shuffling his pain between legs and feet, while supporting a great weight on his back: his wings.
She did not know how long they stood there, together. Miss Williams could have easily fetched a coin to join with his palm, but she was too taken with the skin there, so intricately cracked, a map of wells and creeks. When she placed nothing in his palm he withdrew his hand and offered her the other one, just as a bird ruffles his feathers to air them out, and then appears to have done nothing.
His fingers were like leaves, their reach toward the sun and meaning. She saw no harm in touching him, although she knew the dangers of touching birds, particularly the hatchlings.
Miss Williams had not known her own mother very well; the woman had been taken from her when Miss Williams was still a girl, and in the short time they had together, her mother was often bedridden, unable to show her daughter the acts and places of nature that she wanted her daughter to also adore. But her mother had warned her, once, on an afternoon when they watched the wrens splatter about in the bird bath: never, ever, touch a bird. The human touch permanently marks it as different, separate. The flock will reject it. Mother birds are particularly attuned to the scent of mankind. Should they discover it on their offspring, they leave them to the elements.
“Come,” Miss Williams said as she realized this must be The Hawkman before her. To him she extended her palm. He did not take it, so she tried again, “Come. You must be hungry,” but he remained perched as he was, moments away from her. She could see that the palm was scored and wrapped in calluses. But it was also white as paraffin, and as she took it, it had an almost lifeless quality. “I won’t bite,” she said, and it occurred to her that he might not have been able to hear her. But she did not wish to shout.
“Come come come,” she said. He relinquished her hand, dropped his arm and returned it to its original position, behind his back. He took a step, more like a lunge, as his posture required, but Miss Williams did not balk.
“This way, then,” she said as she stepped back and returned her attention to her bicycle. She would have to walk it all the way home, if he was to follow her. She pushed the bike and took a step but did not look behind her, fearing how he might interpret the move. He might see it as a test of his civility or a measure of her hubris. She listened for the strain of his movements—human movements—the thaw in his knees and elbows, the stress in the soles of his shoes.
She walked the bicycle, and he lurched behind her: she could sense it through the dreadful rhythm of his footsteps. One foot gallantly placed forward, the other following in a tedious attempt to remain upright. He almost hopped. As if trying to avoid tenderness on either side of his feet, only to experience it in both, she guessed. The farther they walked together, the stranger they must have seemed, Miss Williams thought—master and servant or Mary Shelley and the physical manifestation of her imagination. She stopped walking, at uneven intervals, to make sure The Hawkman was truly there and not an apparition of her fantasies.
She got a proper look at him once they arrived at the cottage, and she could lay the bicycle on its side. He was faceless, having concealed his head within his coat, and he shook as if he was nothing more than a defeated husk of corn, waiting either for the wind or the vultures to take him.
“You might have to duck a bit,” she said by way of instruction, as she opened the front door. “It’s an old place, but very comfortable.”
She led him through a short hall to the kitchen that had been added onto the original cottage, but it was hardly a kitchen at all. There was a sink, a washtub, an ice chest for preserving a small amount of food, and a pile of firewood beside the back door, but no stove. That remained within the sitting room, where it also provided heat for the rest of the first floor. Miss Williams explained that she took most of her meals at the college with her students, so the arrangement was quite suitable for her. The carriage of The Hawkman demanded a hot meal immediately.
She could not think of removing her hat, gloves, and coat, so quickly did she feel the need to retrieve the pitcher of buttermilk and pour out a glass for him. A hand and arm darted from his mass to take it; it disappeared in one long, vicious gulp. He wiped his lips on his coat sleeve when finished. His lips were left pale by the milk, and he held out the glass as if for a second drink. But when she motioned to pour into his glass again, he shook his head, and then nodded as she took it away from him.
“Would you like some tea?” asked Miss Williams, but The Hawkman did not respond. She was now confronted with the audacity of what she had begun. He stood oblivious and as still as his trembling would allow. She could hear his breathing, quick; the sway in his shoes; the swallow in his throat. “Please, please, sit down,” she said, motioning to one of two chairs at the small table as if sitting would calm him, help him settle. “I do not keep much here, but I have a bit of chicken they roast for me at the college. I can make you a sandwich, or a plate . . .”
She left him there as she went to boil the tea. She tried to keep up a stream of chatter over the sounds of her preparations: about the college and the responsibilities of the days awaiting her. She spoke of lectures and luncheons and other meals; poems she had planned for idle moments she could capture; she spoke as if unfurling a blanket of birdsong, what mother birds use to envelop their sons and daughters.
“I keep busy enough so that I am not too homesick,” she said. “The modern conveniences, a cook stove, I do not miss them much. I rather like the fire, as long as I have someone to help with the firewood.”
She listened for any response he might make, but there was none. When she returned with the boiling kettle, The Hawkman remained unchanged except for his coat, which seemed to have been pressed tighter, faster, about his neck and trunk. Her kindness could be killing him.
“Here you go,” she said, once she had served him a plate of chicken and sliced tomatoes. He held the fork not between his fingers but with his fist, as if it were the end of a spear. Miss Williams watched from too short of a distance, she realized, from across the table. She drank her own cup of tea, and wondered if it pained him to hold the fork in such a way that he had to twist his hand into such uncomfortable figurations to deliver the food to his mouth. He shoveled the tomatoes, not necessarily like a starving man would, but as one who had too long lived confined from civilization: in a prison, a hospital, or some other regimented environment.
“Were you,” Miss Williams dared to ask, “in the war?”
He looked up from his plate and now showed her his eyes, the yellow everyone had known and castigated. They moved together, his eyes did, first over her face, and then over their surroundings, as if he was gauging the strength of the walls, their dependability in a storm—or a fire fight. He did not nod or shake his head, but instead returned his attention to his meal.
“Should I get you to a Voluntary Aid hospital, then?” Miss Williams asked. This time when he showed his face to her, he shut his eyes and shook his head. His next object of concentration was on the last slice of tomato, which he pushed into his mouth. He edged the plate toward her once he was finished.
“Might I get you anything else?” she asked.
No, he shook his head again. He was no longer shivering, but both his arms still hugged the coat, as if to drive it deeper into his flesh. One eye had seemingly retreated behind the tussle of his curls, and the other appeared as fierce and bright as it ever might have been, stronger than the sun. A corona of stain spilled out, onto his eyelids and circles around and beneath, and he rocked in the chair. If he was still in need, he could not bring himself to admit it.
“You could have a bath,” Miss Williams said, because her solution was to keep things moving—herself and him. She sprung up from the table for the back door. Just outside there was a shed with garden tools and odd pieces of clothing for what must have been the groundskeeper, for a time. A small man, Miss Williams thought, and those clothes were likely as dusty as her guest’s; they would have to do long enough for her to wash and mend whatever he wore. Upon her return to the kitchen, she found The Hawkman to be dutifully standing by the table. She presented him with the old clothes, but he did not take them from her.
“It’s all right,” she said.
His one visible eye was honey-bright, and Miss Williams presumed the eye followed her as she swung around the kitchen to lead him up the stairs. He labored to climb the short steps, his breath was thick with nuisance, coughs, and phlegm. She left the clothes and the towel she collected from the hall linen closet on the side of the tub, and shut the door to leave him to his business.
Darkness had begun its walk on earth by the time he emerged downstairs. He found her at her desk, her eyes squinting into a book, through the colors of the approaching evening. She was not generous when it came to her candles and lanterns, lighting them had always been a trial; she could not adequately judge the distance required to light a taper to begin the candles, as if she did not know the reach of her own limbs. She would often find herself surrounded by nightfall before she would be forced to oil wicks and strike matches. She felt more secure in the darkness, as if it were a fabric, a net that would stop her falling. But she could sense him, see him, through Browning’s words and the book’s spine. His eyes were like a sentry, guarding his inexplicable history.
“Those clothes do you well,” Miss Williams said. They even fit, to a degree; he was much smaller in the shoulders and legs with his coat removed than she had expected. He was, she was afraid to admit, substantially more delicate than a soldier should be: the mass of him almost doll-like, and his hands finely boned in length and width. If he had been a soldier, it was certainly not through his own volition. Perhaps he was a deserter, a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance. That would justify, in some minds, the villagers’ treatment of him.
He extended his arm, the coat draped over it, and Miss Williams retrieved all the garments underneath the coat as well as the coat itself. Everything was so caked over with road dust and field mud that the cloth had a strange, second presence, beyond its bulk. There must have been a ghost in the clothes, within the fibers, where the soil and moisture had created something like vellum, important and delicate.
“Now, you should have a haircut,” Miss Williams declared, to which the man took a demonstrative step backward. He shook his head—no, no, no.
“Oh,” Miss Williams said. “I’m sorry. Would you like to rest now instead?”
She had to step around him, his last declaration was so rigid, to take him to her favorite room in the cottage. At one time it might have been a nursery, judging from its light and airiness. The room looked out over the open fields that buffeted the cottage, and the sun always rose first there, leaving it warmer than the rest of the house. Miss Williams imagined that the crickets and frogs that would live in the field during summer would be best heard from this room, a gentle infantry that carted children and troubled souls off to sleep most efficiently. This being still so close to winter, it was too early for those sounds, but the sweet green trim of the ceiling beams and moldings still enlivened the room, with its pair of twin beds and a nightstand between them.
Miss Williams turned down a bedspread and then a blanket for her guest, who could move no farther than the doorframe. Neither eye was visible. When Miss Williams finally turned to formally invite him into the room, she thought she might be hearing the verge of a sob in his throat. She had never considered that, having slept without shelter from both the natural elements and man-made harassments for so long, he might be afraid of sleep and the unique class of demons it might bring to visit him. “I promise: nothing to disturb you,” she said, and she sat on the other bed, leaving a clear route for him to walk on his own.
He approached the small bed as if driven by contradictory instincts: one to rest, the other to remain vigilant. He could not tell the difference between an offer and a demand. His eyes revealed themselves, trained as they were on the sheets meant to match the trim and molding. He could sleep in green without it cutting or scratching. The fresh bedclothes, the mattress, the ache of his exhaustion—he could defy them no longer. He had fallen into the mattress.
As she stood over him, to tuck him in, after a fashion, she was taken by how large his eyes were, how they resembled packets of amber—clear yet intricate, but not symmetrical. Their irises did not quite match, the left eye consistent in its hue, and the right flecked with brown and green that lunged from the background. She turned toward the window to draw the curtains when he stopped her. He grabbed her by the wrist.
Miss Williams had long been in the close proximity of men: her father, for one, in the tenements where they slept, four families to a room. She had watched the backs of other men as they slept in their corners, the strain and pressure that their naked muscles could not relinquish, even in slumber. She had sat across from men at tables and in classrooms before lecterns. But she had never found herself so near to a man and his bald demands, and instinctively she resisted.
He put a finger to his lips, and with the other hand, he pulled her down so she was sitting beside him on the bed. She sat up straight, defiant, yet there seemed not to be a need. He merely moved his hand from her wrist to her fingers, and took the fingers into his own hand, then rested the pair he made on his chest. She thought he should turn his head, close his eyes, but instead he looked to her, boldly, without blinking. He meant for her to watch over him, she guessed from the wideness of his eyes, persisting despite his obvious exhaustion. She remained there until he fell asleep, his misery temporarily lost in the night. It had been an uncomfortable experience, his hold on her hand, the naked feeling in his eyes. But she did not protest as she reminded herself that she, too, as a child, had been afraid of the dark—the night could take more than her dreams, but her last thought of the day, the picture she might have made of her and her mother, together.
That night, with a candle at her desk, she listened for his breathing. Would he wake up, wander about the cottage, pillory the kitchen; would he shout out his story in a nightmare? But she heard nothing. When she was convinced there would be nothing more from him, she wrote in the book where she let her ideas run:
Beast to beauty to beast again:
all beasts have a soul
but a human who loses his core
to circumstance and language
is neither human nor creature
but a pinnacle of all the things he fears:
dirt and hunger, his lathered clothes and
the evening chill; the song that bleeds from nightfall
to daylight; a song of what he lost and cannot regain;
except for the moments in between when he remembers
the needs of an infant, and the gold of sustenance
offered to him in modest presentation.