White Wind Blew (18 page)

The journey of Wolfgang’s requiem had been a long one. He had started writing it in the latter days of 1918, weeks after the war in Europe had ended and days after he and Rose secretly married at Saint Patrick’s on West Market Street—a sudden and private ceremony spurred on by the patriotic fervor that spilled onto the Louisville streets for days after the armistice was signed. Of course, it had been Rose’s idea to get married that night (not that Wolfgang hadn’t been dreaming of it since the day he’d left Saint Meinrad), and so Wolfgang had contemplated it in front of her for all of three seconds before throwing his arms around her waist and lifting her off the sidewalk, smothering her with kisses as dozens of neighbors walked along the street with American flags draped over their shoulders.

At the time, the requiem had been the beginning of a symphony. It had also been the longest piece of music he’d ever attempted to write. He met the challenge at full steam, inspired as he was by a lifetime with Rose. But even then he couldn’t conceptualize it properly. He’d run into the same roadblocks his father had; it just wouldn’t come out on paper as it sounded in his head. So Rose’s symphony sputtered to a halt soon after it had begun, and Wolfgang all but abandoned it during his medical school studies. But Rose never allowed him to completely let it go; Wolfgang needed the music, Rose understood that. When his studies in medicine grew intense, she urged him to take a break at the piano. When they attended church together, she smiled at him as the organ played, squeezing his hand. “Listen,” she said between humming along with the music. “You can do that, too,” she told him. And so she convinced him to keep trying, week after week, all throughout medical school—until her death five years later, when Wolfgang set it aside yet again.

For weeks after her funeral Wolfgang was lost. He slept all day, rarely ate, his heart beating slower with every passing of the sun, as if an invisible weight had come down to suffocate him, sucking him dry of all tears and breath. He missed his father, he’d been estranged from his mother for over five years, and he prayed for the chance to hold Rose’s hand just one more time. The grass grew tall in the front yard of their Portland neighborhood home, two miles northwest of downtown, where many of the working class were buying houses and raising their families. The mail overflowed the box next to the driveway. Newspapers piled up on the front porch.

And then one morning the sun rose. Birdsong penetrated his windows from a nearby tree. In the few moments it lasted before the birds flew off, he thought of his six years at Saint Meinrad and of the friends and mentors he’d left behind there, the peace and tranquility of the farmland, so far removed from the city. He reflected on one of his times of private prayer there, and the memories of it warmed his heart. He’d been alone in the crypt chapel beneath the abbey church, kneeling at a pew in his Roman cassock, staring at the cross on the wall, confused and praying for guidance about his summer with Rose. And at that moment he heard some of the monks chanting from the church above, plainsong, the Gregorian chanting that was such an integral part of the Benedictine prayer. Their combined voices had perfect harmony, and the timing of their chanting was an answer to his prayers—perhaps not an answer at the time but proof that someone was listening. It had given him the strength and courage to talk to Friar Christian about his relationship with Rose.

For the first time since leaving the abbey to be with Rose, he felt the urge to return and complete his studies to become a priest. He felt the calling again. The pressure on his heart eased somewhat, enough so that he found it more cleansing to breathe, and the beats no longer felt marred in molasses. Music had nourished him as a boy, and it would do so again as a man. The Lord’s music. He imagined joining the organist in the abbey’s choir loft and starting a fledgling choir. Beautiful music would soar above as the monks chanted from their choir stalls below, flanking both sides of the altar. And more importantly for himself, Rose’s symphony needed to be opened up again. It needed to be changed: now it would become her requiem, a musical composition for the dead. Rose’s funeral Mass.

He wrote to Friar Christian and told him of his plans to return. Ten days later Wolfgang received a letter from the abbey: he would be welcomed back to Saint Meinrad with open arms.

But while Wolfgang waited for the letter, he’d sat on his porch one afternoon, opening all the newspapers he’d ignored for the past weeks. Every day there were headlines about the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country, and Louisville had the worst death rate of them all. He and Rose had been to Waverly Hills before, but now a new building had been constructed, a massive brick and stone structure that housed nearly five hundred patients. And, according to the article in the
Courier
Journal
, they were in bad need of doctors and clergy. If the birdsong had been a calling, the newspapers had been a sign of another sort.

He thought of Rose and of their experience at Camp Zachary Taylor with the Spanish flu during the war, and he knew what he had to do. He wrote Friar Christian another note: he was fully committed to returning to the abbey, but with the current health crisis back home, he felt he had to fulfill his duties as a doctor and a man of science first. He would return to Saint Meinrad as soon as the tuberculosis died down.

The next day, with his Portland house on the market and a suitcase in hand, Wolfgang walked up the steep road to Waverly Hills, catching ominous glimpses of the monstrous sanatorium through the trees. But he never wavered. He spoke to Rose all the way up, and the thought of her strength in life propelled him. Dr. Barker hired him on the spot.

The patients at Waverly inspired him—he’d found a new home. For months the requiem moved along so clearly, practically writing itself.

As he’d learned weeks before, the sanatorium was short on staff and had no religious figurehead. He quickly, and without an agenda, began to fill the voids of both jobs, at least to an extent on the latter—guilt often left him fearful of overstepping his bounds. The staff had already artificially ordained him as priest and, jokingly or not, Wolfgang lost sleep contemplating it. So again he’d put pen to paper and wrote to Friar Christian with a proposition. Again he said he would return to the abbey as soon as the tuberculosis showed signs of slowing. But this time he added that while he was working as a doctor, if they agreed to send him his cassocks, his lessons, and the theology books, he would continue his training as a theologian at Waverly. Of course he understood that the years studying on his own would not count toward becoming a priest, but the experience he would gain, he told them in the letter, could be immeasurable. After all, many of the patients at Waverly were already calling him Father.

***

On the same evening McVain had stormed away from Rufus and Josef, Wolfgang decided to return to the sanatorium after walking Susannah to her dorm. Like it or not, the fourth-floor solarium was Wolfgang’s new composing area. He couldn’t complain, because it was his own doing, and he convinced himself that cool temperatures helped him think more clearly. His cold fingers on the keys were just another obstacle to overcome. His frozen earlobes only pushed him to focus more closely on sound. After starting the requiem over, as McVain had requested days ago, Wolfgang’s mind began to flow with optimism: certainly the work would be improved. The positive attitude reminded him of the time he’d made the decision to change it from a symphony to a requiem shortly after Rose’s death. But the creative flow had been short-lived back then. Perhaps with McVain’s guidance it would be different now.

He blew into his hands to warm them and continued on, composing, trying to ignore the fact that he was still at Waverly while his theology books sat in a stack against the inside wall of his cottage, covered by a thin but recent layer of dust, used but not often enough. Four years the patients had been calling him both Doctor and Father, and the secondary title felt no less artificial than it had the first time it had been uttered as a mistake.
Focus
on
the
music
, Wolfgang!
The
music
.

Near midnight a quiet snow began falling, drawing his attention from the requiem only momentarily for a quick glance toward the woods. Wind blew flakes against the screen, and a few of them filtered in through the tiny holes and melted on the concrete solarium floor. McVain lay behind Wolfgang and the piano, fountain pen in hand, reworking a portion of the music. He’d said very little since his abrupt exit from their ensemble earlier in the evening.

Several of the surrounding patients slept, but not soundly due to the cold. None of them minded his composing late at night; in fact, they preferred it. Many, even with his constant stopping and starting, considered his playing something akin to a lullaby. Wolfgang blew into his hands again, rubbed them together, and softly played the new opening, which was to begin with the deep, rumbling tone of a bow gliding across the thick strings of a double bass. Minutes later a viola would enter, and then the three would blend into a piano trio.

Wolfgang imagined a woman’s soprano voice singing the introit. He could hear it clearly. He mouthed the words as he played. A song for the angels. A song for Rose. He glanced over his shoulder and found McVain crossing out and scribbling. If the man felt any guilt over his treatment of Josef and Rufus, Wolfgang couldn’t see it. He acted as if nothing had happened.

Wolfgang checked his pocket watch—two in the morning. His eyes were getting heavy. Just as he was about to stand, he heard someone shuffling through the shadows. Josef emerged in slippers and pajamas, walking slowly with his chalkboard.

Wolfgang jumped up. “Josef, it’s late. What are you doing up here?” He stood between Josef and McVain.

McVain dropped the requiem to his lap and glared at Josef. “Scram, Kraut.”

“Blarney,” Josef hissed. Upon his board he’d written a long message: LET ME GUESS. YOU WERE A SOLDIER IN THE GREAT WAR. A GERMAN BLEW YOUR FINGERS OFF.

McVain read the board and looked away.

Josef erased the board with a rag he’d brought with him and wrote again: I FOUGHT FOR THE GERMANS. I’M AN AMERICAN NOW.

Wolfgang said nothing. This was between McVain and Josef.

Josef didn’t give up: WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS FROM?

McVain stared at him with his ornery green eyes before finally speaking. “Ireland.”

THEN WE’RE BOTH IMMIGRANTS. He erased and wrote again. AND WE’RE BOTH DYING OF TB. He erased, wrote. I’D BE HONORED TO PLAY WITH YOU IN THE MEANTIME.

McVain grunted, looked away, and fingered the bed sheets that he’d pulled up to his waist. “Same time tomorrow.” He rolled over in bed and faced the other way.

Josef leaned down toward McVain’s exposed left ear. “Rufus too,” he whispered. “Bullets don’t care what color the skin is.”

***

Wolfgang stumbled wearily down the hillside to his cottage shortly before 3:00 a.m. Yet he tossed and turned in bed, his mind full of everything except sleep: the requiem, his new little orchestra, McVain, Josef, and Rufus…and then Susannah. His mind kept drifting to her legs on the stairwell, her bare knees on his couch, the curve of her hip, her chest gently rising and falling to the flow of his piano music. Her eyes fluttering behind closed lids as she slept, lips slightly parted.

He thought of Lincoln’s bootlegging and joking about the peephole in the nurse’s dormitory. How different would life have been, Wolfgang wondered, if he had never peered through that hole in the wall of his childhood bedroom. He would have believed his mother’s lie. Charles had been deathly ill, after all. Wolfgang would never have turned against her. Would he still have sought comfort under the folds of Catholicism? Would he have met Rose? In spying through that hole, he had traded his mother’s life for Rose’s, and in that, Wolfgang had no regret. He would not have traded Rose for anything, including his parents.

What would Rose think of Susannah?

Wolfgang forced it all from his mind. It was four in the morning. He felt chilled. He was to become a priest someday. A man of the cloth. He grabbed his rosary beads from the dresser, knelt beside the bed, and began to pray. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—”

Something thumped against his front door.

A splat. Then laughter.

Wolfgang tossed the rosary on the bed and ran to the door. He opened it and jumped back. The severed head of a pig faced him, its blood trickling through the cracks in the porch. A knife had been stuck in the animal’s skull, pinning a piece of paper to the muddy flesh on top. Its eyes were open and slightly yellowed. Its ears had been sliced off, the tongue cut out.

Wolfgang ran down the porch steps. Footsteps sounded up the hillside, crunching over the dusting of snow, amid the dark trees, fleeing, but Wolfgang was determined to catch them. If they were indeed patients, he should be able to catch them, even with his gimp foot. He half sprinted and half hopped into the trees, ignoring the soreness that still lingered. The footsteps scattered. Laughter. Male laughter from two different angles. Flashes of white confused him, and before he could react, one of them was upon him. The attacker wore a white garment, not too unlike the vestments Wolfgang wore at Mass, yet atop his head, covering his face and most of his neck, was a pointed hood with eyeholes.

“You’re gonna die.”

The second man, dressed in the same white attire, jumped at Wolfgang from the opposite direction. One of them hit Wolfgang hard in the stomach with a thick club. He doubled over. A knee collided with his jaw. He tasted blood. He dropped to the ground to protect himself.

Another voice bellowed from down below. “Hey, Boss! Hey!”

Upon hearing Big Fifteen’s voice, the attackers took off into the darkness. Instead of giving chase, Big Fifteen stopped next to Wolfgang, knelt by his side, and rolled him over. “You okay, Boss?”

Wolfgang leaned on his right elbow and dabbed at the blood running from his lips. “The Klan.”