Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 9

  Attunement with another creature feels magical, a brief stay against dread. It’s true for humans, and it’s true for us pigeons.

  Our longest stop was at Victoria Station in London, a city whose immensity I could sense from the track. Our supply train’s arrival—according to the American Expeditionary Forces, we qualified as supplies—coincided with that of a train full of troops, Americans like those we were going to aid.

  Their accents were strange. They complained as they stretched their legs on the platform and received cups of English war coffee, evidently weak and terrible-tasting to their tongues. “Coffee in name only,” said one of them, spitting onto the rails.

  Bored of the beverage, the soldier dug into the pocket of his uniform and threw a penny toward a group of soot-cheeked young boys near a newsstand, thereby inciting a frantic scramble that reminded me, surprisingly, of us—the way we pigeons would dart and squeeze and shove to get our share of the fresh feed that John supplied. One of the boys flung himself to the ground, scooping up the paltry treasure in his grimy fist. The others followed its arc to the American soldiers, many of whom began to pull pennies from their own pockets and toss them into the mob. Little boys of all sizes piled up, swearing and squeaking when punched or stepped on, elbowing one another, hats flying off, coat sleeves yanked, until a sergeant ordered his men to knock it off and get back on the train. The boys scattered like raindrops shaken from a wing, jumping in every direction to get out of the way.

  I thought for the rest of the journey how very like hungry birds those little boys had been, or how like them we were. On the farm we’d never seen children idle like that—idle and desperate—and I realized that most were probably war orphans, their fathers killed in France.

  When the train arrived in Dover, an American soldier slid open the boxcar door. Before we could say good-bye to the horses, adieu to the mules, he took Thomas Hardy and me and our ten Wright Farm dovecote-mates out to the docks, briny with salt spray, crowded with hundreds of baskets identical to ours. Stevedores lashed our carriers to the hurricane deck of a channel steamer and covered us with a tarp.

  The water was choppy and fogged, and the whole way across, the men talked about the weather. In the Great War, everyone adored the meteorologist. Artillery officers relied on reports about air and moisture, temperature and wind; they needed to know if shells could be fired. And everyone needed to know if roads would be passable. The preoccupation was familiar to me, since I thought about weather all the time when I was homing.

  “I wish we could fly over,” I said. “This boat ride is rough on the stomach.”

  “Come on, Cher Ami,” said Thomas Hardy, nuzzling against me, hale and encouraging. “We can’t have you being seasick in the basket. You’ll make everyone else ill.”

  The tarp blew off into the bitter blue water, and cold mist swept over us, punctuated with occasional freezing splashes. “Well, here’s a silver lining,” Thomas Hardy said. “Now you can keep your nausea at bay by looking at the horizon.”

  John had done his best at selecting names for us, but his aim was often off: flubbing my sex, for instance, and christening Thomas Hardy after an English writer whom I gather is among the most relentlessly pessimistic of his era. While my brother’s cheerfulness could be overbearing at times, I was glad of it during that crossing.

  And I miss it badly now. When I was recovering from the injuries that I suffered in the Pocket, I met another wounded bird who’d been Thomas Hardy’s basketmate on the battlefield and who’d seen him die. He’d been pulverized in midair, his fluids spurting everywhere, a few white feathers floating down—like someone shot open a child’s snow globe, the pigeon said. At the time I didn’t understand the reference; it’s one of the many things I’ve learned during my long decades in the museum. It still strikes me as a strange metaphor for a pigeon to use, but then again we have a very limited apprehension of violence, much as humans have a rudimentary understanding of flight.

  I didn’t watch the horizon during that crossing to France. Instead I watched the Royal Navy blimp overhead, on alert for the approach of U-boats. I envied it, because it was airborne and I was trapped, but it also seemed grotesque. A bloated parody, swollen like a tick.

  Airplanes have always seemed more honorable to me: pathetic in their way, but expressive of an honest desire for the mitigated plunge, the intense negotiation with unseen forces that is proper flight. My landlords at the Smithsonian Institution have an entire building devoted to human achievements in this area. I’ve never seen it. I remain in my glass case, earthbound, a monument instead to loss.

  CHAPTER 6

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  Hannibal took elephants across the snow-covered Alps, the better to bring his war to the Roman Republic. We men of the 77th Division took steamships across the gray Atlantic—fifteen hundred men in each, like skyscrapers laid on their sides—the better to fight the war to end all wars.

  Here on the promenade deck of the Toloa—in international waters now, en route to Cuba—I try to concentrate on my impending escape, but as always the present streams by me, trailing hooks to drag me back toward the past. With each wave split by the white ship’s prow, recollections of my first Atlantic voyage beat against my brain.

  A man traveling alone has the luxury of being meticulous to a much greater degree than do those moving en masse. After interminable anticipation, the order for the 77th to ship out came with little warning and much alacrity, haste making the waste that one might expect.

  We, the 308th Infantry Regiment, left Camp Upton for France in the second convoy, which embarked on April 6, 1918, one year to the day after America’s declaration of war. Hurry and discomfort characterized our leaving. Squads were detailed to destroy everything left in the white pine buildings that was not the property of the United States government. Pictures were ruthlessly torn from the walls. The treasured phonograph was lugged away, to cheer us no more. Books both trashy and high-minded, civilian clothes both shabby and modish, boxes and packages both worthless and valuable were all seized and burned, though many a hard word was spoken by the men. The stuff was cherished but inessential to the fight; thus it perished.

  The night before had blown in chilly, but we officers had had to order our soldiers to turn in their bedding and sleep on the bare spring mattresses or the naked floors. I could have exerted the privilege of rank and kept mine, but I surrendered it in solidarity. Before dawn I dug my hip bones out of the hard wood to the sound of reveille, then went to the mess hall with everyone else for a quick cold breakfast and further instructions.

  “The sun never rose more beautiful, did she?” said George McMurtry, passing my table in a flurry of olive drab and hail-fellow-well-met.

  By 5:00 A.M. we’d fallen in facing east, where the sun had begun to lace the clouds. We received our orders and snapped into action, stepping out for the trains to Long Island City and the waiting ferries, which took us and our gear to the North River Piers. Each of our three battalions was assigned to a huffing transport ship, its sides pimpled with rivets. Swarms of sailors swung derrick nets, hoisting blue denim barracks bags and hauling them away.

  My 1st Battalion and Headquarters Unit boarded a Red Star Liner by the name of Lapland, with the 2nd and 3rd on the Cretic and the Justicia. We filed up the gangplanks and checked in with an officer, shouting over the din, then received our deck and mess and bunk assignments as well as our cork life belts, which we were ordered to put—and keep—on.

  Our departure was meant to be secret, and therefore we received no grand send-off dockside, which didn’t bother me. I was still rattled by the spectacle of our parade through the city—the sense of a species shaking off its humanity in answer to some darker impulse. The eerie tension between near chaos and stealth befitted my ambivalence. When it seemed as though the deck railings might give way from the pressure of bodies craning for a last look homeward, we officers ushered most
of the men to the bowels of the ship, where they clustered around the cloudy portholes.

  Just as Manhattan was knocking off work for the day, the steam whistle shrilled a single, splendid note. The civilians heading home knew who we were and where we were headed, and as we turned down the Hudson and made for the sea, they spotted our trio and cheered us. Ferries blew their horns, and the residents of the buildings along the water waved white towels and handkerchiefs.

  I had a spot on one of the open lower decks, jammed with men, but my height granted me a view of the Statue of Liberty receding in the golden light, a sentimental sight that nevertheless provoked my sentiments. How many crimes, I wonder now—how many blunders worse than crimes—get committed in her name?

  As the stars came out, we were ordered below. The captain of the Lapland passed around the promise of a reward: one hundred pounds to any man who spotted a sub. Thinking of the torpedoes that sank the Lusitania and of the Germans’ proclamation of unrestricted submarine warfare, we eyed the waves as if we were gulls hunting prey, motivated less by the contest than by the reminder of peril. I heard many a man remark that an Atlantic crossing that might have been a pleasure in peacetime was anything but in a time of war.

  For the second night in a row, I had difficulty sleeping, it being vexing to expect one’s ship to be fired upon at any hour. But despite many false alarms of sub sightings from the overexcited men, we never saw one.

  To call the shipboard food terrible was to overpraise it. Our meals were prepared by English cooks, evidently committed to safeguarding their reputation for awfulness. Boiled potatoes, rice, tapioca, and marmalade—no salt, no sugar, no seasoning of any kind. For lunch that day, we’d had rabbit stew, which tasted as if the cooks had left the fur on. Coffee was served from garbage cans. Seasick men puked thickly over the sides: “feeding the fishes,” they called it.

  By April 8 we’d reached Nova Scotia, where we stopped to load the scuppers with coal and to take on more supplies. Supplies, supplies, always more supplies! I didn’t yet fully appreciate the degree to which wars are fought and won by quartermasters or the quantity of killing that was accomplished through lack. France would teach me that lesson, with the Pocket as my final examination.

  We spent an afternoon conducting lifeboat drills in the Halifax Harbor. Dropping the boats and rowing around the icy chop of the bay provided a welcome break from the crowded ship, which I had come to imagine as a floating tenement—or as how I imagined a tenement would be, since unlike the majority of the enlisted men, I had never set foot in one. With the regiment in action, it was easier to picture the Lapland as a beehive—honeycombed with bulkheads and decks and infinite compartments—and the men as a purposeful swarm.

  We departed from Halifax the following evening to a much livelier send-off than we’d been granted in New York. Women and kids waved; bands played “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “La Marseillaise” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The men seemed especially moved by this last one; many had sweethearts, or even fiancées. I sympathized, feeling a tinge of yearning myself—not for anyone in particular but rather for my habits in the city, where I had freedom, and privacy, and Marguerite as a trusted friend. Melancholy and relief in equal measure rushed at me through the salty air; I was sailing farther and farther from my double life.

  That night, like every night, provided a beautiful sunset, a golden yellow disk sinking into the water like a coin into a slot.

  That night, like every night, strict light discipline limited our activities. We’d given up our matches upon boarding the ship; absolutely no smoking was permitted outside at night, as the glow of a cigarette could be seen at sea from half a mile. Portholes were kept closed, and the only illumination came from tiny blue bulbs.

  Once the bands were out of earshot, most of the men drifted belowdecks. Though it had begun to mist, I stayed above in the briny sea air to watch the sun’s last traces vanish, in no hurry to return to the fetid stench among the bunks below. From the rear deck, all I could see was deep blue water in every direction. The only sounds were the engine’s thump, like a giant heart, and the faint applause of waves against the hull. I liked the nights best, with blackest darkness all around. Sharing solitude with these fifteen hundred men made the isolation that I had always felt seem external as well, a quality of the night itself: a pathetic fallacy that made me feel less alone.

  The morning after our departure from Nova Scotia, I rose early to catch the sunrise—no less spectacular—and to beat my fellow soldiers to the decks, where we’d all go to smoke in the open air.

  That morning, April 10, was the first time I set eyes on Bill Cavanaugh.

  I didn’t notice him at first, a slim figure leaning aslant the opposite railing, utterly motionless, his back turned to the horizon’s glow. His elbows were braced so he could hold something close to his face at an odd angle: a book. He was reading. He and I had both been craving first light, but he was using the dawn to inhale knowledge, while I’d just been impatient to safely strike an army match. I was amused, and impressed, and a little ashamed.

  I didn’t want to disturb him—or, honestly, to speak to anyone at that hour—and had decided to pursue my original aim of sunrise-watching by drifting farther along the starboard side when he looked up and saw me.

  “Good morning, Captain Whittlesey,” he said, coming to attention and saluting. It was the most perfect salute I had ever seen—perfect, I realized later, because its perfection was achieved for its own sake, not to impress me. As he turned, the copper light from the east caught him, shrinking the pupils of his sapphire eyes. I detected no nervousness in his expression, and its absence reminded me of its ubiquity in the other enlisted men who chanced upon me. His face showed only guarded readiness and a trace of good humor, like that of a skilled tennis player awaiting a serve. He carried his book smartly at his waist, saving his place with the tip of a little finger.

  “At ease, Private,” I said. “What brings you out so early? Most men don’t want to prolong these dull days by waking up any sooner than reveille requires.”

  He lowered his hand, nodded toward the open sea. “I’ve never been on a boat before, sir,” he said. “Not even the Weehawken Ferry. It’s a thrill for me. I figure from here on I’ll be seeing and doing a lot of things for the first time, not all of them this pleasant. So why not make time for the sunrise?”

  “And for study?”

  He brought up the book, held it in both hands. “The Homing Pigeon,” he said, “by Edgar Chamberlain. I’m a pigeon man, sir—I mean, I’ll be handling pigeons for the regiment—but I keep birds at home as well. I want to learn everything I can about them.”

  “I’m impressed you managed to get that book out of Upton.”

  “It took some convincing, sir,” he said. “The roundup of personal effects was pretty thorough. But I told them that it’s related to my army work, and they understood.”

  This was a good answer—explaining the situation without suggesting that anyone hadn’t done his job—and he didn’t seem to offer it with care, only honesty. His face was stunningly symmetrical, perfectly proportioned, like that of an antique statue, and I understood at once how convincing he could be.

  “What’s your name, Private?”

  “It’s Cavanaugh, sir. Bill Cavanaugh.”

  “Lucky for the regiment to have an experienced pigeon man in its ranks. And lucky for you, too, I suppose, that the army has put you to work doing something you enjoy.”

  “It is, sir,” Cavanaugh said. “It really is. To hold a pigeon and to feel it enjoy being held . . . well, sir, it’s a pleasure unmatched by any other.”

  Though I took it at first for a trick of the morning light, a closer look confirmed that he was blushing. This soldier who’d converse with a captain or a king as easily as with a fellow private would, I’d come to learn, turn boiled-lobster red whenever he spoke of
something he loved. And he loved many things, though none, I think, more than pigeons.

  “Being in the loft with my homers,” he went on, “quiets all the troubles of life. It’s like growing roses, I imagine. Pursuing beauty, cultivating it, but never reaching it completely. Not that my family ever had space for a garden.”

  It felt rare, almost unsafe, to hear a grown man speak so openly of his passions. My mind alit at once on my own comparable pursuits, in much the same way that one’s hand might reach automatically for one’s wallet while navigating a crowded street. To be clear, I’m referring not to my dalliances with men—an appetite is not a passion—but rather to my dalliances with poetry, which I had written seriously since I was a boy and for which I had earned modest acclaim at Williams. Even at work in Manhattan, I would still sometimes hit upon a promising string of iambs and cancel engagements in order to spend the weekend coaxing them into a sonnet or a villanelle. But no one in the army or back at my law office knew that I did this, and I had never for a moment considered telling them, or sharing my verses with anyone but Marguerite. It had never occurred to me that I might do so.

  I tried to steer Cavanaugh back toward practicalities. “So you breed and race them?”

  “Yes, sir. They really are a lot like roses. Flying flowers! All different colors, different degrees of hardiness. To appreciate them you can’t just go by how they look but also what they can do in the air. Their power and their smarts.”

  “How did you come by this hobby? Has your family always raised pigeons?”