The Scottish Highlands
At first it had reminded Luke of the Spanish prison. The building was once a fortress, made of stone, and full of old terrors. But the air was colder, wetter. A different place, redeemed by healing, and women in white.
Isabelle drifted in like an exotic bird among the nurses. She sat beside him, parting and re-parting his hair, singing Lilli Marlen at his ear, in four languages, now. She told him of Magdelena, who was one of theirs, as well as a smuggler and sometime lover of loose-lipped Spanish and German officials. She told him of Magdelena's courage in getting the location of their rescue rendezvous spot to him while he was in Porta Coeli. She was a woman who made her murdered mother proud in her resistance. And it was not she who betrayed their original meeting place on Santa Clara. It was the powerful German, who could empty U-Boats of gunner crews, and post them on every island large enough for a plane to land. They all had to remain on guard for that one, known as Helmut Adler.
"But they did not provide enough guns to prevent a water landing vis a vis our marvelous Breguet 790 Nautilus! Though, to speak the truth, it was very clever of you to stay out of the guns' range, as our seaplane's hull is metal, but our wings are wrapped in fabric only!"
Isabelle brought sweets for the nurses and chased away Spencer’s men, the ones in grey suits. They were full of questions. Important questions, they said.
Luke could not gather the strength, or find the voice to answer them. At first he could barely breathe through the shattered glass he felt his lungs had become.
A cloud descended over his spirit. It had stolen his voice, stolen words in any language.
All of his rescuers, Isaiah Morgenstern, Isabelle and Alain Marius, argued with Jack Spencer’s men about his lost voice.
“He must tell us —”
“He is trying to get over the pneumonia,” Isabelle insisted. Her husband took up her cause, “Which he got in your service, along with the scars.”
“We have to debrief him!”
“Let him rest, gentlemen.”
“We have to ask —”
“You know this man!” Isaiah proclaimed. “You know what he’s done. Let him heal, get him home. Then he’ll answer all your questions.”
“The doctors can find nothing wrong with his voice. Why won’t he —”
“Maybe it’s you.”
“Us?”
“He needs to see your boss, maybe.”
* * *
Luke opened his eyes on another day, after roaming the Spanish mountains, looking for the place he'd buried the airman in his dreams. Isaiah Morgenstern sat beside his bed.
“Got in to see you early today, bunkie. Why? Because I’m nice to nurses, including that past-the-first-blush-of-maidenhood battle-axe one, MacArdle, who’s taken a secret liking to you. Your boss Spencer’s fancy swells could learn a few things from me. About how to treat the womenfolk, you know?”
Luke did know. Nurse MacArdle had little tolerance for any of his visitors except for his Kokopelli.
“I thought the Lincoln Brigade was an irregular unit,” Isaiah continued. “Your bunch has got us beat, Lieutenant. Plaguing me, like I’m going home to tell Abie the fishmonger all your secrets. Secrets, which I, of course, don’t know in the first place, on account of all I ever got out of you was name and rank.”
He'd gotten more than that, Luke thought. But he had earned the knowledge of every word, story, detail. He would trust the small, rugged Jewish man with his life. And he would invite him into the most sacred Navajo space. He would find the best singer for his friend's Enemyway ceremony. He would even allow Isaiah Morgenstern to court his mother, should they ever take a liking to each other.
Traveling clothes, a suit. Isaiah was going home away, Luke realized, leaving him behind. The small man who had been so good to him shifted his glance toward the stone floor.
“The medicine your boss sent for, from that moldy cantaloupe in Peoria is helping you, yeah?”
Penicillin, Luke remembered its name. Respond. Nod. Did I? Yes. A smile from his friend.
“Well, pull through the last of this shreklekh Scottish winter and you owe your life to a rotten piece of fruit. Don’t know how you’re going to face the future knowing that.”
Trickster. Kokopelli, making a joke.
Isaiah placed his right hand over Luke’s still, folded ones. His voice hushed. “Mishpacha, listen to me. I gotta get home now, on account of my father’s sick. I’d stay until you’re feeling better, if it weren’t for that, you understand?”
Yes. Of course. Yes.
“Yeah, it's all right, bunkie. I know you understand honoring ancestors. We are of related people, that's why I call you this new Yiddish endearment, Mishpacha. It means you are like family. You like that one, bunkie?
Yes.
Sure you do. Listen. I cleaned up your pocket watch. Got it running good. Battle Axe MacArdle promises to wind it every morning. It gives you any trouble, or needs a cleaning, drop by the shop on Orchard Street. Will you do that, meyn bagleyter?”
Luke nodded.
His friend grinned as if he were in the company of a better example of what he'd called him — companion. He would never forget his kokopelli's beautiful. pieced-back-together face, his wide snaggle-toothed smile
“I wouldn’t let them throw out your boots, either. I remember how touchy you were about those, bunkie. I re-blocked them nice and shined them up. Good leather. Rubber soles. Hold onto them. They’ll get you home.”
Isaiah pressed their joined hands.
Luke enjoyed the full silence between them.
“Ah,” his friend broke it, glancing up and raising his voice. “The beauty queen of the MacArdle clan’s on shift, ready to fluff your pillows, you most fortunate of men!”
“And that’s more care than bloody, badgering Yanks can do fer him!” The woman sent her barbed voice out like a weapon.
Isaiah finally took his last leave of Luke's company once Stones-in-Her-Throat was there. No, not Stones-In-Her-Throat. MacArdle, Luke remembered what Isaiah had called her. Nurse MacArdle. She reminded him of his mother, although Ada Kayenta’s anger sounded more like the screech of a soaring red hawk.
She was built almost as wide as his mother was tall and lean. Her hair was not neatly bound in wool, but its tight, silver curls shot out around her head and nurse’s cap like crazy coils. One of her beautiful grey eyes was always looking at her own nose.
She was right about his visitors. They couldn’t restore his voice, or his spirit.
He needed a ceremony, under the clear skies of home. He closed his eyes.
“Nae, now, Captain. Enough with your layin’ about like a big store dog.”
She piled the pillows behind his head and shoulders. How had he become a captain? Oh, yes. “Battlefield commission” one of Spencer’s men said, after he'd led some of Lomax's men.
Nurse MacArdle came closer.
Perfume. Almost covering the iodine scent of her. Jack Spencer’s perfume. His superior's men gave gifts to all the hospital staff. Which of the Spencer scents was hers? Luke couldn’t remember a single one, and they were part of his cover story. But he’d always had the most trouble with that part of his cover, working for a man who’d made his fortune selling perfume. Knowing what a man who had that job would know.
“Din’na care for a one of yer friends from New York, except fer that last one, no matter the quality their bribes,” Nurse MacArdle complained as she laid out her elaborate system of linens with her fine, freckled hands. “Spoiled. Bloody handsome, spoiled Yanks, like me mam warned me against when they came over to tea during the last war, yer visitors are, to be sure.
“Now hark at me, young one,” she summoned, keeping her good eye on his face as her linens only exposed the part of him her hands found, cleaned, treated with her comforting ointments. “They may have flown in their fancy powder concoction from the States to cure ye, but it was Alexander Fleming of Lochfield, Ayr who first figured what penicillin might do for those suffering from congested lung, back in ’28. Scratch any Yank or Englishman of worth ye’ll find a Scot!”
She gave her attention to each wound as her words continued gargling like a river over stones. “Not that ye haven’t earned the health returning to you, lad. The wee feller that’s just now left, he with the face that’s worn out three bodies? He said you got a mighty number of good folk free o’ that dreadful prison.”
Luke turned his face to the grey stone wall. But there was no hiding from a listening woman. And she listened well to the words he did not say. Luke's peripheral vision caught her signaling for a steaming bowl from another nurse's food cart.
Luke smelled the thin soup. He winced, prompting her hardest-stones voice.
“Turning as fussy about our food as your Frenchie friends on me, then?” She lifted the bowl from the tray and chose her weapon.
He raised his fingers. Could he show her before —
There. She stopped, hovered, put down the spoon.
“Ach, lad, easy,” she said softly, the rocks becoming smooth stones. “Is it the sores around your mouth troubles ye? Shall we try a syringe, then?”
Luke felt the blood leave his face.
She sighed. “Aimed in your mouth, not your veins, lad.”
He let his breath out.
“Aye, then?”
He nodded slowly.
She loaded a syringe and slipped it between his lips. The broth trickled down his throat.
He didn’t cough it back up, which must have pleased her, because her shoulders lost their at-the-ready stance.
He kept swallowing.
“Good, then,” she said when the bowl was empty. “Something nourishing in you, at long last.”
She pressed her hands to her knees and rose to see to the needs of others. He felt her return just as he was drifting off to sleep, and without the energy to raise his eyelids.
Her fingers sifted through his hair to make room for the press of her lips on his forehead.
It was something his mother might have done, after he’d accomplished something that pleased her. Waiting, like this woman, until she thought he was asleep, so that he would not grow too boastful of her love.
* * *
When he woke again Nurse MacArdle was approaching his bed, sweeping off a dark blue cape. Under her perfume, it smelled of the promise of spring. “Captain, look ye here. My brother Ian sends a present.”
Her hand disappeared into her pocket. “As if we are needing another stinking concoction around here! But he says it will help your mouth heal.” She opened a small tin.
Luke smelled home.
“Why, laddie,” she entreated, “what is it? Something hurts? Captain? Come now, show me where.”
He shook his head, feeling foolish.
“Shall I call over a doctor, then?”
He shook his head harder.
She found her handkerchief and blotted his tears. She smiled sadly. “Ach now, you can tell me. Do you nae tell me everything?” she teased.
He lifted his hand toward the gift. It shook, but he didn’t have to hide the shaking from her. Her eyes, as grey as the stone walls of the hospital, widened, even the one that only pointed inward.
“It’s the sheep grease gone made you all sentimental? How is that?" Two fingers touched her cheek. "Wait now, those big Yanks, they called you the shepherd. I thought they were casting you in a holy light, you know, for your rescuing, comparing you to our dear Lord. Is that what you were, then? Back in the wild American West? You’re a shepherd are ye, then?”
He smiled, smearing the grease across his lips.
She sat back, watching, grinning, before her no-nonsense voice returned. “Well, you’d best get yourself out of this bed, and soon. My brother will need an extra hand come shearing time.”
Luke smelled home and spring though the hospital scents, and through all the centuries of black powder warfare, fire, ritual and feasting behind it in this ancient place that Nurse MacArdle called "the Keep."
Over the next days Nurse MacArdle told him where her brother’s sheep station was, even mapping the way that her stout legs peddled the four miles distance, all within her stories of the sheep men going off to war, some lost at Dunkirk and others, many others shot down out of the skies as Philippe Charente had been.
* * *
Luke’s bruises turned yellow except around the burns and cuts, which were still red.
He needed to be of use.
So, finally, when he judged it to be a good day, he got up while it was still dark and the night nurse asleep in the far corner of the ward.
He put on the clothes Isabelle and Alain had left in the wooden chest at the foot of his bed. He laced up boots made fine again by Isaiah, and took his grandfather’s watch from its drawer, wound it, and placed it in the pocket over his heart.
He eased himself out the window and landed in small low-growing flowers, shielding themselves from the hearty wind. He did not know their names but one looked like owl's clover which bloomed in the mountains of his home, and another resembled heart leaf arnica.
He crossed the gray wool scarf around his chest, which no longer rattled when he breathed. And then, how to find his way? He would remember it from her stories.
As he rounded the third hill, the sun rose, glinting off the brook’s rushing water. He thought he heard a child crying.
Then he knew better. An abandoned spring lamb was caught, washed to the center patch of earth, on a branch of thorny briar.
Cold rushing water ran over the distressed creature, but the water was not deep. And the rushing brook would be of no danger to Luke, not unless he stumbled. He was stronger now, after walking the hospital grounds every day. He would not stumble. Still, he hesitated, and felt the sweat bead his brow, the short breaths constrict his lungs. He scanned the countryside around him. No one was coming for the animal.
The lamb’s struggle caught it further in the briar’s grip. The cries grew weaker. The brook, though high flowing, was not an ocean.
Not an ocean, ready to take him down.
Luke yanked off his boots and coat and waded in. The lamb’s face was a mix of black and white, like the badger face pattern on some of the churros at home. He held out his arms, trying to keep calm, not to frighten the animal. He wished he could find a song, or a voice to sing it.
The lamb allowed him, even without a voice, to remove her from the tangle. To take on her weight, heavier than it should have been. No, it was he who was weaker. She clung when he reached the shore again.
So he carried her toward the smoke rising over a hill, though he couldn’t do it without resting twice to capture his strength and breath. On the hill he heard the singing voices of children.
Who’d be a king, can any tell
When a shepherd lives so well
Lives so well and pays his due
With honest heart and tarry wool.
He felt lighter at the sound of their voices. Lighter, not so anchored in the boots and their promise to the airman Philippe Charente, still not kept.
Children’s voices had always made him feel like that, he realized now. So many things he was learning in his silent time, even things he should have always known.
Suddenly, he wanted to give thanks for this revelation, here at daybreak, where he had not said his Dinè prayers for a long time.
He held the soft lamb closer, feeling the thrumming of her heart against his own. He faced the east. He closed his eyes. The sun warmed his lids.
And he waited for words. To his astonishment, they came in song. In the Dinè language, the one he heard in his mother's womb, the one the matrons and teachers tried to soap from his mind, the one his country now wanted to use to help save the world from the grip of tyranny.
Father, the Sun,
Shine brightly upon her path this day,
Allow her to see the beauty in herself and in others.
Protect her. Keep her warm.
Oh, Woman who walks in beauty,
I am a friend now distant and silent.
I will care for you always.
When he opened his eyes Luke found a small band of children in a circle around him, staring. The lamb in his arms called out to one of them, just like a sheep at home, one who knows she belongs to one of his sister’s children. To Anaba or Lillie, or Burke.
He wondered if these children named their animals, the way his nieces and nephews did.
“Tilda!” a girl called, giving him his answer.
And just like one of their churros, when placed on her feet, Tilda ran for her girl, whose light curls matched her animal’s.
A boy of about eleven stepped before the others, his stance protective, his arms stiff at his sides.
“Do you understand my talk, man?” he called out.
Luke nodded.
“Are you a dirty spy?”
He shook his head. "I've had a bath."
The boy grunted out his frustration. “Are you German?”
“American.” For the first time, the word did not come out of him hostile, or sounding like a lie.
The boy’s frown deepened. “That was nae American words in yer singing.”
The tallest girl, one on the brink of her womanhood, joined him, her eyes steady on Luke’s even as she spoke to the boy.
“And what do you know of American singing, Alisdair MacArdle?” she demanded. “He’s dark, maybe one of their black men. Maybe it was the jazz he was singing.”
Luke smiled. “Is this the station of Ian MacArdle?” he managed a longer sentence, his own voice still sounding strange to him.
“It is,” Almost Woman said.
“I am sent by Ian MacArdle’s sister. To help with the shearing.”
The children closed their circle in tighter.
“From the hospital at the Keep she sent you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re Auntie’s Yank, then, from out of the Wild West of America?”
“Yes.”
The Dinè Yank, he finished in his head. Born to the Salt Clan, born for the Deer People.
The tallest girl walked closer, squinted up at him, as her hands came to rest on her hips. “Do ye wear braces, man?”
As he was trying to understand what she meant, the boy Alisdair moved in, opening Luke’s suit coat’s lapels and peering past his open vest.
“He does, Catriona, see?” he reported, showing them all Luke’s suspenders.
Almost Woman, whose given name was Catriona, smiled and nodded. “That’s good. I fear your fancy cut city trousers would fall off with the stooping.” She laughed a woman’s laugh. “We canna have that, as fine-formed a man as you may be.”
“Oh, aye, with eyes like the galloping Western horsemen in the picture shows,” Tilda’s Girl finished.
All the girls began giggling behind their hands then, just like the ones at home.
Women around the world enjoyed their ability to unnerve him, Luke decided.
“So,” he interrupted their festival, taking advantage of the rough texture of his newly-returned voice. “Now that you are sure my trousers will stay up, will you lead me to your shears and your sheep, little grandmothers?”
They all looked to Catriona.
“If Auntie Anna says so. Best not to cross that one.”
“I know,” he agreed.
By the time the sun was high in the sky, Luke's every muscle ached, and he worried he’d drunk their well dry of its water. But the farmer Ian MacArdle, a slight man whose face was set in a perpetual squint against their valley’s wind, grinned. "That's the lot of them, laddie," he said.
Luke had shucked the fleece off three dozen sheep, by Catriona’s reckoning. He’d nicked none, and accomplished his task in forty-six strokes for the last dozen. The children laughed at their animals rolling on their bared backs in the new grass.
Sounds interrupted all the laughter. Unwelcome, mechanical sounds.
Trucks, an automobile and an ambulance appeared. They screeched to a halt before the shearing pen.
Luke opened his grandfather's watch. Spencer’s men had taken three hours to hunt him down to this place, which made him wonder about the chances of the Allied war effort. Of course, Nurse MacArdle might have done some mis-directing.
Her brother joined his children as they formed a wall between Luke and his captors.
The vehicles emptied of Spencer’s men, hospital officials, and Stones-in-Her-Throat in high gear.
Ian’s squint deepened, making his eyes disappear. He nodded. “Sister,” he acknowledged only her.
Luke touched his sleeve.
“Best stay where ye are, lad,” the farmer advised, without turning. I wouldna worry yourself about the others and any displeasure they have with ye. But that one? There’s no holding herself once she starts. Give her a wide berth.”
The next voice was his sister’s.
“Luke Kayenta, your heart is as black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit!” she called out. “Traipsing off so these fine gentlemen had to spend the morning on a grand tour of the countryside to find ye!”
Her voice left its stones-in-the-brook and now rolled over thunder. “And ye’ll wipe that white-toothed smile from yer face this minute! You’re nae too big for a good hiding and clap on the jaw frae me!”
He opened his arms in the charged silence. “Your attention to my absence honors me, Nurse MacArdle.”
She stood stock still. Her eyes weren’t grey, Luke realized now, they only seemed so in his room. They reflected the colors she was near. They were the soft green of the new grass out here, at her brother’s farm and sheep station.
“Ye found it, lad,” she whispered, taking his hands in hers. "Ye found yer voice.”
“Aye.”
“Then ye had best let these great grey lummoxes fly ye on home, my lamb.”
The End
Eileen Charbonneau is a Rita and Heart of the West award-winning author of novels and screenplays. She’s been involved with theater and independent filmmaking projects, and is a storyteller of Irish and Native American tales. Eileen’s multi-cultural heritage includes Shoshone relatives who were three members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. You can reach her through her website: eileencharbonneau.googlepages.com, her blog: Manituwak.blogspot.com, on facebook as Eileen Charbonneau Author, via Twitter @EileenC1988 or by email: EileenCharbonneau@gmail.com
