Time of the Singing of Birds Read online

  Then suddenly an order came through to evacuate the position, abandon the hospital and equipment, except such as could be gathered in haste, and depart. Warning had come that the enemy was on the way.

  By night, in a shaky old ambulance they hastily bundled Barney Vance over rough roads, or no roads at all. They jolted frightfully, bringing all the pain of the past weeks back into the weakened body that had been bearing so much—bumping into looming trees in the pathway, not even stars to light them. There was distant booming of enemy fire, frightening rumors brought by stealthy scouts, whispered orders, hurrying feet, muted motors, and then an open sky. Careful, anxious hands carried the patients hurriedly across a stubbly field, and deposited them in haste in an airplane. A jerk, a roar, a dash, and they were soaring up, somehow like the eventualities of battle that had been so much a part of his life and thoughts for the past months, that he was plunged backward and roused to a tense alertness, wondering if he was responsible again to help quell what was going on. Then the whir of wings overhead, around, everywhere! Was the enemy pursuing? He looked up with a strange apathy, as he felt that they were mounting. Would they escape? Or was this the end, in a decrepit airplane, unable to escape? Shot down at the last, ignominiously, after two years of noble fighting! At least they all called the work he had done noble. But there didn’t seem much nobility to an end like this. Crippled, weak, sick, and no chance for escape!

  Still they were mounting. Were they going up to God now? Well, the enemy wouldn’t come that far, at least. Enemies would have to stop before they reached God’s throne. That was one refuge they would not dare to face.

  He drew a wary relaxed breath as he felt their altitude. Clouds around, below! He raised up on one elbow to get a glimpse out the window. There didn’t seem to be an enemy in sight. Had they lost them? But there was still the sound of bombs far below. Would the clouds keep their secret, or part and give the enemy another view to follow?

  He dropped wearily back on the roughly improvised pillow and closed his eyes. What did it matter? He had to go to sleep. Even in such straits, he had to go to sleep.

  When he awoke it was night, and they were coming down silently in the darkness. There was some trouble about refueling, but it didn’t have to concern him, though he was comfortably relieved when he felt the lift of wings again. They were going high now, but he did not look out to see if they were followed. He did not care. Perhaps they were really going to God, and that was all right with him if they did. He knew God. He had got acquainted with Him out there on the battlefield in all that stress. Of course his mother had tried to teach him from the time he was a mere babe, but it hadn’t somehow meant anything to him until he got out there facing danger. Danger and a battlefield. That was a great place to have God, the great God, come walking toward you with welcome on His face. A hand held out to help and lift. No, he wasn’t afraid of God.

  When he woke again he was being carried on a stretcher to a dim building where there was a hospital of sorts. But it didn’t matter. He was glad of any anchorage for the time.

  There followed an indeterminate period of dullness. Waiting for orders. Waiting for transportation. And then more journeying. A ship at last. But it was all hazy. He hadn’t even then quite roused to the consciousness of the moment enough to ask just where in the great world he was, or perhaps no one talked about those things. He hadn’t entirely come out of the stress of war far enough to care much. There were only two places that mattered anymore. Where he was, and home. And perhaps home was only a great wistfulness now, since he had had the word that his mother was gone. It was all just a great weariness, and wanting to get where he might have the say of what he should do and when he should eat and sleep. Rest was a great need.

  Then the rough truck journey to the ship, his first attempts to walk around by himself, without much desire to do so. Was it always going to be like this? This great aversion of his body to take the initiative in any movement? Would this continue? Was he half dead already? He wasn’t afraid of death outright, but this deadness of senses, this apathy of mind, this terrible weakness, it was intolerable. Sinking into a deck chair and closing his eyes brought momentary relief. Gradually the quiet of the sea, the invigorating salt air, cleared his brain. Hours came when he could walk with almost a spring in his step, when he could look off over the blue of the sea. Such peace of blue with sunlight on its billows. So wide, so quiet, so far from tumult and war! He was sailing, sailing! It was better than sailing up among the clouds. It was quieter. It rested him. This might go on forever.

  In the night the scene of peace changed. An ominous sound. Was it wind? Or wings? Motors? Hurrying footsteps, voices, shouts, sudden lights, startling words hurled hissingly through long whispers. And again the old tumult back, a pounding heart, presaging disaster. The enemy again? He must get up and fight for victory. He could not lie here and rest when the enemy was rampant again.

  Explosions! Yes, that must be a submarine! He sprang from his berth to investigate. A sudden long shudder through the ship. More explosions! He shook the sleep from his eyes and tried to think. He was back on the alert again now, dropping into the old training, thinking quickly, working fast, back among the crew taking a hand, his weakness forgotten, his mind racing ahead. Long hours of activity, anxiety, readiness for what might come, no time to think of where he was going, nor how it was going to be when he got there. No time to rest, or even to sleep or eat. No one with time enough to prepare meals. Putting out fires, saving their ship. There was plenty to be done, and not even a doctor with time enough to notice whether he was fit for the work he was doing.

  He told himself that perhaps it was as well, that is, when he had a split second to think about it. He had been getting lazy. That apathy was gone. It took an enemy, and threat of disaster, to bring him back to normal again. Oh, perhaps there might be a reaction afterward, and the apathy return. What he was doing now might delay his final recovery. Oh well, what did it matter? This was the job at hand and it must be done. Something that future generations might need for their well-being. This was what he was set to do. His business in life was to help win the war, not to humor his physical needs.

  So, the hours went by, and the ship was saved, the submarine vanquished. The anxiety lessened and a great impatience followed, a gradual lethargy stealing on again, as native skies drew nearer. Strange ships dimly on the horizon, airplanes at night! Would they never reach the land, the place of peace?

  He had thought when he left his home that he would not return until every enemy was vanquished, yet here he was, almost at home, and the war not won yet! A rising shame engulfed him. What had he not done that he might have done to save his world? He had wrought his best, and here he was almost back among a people that had expected so much of him and his companions, and now they had had to send him home, without them. It was ridiculous. He went over there to die, didn’t he? Why didn’t they let him stay and die then? He could have sent a few more deadly shots, couldn’t he, before he was done? What did it matter if he died doing it, after he had done his best? Why hold him to recover? Just his few last shots might have helped the deciding battle.

  Those were his last thoughts before he dropped out of consciousness.

  The birds sang on. And off in the distance there came the sound of cooing dove, bringing dimly to mind the rest of that verse. “The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle [dove] is heard in our land.”

  Chapter 3

  Three boys were wheeling by the old Vance house on bicycles that rattled and clattered, and showed their age nonchalantly. They looked toward the old house with something of a possessiveness in their eyes.

  “What’s become of the guy that usedta live here?” asked Jimmy Holzer. “He get killed or somepin’?”

  “Naw,” said Billy Lang, “I heard it was worse’n that. I guess he got took prisoner.”

  “Naw! You’re wrong!” said Boog Tiller importantly. “He got took by the enemy, all righty, after
he’d brought down seventeen of those mosquito things, or mebbe it was twenty-six, I forget which. An’ then they got him, and took him to ’n ’nterment camp, I guess it was, but he escaped, see? And he had all kinds of a time gettin’ back to his outfit, an’ mos’ died on the way, only some pal of his found him and carried him back to his own company, an’ he’s been in the hospital an awful long time. He was hurt bad, ya know. But they say now he’s gonta get well after all, an’ he’s gonta be sent home for rest, sometime, mebbe soon.”

  “You mean he’s gonta come back here to Vance’s Point? You mean we can see him again sometime, Boog?”

  “Could be,” said Boog, speculatively.

  “Oh, gee! Wouldn’t that be great? Mebbe they’ll have a celebration with a procession an’ eats an’ things, an’ we can be there!”

  “Could be,” said Boog again, contemplating the possibility of giving out such information as a fact, and whether it might have any bad reactions for the giver of such news, provided it didn’t turn out to be exactly true. However, one could always qualify it by prefacing such information by the words “I heard—”

  But the subject of all this speculation was sweetly sleeping behind the apple blossom screen, and didn’t hear. Even though the voices of the boys were by no means hushed, but rang out clearly as if they wanted to make an audience hear. So they wheeled on around the bend of the road and could be heard no more.

  Two old men and their hired helper, sitting in the back of a truck steadying a plow, were the next to pass by.

  “I see that young Vance has been doing great things over there across the water,” said Ezekiel Summers, as he drove down the road gripping the wheel of his car with his gnarled old hands, and nodding toward the old house. “Pity his ma ain’t alive to know about it. They tell me where they read in the papers how he got a star and a purple something for honorable bravery—ain’t that what they call it? Yes, it certainly is a pity his ma can’t know about it. It would have done her heart good. She certainly did think a heap of that boy o’ hers, an’ rightly, too. She done a good job, bringing him up, all alone as it were, without any dad to help. He ain’t no sissy, neither, even if he has got a college education, an’ wasted a lotta time playin’ ball, an’ got his picture in the papers. But I guess we can rightly be proud of him in our town in spite of all that, after all them enemy planes he done for.”

  “Yeah,” said the tough young plowman, Sam Gillers, “but they do say he’s been wounded bad. Some say he may not get well. He might not even come home at all. There’s thousands of them boys just die, and their folks don’t know for a long time.”

  “Aw, yes, their folks get notices,” said Ike Peterson. “The gov’nment’s been real nice about sendin’ their folks word about what’s happened to ’em, afore they tell it to the papers, Zeke!”

  “Well, yes, I guess they have been kinda careful about such things,” said Zeke. “But you know it ain’t so easy to attend to all such little trifles when you’ve got a whole army to look out for. Besides, they don’t waste many words tellin’ their folks. There was the Barrowses only just got word their Joe was missin’ in action, an’ got took pris’ner an’ they haven’t had one word since, an’ that was two years, lackin’ a month, ago, an’ Miz Barrows she’s pretty near went crazy about that boy of hers. They oughtn’t to wait that long, I don’t think.”

  “Well, in this case,” spoke up the young plowman, “there ain’t nobody to let know, since Miz Vance passed on. There ain’t none of his folks left around here.”

  “Well, I guess Roxy an’ Joel think a lot o’ that Barney fella. Roxy’s took care o’ him since he was a babe in arms,” said Summers.

  “Yes, I guess she has,” said Peterson.

  Their echoing voices clanged among the apple blooms and seemed to hit the very clapboards of the old house as they passed, but they did not reach the sleeper whose dreams were sweet and deep.

  A little later, when the morning sun was mounting higher, a stylish car drove by with two dashing girls talking hilariously above their motor’s noise.

  “Oh boy! I wish this war would end!” yawned one daintily. “I’m fed up with all the things we do these days, and all the things we can’t do. It’s too ridiculous, telling us we can’t have things we like to eat, and not giving us all the gas we want. Why, I’ve heard there’s plenty of gas, stored up somewhere. What right have they got to tell us we can’t take pleasure rides, I’d like to know? Look at all their spending, sending tanks around the world. That must cost a lot! I don’t really think I believe in war, anyway,” said Irma Watts. “They act like they were playing a game trying to see which could kill the most. For my part, I don’t see why the good people have to go out and endanger their lives just because some crazy people across the ocean want to fight. Look at Mary Forbes having to go to work, and let her young husband go off for no telling how long, and maybe never come back. And Janet Waters with three babies to take care of. And her husband has to get called. He goes next Monday. I don’t think it’s fair, do you, Hortense? I don’t see why somebody doesn’t do something about it. I think it’s time for this war to be over, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” yawned Hortense, “I think it’s an awful bore!”

  “Say, Hortense, isn’t this the old Vance house? Didn’t you used to have a crush on the handsome boy they called Barney? Seems to me they told me that when I got back from visiting my grandmother. What became of him?”

  “Oh, he’s gone to war of course, like everybody else,” said Hortense. “There’s hardly any men left in town worth speaking about. But they say some of them are coming back on furloughs pretty soon. I shouldn’t wonder if Barney Vance would be coming home. Nobody seems to know. Yes, I used to go with him a lot. We were practically engaged before he went to war, but of course he was pretty much under his mother’s thumb, and she had a terrible religious complex. She didn’t want him to do this and that, and he had to go with her to church. Even after he grew up she hung on to him, and she and I never would have hit it off. But now, she’s out of the way, I might be interested in him again. We’ll see! He was a nice kid, and awfully handsome of course.”

  “He’s maybe changed a lot himself,” said Irma.

  “Well, yes, probably. He wouldn’t have stood for lipstick and blush, not in the old days. But he’s likely come in touch with a little European sophistication, and learned how girls ought to look. Anyhow, why should I care?” And Hortense tossed her dark curls back from her forehead and tilted her ridiculous little trifle of a hat down over one eye with anticipatory assurance, while her laugh rang out noisily and startled a wood robin that was practicing a love song on a tree by Barney’s window. Perhaps it was the cessation of that love song that made Barney wake up, and then the next sound that he heard was the shuffling of Roxy’s old felt slippers as she scuffled along the hall that led to his room. The footsteps paused, and there came the subdued tinkle of glass against silver. Roxy was bringing his breakfast, the way she used to bring it when he was a kid and had been sick for a few days, measles or mumps or something. He half smiled and opened his eyes. Softly he heard the doorknob turn, and Roxy’s gray head and the gleam of her steel-rimmed spectacles appeared cautiously.

  “Hello, Roxy!” he called with his old grin. “Top of the morning to you! What are you tiptoeing in so carefully for? I don’t have to go to school this morning, do I?”

  Roxy almost cried at the familiar greeting, and her sweet old lips parted in her well-remembered merry smile.

  “Bless you, dear boy!” she said. “No, you don’t have to go to school anymore. Leastways, not to the old village school. Perhaps you’ll find a few more lessons in the school of life for you to learn yet, but this morning you’re home, and you have the whole day before you. Ready for breakfast, are you?”

  “You betcher life, Roxy. Real home-cooked breakfast! That’s something I haven’t had for two long years. Whatcha go, Roxy? Is that bacon I smell? And eggs? Pancakes? Oh boy! Honey? From our bees? S
ay, Roxy! That’s swell! I was afraid honey might be rationed, or perhaps the bees had gone to war.”

  Roxy laughed happily. “No, the bees ain’t gone yet. They’re using mosquitoes instead in the war, I heard. I read something about that in the papers.”

  “Say, Roxy, you still have your fine old sense of humor, haven’t you? That’s good. You said you were getting old, Roxy, but you’re mistaken. You couldn’t twinkle like that if you were old.”

  “Oh, go ’way with you, child!” said Roxy happily.

  “Say, this is a swell breakfast, Roxy, and I see you’ve started in to spoil me just the way you always did. Didn’t you know I’ve graduated from having my breakfast in bed? They wouldn’t have let me come home if I hadn’t. You can’t baby a big soldier like that, Roxy. The government will get after you if you do.”

  Roxy dropped into a straight chair with her arm over the back and sat there beaming on her adored nursling as he ate his breakfast and joked with her, until she was convinced that he had not lost any of his old spirit by going to war, grim as it must have been. And when he had eaten the last crumb she rose to take the tray.

  “Want some more of anything?” she asked anxiously.

  “Not on your life, Roxy,” he said with a grin. “You know it doesn’t do to feed a starving person too much at the first meal, and I’m sure I’ve already eaten twice as much as I should have eaten for the first meal at home. Now, Roxy, sit down again and tell me all about everybody. Where are all the fellows and the girls I used to run around with? Are any of them here yet?”

  Roxy sighed. “Well, no, only a couple of them. Cy Baxter is still in the bank. You know he has flat feet, and he’s tried several things and they won’t take him. Of course his mother’s glad, but she keeps it to herself, though you can’t blame her. She’s almost blind, and he’s all she’s got.”

  “No, I suppose war is hard for mothers. It must have been hard for mine, although she urged me to go, said she was glad I wanted to. She always taught me to be loyal to my country, and brave to do the right thing, even if it meant fighting and dying, for a principle.”