The Hawkman by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Author:Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fairy Tale Retelling, Fairy Tale, Historical Fiction, WWI, PTSD, Magical Realism, 20th Century History, Romance, Literary, War & Military
ISBN: 9781944995683
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Mr. Sheehan had also changed over the course of Miss Williams’s convalescence, in manner if not in appearance. He remained steadfastly quiet but less silent, in the language he must have developed between himself and the authorities. He acknowledged the doctor and nurses with nods of his head, and offered his hand in greeting to male visitors, including the reverend and the president of the historical society. To women, such as Miss Williams’s colleagues, he bowed. His yellow eyes kept watch on every movement in the room and on her bed, Miss Williams noticed, but with less of the varnish that had once made its stare so threatening. He was a constant presence, and yet when he took her on those painstaking walks down the floor of the infirmary, he was more distant than he ever had been.

When they had been together in the cottage, Miss Williams had tried to intuit the wanderings of Mr. Sheehan’s mind. She had failed, and this was the punishment; in the infirmary he was as much of a puzzle to her as he had been at their first meeting. She could know only how easily he met her pace, as he escorted her through the halls to the college’s gardens; he did not rush or risk the slightest hint of impatience. She could know only how carefully he held her hands, whether they were on one of their walks or she was laying on the cot, and he was seated beside her. She could know only the soreness and fatigue he must have bitten off to continue supporting her at that leaden pace. She could know only that whatever his own suffering during the war, it had been lobbed off, discarded for a while, to attend to her suffering because there was possibility in it. The possibility of recovering, which did not necessarily belong to his own trials.

Her deliberate gait, the effort she put into each footfall—no matter how difficult—Sheehan took joy in them, because he was convinced she would come back to herself. She would be restored in place and prominence. It was all that he wanted, even for himself, once he repatriated. After the handwritten letter from King George was thrust into his hands, his welcoming committee boiled down to a pair of functionaries, a major and his secretary from His Majesty’s Army.

His debriefing lasted for days, it seemed, in the Dover barracks. In some ways the British officers were no different from the Germans in the beginning, with their emphasis on names: the enlisted and officers, those he encountered in the camps but at peacetime could not be accounted for among the dead and injured. Then the names of other Irish with whom he might have colluded. It was a fact that the Germans gave the Irish preferential treatment.

But those two men, the major and his secretary, knew the answers to the questions they put to him before they started: the succession of camps, whether there were other Irish, what the International Committee of the Red Cross had so scrupulously observed in each setting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.