Alex Bledsoe - The Hum and the Shiver

She was about to ask for more gossip when she heard a faint, regular tapping. She glanced at the front window and saw a sparrow perched on the outside sill, pecking against the glass.

Brownyn looked at her father; he’d seen it, too. They both knew what it meant: a family death in the near future.

“You think that’s for me?” she asked softly. She should have been terrified, but she was too numb even for that. “Is that what Bliss was worried about?”

“Just a bird confused by all the ruckus, honey,” Deacon said with all the laid-back certainty he could muster. “Sometimes it don’t mean a thing.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes.”

Aiden burst through the front door. He propped the shotgun against the wall just as Deacon said, “That gun best be unloaded, son.”

The boy patted the pocket where he carried the shells. “Didn’t have to shoot nobody, dang it.” He saw Bronwyn, and his face lit up. “Hey, can I show her now?”

“Show me what?” Bronwyn asked.

Deacon nodded. “But make it fast. Bunch of people are here to see her.”

“Show me what?” Bronwyn repeated.

Aiden grabbed her crutches. “Come on, you won’t believe it.”

“He’s right,” Deacon said. “You surely won’t.”

Bronwyn’s bedroom door still squeaked at the halfway point. It had squeaked all her life, and betrayed her many times when she’d sneaked out, or in, late at night. She could’ve oiled it, but it had become a point of honor to face this devious hinge, to open and close it so slowly, the squeak did not give her away. And now it renewed its old challenge as she opened the door.

The immediate sight cut short any reverie, though. She balanced on her crutches, shoulder against the doorjamb, and stared.

“I fixed it up for you,” Aiden said breathlessly behind her. “What do you think?”

American flags hung everywhere. The two windows sported flag-patterned curtains, small arrangements of flags and flowers rested on her desk and dresser, and flag banners crossed at the center of the ceiling. A pair of pillows, one with stars and the other stripes, rested on her bed. “Wow, Aiden,” she said at last. “It looks real… patriotic.”

He squeezed past her and stood in the center of the room, bouncing proudly. “Had to order them curtains off the Internet. Took all my ’lowance for a month. Was afraid they wouldn’t get here in time. You really like it?”

“I am genuinely surprised,” she assured him. She was also appalled, since that symbol now meant a whole lot of new things to her, most of them ambiguous, a few downright unpleasant. But Aiden didn’t need to know that. If he’d convinced their parents to let him do this, he must’ve really had his heart set on it.

She put the crutches against the wall and carefully eased the two steps to her bed. The weight of the pin brace tried to pull her off balance. She sat heavily, and Aiden plopped down beside her. The bounce sent little needles of pain through her leg, but she held back the gasp.

“Shawn and Bruce say you’re a hero,” Aiden said. “I said you’re a heroine, because that’s what they call a girl hero, isn’t it?”

“Heroin’s what you shoot in your arm in the big city,” she said.

“That’s spelled different. I know, I came in third at the spelling bee.”

“Yeah, well, I’m no hero or heroine. Just a soldier.” The word felt odd in her mouth, and sounded alien now. What exactly did it mean anymore?

“Didn’t you kill ten Iraqis before they captured you?”

She smiled and tousled his hair. “You think I could kill ten people, Aiden? That’s sweet.”

“Well, did you?”

She thought carefully about her words. Aiden had not visited her in the hospital in Virginia, so he hadn’t seen her at her worst, hooked up to more machines than Anakin Skywalker. He still thought of her as his daredevil big sister, and while she no longer wanted the role, she also didn’t want to hurt him. “That’s what they say I did. I got whacked upside the head real good. It makes a lot of things fuzzy. I don’t remember it right now.”

“But you will?”

“Don’t know. Not sure I want to. Killing people for real ain’t like it looks on TV. All that blood has a smell, did you know that? And them bullets, they’re hot; makes the skin where they hit smell a little like cooking bacon.” Her voice had grown soft and quiet. She was describing things she recalled as sensations rather than full-blown memories. She took a deep breath and continued. “Plus sometimes you have to kill someone sitting as close to you as I am. Think you could do that?”

Aiden shrugged. “If he was trying to kill me.”

“So you could kill someone if he’s trying to kill you because you’re trying to kill him because…” She trailed off and waited.

His face scrunched up the way it had when he was a puzzled toddler. Affection for him swelled in her; then like every emotion, it found no real purchase and faded back to the numbness. “It sounds complicated,” he said after a minute.

“It is. And it’s supposed to be. It shouldn’t be easy.”

“But you did it.”

She nodded. “ If I did it, it was because I was trained to do it, and I gave my word I would.”

He leaned against her, his own arms pressed tight to his side to keep from hurting her. “Glad you’re back,” he said simply.

“Me, too,” she said, and kissed the top of his head.

“Your leg going to be okay?”

“Eventually.”

“It’s all hairy.”

“Yeah, well, shaving around all this stuff is like mowing around the garden statues in Uncle Hamilton’s yard. Hey, you see where these metal pins go into my skin? I have to put antibiotic cream on them or they’ll get infected, but I can’t reach all of ’em. Reckon you can help me out later?”

His eyes lit up the way a boy’s do when presented with the chance to do something icky. “Heck yeah. How about your arm?”

“Oh, that was nothing. Bullet went right through. Want to see?”

He nodded eagerly. She undid her uniform blouse and pulled it off her shoulder. The gunshot wound was now a puckered, scabbed hole that would shortly fade to a scar. His eyes widened as he leaned around to see the back of her arm with its matching exit wound.

“Wow,” he whispered. “Does it hurt?”

“Compared to my leg? No way. Now, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Get Magda out from under the bed for me.”

He jumped up, which bounced the mattress again and sent a lightning bolt of pain through her leg, up her spine, and into her skull. She bit back the cry, but sweat broke out all over her. She grabbed the bedspread tight and clenched her teeth.

Oblivious, Aiden pulled the tattered case from beneath the bed. It had once been expensive, and even now only the outside showed signs of age and wear. The buckles were shiny, and when she placed it across her lap and unsnapped them, the green velvet lining was as rich and deep as it had been the day it was made.

But the mandolin inside held her attention. Magda had been built in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1914, according to the history Brownyn had been told when Granny Esme gave her the instrument. She was a Gibson A-5 model, with two sound holes that looked like calligraphied letter f ’s parallel to the strings. She was polished to burnished perfection except in places where the finish was worn down to the wood grain, evidence of her nearly century-long use. This was no priceless heirloom to be locked away; Magda had been passed to Bronwyn so she could be used, so the songs embedded in her might grow and be shared.

Granny Esme first played Magda in one of the mandolin orchestras popular at the time the instrument was originally built. It had been something of a scam at first: traveling music peddlers put together small community groups, encouraging the purchase of their wares as a way to participate in the latest fad. But in Cloud County, among the Tufa, the mandolin’s antecedents were already well known, and the merchant was surprised to find families who actually owned Italian mandores. He’d put together a brief tour, sold his entire traveling stock, and moved on. Among old-timers, talk of the Glittering Strings Mandolin Orchestra still passed in whispers, lest the fragile majesty be smirched.