The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block Read Free Book Online Page A

Frederick and Lowell and others as well, in her masterful, just vaguely lascivious way. Other than the occasional glower as Brenda moves her attention among the men of the room—that and Stanley’s unintelligible conversation with invisible guests—the spirit is convivial, the cocktails temporarily eclipsing the men’s interminable, listless days.
    Outside: the bluster, summertime cracking and breaking. The rain is driven horizontally and at such speeds one might not even recognize it as rain, one might perceive only a particularly lashing wind and come in wet and know there must have been rain.
    Marshall wheels past the open door of the party. None but a nurse notices him. The nurse, however, only admires his dedication,seeing to the flag’s lowering in such hostile weather. She is glad to see he wears his poncho. She does not know that, underneath it, he conceals his folded bedsheet.
    When Marshall cracks ajar the front door, it is an invitation for the wind, and the door slams open the rest of the way with a bang that makes the partygoers startle and giggle, would take the door clean from the hinges had it not been reinforced for the security of patients and staff. Marshall reaches the ramp, and descends.
    As Marshall approaches the flagpole, rain glances off the curvature of his bald head. Marshall looks up: the flag at the pole’s top is nearly invisible in the storm.
    Then, with the assistance of his mouth, Marshall pulls on the glove necessary to manipulate the thin, lacerating metal cable. Even though he is one-handed, the hospital must buy Marshall these gloves in pairs, and he has run through a considerable number, the wire having burned straight through and badly cut him several times.
    Marshall is untouched by fear as he lowers the flag. Is this the calm of a man who has been blown apart by Nazi ammunition and survived, or only the calm of a man who has claimed that final power? Even in the chilling winds, he does not waver as he reaches his one arm to unhook the flag. Soon it is folded into the box in his lap.
    With the dexterity born from years of one-limbed existence, Marshall locates the clip that binds the line’s two ends and unfastens it. In the wind, the unbound line comes to sudden life, bucking against the pole like a cobra grasped by its tail. It nearly lashes his cheek but just misses.
    James Marshall, the Amputation Artist of Mayflower, has now settled into the execution of his masterwork, and he is careful toattend to all the details. With his one hand, he manages to pull the line through the loop at the pole’s summit and lets it fall next to him. He feeds the slack through the glove of his hand until again he locates, at its end, the two clips to which he has so devotedly fastened and unfastened his flag. He removes the folded bedsheet from beneath his poncho. With simple double knots—he pauses to wonder if he should spend the time on a knot more elaborate, then decides it is enough, it will hold—he ties the four corners of his sheet to the fasteners, two corners to each clip. And then what was a bedsheet and a slack flag line has become something between a kite and a sail.
    Does he think now of Normandy? Does he think of the absurdity that he has survived as he has survived, plucking hairs, fingers, whole limbs to keep some poison, some evil he contracted that day from reaching his heart? Or does he think of his parents, his only family, and how they have never been able to look directly at him since that day, looking away for another boy, their boy, whom they lost moments after his boat capsized at Normandy? Or is it merely an act, symbolizing nothing or maybe a great deal, a gesture of the unconscious, like Pollock’s splatters? Marshall gathers the tail end of the line, and when he has enough slack, he wraps it around his neck four times. Already, he has begun to bleed.
    Inside Ingersoll, the partygoers are singing songs from Frederick’s favorite record,
New Faces of 1952
.