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  Praise for

  CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY

  “If you haven’t yet discovered the offbeat genius of Kathleen Rooney, start here with a novel both heartbreaking and sharply funny. It justifies its own premise on the first page, and quickly surpasses that premise. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is brilliant and surprising at every turn.”

  —Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Great Believers

  “Imaginative and audacious . . . Rooney uses Cher Ami’s bird’s-eye view and curious afterlife to exhilarating, comic, and terrifying effect, while Whit’s tragic fate is exquisitely rendered. . . . Unforgettable . . . A celebration of animal intelligence, and tribute to altruism and courage.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Hands down, one of the best books of the year. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is a magnificent achievement and everything I want from a novel. I loved it.”

  —J. Ryan Stradal, bestselling author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota

  “You’ll be amazed at the depths of character Rooney plumbs from a literal bird’s-eye-view, and by how she entwines the voices of a messenger pigeon and a witty, disconsolate veteran to craft a story based on true events.”

  —Chicago Magazine

  “A properly mysterious, warmly convincing work of bright imagination. A pigeon and a haunted man returned generously, gently, to the story of the world.”

  —Sebastian Barry, Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Days Without End

  “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is a splendid novel; so smart, so beautifully written—a heroic tale of the cross-species relationship between pigeon and man during the Great War. Affecting and imaginative, this story vibrated deep in my heart because it all felt so very true.”

  —Annie Hartnett, author of Rabbit Cake

  “Her well-researched novel touches on the folly of war (particularly this war), the sentience of animals, and—especially—survivor guilt and imposter syndrome. Rooney’s writing has a delicate lyricism. . . . She injects humor and whimsy into an otherwise solemn story. A curiosity but richly imagined and genuinely affecting.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Kathleen Rooney’s immersive, immaculate new novel is both a memorial and an imperative, broadening our collective definition of humanity and courage. In bell-clear prose, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey paints a harrowing portrait of the callousness and deep compassion of those—both man and bird—involved in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Like Rooney’s rich and poignant characters, readers will emerge from the pocket irrevocably changed.”

  —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

  “In this extraordinary novel Kathleen Rooney manages to transport the reader both inside the foxholes of World War I and above them, flying over a landscape grotesquely altered by a war whose logic defies all efforts—both human and animal—to grasp it. Both a gripping tale of survival during and after war, and a contemplation of the ties between human and animal, this is a beautiful, original, deeply empathetic book.”

  —Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations

  “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is brilliant—elegant and wise, deeply felt and flecked with humor. Rooney has a gift for illuminating the intimate desires of her historical characters while offering insights into our own bruised reality. It takes command and courage to write a novel as daring yet as quietly resonant as this one. I was blown away.”

  —Sarah Domet, author of The Guineveres

  Praise for

  LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK

  “Transporting . . . witty, poignant and sparkling.”

  —People (People Picks Book of the Week)

  “Prescient and quick . . . A perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Extraordinary . . . hilarious . . . Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time—and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge past and future.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Rooney’s delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Truman Capote. Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney’s nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY

  © Beth Rooney

  Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She is the author, most recently, of the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the co-editor of René Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Her previous work includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Salon, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and elsewhere. She teaches English and creative writing at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.

  Look for the reading group discussion guide in the back of this book. To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit penguinrandomhouse.com.

  ALSO BY KATHLEEN ROONEY

  FICTION

  Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte

  O, Democracy!

  NONFICTION

  René Magritte: Selected Writings

  For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs: Essays

  Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

  Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America

  POETRY

  Robinson Alone

  That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (with Elisa Gabbert)

  Oneiromance (an epithalamion)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Rooney

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Rooney, Kathleen, 1980– author.

  Title: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey / Kathleen Rooney.

  Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019051665 (print) | LCCN 2019051664 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135425 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525507093 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Meuse River Valley—Fiction. | Cher Ami (Pigeon)—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.O676 C47 2020 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.O676 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051665

  This is a work of fiction based on actual events.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  IN TOKEN

  OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS,

  THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

  TO

  MARTIN SEAY.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Kathleen Rooney

  About the Author

  Also by Kathleen Rooney

  Title Page

  Copyright


  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  In the great majority of animals there are traces of physical qualities and attitudes, which qualities are more markedly differentiated in the case of human beings. For just as we pointed out resemblances in the physical organs, so in a number of animals we observe gentleness and fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirits or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something akin to sagacity.

  —Aristotle, History of Animals

  We want men, men, men.

  —General Joseph Joffre to President Woodrow Wilson, April 1917

  CHAPTER 1

  CHER AMI

  Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers.

  I myself have become a monument, a feathered statue inside a glass case.

  In life I was both a pigeon and a soldier. In death I am a piece of mediocre taxidermy, collecting dust in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

  The museum has closed, and everyone has gone home. The last guests took their leave at five thirty, as they do every weekday, and even the janitorial staffers have finished their tasks: miles of floors polished and pine-scented, acres of displays gleaming and silent. A few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the one-hundred-year anniversary of what, according to the United States Army, was the most important day of my avian life: October 4, 1918.

  I’m not sure I agree. That day was an important one, certainly, but days don’t carry the same meaning for pigeons as they do for humans, and my life comprised other days, days that might be equally worth note, if not to the army then at least to me and to those I loved.

  Pigeons can love.

  Pigeons cannot fight. Yet I was once as well known to schoolchildren and grown-up citizens alike as any human hero of what was then called the Great War.

  Hence the stuffing of my mangled body. Hence my enshrinement here, in the grandmother’s attic of the entire country.

  I hear the tale of my heroism—the simple version—over and over. I used to hear it daily from patriotic patrons who knew it by rote. Time having passed, other wars having superseded my own, nowadays I hear it every week or so from history-buff parents—usually French or British but sometimes American—as they lead their kids from case to case. Or I hear it from precocious children themselves, animal lovers fascinated by what I did. In their reedy voices, birdlike in their own right, they tell the tale as follows: During that big war in France, some American soldiers got trapped in enemy territory. They were called the Lost Battalion because they got surrounded by the Germans. They released homing pigeon after homing pigeon with messages for help. They watched and watched as the little birds fell, shot down by enemy fire. But the last pigeon, Cher Ami right here, wasn’t going to let that stop him. Even though he got shot through the chest and the leg, the brave bird struggled on, carrying his note for forty kilometers—American kids say twenty-five miles—until, close to death, he arrived at his loft at the American base. Thanks to Cher Ami, all the soldiers were saved.

  Their parents will smile and say, Very good.

  Occasionally a child who doesn’t know the story of the Lost Battalion will glance my way as she goes by. Catching sight of my single orange leg, she will ask, Why? Why does the pigeon only have one foot?

  Balanced there on my polished oak base, I will want to explain. Naturally, I can’t.

  The little girl and her parents will see that I am displayed near a Yeoman (F) uniform and a field telephone. They’ll read the plaque beneath the black-and-white photograph of an infantryman’s back as he trails a spool of wire through the woods, toward the front: TELEPHONES WERE ONE OF SEVERAL NEW TECHNOLOGIES DEPLOYED IN THE SERVICE OF WAGING WAR, it states. TROOPS STRUNG MILES OF TELEPHONE WIRE IN THE FIELD, ALLOWING INSTANT COMMUNICATION. BUT THE LINES PROVED VULNERABLE, AND THE ARMY OFTEN RELIED ON TRADITIONAL MEANS TO RELAY MESSAGES—HUMAN RUNNERS AND CARRIER PIGEONS.

  The little girl and her parents will look at the engraved silver band around my remaining leg, identifying me as National Union of Racing Pigeons Number 615. I’ve never thought of myself that way, only as Cher Ami, my given name: French, meaning “Dear Friend,” though I was a British bird.

  The family will read my placard, quite brief, which states:

  CHER AMI, ONE OF THE 600 CARRIER PIGEONS DEPLOYED BY THE U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS, WAS AWARDED THE FRENCH CROIX DE GUERRE WITH PALM FOR HIS HEROIC SERVICE.

  Huh, they’ll say, and wander off, satisfied. And I, too, will feel satisfied, partly, at the knowledge they’ve gained.

  The placard gets my name at least, if not my gender. Even now, more than a century after I was first misidentified, that error still grates. Though originally registered as a Black Check cock, I’m really a Blue Check, and when I was being taxidermied, they discovered that I was—that I am—a hen. The man doing the job informed them as much, but since they’d already had the placard made and budgets were tight, they didn’t pay to change it. Good enough for government work, they said, and laughed. I’ve been wrongly called a cock bird ever since, in history books and military records.

  I never behaved like a typical hen, it’s true. But I am a female, and female war heroes are rarely given their due.

  This erasure annoys me.

  I do appreciate that placard for its refusal to overemphasize me: one of six hundred. There were so many of us, and so many of us could be called heroic. My fellow pigeon President Wilson, for instance, my fond companion during the war who joined me for a time in this display case, this eternal institutional afterlife. They shipped him over to the Pentagon in 2008, I think. I miss him.

  Though he’s not the bird I miss the most.

  Pigeons have an almost bottomless capacity for longing.

  I’ve still got Sergeant Stubby in here with me, sleeping now. He and I talk and talk and talk when we’re both awake.

  He was the mascot of the 102nd Infantry, 26th Division, accompanying his unit in the hellish French trenches, awarded a gold medal by General John J. Pershing. A consummate joiner, as are most dogs, he was made a lifetime member of the Red Cross, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the American Legion. He stands over there by the canteen, the bread tin, the wire cutters, the first-aid kit, the mess kit, and the trench periscope, looking as pert and ferocious as he did in life, or so he assures me.

  His paws, quick and light, look ready to leap from his mahogany block mount, and even in repose his underslung jaw seems ready to bite the enemy or eat a treat. His ears appear as though they could still rotate to hear an incoming shell, and his studded leather collar gives his stalwart adorability the slight sharpness that befits an army pup. I never call him Stubby; I call him Sarge, because my doing so pleases him. He’s a dog of uncertain breed but seems mostly Boston terrier in appearance and temperament. He’s also the only dog—as he’ll tell you, repeatedly—to have been nominated for rank and promoted to sergeant through combat.

  I don’t much care about rank. Most of us pigeons are less fixated on titles and decorations than on missions completed. In this respect we resemble the flying aces—or so I gather; we had no contact with them during the war and certainly never sought to emulate them. Something about perf
orming one’s duties alone, aloft above the carnage, may engender this attitude.

  Dogs, on the other hand, are infantry through and through, not to mention rule-bound and craving of human regard. Sarge deserves the regard that he received. He served eighteen months on the front, in seventeen battles. He gave comfort to the wounded, saved his regiment from a mustard-gas attack, and stopped a German soldier by clasping the seat of his pants in his terrier jaws until human reinforcements arrived to complete the capture.

  He, unlike me, is excited about my centenary. But as I said, dogs are like that. I am to wake him at midnight so he and I can celebrate. Knowing Sarge, this will mean that we will reminisce and sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Dogs love singing. And I love Sergeant Stubby. His uncomplicated good cheer and patience remain constant even in death, and I can see why the men of the Yankee Division adored him. His owner had his pelt mounted on a plaster cast after he died in his sleep in 1926, and Sarge passed into the heterogeneous holdings of the Smithsonian in 1956, where he still greets each day as though this placement were the best and most unexpected surprise.

  Sarge is, however, not immune to indignation and is given to wondering aloud why the army hasn’t seen fit to present either of us—or, for that matter, the many other creatures who served alongside us, birds and horses and mules and dogs—with the Distinguished Service Cross. The DSC was not, I remind him, an honor customarily presented to animals, at least not while any of us were alive. Well, a posthumous award is still an award, he always replies, snuffling.

  General Pershing did give me a small silver medal, but it was just a made-up thing. Though aren’t all honors, really? Either we believe that they matter or we don’t.

  Still, I like having my Croix de Guerre here next to me. Next to, not on, as it’s too large and heavy for a pigeon to wear, and I haven’t a uniform on which to pin it. The French have long been more willing to perceive valor in sapient creatures of species other than human. Their citation notes that I—NURP Number 615, Cher Ami, un pigeon voyageur—was responsible for the safe delivery of twelve battlefield messages in France. Here in the States, I’m remembered only for that final voyage, but I flew many missions before being invalided out trying to save my Lost Battalion.