THE BLUE SCARF

Their yards were separated by a tall trellis overgrown by a thick climbing rose with sharp thorns and terrifying canes, heavy with delicate-scented yellow roses. At the base of the trellis, the rose canes separated, forming an arch at ground level. Attracted by this natural doorway, they both crawled toward it, and, in exploring, bumped noses directly beneath the fence. At that second, he saw in her eyes the reflection of his own, which again reflected in hers an infinite number of times. She saw the same, and, at that moment, with no choice in the matter, they bonded forever.

They became inseparable companions.

Their days and hours of play in one another's gardens gave way to months and years of devotion to one another as schoolmates, sweethearts, young lovers, and always inseparable. In church on Sunday, they sat side by side, and, finally, as they had always known they would do, they stood side by side in Church and promised God and the Congregation that they would remain together always. This was, they believed, the easiest to keep of all the promises they could ever make.

As a bride, she went to live in his home, and when his parents passed, they made it their home permanently and never imagined living anywhere else.

They thought their lane was the center of the world. She called it “The Corner of God's Smile,” which she meant as an expression of gratitude and reverence, not smugness.

Their happiness was only increased when a daughter came; it was magnified again when another followed a year later. They named their first child after her mother, and the second after his.

He worked at the foundry near the outskirts of town, and each morning she would walk with him to the top of the lane where he boarded a streetcar. At night, she would hear his steps and open the front door before he reached it.

She painted pictures of their garden on pieces of board and tile, which she would sell at the park on Sundays as more an excuse for a park-outing than profit.

The foundry work was hard but satisfying. They would cast in bronze and other metals all sorts of important plaques, statues, and monuments. Once he took her on a train trip to the Capital to see the bronze doors of the Central Bank, which had been one of their special commissions and on which were engraved some small designs of his own, an eagle and an owl. She playfully dubbed him “Master of the Skies,” and her pride was full and genuine.

All mountains are subject to erosion, however imperceptible, and friendships and families, which are much like mountains, are also attacked by destructive elements more potent than wind and water.

The foundry men had become excited about a subject more interesting and important than the commission they had just received to cast a bell for the Cathedral of St. Denis in the Capital. The talk was of war.

The government of their neighbor to the East had insulted their own government by many recent provocative acts, and it was widely accepted that the Nation would be at war by the end of summer. Their predictions were accurate, and, in the fall, the bell commission was postponed as the foundry prepared to make artillery barrels. The men seemed mostly to prefer the idea of shooting the artillery to casting it, oblivious to the inevitability that other artillery from other foundries would be pointed at them.

He had no profound or even superficial appreciation of the nation's honor or promises to allies, but he understood the concept of duty. He understood that the life he led did not come without a price, and, although he did not fear the enemy would pillage his town and burn the houses in the lane, he believed that the enemy needed to be reminded that the men of his country were not cowards and were ready to protect their nation's honor and their own.

When the infantry sergeant came to the foundry to accept the enlistment of a dozen of the workers, he signed his own name to the list.

His wife did not welcome separation, but she believed that all things happen for a purpose, and she accepted without doubt his promise that he would be back within six months. This time when they bade goodbye at the top of the lane, he boarded the streetcar going in the direction opposite the foundry. He carried a bag with some books, brushes, a razor and writing paper rather than his usual bag of tools. He kissed her and promised to bring her something pretty. He hesitated, but she urged him to hurry, joking that the war could not be won without the Master of the Skies.

She walked back down the lane to the house uncertain about the prospect of being separated at so great a distance for the first time since they had met at the opening in the fence. Nevertheless, she accepted the fact that dealing with the separation was her duty.

She returned home to care for her house and her daughters, but she gave up her painting.

On the train that evening, her husband took from his pocket a tile on which his wife had painted a scene of their small garden with the rose trellis in the background. The small arched opening at the bottom of the trellis was very small but still visible to someone who knew it was there. He did not know it then, but he was going to a land without flowers, without gardens, and without hope.

The most terrible instrument of destruction and human cruelty ever devised is the machine gun. If ever there was gallantry in war, the machine gun erases it totally and forever. Duelists in a country churchyard at morning need courage to face the man they would kill, courage to look him in the eye, and courage to face his shot. Moreover, the duelist agrees as a matter of honor that one or two unsuccessful attempts to kill or wound his adversary are a sufficient contest. The machine gun repudiates all these outdated notions of chivalry and denies even the illusion of playing by rules.

The despicable machine gunner sprays his destruction from an anonymous distance and crouches or lies on his belly like a coward behind the hail of bullets that he sprays one after another after another. Never will he concede his incompetence. He can fail in his marksmanship a thousand times and still he persists in firing, when a gentleman would have acknowledged failure and quit the field. He denies his enemy safe haven anywhere on the battleground and makes his would-be victims crawl. There is no credit here, and it becomes a mystery as to how the nation's honor can be redeemed by such cowardice and cruelty.

The only defense to a machine gun is a hole.

When two opposing armies meet, so that their machine gunners do not eat each side alive in mercifully short order, they dig holes. Thus the evil machine gunners visit their final indignity on their enemies by making of them cowards who must hide in the ground like moles.

The holes they dig and inhabit become ditches, and then trenches, then cities, and then entire worlds below ground. Once dug and staffed, the trenches fill with water, vermin, and rats. Occasionally, artillery shells or gas or, more than occasionally, diseases are introduced to add another concentric ring of hell to this world below ground.

Periodically, the blundering Generals of each army, hoping to move their line of trenches a few meters further to the east, or further to the west depending on their perspective, order the inmates of hell to go above and face the machine guns. The only practical effects of these forays are to make room in the narrow trenches for new inmates. Thus is created a horrible, corrosive stalemate, the effect of which is to generate a constant need for new men to feed the appetite of the guns.

At first, even under the worst conditions, he wrote home frequently, being as careful as he could not to give any clues that his letters were posted from such hell. When a shard from an exploding artillery shell shattered the skull of a comrade in the act of writing a letter, he became superstitious and could not bring himself to write. The pencil always froze in his fingers, and he never wrote again. Mail from home was sporadically delivered, and very shortly after establishing their position, the Commander decided that mail from home was destructive to the fighting spirit, and no further letters were distributed.

A rumor began to circulate that in several weeks they would advance in a grand plan to move the trench line an absurdly optimistic twenty kilometers to the east. Perhaps in anticipation of heavy casualties, his sector was granted two days leave. They sneaked backward from the trench-line at night to a safe area where six mud-spattered buses waited to carry them to the river town of Hirondelle many kilometers from the front.

His comrades were anxious to visit the taverns, to wash and to eat, and to fill the time with enough activity to resist the overpowering urge to desert. He had no interest in the taverns, but instead walked the streets of the town imagining it was his own town and that he was walking home in the blue dusk to his wife and family. He passed many shops, all closed and all advertising in their windows, not what commodities could be bought, but what things were permanently unavailable or forbidden.

As he passed a milliner's shop, which seemed to be the only business with anything actually for sale, he saw in the window the present he had promised. It was a blue scarf, displayed and tied around the neck of a cork mannequin. In the trench, he would sometimes try to escape from the damp by lying on his back on a wooden bench. Sometimes as he lay flat, looking up at the sky, he would be hypnotized by the depth of the blue, which was in stark contrast to the brown and gray and black and red of the trench hell. The silk scarf was that color blue, the blue of heaven as seen from the depths of hell.

He did not even try to bargain over the price. He refused to touch the scarf with his own unclean hands, and he had the shopkeeper fold it and wrap it in oilskin to protect it from the filth and damp of the trenches. The next day he went to the post office and sent home the remainder of his money. He kept the scarf. That, he would hand to his wife he silently promised himself and her.

He went to the town park where he washed his face in the fountain and slept on a bench fitfully until it was time to board the bus to return.

He noticed his own bus was not as full as when outward bound and guessed that at least a few men had decided it was preferable to face the six bullets of the execution squad in their own land rather than six thousand bullets in No Man's Land.

The big advance took place as carefully planned by the incompetent commanders, and a month later the trenches had not moved a millimeter.

After the advance had failed (or after it had succeeded as the commanders claimed, awarding themselves many grand medals for valor and genius), he noticed that the faces of the men around him were different from the group who had started with him. He called the new men the Second Faces. As time ground on, even newer faces appeared. In one of the many subsequent successful advances, he was wounded by a machine gun bullet and developed an infection. He was evacuated to Hirondelle where they treated and tended to him and did him the greatest service of rendering him fit to return to duty. Fortunately, the nurses had kept safe the pouch with the scarf and returned it to him when he left the field hospital.

Upon his return, he realized that during his convalescence, the Third Faces had all disappeared.

It was now the time of the Fifth Faces. As the soft-edged side of autumn sharpened, the men greeted the cooler days with resignation. In early November, shortly before noon, the machine guns, which had rattled perfunctorily all morning, suddenly stopped. Men passed the impossible news to one another, and the men quietly climbed out of the trenches and began to walk slowly to the east or the west, wherever were their homes, leaving behind the ugly ditches to fill with water and mud, and finally to be reclaimed by the grass and trees.

He received his medal and certificate of service and then began to walk westward and homeward with the Fifth Faces. By coincidence, he passed the shop in Hirondelle where he had bought the scarf; he saw his face in the window. The shock of the reflected ugliness and cruelty that he saw was more horrible than any shell that had ever exploded in the trenches. He saw what he knew his wife must see, a stranger, five faces removed from the man she knew, a man who had bought survival at the cost of his soul, a machine-gunner.

When he got to the crossroads, he saw the sign pointing west and felt a momentary temptation to go that way, but feeling that he understood what was best, he turned south.

His wife waited and never despaired. Actually, she lived quite peacefully, steadfastly believing that each new day was the day her mate would return. As the days melted successively into months and then years, her spirits never darkened. At first, she spoke and acted as though at any moment her husband would come through the door, put down his tool bag, and kiss her in greeting. Her daughters, her neighbors, and friends patronized her harmless delusion even as they tried to convince her to start a new life elsewhere with someone new. She resisted and kept her faith but did so quietly and to herself for the sake of her daughters. Still, always when there was noise outside her house or a knock at the door, she smoothed her hair and straightened her dress as she had always done when her husband came home each day from the foundry.

She worked, she cared for her children, and she waited.

The reward of a clear conscience is untroubled sleep. She always slept peacefully, and when she dreamed it was always a pleasant dream of times to come. Unexpectedly, and with no precedent, there came to her a dream that was more poignant than ever before, and she gave herself entirely to it even though she knew it was only a dream.

It was a festival day. She was dressed in the flower print dress she had worn on her wedding day when she had signed the register at the Town Hall. She wore a soft felt cap with a gray bird's feather and a blue silk scarf like one she had once admired in a shop window.

She was standing with a great crowd of people watching a parade passing. Music played somewhere, and the people chattered and laughed.

Strolling in the roadway, rather than marching, was a constant stream of tall, smiling young men dressed in crisp military uniforms festooned with ribbons of bravery. At regular intervals, a man would leave the march to reunite with a one of many young women watching and pull her by the hand into the parade which flowed in a never-ending circuit of the town. She waited with a confident and expectant heart for her own reunion with her husband who she knew was in the march.

So strong was the feeling that her husband was at any moment about to rejoin her, that in her sleep and in her dream, the time came to choose between waking or continuing to wait by the dream-roadside in her wedding clothes for the return of her husband; she chose endless sleep.

Her daughters felt her absence keenly in the first weeks after her passing, but in recent years their visits had already become less frequent, and their grief subsided quickly. They went their separate ways, meeting twice a year at one another's home to chat about their lives and share silently their regrets of a fatherless childhood. The older daughter lived a self-absorbed life in the suburbs where she painted pictures that she hung on her own walls and wrote poems that no one read. The younger girl lived alone in the city and painted pictures which she shared in galleries. She occupied her time by correcting small injustices and performing small rescues.

In disposing of the house, they showed no sentimentality. The district had already become industrial, and the house was the last on the lane to be transformed. The buyer was a molder of concrete statuary and birdbaths who promptly placed a desk and cabinet at the very place where their mother had dreamed her dream of the homecoming parade.

Across from the birdbath factory was another house, now adapted to a small brickyard. The front yard was bare dirt, and on the dirt stood an old sprung sofa, which the brick men and the bath men sometimes sat at day's end to drink beer. Despite its shabbiness, the sofa was inviting to the tired man who had wandered aimlessly into the lane, and he decided to sit for a few moments or until someone might chase him away.

The prospect that faced him across the lane was like a page from a child's paint book. It seemed so familiar that he thought he might have colored such a page as a boy. There was a cottage with a familiar roofline and with familiar flat brass numbers on the front door.

The front yard was a fanciful garden. Cement birdbaths of different heights painted pink, or green and brown, and some not painted at all stood in random groupings looking like so many mushrooms. On the bowl of one of the mushroom caps, a small gray bird sat motionless, but looking directly at him, and he thought it was a cement ornament until it suddenly flew away and disappeared into the sun.

The residue of the illusion of recognition was chased away by the harsh voices of the workmen and the shrill complaints of the office clerks.

Sitting on the bench in the warm afternoon sunlight he became aware, as he had not been before, of just how tired he had become. With no one threatening to evict him, he closed his eyes and slept.

It was a peaceful, quiet sleep without dreams, or at least without dreams that he could remember. For so long his sleep had been haunted so that this little moment of quiet felt as though a peace of sharp glass had been removed from his shoe after a long walk.

When he awoke, the sun was still warm, but he was no longer sitting on the bench. He was lying on his back on what he first thought was a wooden bench, but what he soon realized was a flat-bottomed boat which floated quietly in the middle of a large lake. Above, the sky was blue and cloudless, while around him the lake water was as still as glass and a deeper blue than the sky. The lake was surrounded by green mountains, and he thought he could see on the distant banks little villages nestled against the quiet hillsides.

He lay back in the boat and looked at the sky and drank in the serenity of the scene. After a few moments he heard a chirping, keening sound, and, above, he saw what at first looked like dark ribbons. The ribbons became darker and broader, and, finally, he could see that what they were was a circling wheeling mass of small gray birds.

He watched as they circled and intertwined, and, as he watched, he felt himself rise upward as though on a cushion of air, higher and higher, until he found himself surrounded by the birds and moving in the widening circles that they turned. He looked down to the boat, which still floated quietly in the lake, but it was empty. He looked around at the swarming birds and wondered how it was he kept pace with them. He looked toward the green mountains, and at the far end of the lake, they seemed to open as though they were the bronze doors of a great building so that his view beyond was unlimited. In the far distance on the ground, he imagined he could see the sprung couch by the side of the road in the city lane where he had slept, and he imagined he could see himself seated still on the couch unmoving and unnoticed by the passers by.

His gaze turned sideways, and, in a blaze of recognition, he saw in the eye of a bird flying alongside him the eye of someone familiar, and in that eye he saw the reflection of his own eye, and in that reflection saw her eye once again. Just as they had done before and long ago in the garden, they gazed within one another and traded selves and then traded back again and knew they were one person in two shapes and could never again be separated.

He saw now that he too had the body of a bird and realized also that though he had traded one form for another, inside he had never changed and never would change. He understood too that the cruelty and dishonor that he had carried like iron chains around the world and back were at long last cast away.

The shimmering image of the lopsided couch in the far distance seemed to be always in his view as he wheeled with his companion and the myriad birds in widening rings and spirals. Having no further fear of separation, he broke free of the flock for what he knew would be only an instant and flew toward the city and the couch and toward the body he no longer needed.

He alighted on the shoulder of the quiet form and looked into the pocket of the heavy coat. He pecked his beak inside and nudged open the flap of the oilskin pouch. The contents by now had become quite flat and stuck to the sides of the pouch. He drew the scarf slightly out of the pouch and pecked at the fraying edge. With strength he now took for granted, he grasped a few strands of the unraveling silk and pulled them free.

Soaring skyward he raced back to the flock with no doubt whatsoever that his companion would be exactly where he expected.

This time, there were no detours, no crossroads, no signposts.

He found her, and, as they came side by side, he saw again his own reflection in her eye, and in that reflection he saw what she saw.

Dangling from each side of his bird's beak were three strands of silk, still bright and blue, bluer than the lake below, bluer than the sky which enveloped them, and almost as blue as the beckoning twilight toward which they flew.

The End

The author has resided in Southern California almost long enough to pass for a native despite the occasional pang of nostalgia for snow falling on steam grates, pizza by the slice, and Jones Beach. Enjoyments are movies (Manhattan locales - caper flicks - film noir), California history, Linda's biscotti, Linda, Saturday football, the ocean (either one), and, once in a while, serene travel. His fiction has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Thieves Jargon, River Walk Journal, Bewildering Stories, Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, Green Silk, Lunarosity, The Cynic Online Magazine, Skive, Static Movement Online (frequent contributor),Crime and Suspense, and Mysterical E.