Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (22 page)

But she was homesick for Oregon.
Careful…Don’t let the panic in your heart get started…Slow your breathing, slow your heart beat.
She missed her husband and her child so awful much. It had been not quite 2 years since she’d run for Blair’s life and took the helm; almost two years since she had felt the soft skin of her child’s cheek, or smelled his baby-scented hair.
Oh…God…
She grabbed her stomach and curled fetal-like on her bed, willing her sudden nausea to go away. She tried to quickly tamp down thoughts of Sean and Victor whenever they bubbled up to her consciousness. But sometimes the blues swamped over her, leaving her depressed and fairly bereft of hope she would ever see her family again. She knew Blair was not strong enough to return to Oregon.

Anyway, Cindy had sent a letter to Sean months earlier asking him to forget Blair. Rebecca was widowed, and Cindy had told Sean to marry another.

Cindy fought her depression by getting up and going shopping on Navy Pier. She’d stopped at the bakery window and paid for a cinnamon roll and coffee. She strolled a few shop windows farther, then stopped to gaze through a jeweler’s window at a darling watch piece. The gold neck chain was spaced every few inches with pale pink crystal beads. The front of the piece was beautifully scrolled, but what caught Cindy’s eye was inside. The shopkeeper had opened the piece to show a porcelain face, hand-painted with pale pink calla-lilies.
What a guilty pleasure it would be, to wear something close to my heart which so reminds me of the Marshall home
, Cindy mused.
It’s too expensive. You mustn’t.

“Oh, young lady, you simply must!” The shopkeeper had walked out the open door to engage the beautiful young woman who was contemplating the ladies’ timepiece. He’d only placed it in his front window that morning. “The watchmaker no doubt had you in his mind when he crafted its beauty. Come, let me show it to you,” the shopkeeper said, bowing deeply.

Cindy could not resist. She followed the shopkeeper inside to see the timepiece up close. It was exquisite. And, Cindy had reasoned, her twenty-second birthday was coming up. When she’d handed it back to the man to wrap up, he asked her, “how would you like it engraved, Miss?” Cindy was momentarily stumped. She did not know if she should put her name on the piece or Blair’s name on the piece. But the man, wrongly sensing her hesitation at paying extra for engraving, interrupted her thoughts saying, “Tell you what, Miss. I will put on there for you a name, a special date, a favorite proverb, you just name it. And I won’t charge you but for half the standard engraving fee.”

Cindy thought a moment. “You can put a proverb on it?”

“On the backside, yes Miss.”

Cindy smiled and turned coyly away from the man as she reached into her bodice and withdrew the treasured Emily Dickinson poem. She had long since transferred the strangely soothing words onto a piece of pink stationery, which she handed the shopkeeper. “Can you engrave all of those words on the backside?”

The jeweler read the words to himself and smiled as he finished, nodding. “I, too, am a fan of Miss Dickinson. Haunting yet alluring, do you agree?”

“Yes, I do.” Cindy replied. “How long will that take you, sir?”

“Oh, by the time you walk to the end of Navy Pier and back to this spot again, it will be ready for you. I’ll get to it straight away.”

Chapter 48

September, 1939

Cloverdale, Oregon

L
orette moved into the Marshall’s house six years earlier, soon after Sean was found near dead in a dry creek bed smack in the middle of the Great Burn. Will could not be expected to run the farm and gristmill by himself and look after Mavis and Sean too. The solution became obvious; they needed to hire a housekeeper and nurse companion. Lorette nursed Sean back to some semblance of health, fetched Mavis whenever she began wandering through the house in her confused state, and cooked and cleaned for the men. Lorette was an extremely busy young woman. She was buxom and a little on the ample side. She was not a great beauty, but neither was she unattractive with her bouncy blonde hair that fell below her shoulders whenever it wasn’t pinned up, and generous lips. Sean was certain that his brother sometimes watched Lorette for too long whenever she exited a room, but Lorette never seemed to notice any of Will’s attention. She was simply a young woman who was grateful for a full-time job that included such grand room and board.

Two months before the second Tillamook Burn, Lorette’s job became a little easier. She suddenly had one less patient to worry about. She’d been out in the garden when Mavis rose early from her nap and began wandering the downstairs rooms again. Her cataracts were as thick as jelly wax, and for some time, she’d been unable to make out anything more than shadows. When Lorette found Mavis, she was cowering in the corner of the music room in extreme distress over being lost and not knowing where she was. Lorette did her best to calm the elderly woman down, but the experience had rattled Mavis’s final reserve of strength. She died in her sleep later that same night.

No one blamed Lorette except Lorette. She atoned by lavishing attention on Sean, who grew rankled by the constant care. Her hovering finally forced him out of bed each day and pushed him to his limits, something that saved him from wasting away. The tip of the tree had hit Sean square across his midsection. It had cracked four of his ribs, damaged his spleen, and had broken his back in several places. The injuries resulted in making his heart work all the harder just to take breaths. Now his heart was abnormally sized and working twice as hard as that of a healthy man. Sean knew that he needed to take life easier, but he refused to lie in bed like an invalid. If that would be his existence, he would just as soon die.

That day, Sean rose early and got right to the business of picking through old photographs. He had started his own business turning his historic, scenic photos into picture postcards. They were much in demand, since the Tillamook forests ceased to exist, having been devoured by fire, twice. The forests of the scenic Pacific Northwest lived only in the minds of those who could remember and on Sean Marshall’s postcards. The postcard business and Sean’s sideline of making ham radio sets didn’t just add to the family income; they gave Sean Marshall a reason to live. Once again, Sean had saved nearly enough money to attend the college and become an engineer. He was registered for the spring semester. Sean sat cross-legged on the large braided rug in the parlor. The room had three floor-to-ceiling windows to provide the light he needed, but he swore that he could still smell his mother’s strong cologne emanating from the bedroom just off the parlor, and it persisted in making him feel melancholy about all the people missing from his life. He picked up his pencil and began rating each of the photographs on a point system. Then he went back through the pile and began numbering them in order of quality. He decided he would send off only the top twenty-four and see how they fared. He was cataloging the remaining photographs as he returned them to their boxes when Will burst through the parlor doors.

“Sean! You’re not going to believe this! Guess who I just heard is getting himself a ham radio set?” He did not bother to wait for his surprised, mildly annoyed brother to answer before he blurted the answer. “Preacher Bowman! That’s who!”

“Baloney!” Sean laughed. “He’d never dream of asking me to build him a set. I’m not sure I would even if he paid me double.”

“Well, he ain’t gonna ask you. I guess there’s a guy up in Garibaldi who builds ‘em now. Your friend Osborne from over there in Salem was just by and stopped to say hello. I didn’t know you was up or I’d have asked him in, Sean—”

“That’s okay. Get on with it,” he urged.

“Right. Anyways, he got a set built by this Garibaldi guy and applied for his license. Osborne says everything checks out, so…I guess we’re gonna have us a new voice in the night to chit-chat with.” The mirth in Will’s eyes was unmistakable.

“Glad you’re having so much fun with this, Will,” his now-dour brother answered. “We’ll have no peace—the deviate’s voice can intrude into our very own parlor, day or night.”

“Yeah.” His chuckle had been full of good humor, but Sean raised a negative Will had not considered. Still, Sean clearly missed what it was about the news that had lifted Will’s spirits. “But listen. I thought that maybe, just maybe, the preacher might allow Victor to, you know, talk on the radio now and then. I mean, Victor’s at an age now where the preacher might just have trouble keeping him off’a it.”

Sean looked over to the radio sitting idle on the desk by the window. “Victor,” he said, looking up sadly at his brother. “You know, Will, I was thinking last night when I couldn’t fall asleep, that I can’t really picture Blair so clear in my head anymore. I’m forgettin’ what she looked like unless I study the portrait. And I don’t remember what she sounded like. Her memory’s fading as fast as my blue jeans.”

The mirth drained from Will’s eyes. He crossed the threshold and sat in a chair across from his brother’s position on the floor. He studied his hands for a few seconds, but when he finally looked at his brother, he was as serious as a heart attack.

“Sean, brother, it has been more than seven years since she left. Seven years. We don’t even know if she’s alive. Rebecca’s alone now too. She still loves you, you know. It’d be far better to drift off to sleep with images of a woman who is real, who’s here and who loves you, than to pine for someone who’s never coming back.” He paused. “Little brother, I promised myself I wouldn’t intrude on your privacies, but I think it needs saying for your own good. Sean, your wife is never coming home to you.”

“I know.”

Sean went back to flipping through photos, but aimlessly. Will studied his hands some more, twirled his mustache, coughed. The silence grew louder by the second.

“So, whaddya think of the preacher doin’ a radio broadcast? Maybe he’s planning to do sermons on the air or something like that.”

“Nah. He’s just a lonely old man, like the rest of us.”

But Sean was thinking how unlike other men the preacher was. Sean knew that Bowman was not merely old and lonely but old and dirty. Sean’s fingers stopped flipping photos. He looked up at his brother as the thought occurred to him, and slowly, his mouth turned into a devious grin.

“I think I know something that will spark up anything the preacher has to say over the airwaves.”

Will was relieved to see his brother smile and to have the tension empty out of the room. “I recognize that grin. What have you got up your sleeve?”

“I think it’d be much more fun for you if it were a surprise, Will. I’m gonna go give Ozzie a call. ”

Chapter 49

C
indy celebrated her twenty-eighth birthday on September 1, 1939, with an abundance of champagne, provided by her date, and dinner with friends at the Table D’hôtel. The milestone was punctuated by Germany’s invasion of Poland and an ultimatum that would set off the beginning of the Second World War. But Cindy’s spirit for celebrating had been dampened first by the news that Tillamook forests in Oregon were again gripped by a fire holocaust. Much the same as the fire of six years earlier, this one raged between the Wilson and Trask Rivers, blackening more than 200,000 acres.

From pictures in the papers reaching as far as Chicago, one would think there was little left for a fire to eat. But flames found food among the deadfalls, debris, young seedlings that never had a chance to grow, and thousands of bleached snags jutting for steep miles across the area of the huge Burn of ‘33. Cindy looked in horror and disbelief at the destruction evident in the photos. Much of the region of her childhood was unrecognizable, and she could find none of the familiar landmarks. They were all gone.

She had been surprised by the intensity of her own grief over the news. Her life in the county of Tillamook had certainly not resembled any fairy tale, save perhaps the wicked fiend who was the preacher. But the forests had been her asylum whenever her existence reached the pitiful lows that it had time and again, and in many ways, Sean Marshall had been her prince. Now those forests were dead, maybe forever.

Cindy knew that she’d been blessed with those short years living in the Marshall home and being the recipient of their love and kinship. She also knew that she would not be grieving over people she did not feel a genuine love for in return. So, perhaps grief is the price that must be paid for the privilege of that love and kinship, and the deeper the love, the deeper the grief.

She had been immensely saddened six years earlier by the report of Elrod Tjaden’s death. The papers had lauded him and his seriously wounded friend, Sean Marshall, heroes for risking their lives in order to set up radio communications for the firefighters. Cindy worried who she might lose this time. The loggers were calling the area jinxed, apparently in the Biblical sense. They were predicting the fire plague would continue every six years, three times in a row.

To the surprise and amusement of her date, she silently prayed before her plate of cherry-roasted game hen. She prayed to God that she lose no more of her friends to Satan’s little games. Her date, Chester Lasley, completely mistook Cindy’s prayerful concern as being about the day’s events in Europe. He thought it funny that a high-class whore should fret about world crisis, and he patted her hand patronizingly as he refilled her champagne glass.